Guide in Place
Text: Exodus 14:19-31
Other texts: Romans 14:7-12
The third commandment teaches us to observe the seventh day of the week for Sabbath. There are two reasons given for this in the Bible, because there are two listings of the commandments, one in Exodus and the other in Deuteronomy. The two reasons come from the two founding stories in the Bible. They each are a story version of central Jewish and Christian ideas of the world and God’s role in it. A little like two focus points of an ellipse, together they control the form of our faith.
God created the world and everything in it. That’s the first story. In Exodus it says “In six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.” From the creation story comes our notions of blessing, beauty, God’s sustaining abundance; and also sin and death.
God freed the Israelites from slavery. That’s the second story. In Deuteronomy it says “You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.” From the Exodus story comes our notions of compassion, justice; and also resurrection.
Both of these stories narrate an ordering of the world from out of chaos, a pushing aside of chaos. The chaos of the formless void and the chaos of a broken relationship between the peoples of the earth. Both stories are sources for us of gratitude for God’s intimate connection with this earth and its people. They tell us what God is like and what God likes.
The story of the Exodus, from which we heard today, is the central Biblical story of God’s wish to free people from oppression, exploitation, and abusive power. The Israelites, once favored by the Pharaoh for their industrious contribution to the welfare of Egypt and the skillful management by Joseph that once saved the nation, are now slaves. Their history has been forgotten, and a kind of xenophobia has seized the Egyptians, who, as all slave-holding people do, both need the Israelites and fear them. The Israelites are exploited and maltreated. Their lives were made bitter, it says in the story.
But, as you know, Moses conspires to engineer their freedom. With God’s help, who pressures the Pharaoh with curses and plagues. In the end, the Pharaoh relents, the people flee. But the Pharaoh immediately regrets his decision and pursues them once more. Which is where the part of the story we heard today begins.
This story is like an action adventure movie. There are bad guys, special effects, and devastation. The heroes prevail, the enemy is vanquished. As always, it is the victor who gets to tell the tale. It is our story, so we get to cheer the destruction of Pharaoh’s army and the escape of the Israelites through God’s intervention. In our telling of it, the story ends with genuine thanksgiving for the redemption of the people from slavery. It is the thanksgiving that is finally the point, the rest is drama.
It is God who makes it all happen. God is the main character. God’s hand is laid on human history. The God of a most gigantic universe bothers to divide a small sea for a moment into two parts so that an enslaved tribe of former nomads might be freed from their abusers. It is this same God that continues to lead them to a new settlement. How can that be? What are we humans, as the psalms ask, that God is mindful of us?
We are the Lord’s, Paul writes. That is how it can be. Though often read at funerals, these verses in Romans are a celebration of an intimate and an nearly-unimaginable connection with the God who created all things. A connection that extends beyond what we know. If we live—which we do—we live to the Lord, and if we die—which we will—we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die—and it will be one or the other for sure—we are the Lord’s. This is another way of Paul saying, as he does earlier in Romans, that there is no way that we can be separate from God.
But it is not only that we belong to God, but that God is actively involved with us. God does not just open the gates of Egypt and send the people on their way, out into the chaos of the desert and the unknown. God leads them in their journey from slavery to freedom by taking the form of a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. God guides them as they flee, as they attempt to leave a sorrowful past behind, as they approach a new land, as they hope for a new future. As we often do.
God stays with us during our days, in the light, during the raucous distractions of our lives, in our hot anger, in our cold calculations, in our exhaustion, in our energetic action. God is with us during our nights, in the darkness, in our blindness, in our fear and worry, in our keyed-up illuminated hours, in our welcome rest.
As with the Israelites, our future is uncertain, the outlines only a vague sketch. But we are not alone as the Israelites were not alone. We have not been abandoned to ourselves. We do not even belong to ourselves. We are not self-contained. As Paul writes, we do not live to ourselves, we do not die to ourselves.
Everyone follows some lord, follows some guiding voice. Everyone hopes it to be wise and not wicked, hopes it to be clear and not confusing. For Christians, that voice is Jesus’. For us, whether we live and whether we die, we belong to Christ.
Thanks be to God.
