Loving God, you call us from bondage to freedom, from death to life, and from darkness into light.  Teach us to trust you as Jesus did, relying on your Holy Spirit for all that is needed; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

           Between last week and this week a lot has happened, probably in more ways than one.  As far as our Scripture readings go, last week we were in Egypt with Joseph, who had been thrown into prison after being unjustly accused.  This week, it is many years later, and many of Jacob and Joseph’s descendants have been living in Egypt as slaves.  As today’s reading begins, the Israelites have been sent out of Egypt by Pharaoh, and they have reached the Red Sea.

         So just imagine that you have finally tasted freedom after many years of slavery, and you are camped in the wilderness by the sea.  You look back towards Egypt, and you see the entire Egyptian army coming after you with horses and chariots.  Within minutes, you have just gone from certain freedom to certain death.  How, then, are you going to respond in this situation?...

         Will you remain firm in your faith that God is going to save you?...  Do you just sit down and give up?... Do you cry out to God and say, “Lord, do something!”?...  Or do you start ripping on Moses and asking why he had to bring you out of Egypt just so you could die in the wilderness?...  

         The Israelites, perhaps understandably, respond with fear, and they lament to God and to Moses that they are going to die.  God, however, has different plans for them.  Moses tells them to stand firm and to keep still, and they will see God fighting for them (Ex. 14:13-14).  The next verse, which is not part of today’s reading, is even more interesting: “Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘Why do you cry out to me?  Tell the Israelites to go forward’” (Ex. 14:15).  No wonder they didn’t know what to do!  One minute Moses is telling them to keep still, and then the next minute God is telling them to go forward.  However, is there not more than one kind of stillness?

         You can literally stay still - as in, not moving.  Or, there is an inner stillness – as in, “Be still, and know that I am God!” (Ps. 46:10).  Was it this inner stillness that they were to cultivate, even as God is directing them to go forward and march toward the sea?

         I keep thinking of the guy who kept praying to God that he would win the lottery.  Week after week, he asked God for this, and finally God got tired of it and replied.  “Dude! You’ve got to help me out here! Get out there and buy a ticket!” There comes a point where we need to do more than just sit back and see what God is going to do.  “Why do you cry out to me?” says God. “Tell the Israelites to go forward.”

         God is telling them to go forward when all they are thinking about is going back.  In spite of the fact that they had been living as slaves and had been enduring hard labour, they want to go back to what they know. Life may have been miserable, but at least they knew what to expect.  How true it is that we usually want to stick with what we know, even if it is hurting us or it is not working any more.

         God, however, always seeks to lead us into new life.  In the case of the Israelites, this took many years of learning how to be a community that worships and serves God by serving one another.  It took many miracles along the way, interspersed with grumbling and complaining.  It took following the pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire through the wilderness so that God could gather them around the mountain and form them into a covenant people – this time a covenant that included some obligations on their part.  It would be a covenant that always remembered what God had done to save them – leading them from slavery to freedom, from darkness into light, and from death to life.

         Truthfully, though, we, too, struggle with moving forward into what God is doing.  We, too, are most comfortable with what we know.  We, too, are not always as trusting and as faithful as we might like to be.  We, too, have trouble moving forward when what is in front of us looks like certain death.  However, God has a habit of transforming death into life.

         As much as people have mourned the loss of some of the congregations that used to be around, people in those congregations have been very intentional about giving new life to other ministries and congregations.  A death in one place has meant new life somewhere else.  There have also been some individuals who have given new life to the church even after their death, through gifts and bequests in their wills.  Yet, new life can come in other forms, too.

         While it might be easy for us to sink into fear and want to go back to the way things used to be, some younger pastors have been asking some interesting questions about the church. In a presentation I heard back in May, a “millennial” pastor asked, “What if the church as it is now is exactly the size that God needs it to be?”  What would that mean for how we see things and how we approach ministry?  What sort of answers would we get if we were to say, “Here are the resources that God has given us.  What is God calling us to do with them?”

         After all, our God is the same one who opened a path in the sea that led from death to life.  Our God is the same one who loves the world so much that Jesus was sent to live and serve and die among us, only to be raised to life for our forgiveness and salvation.  Our God is the same one who raises us to new life through baptism, making us a new creation in Christ.  Thanks be to God!  Amen.

Pentecost 19 (NL 1)                        Exodus 14:5-7, 10-14, 21-29

September 30, 2018

St. Luke’s Zion Lutheran Church

Pastor Lynne Hutchison

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