Tuesday, March 31, 2020

March 29 Sermon - Water from the Rock

Texts: Exodus 17:1-7, John 4:5-15


I was a fourth grader. Teachers changed all their plans that day to talk to us about what happened. I came home that night to see the newspaper on my parents’ table, with three huge letters filling the page: W A R. It was 9/11.
9/11 was a defining moment for people of my generation: millennials. Millennials were born roughly between 1981 and 1996 and are now between ages 24 and 39. Generation Z - the generation after mine - runs from about 1997 to 2012, so that’s people between ages 8 to 23. One of the main differences between those two groups in this country is whether you remember 9/11. Researcher Jason Dorsey says that “in order for 9/11 to be a generation-defining moment you had to remember it, feel the emotion of it, and the uncertainty of what was going to happen next.” Surely we are now in another generation-defining moment today.
There are many of those moments in the history of our faith. A few weeks ago, I shared one. Does anyone remember? It’s a real question - I’ll unmute.
Yes: I shared the story of the Roman attack on Jerusalem that took place over months, ending in the destruction of the Temple in the year 70 AD. That temple was called the Second Temple. I talked about how the pain and trauma of that story is central to understanding the New Testament. 
I believe the biggest moment for really getting the Old Testament, including today’s story from Exodus, was a similar event which I’ve referenced many times before. The destruction of the first Temple in Jerusalem , in the year 587 BCE, by the Babylonian Empire. The Babylonian Empire was a brutal and violent empire just like Rome would be centuries later. As I tell this story I invite you to paint a picture in your mind. So much like what happened in 70, it began when the people of Jerusalem and the surrounding countryside said enough, and their King - Zedekiah - revolted against Babylon. In return the Babylonian army attacked Jerusalem for 18 or 30 months, depending on the sources. The Bible describes awful conditions and says after the fourth month there was no more bread to eat.
Eventually the Babylonians broke through Jerusalem’s walls and conquered the city. The King’s sons were killed in front of him and he was then blinded and taken captive to Babylon. Jerusalem was plundered, and the Solomon’s Temple was destroyed. The elites were taken to Babylon and only the poorest remained.
With the destruction of the Temple, the people lost their biggest connection to God. Many had believed that certain things could only happen at the Temple, that it was in some very literal sense where God lived. It was the pride of the people and the center of religious life. And then it was gone.
(It helps me put in perspective my own yearning to be back in our building. We will be back. When, I don’t know. But it’s still standing. We will be back).
This was a generation-defining moment if there ever was one, and most of the Old Testament was developed and finalized in its wake. Stories that had been told for generations got written down and rewritten. And in particular, the books of the Torah came together: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. 
Stories like the Exodus story, which we heard part of today, got put front and center. Stories of ancestors who wandered in the desert wilderness far from home, sacrificing and struggling. Stories of a God with a portable home: a God who dwells among the people in the wilderness and not in a house of stone. Stories like these - and not the stories of past wealth and magnificent temples - became key. 
So we read and hear these Exodus stories through the eyes of those who wrote them -- those who had everything taken away from them, who thirsted not only for water but for new ways of being human, reimagining everything from the ground up: their faith, their community, their economy, their culture. All of it.
In today’s story the people were thirsty and they were complaining to Moses about it. And when Moses took it up with God, God directed him to strike a rock with his staff and promised that water would come from it. And, it did. Miracle or a surprise of nature, depending how you see it. The point is their needs were supplied. Moses named the spot Massah, meaning test, and Meribah, meaning quarrel. Why? Because the story says, that’s where “the Israelites argued with and tested the Lord, asking “Is the Lord really with us or not?”
“Is the Lord really with us or not?”
That is the question that rings out in this story. A question I can easily imagine God’s wilderness people asking; a question written down centuries later by God’s people who had lost everything to the Babylonian empire; a question surely echoed by those who centuries later watched the exact same thing happen at the hands of the Romans, a question echoed by people in every place and time when facing down a situation that seems just absolutely beyond what they could ever imagine and just getting real: “is the Lord really with us or not?” 
But here’s the thing about that question: it’s written down at the end of a story that answers the question loud and clear: Yes, the Lord is really with us. That’s the answer that our ancestors came to time and time again: Yes, the Lord is really with us. I’m a pastor and this is church so it’s sort of our job together to find it in ourselves to answer yes to that question, trusting that whatever we individually feel in any given moment we are part of a community and tradition that has found reason after reason to say: yes, in this thing called life, no matter what happens, the Lord is really with us. 
So the question that nags at me now is on the other side of the coin: “will we stay with the Lord or not?” We as individuals, families, church, state, nation. Will we stay with God? Or not? Right now staying with God has everything to do with staying away from people we don’t live with. Staying at home as much as we can if we at all can. Staying with God means donating whatever we can spare -- this last week the church donated 1,200 latex gloves to Plymouth place, and we’ll be handing out gift cards to food pantry guests in 45 minutes or so. Staying with God means choosing to love our neighbors as we love ourselves, sacrificing our freedoms to save lives -- our own, our families and friends, and those we’ve never met. Staying with God means listening to public health experts and following their recommendation. And yes, as with our ancestors it means reimagining everything from how we organize faith communities to how we organize our economy.
And yes, staying with God includes staying home on Easter. I want to be crystal clear: a church gathering in person for Easter worship during this pandemic is not staying with God, it is abandoning the worship of God to worship economic productivity instead, a hollow freedom requiring no sacrifice. For as the Rev. Emily Heath reminds us that “ the first Easter didn’t happen at a church. It happened outside of an empty tomb, while all the disciples were sequestered in a home, grief-stricken and wondering what was going on. So, we’re all going to be keeping things pretty Biblical this #Easter. The good news, though, is what came next. New life happens, no matter what. The more we make sure people are protected, the more we can proclaim the goodness of God’s grace.”
Our ancestors, when facing profound lack of freedom and intense sacrifice, decided to stay with God time after time after time. Not without questioning or complaining. Not with fear or grief. But they stayed with God. They wrote and rewrote stories. They shared with one another. They did what they had to do so their people would survive, old and young, to tell stories of a God who dwells not in a house of stone but among a wandering people, a God who stays with us and invites us to stay with her in return, a God who brings manna from heaven and water from rocks still today, giving us what we need to so that we can do what the world needs us to do. 

We have a lot of choices in this season for who to follow. To stay with. Let us choose wisely. Let us stay with God, protect our neighbors, and look always for new life. Amen.

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