Life Together: Believing the Promise

Over the last few weeks we’ve been reading about the adventures of the Israelites as they left slavery inEgyptand learned what it was going to mean to be Yahweh’s people together.  The passage we read today is one of the events that takes place while the little band of Hebrews is wandering around in the desert.  They wandered, the text says, for forty years.  Forty years!

A quick glimpse at a map of the Sinai desert—a small piece of land that connects what today is Egypt and Israel, will show that it’s not all that big.  In fact, if you were traveling across the Sinai today in a car, it would take you about 3-4 hours to make the 200 mile trip.  It’s true that the Hebrews were not driving air conditioned cars across the desert, but I would think that they could have made the trip in a little less than 40 years, wouldn’t you?

Besides faulty—way faulty—navigation techniques, there must have been something going on to keep them out there in the desert for 40 years.  Whether intended or not, what ended up happening was that the people spent all that time learning what it meant to follow Yahweh—to become God’s people in a way they had never had the opportunity to do in Egypt—and to learn what it meant to live life together—no small task. 

I am sorry—I’m really sorry—that it took 40 whole years to learn what they needed to learn, but sometimes we human beings can be slow learners, can’t we?

Our worship focus over these weeks is to follow the Hebrews around on their adventures and try to learn some of the lessons they were learning about following Yahweh and about living life together.  And while I find their story deeply interesting, I am hopeful that we can spend less than 40 years trying to learn what they had to learn.  What, then, is our lesson for today?  It seems to me that the Hebrews learned things get really tough when we forget the promises of God—promises for a hope and a future, promises that God would not leave them, that God had a bigger and more wonderful plan for their lives than even they could imagine.

Their desperation became the order of the day when they saw the pain all around them and forgot to keep believing.

To look a little more closely we’re going to have to review where we are in the story.  The passages where we find ourselves these weeks—Exodus 15-17 (you can also read many of these same stories in the book of Numbers)—are known by scholars as “the murmuring stories”.  Don’t think of the word “murmuring” here as, say, whispering sweet nothings in one’s ear.  No, “murmuring” as in the “murmuring stories of the wandering Israelites” means “grumbling” or “complaining.”  And that should give us some framework for what’s going on in the people’s life together.

You recall the dramatic crossing of the Red Sea.  Well, as we heard last week, they barely even made it ashore before they started to worry about water.  It’s not a small bit of irony that they just spent some of the most dramatic and trauma-filled time of their life together AVOIDING the water…now they are desperately worried because they aren’t sure they have enough.

Remember, they went first into what Exodus calls the Desert of Shur, where they found some water that was bitter and, you got it, they murmured.  Moses asked for help and God intervened, and the water became sweet.  God then sat the Israelites down for a serious—I guess it wouldn’t be “Come to Jesus Meeting”—I think my Jewish friends call it a “Holy Moses Conversation.”  The Lord laid out his covenant with the people—he made his expectations for their behavior clear, and he let them know right up front what he would promise them.  He said: “If you listen carefully to the voice of the Lord your God and do what is right in his eyes, if you pay attention to his commands and keep all his decrees, I will not bring on you any of the diseases I brought on the Egyptians, for I am the Lord, who heals you.”

There it is: God’s promise to the wandering Hebrews, set out right at the beginning of their trip, at the very moment that God turned bitter water into sweet and quenched their thirst. 

You would have thought they would have remembered.

But then the murmuring started.  Again.

Even after God made the water sweet at Marah, the people started getting worried about food.  Their grumbling stomachs made them forget God’s promise and EVEN AFTER God responded to their complaining and provided them with quail and manna, they decided to take things into their own hands and make up their own rules for hoarding food. 

In today’s story the people get back on track, following God’s directions that took them into another part of the desert.  When they made camp they found there was not enough water for the needs of their community, so they started to panic again.  Their panic got a little dramatic—they were almost tantrum throwing, from what it sounds like: “Why did you bring us out of Egypt only to make us and our children and all of our animals die of thirst??!?”

The Hebrews were having problems, for sure: they still hadn’t learned the lesson that God said he would provide for them, if they only followed God’s directions and did what God asked.  It seems they had forgotten God’s promise.

Now, many commentators on the text like to paint a picture of the Hebrew people as ungrateful, whiney brats.  And if you read the murmuring texts straight through, I will admit it’s hard NOT to form that opinion about the Israelites.  But, let’s review:

They had been enslaved inEgypt for many generations; they had no idea how to live life as nomads in the desert.

Up until Moses showed up, they had possibly been of the opinion that Yahweh had forgotten about them.  After all, there they were, slaves inEgypt, with no possibility of freedom anywhere on the horizon.  Did they even know this God who had delivered them?  And, if it was Yahweh, could they trust him?

It’s true that the people were complaining, but they were worried about some pretty basic things.  It’s not like they were complaining about lack of luxury items for their travel…they were worried about food and water, the basics.

And, it can’t have taken very long for them to realize that they seemed to be headed nowhere fast.  They’d hoped for freedom, for the Promised Land, but time kept passing and the terrain kept looking exactly the same…where were they headed?  Anywhere?  Anywhere at all??

In other words, while complain they did, one could argue that they had some fair justification for their complaints.  They’d left Egypt with a lot of hope, but the circumstances around them kept adding to their perception that God was NOT trustworthy, that God would NOT take care of them…even though God kept showing up, over and over again.  They forgot to believe.

On Dec. 11, 1979, Mother Teresa, the “Saint of the Calcutta,” traveled to Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Prize.  It would be hard to live in this day and age and not know that Mother Teresa spent her entire life working among the very poorest of the poor on the streets of Calcutta, India, struggling to alleviate the suffering of some of the world’s most destitute.  When she gave her acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo that December she gave a message you and I would consider typical of public statements we’ve come to associate with her: “It is not enough for us to say, ‘I love God, but I do not love my neighbor,'” she said, since in dying on the Cross, God had “[made] himself the hungry one — the naked one — the homeless one.” Jesus’ hunger, she said, is what “you and I must find” and alleviate.

In 2007 a book of Mother Teresa’s private journals and letters was published, after her death.  The book was called, Come Be My Light: The Private Writings of the Saint of Calcutta.  As you might recall, the book’s publication caused all kinds of stir in the media, including a huge article in Time Magazine and many articles and books written in response to the shocking revelation that Mother Teresa of Calcutta sometimes had doubts.  In fact, in a letter she had written just three months before she gave that speech for the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo in 1979, Mother Teresa wrote the following to one of her confessors: “Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear.” 

Here’s the backstory: in 1946 Sister Mary Teresa felt the call to go to Calcutta to teach.  On the train making her way to Calcutta, she felt Christ speaking to her.  “He called her to abandon teaching and work instead in ‘the slums’ of the city, dealing directly with ‘the poorest of the poor’ — the sick, the dying, beggars and street children. ‘Come, Come, carry Me into the holes of the poor,’ he told her. ‘Come be My light.’ After that experience, the nun felt her goal was to be both a material help and evangelistic influence to help the poor live their lives with dignity and, in doing so, encounter God’s infinite love, and having come to know Him, to love and serve Him in return.”[1]

And so, she did.  It was when she began her work there in the streets of Calcutta that she began to struggle with a feeling of God’s absence—with doubts of God’s providence and grace.  She wrote: “So many unanswered questions live within me afraid to uncover them — because of the blasphemy — If there be God — please forgive me — When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven — there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives & hurt my very soul. — I am told God loves me — and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul. Did I make a mistake in surrendering blindly to the Call of the Sacred Heart?”[2]

So many critics have challenged the substance and validity of Mother Teresa’s faith because she had such doubts.  But, why wouldn’t she, given the horrible poverty and hopelessness that surrounded her and that filled her days?  It seems to me that it would be easy to forget God’s promises to her, to forget her urgent sense of calling, to forget that God was there even in the slums of Calcutta, right along with her.

Why?  Because over five million people live in the slums of Calcutta.  They have limited sanitary systems; the people are crowded into inadequate shelter and; they deal every day with extreme poverty and disease.  One writer remembers a visit to Calcutta like this: “In the minds of those who have been there, even for only a day or two, the word ‘Calcutta’ often brings on a feeling of despair at how we fail to look after our brothers and sisters who suffer from diseases that could easily be cured for a few dollars’ worth of medicine. It doesn’t matter how many National Geographic documentaries you’ve seen, you have no idea of the extent of the suffering that exists in this world until you have seen the reality of Calcutta.”[3]

When Mother Teresa woke up everyday with the filth and poverty of Calcutta confronting her relentlessly, you know she had to struggle with doubt—with all the pain all around her, she ran a very high risk of not being able to believe the promise that had set her on her course of calling to begin with. 

But over and over and over again, she publicly and stubbornly insisted that the call of the Christ-follower was to believe in the healing love of God, and to extend it to others.  “Each one of [the poor and abandoned] is Jesus in disguise,” she said, over and over again and in many different variations.

How could she keep it up?  How could she keep pushing the people of the world to love the most discarded people when the filth and poverty and illness swirled around her day in and day out?

It wasn’t that she didn’t doubt—of course she doubted.

It was instead that she believed the promise of God.  She tenaciously kept believing the promise of God.  Year after year, doubt after doubt, darkness and absence aside…she kept believing the promise.

After 40 years—40 long years—the Hebrews finally found their way to the other side of the desert, to the land that God had promised them.  But along the way they had to learn the hard, hard lesson that the providence and promise of God was not a fickle, fleeting thing.  Instead, it was always there, all along, and God’s tender mercy and ongoing care, God’s leading them to the promise for which they waited, had not ended, even when things seemed bleak.

Like us, in their life together the Hebrews had come to identify ease, comfort, and their needs met with the promise and presence of God.  When things got hard, when the promise seemed elusive, when they weren’t sure where their next drink of water would come from, it was then that they forgot the promise of God.

But God did not forget the promise.  God’s vision and plan for the Hebrews in their life together was larger than they ever imagined, and even when they forgot to believe the promise, God was steadily pushing them toward its culmination.

And how about you and me?  We live in a city plagued by violence.  Our ears are assaulted by the empty rhetoric of politicians endorsing failed systems.  Our church is relatively small; our life together often dominated by pressing building issues and challenging budgets.  There’s always too much to be done, so much we could never accomplish it all.  We struggle, sometimes, to understand each other, to live with the gift of diversity we’ve been given.

It’s tempting to look around at all the difficulties of life together as followers of Jesus in this place and allow them to fill our vision, dominate our perspectives, and dampen our hope.

But we must remember the promise of God.  We are called to remember always that for us, God’s promise took on flesh in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and invited us into a whole new way of living.  Remember when we believed so much we would set out into unknown territory because the promise was so compelling?

Don’t forget the promise—for your own life and for our life together.  God will not leave us; God leads us forward.  We must believe the promise.  Amen.