WHAT HAVE YOU DONE FOR US LATELY?
A Sermon preached by the
Rev. Randle R. (Rick) Mixon
First Baptist Church, Palo Alto, CA
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Text: Exodus 17:1-7
A goodly group of God’s people gathered at Grace Baptist Church in San Jose yesterday to celebrate the life of Darline Krause. By all accounts, if someone wanted to know what a maverick is really like, they might look at Darline’s life. A classic iconoclast, she marched to the beat of her own drummer; she had a clear sense of right and wrong; she knew how things should be done and she knew how to get them done. Linda Shepard, treasurer for Pacific Coast Baptist Association, shared with me that when a cause needed financial support, Darline usually came up with a figure that was significantly larger than most deemed reasonable, and not because she was an irresponsible spendthrift but because she believed in the justice of the cause, and often that amount or more would be raised.
In the service we also heard about her wicked sense of humor, about some of the fears and foibles of her eighty years, about her sense of color and about how more than one child at Grace believed in good faith that Darline “owned the church.” She could be cantankerous and bossy and a little obsessive. She was truly human and a child of God. She was one of those people who lived her life until the day she died. She expected others to live the same way as she called us out to live our faith actively by standing up for our beliefs, whatever the cost.
In sharing with those gathered, I recalled one of my early encounters with Darline. It came during the biennial meeting of the American Baptist Churches-USA in San Jose in 1993. There was then, as now ferment over the place of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people in the life of our denomination. Those of us involved in this concern on a national level had carefully strategized our witness at the Biennial. It was to be the inauguration of the Association of Welcoming and Affirming Baptists and, in general, we did not want any boat-rocking confrontations with the denomination. But Darline had different ideas. She believed the denomination’s treatment of sexual minority people was reprehensible and we needed to say so clearly and loudly. In spite of our best efforts to dissuade her, Darline organized her own protest outside the convention center, drawing on her connections to PFLAG and other LGBT groups in the South Bay.
This action, like lots of actions Darline took in her long and faithful life, was nettlesome. It got under my skin and I was not happy with her. In retrospect, though, I imagine that part of my unhappiness was that she was right and I was wrong in my caution. Like Martin Luther King, writing from the Birmingham jail to the good and respectable clergy of that city, she believed that “justice delayed is justice denied,” and what she believed she also lived. It seems to me that a proper tribute to Darline’s life would for all of us to be a little nettlesome on occasion in support of the reign of God on earth.
Now Darline was no Moses though I suppose she could have been in another time and place. She was never literally responsible for leading a whole people out of slavery and through the wilderness over a long period of 40 years, but who’s to say for certain she couldn’t have, God willing. We know Moses came from great privilege. We know he had a temper; he killed a man in rage. We know he was a man of great compassion who chafed when he saw his own people enslaved and brutalized. We know he doubted his gifts when God called to him from the burning bush. We know he exercised great power and authority in confronting Pharaoh and leading the children of Israel out of slavery. We know he was a man of profound faith, who communicated as directly with God as any human this side of Jesus. He was truly human and a child of God. He was one of those people who lived his life until the day he died, looking longingly into the Promised Land he would never enter. He expected others to live the same way as he called them out to live their faith actively by standing up for their beliefs, whatever the cost.
Not so different from God’s children today, the children of Israel were an unruly and self-centered lot. One way to look at these stories from Exodus, which we have been exploring the past few weeks, is to see them recounting the evolution of a disorganized and rag tag group of former slaves, used to the odious security of their captivity, into a more mature and responsible community of faith. We see them grow from a disoriented aggregation of humanity, living in self-absorbed immaturity, into a fully-formed people chosen by God to be both God’s own people and light to the nations on God’s behalf.
However, where we find them on their journey in today’s text is a place in which they are asking Moses, and God, with some regularity, “What have you done for us lately?” Mark Brett writes, “According to the exodus story, Moses was as good a leader as you’re ever likely to find. His staff, his symbol of power, could turn the Nile to blood; it could open the waters of the Reed Sea, and it could bring water from a desert rock. It seems that Moses could bring an oppressive Pharaoh to his knees, destroy an imperial army, and satisfy the most basic needs of his people for food and water. What more could the Israelites want? Yet each new miracle brings a new complaint…here in chapter17, they start to wonder whether God is really with them, because they are suffering thirst. So many needs, so many divine interventions, so little satisfaction. And Moses is stuck in the middle: the extraordinary leader with so much power, yet so little power actually to fulfill the needs of his people. They’re like a leaking jug: the more you try to fill it up, the more it just leaks out the bottom” (Mark Brett, The Power of God, Laughing Bird Liturgical Resources, September 28, 2008.)
It is important not to be too harsh on these wilderness wanderers for their anxiety and griping. It was hot and dry out there. There was a whole host of people and flocks to feed and water. They were traveling through territory both unfamiliar and hostile. It was a scary situation. If you’re hungry and thirsty and frightened enough even the security of slavery may seem appealing.
Is Moses just echoing their fears when he says to God “What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me”? Is he encountering some doubts of his own? Maybe Moses is less of a maverick than Darline was as he works overtime to try to keep all these people satisfied. He must at times have wanted to leave them behind to survive on their own, but, in the end, he would not let go of his sense of responsibility for them. He wants them to know God as he has come to know God – God as providential, God as compassionate, God as just, God as trustworthy, God as mystery, God as God and to trust that God will bring them through.
Walter Brueggemann has written a monumental Theology of the Old Testament, which he subtitles, Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy. In this work he writes of what he calls “Israel’s core testimony.” Among the things he finds as key to the witness of this people is their belief that Yahweh is the God who delivers. Drawing on several key Hebrew verbs, he argues that it is fundamental to the core identity of this people that God is one who “brings out,” “delivers,” “redeems,” and “brings up.” He says, “Israel’s testimony to Yahweh as deliverer enunciates Yahweh’s resolved capacity to intervene decisively against every oppressive, alienating circumstance and force that precludes a life of well-being” (Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy, pp. 174-6.) Theirs is a powerful and personal testimony that comes as they live through, and then reflect back on, this experience of the Exodus and their own growth through the experience. God does indeed bring them out and lead them through. This is the story that defines them as a people.
At the same time, though, Brueggemann observes that another fundament to Israel’s faith tradition is that there is a counter testimony, there is a practice of cross-examining the core testimony. Here we find Moses and Job and Jeremiah questioning God and Tevye shaking his fist at God and bargaining with God. Here we find a people who, while they openly and honestly testify to God’s deliverance and redemption, also ask of God key questions such as “how long?” “Why?” “Where?” and “is?” (Brueggemann, p. 319ff.) We get some those very questions in today’s text – “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and our livestock with thirst?” and, especially, “Is the Lord among us or not?” The story of this people is a story in which God is perceived to be present and in which God is perceived to be absent. This was particularly a struggle as they looked for proof positive that God was with them. “What have you done for us lately?” “Show yourself.” “Prove yourself.”
This is a people, perhaps not so different from us, who live caught in the tension between their own very human anxieties and their desire to affirm the powerful ways in which God has moved in their lives. We want so to know what we cannot know. If we were to experience the fullness of God, we would not be able to take it in or even survive the experience. So, we are left to live in trust and in obedience to God’s righteous commands; or we can choose to wander lost and alone in a wilderness of our own making.
Our words of preparation remind us that “The way through the wilderness imposes on Israel a life full of difficulties and miseries. The most basic needs – food and drink - are barely ensured. But whenever Israel suffers thirst, water is given; whenever there seems to be no food, sustenance is provided…This is characteristic of the way in which Yahweh helps his people in the wilderness – from day to day. Israel is not permitted to live in security lest she forget that she is utterly dependent on her God” (Ulrich W. Mauser, Christ in the Wilderness, p. 22.)
In her little poem, “Go to the Ant,” Barbara Dickinson asks a question that may challenge our own core testimony, “Is there life before death?” She goes on to compare the maverick grasshopper with the security-seeking ant:
…Gladly the grasshopper
glorified God by the
sensuous enjoyment
of each irretrievable moment
while the ant
grieved his yesterdays
and grumbled each tomorrow…
We can like the grasshopper and Darline and Moses risk living our lives, seeking God’s way and constructing God’s realm among us; or we can spend our lives whining and waiting for the next miracle to occur, most likely missing it because we were too busy grumbling to catch any glimpse of God’s glory. On this day, instead of praying, “What have you done for us lately?” maybe we can pray “Lead me, Lord, lead me in Thy righteousness; make Thy way plain before my face. For it is Thou, Lord, Thou, Lord, only that makest me dwell in safety.” Amen.