Reading: Exodus 17:1-7
The people of Israel are on their way to the
Promised Land. Moses has led them
out of Egypt through the Red Sea and into the wilderness beyond. And now the real journey begins. Miles of desert lie between them and the
Promised Land, and along the way they have a lot of learning and growing to do.
This reading is about their time in “the wilderness
of Sin.” In English this seems like a
nice play on words, with the word “sin.”
But it’s really just the ancient name for that region which is also
where Mount Sinai is located, where a little while after this story the people
are given God’s ten commandments for their new life as God’s people.
When you’re out
in the desert dying of thirst and someone strikes open a rock and water flows
out, how can you not say thank you? When
all you are is afraid and angry about how your journey with God is going, and God
answers your complaints by giving you what you most need, how can you not say,
“Praise God”?
It’s good to express
gratitude for what we have, what we are given, and for needs that are answered.
And beyond this
simple, spontaneous response I’m struck as well by a few other things in this story.
One is that the
people aren’t really asking for anything.
They think there is no answer to the problem they’re facing, no solution
to the spot they’re in. They wonder if
maybe they should go back to where and how they used to be, but that’s not really
possible. Nor would they really want
it. But they also see no way of going on
as they are in the direction they’re going.
It seems they’ve come to a dead end, and the journey they’re on is
pretty well over.
It’s not, of
course. We know how the story turns out.
But what is the miracle that saves
them? Is it a miracle of divine
intervention in the way the world works?
Does God at least momentarily suspend the laws of nature and put water
where water wasn’t before, just so the people God loves can have what they
need?
Or is it a
miracle of changed perception, of seeing with new eyes and being opened in new
ways to what was really always there but underground, beneath the surface,
untapped and unknown as an answer to fear?
Was it a miracle maybe of Moses, his helpers and the people being opened
up to what was really there all along underneath their feet, and that needed
their coming to an end of themselves and their own resources for them to see it?
One of my times
of spiritual dryness and fear came in my first pastoral charge up in Bruce
County. I was a year or two out of
theology school and newly ordained.
After years of enjoying being in school, I’d finally grown tired of studying
about theology, God, church and pastoral ministry. I wanted to practice it, and I started out in
my first rural two-point charge with great expectations and high hopes.
Soon, though, I
was feeling lost in what pastoral ministry really required of me. Within a year or two I felt overwhelmed and
inadequate, empty and dried out inside, with no spiritual well to draw from as
I tried to be a minister to others.
So I checked out
the continuing education brochure of the Toronto School of Theology and signed
up for a week-long course called “Deepening the Spiritual Life Through
Prayer.” It sounded perfect – a week of
readings, maybe lectures and probably discussion with other ministers about
different kinds of prayer and how they relate to ministry, from which I could
get all kinds of ideas for my own ministry back home. This was something I knew how to do.
But when I got to
Toronto and the seminar room where the course was being held, within ten
minutes I learned this was not reading and discussion. This was to be a week-long prayer retreat. Each of us would be individually assigned a
spiritual director, whom we would meet with for maybe an hour every day to talk
about our prayer life and where God was leading us in it. The rest of the day would be filled with at
least two forty-five minute prayer times, a bit of guided meditative Bible
reading, walking and resting.
I had never done
anything like this before. The thought
of being that open about myself, my faith and my prayer life with another
person for a whole week scared the heck out of me, and at the first coffee
break I thought about slipping out of the room, packing up and going back home.
But I
stayed. I followed the direction. Through the week I opened myself up as best I
knew how to my assigned director, a little nun from Ireland named Maeve. And that opening up to an answer that I
didn’t even know was there, was one of only a few significant turning points in
my journey with God, towards greater wholeness and fullness within myself.
Answers and ways
ahead that we can’t even imagine are a big part of any honest journey with God
and towards new wholeness and fullness.
As ecumenical
chaplain at McMaster University – a job I had before coming here, students
sometimes would come to the Chaplaincy Centre for pastoral conversation and
counselling. Often when I would sit with
a student and begin to listen to their struggle – whatever it was, within ten
or fifteen minutes I would feel as lost and without direction as they
were. With them, I could see no way
forward, no advice to give, no solution to suggest.
I would feel like
bailing out. I would wish for a simple,
miraculous word of wisdom to appear.
Something to help them out and help me look good, like I had the answer
for them. But nothing would appear, and
all I and they could do together was to keep exploring the issue and their
feelings about it, keep digging deeper into the situation and their own values
and resources, and keep wondering how much deeper into darkness and not knowing
would we have to go and maybe never find our way out?
Until somewhere
along the way a bit of light would break through. A new insight, most often on their part. A new kind of action – something they had
never done before, that might make a difference. Maybe a new feeling of being heard and
accepted, that somehow gave them the courage they needed to do what they now
knew they needed to do.
No miracle other
than the miracle of a new way of seeing what was there all along. No divine intervention other than the loving
willingness to keep whacking away together at the hard rock ahead of us – or
inside of us, until we start to see what’s been there all along, just waiting
to be opened up.
In our Monday
night Lenten discussion group we’re watching a series of video interviews with
Diana Butler Bass about what she learned in researching and writing her book on
gratitude. One thing she talks about a
lot is the importance of really seeing the abundance rather than the scarcity that
there is in the world of all the things needed for the life and well-being of
all people and all creation. She says we
live with an idea of scarcity, we’re afraid of not having enough for ourselves,
and we hoard the necessities of life for ourselves rather than share them with
others. It’s what we’ve been taught,
it’s hard to see things differently and imagine another way, and it’s killing
us and all the world with us. It seems
we’re on a dead-end journey, and closer than ever to the end.
But, she says,
this is precisely what gives her hope. The
way the world works, she says, has become so bad, so dark and doom-filled, that
more and more people are now more ready than before to be opened to another way
of seeing – of seeing what’s really there and has been there all along, and
another way of being together as world.
In the darkness and fear, at the end of ourselves and our resources and
what we think the answers are, comes the turning point.
I wonder if the
COVID-19 pandemic has much the same potential in it. “Pandemic” sounds fearful, like all may be
doomed. People are scared and are doing
some scared and scary things. On one
level it seems the world is only falling more apart.
But on another level,
“pandemic” only means we’re all in this together – that all the world now is
one in our vulnerability to receiving and transmitting, and suffering and most
likely recovering from the effects of the virus, and it’s time now to care about
and look out for another, pool our resources and share what we know about the
virus and how we can all help to minimize its impact, and realize that helping one
another out is the best way for any of us to be well.
It’s an ethic
that’s been there all along under the surface of our life in the very bedrock
of creation. But we lose sight of it as
we get used to other ways of being. Until
something seemingly terrible breaks us open to see the good thing and good way
that’s already and always waiting for us like a life-giving stream to help us
not go back to how we were, but carry on in the journey to where God wants to
lead us.
I’d like to close
with something Henri Nouwen wrote about gratitude and all that happens to us in
life:
“To be grateful
for the good things that happen in our lives is easy, but to be grateful for
all our lives – the good as well as the bad, the moments of joy as well as the
moments of sorrow, the successes as well as the failures, the rewards as well
as the rejections – that requires hard spiritual work. Still, we are only truly grateful people when
we can say thank you to all that has brought us to the present moment. As long as we keep dividing our lives between
events and people we would like to remember and those we would rather forget,
we cannot claim the fullness of our beings as a gift of God to be grateful for.”
I wonder what
hard thing we are being called to be open to, and grateful for today?
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