March 14, 2010 - Lent 4, Year C (RCL)
Five short sentences. That’s all.
They barely make sense. But they mark the end
of one of the great journeys
of all time.
It was the journey of a lifetime,
a journey
that took a lifetime.
Not one of the adults who began it
was alive
at the end of it.
Instead
it was their children
and their children’s children
who finally made it to the end,
crossed the river
and made it home
to the land
that had been promised.
And there they kept
the passover.
And it was the passover
that had began the whole journey.
Remember?
Their parents
had been slaves in Egypt,
had settled there
four hundred or so years earlier
as honored guests,
relatives of the great official Joseph,
come to Egypt to escape the famine in their own land.
But as the years went on
and their ancestors had flourished,
large families and successful farming
made them the envy of the Egyptian people
who began to resent them,
treat them as outsiders,
and eventually wore them down
with laws and penalties and fines and taxes
until they became
servants
and even
slaves.
And there, God had heard their cries,
and made a plan
to rescue them.
He called Moses
as we heard last week,
called Moses
and gave him the task
of leading his people
to freedom.
But it wasn’t as simple
as just packing up their belongings
and heading out.
No ruler
would be stupid enough
to let free the people
who do the dirty work
in his country.
No ruler
would suddenly declare
his slaves
free.
And so it took a lot of bargaining,
and a series of nine interventions by God
in the form of plagues
culminating
in the death of his first born son
before Pharaoh decided
that the slaves had become
more trouble than they were worth
and were free
to go.
And that night, as they packed hurriedly
they ate a special meal,
and that meal became
the passover.
But the story begins
even further back than that.
The beginning of the story
is back with Abraham,
Abraham, who left his home
on the word of a promise, the promise of God: a land, descendants.
And God was faithful,
and Abraham arrived safely in the promised land and settled there,
and had a precious son, Isaac.
And Isaac had a son Jacob, and Jacob had twelve sons,
and one of the was Joseph.
And through a string
of unlikely events,
Joseph ended up a senior official in Egypt,
and when famine came to the promised land,
Jacob’s other sons
joined Joseph in Egypt.
That was how their ancestors
had come to Egypt in the first place.
And after four centuries
came the passover,
and the exodus from Egypt
to the promised land.
But even that wasn’t straightforward.
Mumbling and grumbling and doubting the God who had rescued them, had set them free,
they plodded through the desert, until eventually God got sick of it. And said,
“You don’t trust me to lead you home safely? Well, fine. I won’t. The promised land
will have to wait
for your children.”
And so they wandered
for forty years.
Until finally
the time came
that we read about today.
And God led them
across the Jordan river,
just as they had crossed the Red Sea
going out of Egypt,
God led them across the Jordan River
and into
the promised
land.
But that wasn’t the end of it.
Because once they made it safely in,
God didn’t want to let them forget.
And so he required
that all the men be circumcised,
and once they had healed,
they celebrated
the Passover.
And the next day,
they ate the produce
of their new home,
their true home,
the promised land.
There’s a nice symmetry to it all:
Passover, river, wilderness, river, passover.
It would be fitting to say,
and they all loved happily
ever after.
Except, if that were the case,
the Old Testament would end here,
at Joshua, chapter 5.
We know
that the story goes on,
and it’s not all
happily
ever after.
But on this day, there is a pause.
a pause to look back,
to consider their history,
to see what God
has done.
These five verses, a nice summary.
But they do leave some questions
unanswered.
What did God think
about this whole diversion
to Egypt?
After all, the people are now back
in the same place
they were
when Abraham first entered the land,
five hundred or so
years earlier.
If Joseph’s brothers
hadn’t got so mad at him
and sold him off to slave traders,
he wouldn’t have ended up in Egypt.
Or what if
when he’d offered them the option to move to Egypt
to escape the famine,
the brothers had said, “No thanks; just give us some food - we belong in the promised land.”
Or what if
after the famine was over,
they’d packed up and gone home,
maybe even with their brother Joseph as well?
What if?
Then the whole Exodus thing
would have been
unnecessary.
What might have happened
if they had stayed put?
You see, nowhere in scripture, as far as I know,
does it ever say,
whether God thought it was a good idea,
abandoning the promised land
for the short-term promise of Egypt.
They’re not condemned for it, but neither are they applauded.
We get no hint,
of whether the whole Egypt thing
was indeed God’s plan,
or God’s redemption
of a mess that they have made.
But scripture deals with what is, not what might have been.
And what is, is that the people of God
left the promised land, in search of food,
and now, after hundreds of years,
a fight with Pharaoh,
and a forty year long trek as refugees across the deserts of Sinai,
they are finally home,
home
Looking back
from the other side
of the river.
And God has been faithful;
God has been generous to them,
and they are blessed.
When we look back on our lives
the temptation is
to get tied up
in the what ifs.
What if I’d married the guy
I dated in college?
What if I’d taken that job instead of this one?
What if I hadn’t done that stupid thing,
or made that promise, or opened my mouth?
It’s easy to get hooked into a cycle of what if.
But God deals
with what is, not what if.
God deals
with the lives we have,
the mistakes we make
as well as the good decisions.
God deals with what is.
And works with it, and in it,
and through it,
and brings us out
the other
side.
God redeems
the messes
we make,
and turns them
for good.
But often we can’t see it
until we’re out the other side.
Like the Israelites
who can’t see
the security of God’s promise
until they reach the other side of the Jordan.
Hindsight is great.
It’s like that poem, Footprints.
Where the person can’t work out
where God was
at the crucial, difficult times
of life.
Until she looks back
and realizes
that at the time
she thought she was most alone
God
was carrying her.
The only problem is,
that by definition
we don’t have the power of hindsight
when we’re in the middle of things.
We can’t magically move forward
and see how everything works out.
We spend most of our lives
like the Israelites, stuck forty years in the wilderness.
So what do we do?
All we can do
is trust God.
Trust God
to make something good
of even the most difficult, the messiest,
the darkest
parts of our lives.
And know that nothing, nothing
is too bad, too ugly, too unspeakable
for God.
Nothing
will make God
abandon us.
Nothing
will make God
reject us,
Nothing.
God loves us,
and wants the best for us,
and if that means cleaning up after us
so be it.
Of course, that doesn’t mean
that we should deliberately do whatever we want
and leave God to clean up.
Because God does, usually, make us live with the consequences of our actions. That’s why the Israelites
had to wander in the desert for 40 years.
God doesn’t just magic the bad things away.
But God does work in them and through them, God does work to transform them
so that when we finally get to the other side
we will be able to look back
and see God’s hand at work in our lives.
And we will get
to the other side.
We will get to have
that passover meal,
that welcome back feast
that the father holds
for the prodigal son.
And until then?
Until then, we wait. And trust. And pray.
And God
will hear us.
© Raewynne J. Whiteley 2010