“Is the Lord Among Us or Not?”

Exodus 17:1-7; Philippians 2:1-13

Exodus 17:1-7

¹From the wilderness of Sin the whole congregation of the Israelites journeyed by stages, as the LORD commanded. They camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. ²The people quarreled with Moses, and said, “Give us water to drink.” Moses said to them, “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the LORD?” ³But the people thirsted there for water; and the people complained against Moses and said, “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?” ⁴So Moses cried out to the LORD, “What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me.” ⁵The LORD said to Moses, “Go on ahead of the people, and take some of the elders of Israel with you; take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go. ⁶I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink.” Moses did so, in the sight of the elders of Israel. ⁷He called the place Massah and Meribah, because the Israelites quarreled and tested the LORD, saying, “Is the LORD among us or not?”

Philippians 2:1-13

¹If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, ²make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. ³Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. ⁴Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. ⁵Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

⁶ who, though he was in the form of God,

did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited,

⁷ but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave,

being born in human likeness.

And being found in human form,

⁸ he humbled himself

and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.

⁹ Therefore God also highly exalted him

and gave him the name

that is above every name,

¹⁰ so that at the name of Jesus

every knee should bend,

in heaven and on earth and under the earth,

¹¹ and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,

to the glory of God the Father.

¹²Therefore, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed me, not only in my presence, but much more now in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; ¹³for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.

The Sermon

What a great sentence from Exodus: “From the wilderness of Sin the whole congregation journeyed by stages, as the LORD commanded.”

Unfortunately, it doesn’t exactly mean what it looks like in English. Sin here is just a name—you recognize it as the first part of “Sinai,” as in Mt. Sinai or the Sinai Peninsula.

But if that S were not capitalized, and if sin means “that which turns you away from God,” it becomes much more profound than just a geography lesson.

Maybe we move just like they did, from the wilderness of (small-s) sin to our own Promised Land, in stages.

One of those stages finds them in transit, moving along slowly, not sure where they’re going—not knowing at all, as a matter of fact—but when they stop for a break, there’s no water there in the wilderness campsite.

Sounds like us sometimes. We get so thirsty. “Save me, O God,” says Psalm 69, “for the waters have come up to my neck. I sink in deep mire, where there is no foothold; I have come into deep waters, and the flood sweeps over me.” Have you ever felt like that? I imagine you have, if you’ve been human for any length of time at all.

“I am weary with my crying; my throat is parched. My eyes grow dim with waiting for my God.”

And so the Israelites are out there, in the wilderness of Sin (Capital S), and they’ve been wandering around a long time, and they’re getting a little tetchy, a little irritated, they’re starting to chafe. It only took them, how many years, to start to really get cheesed off about this, all this wandering around, following Moses who said he was following God’s lead; but the thing is, they’re not getting anywhere.

At first the question was, “How are we going to do this?” Then it was, “Where are we going, again? How long is this supposed to take?”

And finally, after getting no satisfactory answers to all these questions, they’ve started to ask the real question, the question of people who feel like they’re being led in circles and for that matter, “We were better off in slavery where at least we knew we had something to eat!” And now, here we are, wandering around; it’s hot; I need a good meal and a shower and a bed—and now I see that we are nowhere near getting where we had every right to expect to be by this time, and for heaven’s sake, I’ve got one question:

Is the Lord among us, or not?

It’s easy to feel like you have no clue where God is, and it’s only very, very rarely that you feel that warming, that presence—blessed assurance: Jesus is mine.

Is the Lord among us, or not?

I think what the Israelites are asking is something other than the theological-philosophical- ontological question of, “Is there a God?”

There’s a kind of trendy atheism going on right now. A couple of generations ago, depending on how you measure a generation, a whole demographic cross section of Americans chose, in great numbers, to stay away from church. And then, as they matured and found out that life wasn’t entirely about boundless personal freedom, some of them started to come back; others began looking for something to replace what they had walked away from, and they joined people in younger generations who were re-imagining the whole enterprise of what it means to be Church, and now form the core of a movement called the Emerging Church—a movement of tremendous value, but no clear definition.

But during that time in the wilderness, basic learning about the Bible became so lacking that when they went back to look at it, a lot of people, as soon as they came up against any kind of questioning at all, or when they discovered for the first time that the Bible contradicts itself all over the place—and a lot of them did seem to feel like they were the first ones to "discover" these facts that the Church has always recognized and invited worshipers to wrestle with—suddenly all these people seemed to think they were Voltaire, and that they were the first ones ever to have the enlightenment to ask critical questions of the Bible, of the Church, of Christianity or any other world religion.

And so some of them, confronted with the startling fact that the Bible is as complicated as life, went the way of atheism; and just as with any other kind of fundamentalism, including Christian fundamentalism, they already have an answer they’re comfortable with; it’s not a search they’re on, but a quest for how best to get to the particular, final answer that they’ve already decided is true. (Tom Long recently called the book The God Delusion “a 700-page trick question.”) They ask the same questions we wrestle with in here, but how would they know that if they haven’t been part of the ongoing life of a congregation on a theological journey, a journey through the wilderness where we’re all, all the time, searching for water together? I guess they think we’re just in here singing Kum Ba Yah all the time, or sitting in pews collecting cobwebs.

The Israelites don’t seem to be asking Moses a trick question; they don’t seem to doubt that God is God, or even that God is their God. They haven’t forgotten their history.

They just want to know: Right now, today, here…is the Lord among us, or not?

The people thirsted for water; and said, “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children with thirst?” So Moses cried out to the LORD, “What am I supposed to do? They’re gonna stone me.”

And God said to Moses, “Go on ahead of the people, take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go. I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink.”

And so, Moses went out, and the elders watched Moses walking in the direction of the rock, with the staff in his hand, and their throats were so dry, they were so thirsty. Absentmindedly, they patted the empty wineskins they carried over their shoulders.

Just a small drink of water would have meant everything, but the sun was high, and their feet were tired, and they were dusty; they didn’t dare to dream anymore about finding some cool lake, or a freshwater pond, because they were afraid that if they even started to think about it, they’d get so depressed over what they could not possibly have, there might be no end to their despair.

And they watched him go up to the rock. They tried to swallow, but in the arid heat of the desert, all they could do was just stand there and watch him.

He seemed a little tentative at first—or was that just the effect of the heat rising up from the burning ground, making it look like he was wavering? Or, was it coming from within them, and they were projecting onto Moses all of their hidden doubt, deep inside just a microscopic light of hope that something would work, that somehow, Moses would lead them to water out in this dry desert heat?

And in the middle of that parched wilderness, Moses took his staff—if this didn’t work, it would be his last act of faith; if this didn’t work, what more could he ever do? And he remembered what God had told him to do. And he took the staff firmly in his hands, and raised it up over the rock, and with an instantaneous prayer, too fleeting for words, he brought the staff down on the rock.

And the elders stood back, watching, and two seconds felt like eternity, and then…something shimmering in the sun… It couldn’t be possible. Our dreams could not possibly have come so true, so miraculously. It was a one in a million chance, they thought for an instant. But no, it wasn’t. It was never just up to chance. And now water came gushing up out of the rock, and the elders called to the people, and the people came, and drank.

Is the Lord with us? Or not?

Sometimes we in the church feel like we are facing enormous odds.

Yeah, there’s the building fund; there’s the volume of Christian Education to be undertaken in a society that has left most of us Biblically illiterate; there’s a new face of homelessness coming to our doors every week; there are the ridiculously overcrowded schedules of church people and ridiculously little time for a person to sit and think—not look at a computer or watch TV, but think about life, and death, and love, and eternity. Who’s got time for that anymore?

But those are all small concerns compared to the thirst of the world. We try, and try, and try; and still people are lost to starvation—a thousand this hour, and a thousand more by the time we get home for lunch today. Still the wars rage on—what’s one person able to do about that, or one church, or one community of people? The violence, across the world behind enemy lines, and here in our own community behind closed doors. It seems like we’re one little boat trying to sail into a windstorm on a vast and bottomless sea. And we’re so thirsty.

“The waters have come up to my neck; I can’t find a foothold; I’m weary with my crying; my throat is parched. My eyes grow dim with waiting for my God.”

Is the Lords with us, or not?

There’s an old song cycle from the 1960s called Celebrate, which tells the gospel story in music. And the lyric from when Jesus is serving the last supper goes:

How do you find the water in the rock, when we’re so thirsty? Paul said to his favorite church, the one at Philippi:

If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy: Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus… For it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for God’s good pleasure.

Talk about getting water from a rock. God has placed it within us all, to be a blessing to the world of which we are a part.

And it’s not that you and I have to try to work miracles all by ourselves. For it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for God’s good pleasure.

According to John, after Jesus was crucified, and the soldiers were coming around to make sure that all those who had been crucified had died, they came to Jesus, and saw that he was already dead.

And one of the soldiers took something like a staff, and pierced Jesus’ side with it. And from the sacrificed body of Christ came water.

Is the Lord with us, or not?

Let us pray…

Keith Grogg

Carolina Beach Presbyterian Church

Carolina Beach, NC

September 28, 2008

[1] (“In Remembrance” from Celebrate by Ragan Courtney and Buryl Red)