Month: September 2023

Exodus 17.1-7, Matthew 21.23-32

The Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity, 1 October 2023

Eldroth, Clapham (Harvest)  

 

The people of Israel were in an uncomfortable place.

They were on the move – freed from a country which had abused and enslaved them, on the way to a land they did not yet know.

God had promised them a new beginning in that new land. But in this moment that land seemed a far way off; they were feeling like God’s promise was an empty promise which had faded away. Lacking direction in the desert, thirsty in a camp with no water, the people of Israel were in an uncomfortable place.

And that place had a name. Exodus calls it ‘The wilderness of Sin’. That’s a very suggestive name, isn’t it? The wilderness of Sin: sounds like a place we’ve all been, at times, a place where we’re struggling, where we’re suffering, where we’re vulnerable and we feel like God has abandoned us.

The wilderness of Sin: it’s where the Israelites quarrelled and asked themselves that most frightening of questions, ‘Is the Lord among us or not?’

In a wilderness with no sight of the land they’d been promised: you’d appreciate the Israelites being anxious. In a camp on arid ground with no water to be found: you’d understand their desperation. No wonder they got to quarrelling amongst themselves and with God.

Now, here’s a question: when you are anxious and desperate for very justifiable reasons, is it a ‘sin’ to express doubts about God?

When the One who is meant to be your rock and protector appears to have abandoned you, is it a ‘sin’ to ask where he’s gone?

When the One who is meant to provide for your needs, stops feeding and watering you, is it a ‘sin’ to protest that you’re hungry and parched?

What person crushed by depression or deep mourning or pressing need hasn’t asked, ‘Where is God?’ Such a person doesn’t want to hear empty religious rhetoric. The Israelites were ‘exceedingly practical’ in their expectations: ‘Don’t talk about water,’ they said, ‘Show us.’ Anyone in such great need today would say the same thing. [1]

When did the fledgling nation of Israel become an adult? [2] Was it in the wilderness of Sin when the people learned to argue with God?

When the Israelites grumbled and questioned God’s provision, were they doing this hoping to ‘persuade Yahweh to be Yahweh’s best, true self’? Because they know who God is, are their complaints actually expressing a ‘deep confidence’ that their God is the kind who will help when the going gets rough? Why else would they cry out to God? Why else would any desperate person pray? If they had absolutely no faith at all then there’d be no point. But  even complaining to God in frustration and fear expresses some kind of faith, a kind of hope grounded in what one trusts to be true about God. [3]

Thus, in a place of desperation, trust is put to the test. When he hears the people voicing their deepest fears and pain, the God who seemed distant to them responds. Water appears. The people’s wavering trust turns out to be justified. And through this frank exchange, God draws closer to these people on their journey together. Their relationship deepens and grows.

They find that ‘growth does not reside in a place called comfortable’. Growth resides in the wilderness of Sin. [4]

How often have you found yourself emerging from a place of struggle, strengthened by the experience? From a serious argument with your spouse or parents or closest friends, with a greater mutual love between you? From a frank exchange of very different opinions with a neighbour or colleague, with a deeper shared understanding and respect?

Have you ever found yourself asking, ‘Is God here or not?’ and coming through that experience with your faith strengthened in the end?

‘Growth does not reside in a place called comfortable’. It resides in the wilderness of Sin, in the messy cut and thrust of life when we face our challenges head on.

Thus we should not fear asking the difficult questions – of ourselves, of others, or of God – in trust that working through them together will strengthen us all. 

This is contrary to the way our culture encourages us to behave when faced with difficult questions: to put off addressing them and vainly ‘hope for the best’; or when we encounter disagreement: to close our ears to those with different opinions than our own; or when in distress it feels like God is absent, to blithely accept he really doesn’t exist.

But – consider this question: when did you become an adult? For some of us an important moment  on our journey towards maturity – a journey which in my case I know I’m still on – was the day we learned to ask questions of God; for some the day we learned to cry out, maybe even rage, to God.

In the Exodus story, the people of Israel believed God’s promises of fidelity to them, and understood  that when God was not present and engaged on their behalf, things would go awry. So they raised their voices to him in his absence to call him to their attention. And, having done so, they found that he would hear, and answer their cries. [5]

In a world where any water, good water, life-giving water is decreasing in supply; in a world where so many people are thirsting for justice and righteousness… the Exodus story teaches those who are in any sense thirsty, parched and dry, to never hold back from calling out to God.

Whether we’re thirsting for love, or safety, or hope, or whether we have a real physical need for pure water where supply is lacking or polluted: each person, each community, Exodus encourages us to raise our voices to heaven in petition, and protest, and in prayer.

For this God who hears the people’s cries in the desert, and ‘brings streams out of the rock and makes water gush out like rivers’… this God who does not reside in a place called comfortable… this is the God who we can and should always call on, in whatever we’re experiencing as ‘the wilderness of Sin’.

 

 

Notes

[1] Kate Matthews Huey, God’s Sustaining Presence. United Church of Christ, Sermon Seeds, Twenty-sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time. Huey is drawing on Walter Brueggemann, Inscribing the Text: Sermons and Prayers of Walter Brueggemann.

[2] ‘When did you become an adult?’ A developmental question often asked by Pip Wilson, youth worker / trainer / life coach: see eg, I have recently asked a question on Facebook – I find it to be a great one to get humans sharing. pipwilson.com, 27 July 2019. 

[3] Kate Matthews Huey, God’s Sustaining Presence. Edited.

[4] Pip Wilson, ‘Growth does not reside in a place called comfortable’, in Pip Wilson, Ian Long, Pip Wilson’s Becoming Quotes. Wikipedia: Wilderness of Sin, ‘Sin does not refer to the moral concept of “sin”, but comes from the Hebrew word Sîn, the Hebrew name for this region’.

[5] Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy. p.321.

 

 

 

Exodus 14.19-31, Matthew 18.21-35

The Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity, 17 September 2023, Austwick, Eldroth

 

If we want to get a sense of how it might have been for the Israelites waiting in the wilderness before they crossed the Red Sea, from modern times, we might recall the Kabul Airlift of August 2021, following the takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban. You might remember those reports from Kabul Airport, showing people massing on the concourse in 40˚C heat awaiting a flight to safety: interviews with some unsure of whether they would be granted passage; the panic and the crushing as the deadline to the end of the evacuation approached and people faced the prospect of being left behind; the occasional interviewee saying that they’d decided to stay, prepared to risk a hazardous life under the Taliban they knew, over the uncertainty of crossing over into an unknown situation. [1]

The picture which Exodus paints looks very similar, of the Israelites escaping Egyptian slavery crowding together near the sea coast, with the added tension of the Pharaoh’s army closing in on them, intent on bringing them back to Egypt by force. If the outcome is quite different that’s because it didn’t rely on the logistics of NATO forces; it depended on the miraculous power of God. 

Now, whilst the evacuation of Kabul was a compelling moment in modern history, every historian and archeologist who has searched for evidence of the parting of the Red Sea has had to conclude that it is a fiction. [2] But what a fiction; what a very powerful myth; as you may have heard me say last week, the Exodus is a rare story which has changed the world forever. It may be Israel’s folklore, fashioned through centuries of retelling, but the Exodus has impacted all human history so completely that we cannot imagine our world without it. [3]

For all those peoples who have resisted their enslavement, for all those peoples who have struggled for freedom, in so many different circumstances, and who still do today, this story of a God – unique among all the gods – who sets captives free, has awoken hope in them, and empowered them in their movement towards liberty. It might be hard for us to imagine, but without this story having been told, there may never have been any movements to end slavery and liberate subjugated people around the world.

The Exodus is a story of a God who – unique among all gods – is on the side of the victim. ‘Though I am poor and needy, the Lord cares for me’, says the writer of Psalm 40. [4] This is an insight which turned the world upside down when it was first revealed through Yahweh’s dealings with the Hebrew slaves. ‘You are my helper and my deliverer, O my God,’ the Psalmist continues. The helper of the poor – unlike any of the other gods, who only ever privilege the rich; the deliverer of the enslaved – unique among the principalities and powers whose work in this world is to sustain the wealth and dominion of the few by exploiting the many. This God of the Exodus, this is our God, whose love liberates us to live in the light of his freedom in our place and time.

And yet there is something in this story which does not sit well with us. For even as we celebrate the Israelites’ freedom, we may find ourselves asking, ‘What about the Egyptians? Why did they have to suffer so cruelly?’ Those ten plagues, from the rivers of blood to the deaths of their first born: why would God be so callous? The closing of the waters of the Red Sea; could God not have done that before the soldiers entered them, to block their passage, but to spare their lives? 

We are faced, here as in many other places in the Old Testament, with a God who may be loving and faithful to the previously suffering people of Israel, but who treats other peoples vengefully, who is excessively violent in his acts of retribution. Many of us struggle with this God, because this is meant to be our God, and yet we fear to associate with him.

Now it is possible to not think about the violent God of the Old Testament, to ignore or skip over him, to treat him as irrelevant. But isn’t that a luxury which the Egyptians couldn’t afford? Which today’s evacuees from religious violence can’t afford? Which, most strikingly, the Jews caught up in the Holocaust couldn’t afford?

In the play God on Trial, a fictional dramatisation of what Elie Wiesel witnessed at Auschwitz, a group of prisoners awaiting their deaths later that day debate why God is allowing his children to be massacred. One of their number, Rabbi Akiba, speaks of the Exodus and all the Egyptians who are supposedly slaughtered by God, them and others in scripture who were murdered at God’s command, and he asks, ‘Did the Amalekites think that Adonai was just? Did the mothers of Egypt think that Adonai was just?’ Another prisoner, Idek, answers, ‘But Adonai is our God.’ 

Akiba replies: ‘Did God not make the Egyptians? Did he not make their rivers and their crops grow? If not Adonai, then who? Some other god? And what did he make them for? To punish them? To starve, to frighten, and to slaughter them? The people of Amalek, the people of Egypt, what was it like when Adonai turned against them? It was like this. . .’

In the Holocaust, Rabbi Akiba says, the Jews learned how it was for all those who were slaughtered by Israel’s God. ‘And what did they learn?’ he asks. ‘They learned that Adonai, the Lord our God, our God, is not good. He is not good. He was not ever good. He was only on our side.’ [5]

What I hope we might learn from this difficult discussion is that scripture tells us more than one story about God. It tells us about the tribal god who is on the side of one people and whose power is expressed through violence exacted against the enemies of his chosen tribe. But it also tells us about ‘the God of all creation whose power breaks into the world in acts of compassion and love, which break down the walls of hostility that structure all ordinary human culture and religion’. [6] 

Exodus is a rare story which has changed the world forever. It has changed our world. We know this whenever we find ourselves asking the question, ‘What about the suffering Egyptians?’ 

Why should we care about the fate of the Egyptians, for they are not our tribe? Why should we care about the slaves, for they are not our people? Or for the Jews, for they are not of us? [7]

Something in Exodus permits us to think that way. To think tribally. And sadly, sometimes we do. But something else in Exodus arouses in us, empathy for the struggling ones, compassion for the victims.  Whoever they are. And that something else is an aspect of God who, I would argue, we see more and more of, as the Old Testament merges into the New, and is revealed most fully in Jesus. [8]

We have to live, I’m afraid, with the violent God of the Old Testament. We live questioning whether ‘God’s perplexing ways’ may ‘be understood’. But – because we have already embraced this part of his story – we live in faith that helps us ‘say that love is real, and God is love.’ [9] 

 

Notes

[1] Larissa Kennelly, Hours without food or water in Kabul airport ‘hell’. BBC News, 23 August 2021; Wikipedia: 2021 Kabul Airlift.

[2] Wikipedia: Crossing the Red Sea.

[3] In a relationship built on grace and gratitude, the enslaved people go free. My talk from 10 September 2023.

[4] Psalm 40.18-19.

[5] Wikipedia: God on Trial; extract from Akiba’s speech quoted in Paul Nuechterlein, Girardian Lectionary, Reflections, Year A, Proper 19A.

[6] Paul Nuechterlein, Girardian Lectionary, Reflections, Year A, Proper 19A.

[7] Why did we sing when the Egyptians drowned? Jewish Chronicle, 18 April 2014.

[8] Anthony W. Bartlett, Seven Stories: How to Study and Teach the Nonviolent Bible. p.8-9, p.56-61; Anthony Bartlett, Signs of Change: The Bible’s Evolution of Divine Nonviolence. pp.1-23.

[9] Brian Wren, Will God Be Judge? [PDF]. Quote from v.2 below:

1

Will God be judge, and will there be a time,

timeless, yet final, in a world new-born,

when all is weighed, accounted for, made good?

Faith says, Amen, we know not how or when, 

but pray and hope for justice seen and done.

 

2

Will God be judged, and satisfy the slain, 

destroyed by torture, genocide and greed? 

Will God’s perplexing ways be understood? 

Faith says, Amen, we know not how or when, 

but say that love is real, and God is love.

 

3

Will Jew and Christian walk at last in love?

Will clashing faiths be honoured and fulfilled

as pilgrims dance in galaxies of truth?

Faith says, Amen, we know not how or when, 

but being found, are seeking yet to find.

 

4

Christ is our sign, our window into God:

this freeing life, unfinished by a cross,

awakens hope, and points a way ahead.

Let Faith’s Amen be changing us for good, 

to live as friends of God, and practice love.

 

Brian Wren © 1993 Hope Publishing Company

Exodus 12.1-14, Matthew 18.15-20

The Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity, 10 September 2023, Austwick, Keasden

There are some stories which change our world. Stories which impress themselves so strongly on us that they will alter the way we view things, forever. Think of those stories which we cherish from childhood which have helped us form our view of life; think of those stories which have become embedded in the culture of whole societies, shaping their character. 

The Exodus story is one of these. A tale set thirteen centuries before Christ, which has impacted history so completely that we cannot imagine our world without it. The story of how a previously unknown God rescued a previously insignificant people from a life of slavery and set them on a journey to a land of promise: Exodus has inspired countless movements for liberation. 

In recent modern times the leaders of slave revolts hoped to re-enact the Exodus. Escape from America’s Southern states to the North was imagined as a flight from Egypt. Harriet Tubman, a ‘conductor’ on the Underground Railroad, was celebrated as a black Moses. Spirituals such as ‘Go Down Moses’ described America as ‘Egyptland’ and told old Pharaoh, ‘Let my people go!’ [1]

In our own day theologian James Cone describes how Yahweh heard the groaning of the Hebrew slaves in Egypt and ‘took heed of it’, and how this Exodus story was taken up by the Black churches because ‘the central image and dynamic of the biblical story “met their historical need”. And Phyllis Trible refers to the Exodus as a “compelling… theme of liberation from oppression” which “speaks forcefully to Women’s Liberation.”’ [2]

The Exodus story has inspired countless books, films, and other works of art over the centuries, and still does. As recently as 2006 the seaside town of Margate, Kent, hosted The Margate Exodus, the story of Exodus told for the present day as a feature film for theatrical release, which brought together international and local artists and the town’s general population to create what the filmmaker Penny Woolcock called ‘a timeless story of identity, migration and the great movement of peoples in search of a promised land.’ 30 September 2006 was dubbed ‘Exodus Day’ in Margate. A fictional politician gave an incendiary speech to a real crowd; in the evening ten ‘plague songs’ were performed – one for each of the ten deadly plagues – while above it all Antony Gormley’s giant combustible thrift sculpture, Waste Man, a Wicker Man made of Margate’s rubbish, representing a Pharaoh of our broken consumer society, was burned to the ground in front of an audience of thousands. [3]

It seems that whenever people have cried out for liberation from their sufferings, wherever people have pleaded for freedom from bondage to oppressive masters of whatever kind, the Exodus story has inspired them to believe that their voices will be heard… by a divine heart who will let those people go.

It is such a powerful story that it finds its way into the very centrepiece of our acts of Christian worship week by week, the eucharist. For the Exodus begins with a meal around a common table, as outside the Hebrews’ homes the angel of the Lord goes about his liberating work; and surely Jesus knew exactly the symbolic power of what he was doing when he chose the Passover as the time for his last supper, and told his followers to aways remember him in that way. 

And so today,

“Through him you have freed us from the slavery of sin,” say our eucharistic prayers, 

“Through him you have sent upon us your holy and life-giving Spirit, and made us a people for your own possession.”

Like the Hebrews in their homes at the very first Passover, here, around our communion table, we wait on God to deliver us from all that harms us. Like everyone who has ever cried in hope for liberation from oppression, as we set out from our Sunday gathering, God walks with us to guide our feet on a path to freedom. 

Now, there is much about the Exodus story which might trouble us, not least the suffering of the ordinary Egyptian people in the plagues visited upon them by Yahweh. The story was forged in a brutal world where people believed that their gods were jealous and violent in the same way as their rulers were. But there is, breaking through the Exodus story, something quite new about this particular God and his ways with his people. To understand it in all its power we have to try to do something difficult; we have to try to imagine a world before The Exodus, a world which had not yet heard that story or soaked in its meaning. 

We have to try to imagine how strange and new is this God who observed the misery of the Hebrew slaves in Egypt; a God who heard their cry on account of their taskmasters, a God who told them that he knew their sufferings. [4] 

This is remarkable because no god before had ever sided with the powerless, rather than with those in power. No god before had ever expressed solidarity with human suffering in that way.

And it is remarkable because it is personal.  This God is using a new, transformational language previously unheard; a personal, relational language. ‘I am the God of your father,’ he told Moses, ‘the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ [5] 

The other remarkable thing about the liberation of the Hebrew slaves is that God did not want   them to fight for it. God did the work – while they ate the Passover feast. God does not require them to take up the sword against their oppressors; all that God asks them to do in response to his liberation is to remember that he is the LORD their God, who brought them out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. [6]

In a relationship built on grace and gratitude, the enslaved people go free. 

How this story has changed our world over the years….. How will we let this story change our world today?

John Davies

Notes

[1] John Coffey, ‘Let My People Go!’ History Today,15 Dec 2014

[2] Anthony Bartlett, Signs of Change: The Bible’s Evolution of Divine Nonviolence. p.7,8.

[3] Penny Woolcock, Exodus. Artangel, 2006.

[4] Exodus 3.7.

[5] Anthony Bartlett, Seven Stories: How to Study and Teach the Nonviolent Bible. p.56-58; Exodus 3.6.

[6] Exodus 20.2.

Exodus 12.1-14, Matthew 18.15-20

The Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity, 10 September 2023, Austwick, Keasden

 

There are some stories which change our world. Stories which impress themselves so strongly on us that they will alter the way we view things, forever. Think of those stories which we cherish from childhood which have helped us form our view of life; think of those stories which have become embedded in the culture of whole societies, shaping their character. 

The Exodus story is one of these. A tale set thirteen centuries before Christ, which has impacted history so completely that we cannot imagine our world without it. The story of how a previously unknown God rescued a previously insignificant people from a life of slavery and set them on a journey to a land of promise: Exodus has inspired countless movements for liberation. 

In recent modern times the leaders of slave revolts hoped to re-enact the Exodus. Escape from America’s Southern states to the North was imagined as a flight from Egypt. Harriet Tubman, a ‘conductor’ on the Underground Railroad, was celebrated as a black Moses. Spirituals such as ‘Go Down Moses’ described America as ‘Egyptland’ and told old Pharaoh, ‘Let my people go!’ [1]

In our own day theologian James Cone describes how Yahweh heard the groaning of the Hebrew slaves in Egypt and ‘took heed of it’, and how this Exodus story was taken up by the Black churches because ‘the central image and dynamic of the biblical story “met their historical need”. And Phyllis Trible refers to the Exodus as a “compelling… theme of liberation from oppression” which “speaks forcefully to Women’s Liberation.”’ [2]

The Exodus story has inspired countless books, films, and other works of art over the centuries, and still does. As recently as 2006 the seaside town of Margate, Kent, hosted The Margate Exodus, the story of Exodus told for the present day as a feature film for theatrical release, which brought together international and local artists and the town’s general population to create what the filmmaker Penny Woolcock called ‘a timeless story of identity, migration and the great movement of peoples in search of a promised land.’ 30 September 2006 was dubbed ‘Exodus Day’ in Margate. A fictional politician gave an incendiary speech to a real crowd; in the evening ten ‘plague songs’ were performed – one for each of the ten deadly plagues – while above it all Antony Gormley’s giant combustible thrift sculpture, Waste Man, a Wicker Man made of Margate’s rubbish, representing a Pharaoh of our broken consumer society, was burned to the ground in front of an audience of thousands. [3]

It seems that whenever people have cried out for liberation from their sufferings, wherever people have pleaded for freedom from bondage to oppressive masters of whatever kind, the Exodus story has inspired them to believe that their voices will be heard… by a divine heart who will let those people go.

It is such a powerful story that it finds its way into the very centrepiece of our acts of Christian worship week by week, the eucharist. For the Exodus begins with a meal around a common table, as outside the Hebrews’ homes the angel of the Lord goes about his liberating work; and surely Jesus knew exactly the symbolic power of what he was doing when he chose the Passover as the time for his last supper, and told his followers to aways remember him in that way. 

And so today,

“Through him you have freed us from the slavery of sin,” say our eucharistic prayers, 

“Through him you have sent upon us your holy and life-giving Spirit, and made us a people for your own possession.”

Like the Hebrews in their homes at the very first Passover, here, around our communion table, we wait on God to deliver us from all that harms us. Like everyone who has ever cried in hope for liberation from oppression, as we set out from our Sunday gathering, God walks with us to guide our feet on a path to freedom. 

Now, there is much about the Exodus story which might trouble us, not least the suffering of the ordinary Egyptian people in the plagues visited upon them by Yahweh. The story was forged in a brutal world where people believed that their gods were jealous and violent in the same way as their rulers were. But there is, breaking through the Exodus story, something quite new about this particular God and his ways with his people. To understand it in all its power we have to try to do something difficult; we have to try to imagine a world before The Exodus, a world which had not yet heard that story or soaked in its meaning. 

We have to try to imagine how strange and new is this God who observed the misery of the Hebrew slaves in Egypt; a God who heard their cry on account of their taskmasters, a God who told them that he knew their sufferings. [4] 

This is remarkable because no god before had ever sided with the powerless, rather than with those in power. No god before had ever expressed solidarity with human suffering in that way.

And it is remarkable because it is personal.  This God is using a new, transformational language previously unheard; a personal, relational language. ‘I am the God of your father,’ he told Moses, ‘the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ [5] This is uniquely a God who wants to be known, and wants to be close, to his beloved people.

The other remarkable thing about the liberation of the Hebrew slaves is that God did not want   them to fight for it. God did the work – while they ate the Passover feast. God does not require them to take up the sword against their oppressors; all that God asks them to do in response to his liberation is to always remember that he is the LORD their God, who brought them out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. [6]

In a relationship built on grace and gratitude, the enslaved people go free. 

How this story has changed our world over the years….. How can we let this story change our world today?

 

John Davies

 

Notes

[1] John Coffey, ‘Let My People Go!’ History Today,15 Dec 2014

[2] Anthony Bartlett, Signs of Change: The Bible’s Evolution of Divine Nonviolence. p.7,8.

[3] Penny Woolcock, Exodus. Artangel, 2006.

[4] Exodus 3.7.

[5] Anthony Bartlett, Seven Stories: How to Study and Teach the Nonviolent Bible. p.56-58; Exodus 3.6.

[6] Exodus 20.2.