3rd Sunday in Lent
John 4:5-30, Exodus 17:1-7

Once upon a time, I lived not in a place
called “striving” or “testing,” as did the Israelites in this story: but in a
land named Absolute, in Certainty’s backyard: in a place where doubt was
searched out carefully, like a weed, and ruthlessly uprooted. I remember a
friend I used to have in those days, a thoughtful girl, who once questioned
whether the children of Israel could really have
walked miraculously across the Red Sea on dry land; for she had read
that the Red Sea was, in those days, a mere eighteen inches deep. This testing
of God’s word disturbed me, so I took the troublesome weed to my bible study
leader, who said, eighteen inches deep?
Well, then, the Israelites might have waded across, but, praise the Lord, God
drowned the Egyptians in a foot and a half of water!” In tending
the neatly manicured lawns of the Land of Absolute, the first law is You Shall Not Put the Lord Thy God to the Test.

I was thinking about my old smug and
certain self this past week when I found myself, literally, driving from the
old world of safety and certainty toward a place I had never been, where there
were more questions, and harder ones, along a way that was cold, slippery, and
dangerous. I was sent by Presbyterian Disaster Assistance to help respond to
the shootings last week at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb. On my way
there, I drove through the town of Wheaton, where I attended college. Wheaton
College, founded in 1860 for Christ and his
Kingdom, is a school with strict academic standards surpassed only
by its rigorous standards of belief. To go there, one must subscribe to a
narrow statement of faith and practice, affirming the literal truth of the
bible and a clear, unswerving path to salvation.

I was happy there: sheltered and well fed;
and it was many years before a Moses broke into my world to threaten and
challenge me with a flight toward freedom.. . .

When I drove by the campus last week I was
surprised how small it was; how little it had changed in thirty years. . .and I
thought, I could never go back there.

But going forward, as I recall, wasn’t
easy, either; then, or now. The campus of NIU in DeKalb is, like most state
universities, large and growing larger. Cole Hall, where the Valentine’s Day
shootings took place, sits in the heart of campus. Faculty and students I spoke
with described how the wounded and frightened geology students scattered in all
directions, finding shelter and support wherever they could. They will not go
back to Cole Hall: the way is barred to them by a yellow police line and by
the memory of what happened there, Members of the NIU community who also claim
an identity as people of faith have hard questions to ask God and one another:
they, too, are aware they cannot go back, and are wondering where the way
forward will take them, as a community, as persons, as believers. Those who
have been this way before know they are on the road toward a promised land—one
bigger than the land they left behind, if they are willing to move, as the
university’s new motto puts it, Forward,
Together Forward.

The people of Israel were nomads; ex-slaves
on the lam, with a wilderness of doubts about the integrity of their journey,
the reliability of their leaders, the reality of their ultimate destination,
and the faithfulness of the unknown god who had called them out. They could not
go back to Egypt; their lives depended upon finding a way forward. Yet they had
no idea where they were headed, nor how to get there without losing what little
they had left.

They left slavery behind and escaped with
their lives, but now they face survivors’ guilt, and carry survivors’
questions: why me? What do I do with this
new life I am being given? I can’t go back to the person I was before, so who
am I becoming? In the wilderness, unsure of their journey’s
direction or end, they are acutely aware they have no water. Desert journeys
are, as anyone who has undertaken one knows, dry and thirsty work. Have we gone up from Egypt merely to die in the
wilderness? All Israel cries with the fear and the torment of this
question; it is as though each voice, from cattle to children to adults, is
raised in a mighty and unified voice of fear and abandonment. Did you bring us out of Egypt to kill us and our
children and our livestock with thirst? It is a reasonable
question, and a reasonable request: give us
water.

Yet Moses, who just days earlier was
eloquent in victory at the Red Sea, is rendered speechless in the face of
Israel’s fear. He is from the old school, the one that obeys the first law and
its corollary: Don’t put the Lord to the
test, and Don’t question authority. In the face of his people’s
honest pain and confusion, he can only bluster: how dare you question me! How dare you challenge God. What right have
you to question the ways of the Almighty, or me, your leader? Confronted
by rage and bedeviled by uncertainty, he does not want the responsibility of
threading a path through a thicket of confusing choices and shifting variables.
Like us, Moses longs for a highway in the wilderness that leads unswervingly to
the promised land; well-marked, well-lighted, and with plenty of rest stops
along the way. He wants regular meals, a warm bed at night, and a clear
statement of what’s what. He does not want questions without answers: he wants
absolutes, and who can blame him? But such certainties are not part of the way
of freedom; but part of the life of Egypt, the way of certainty and security
and slavery that is mitzraim, another
word for Egypt that is also translated, “twice narrow.” It was a place they
left behind, whose doors were forever barred to them. They cannot go back, for
the old solutions and the rigid rules of life in bondage no longer apply. And
if Moses is paralyzed by fear; it seems to me that perhaps the children of
Israel, at least, are on the right track.

For it is their desire, their imperative,
to test the waters. They wonder, have we
made the right choice? Is this invisible God, are these all-too-visibly flawed
people trustworthy enough to help us find the way home? They are
alone in uncharted wilderness, on a risk-filled journey. They are caught in
the no-man’s land between deadly certainty and uncertain, unfulfilled hope, and
they are thirsty.

And as people will do when they are caught
uneasily betwixt and between; they turned on one another. They imagined the
worst, they doubted, they fought with each other and they blamed each other and
they blamed Moses and finally, in their rage and desperation, the hit upon the
solution, and challenged both Moses and God. Is
this God of yours reliable, or are we everlastingly to wait for the cosmic
other shoe to drop? Give us something to drink, they said, and prove your trustworthiness among us. And
then they waited.

The word in Hebrew for “testing” is nissah, and it means, to prove a person
and see whether they will act in a particular way, or to see whether the
character of a person is consistent. What the children of Israel hit upon, in
their desperation, was probably the only truly faithful act they were capable
of performing, there in the desert. They could not go back, relying on the
old, cold certainties: but they could go forward and ask God, Who are you? They could not yet have the
Promised Land, but they could build a relationship capable of bearing them
through the wilderness. They could not know the future, but they could know the
God who would lead them into it. They were able to say: we can’t do much, but we can give you an opportunity
to say who you are among us, and from there, maybe we can find our way forward
together.

In the twice
narrow place that was slavery in Egypt; life was hard. But the road
of freedom that passes through the dry and dangerous desert is, in its own way,
harder. It is a road fraught with risks, and unknowns, with dangers and with
doubts. But doubt can be the catalyst that makes our growing up into the image
of God a possibility. And striving with God, wrestling for even a bit of what
we need to sustain us along the difficult journey, might be the beginning of
faith, and a way through the wildernesses of uncertainty through which we travel,
on our way to our promised lands. If we cut off the avenues of doubt, we deny
ourselves the opportunity to ask whether God is essentially reliable. We lose
the chance to find out who God really is, and then we lose ourselves.

But when we ask, when we seek, even when in
fear and distress and hostility we turn on each other and on God with shrill
demands, God is there before us, the Giver of gifts, making a way in the
wilderness, standing in the rocks before us, bidding us come. It may not be much,
—it may in fact be pitifully little, when our needs seem so great: but by
Grace, it may be just enough. Go on ahead
of the people, the Voice said to Moses, take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go. I will be standing there in front of you on
the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the
people may drink. And he did, and God did, and the people did
drink. It was a small stony miracle in the midst of crying need—barely enough,
but enough to get by. And sometimes that’s the way it is in the wilderness:
not too much, just enough, and God there before us in the rocks, when we stand
beside each other and ask for what we need to survive one more day. Let us
pray, in words from T.S. Eliot’s poem, Ash
Wednesday:

This is
the time of tension between dying and birth
The
place of solitude where three dreams cross
between blue rocks—
Blessed
sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,

Suffer
us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach
us to care and not to care
Teach
us to sit still
Even
among these rocks,
Our
peace in God’s will
And
even among these rocks
Sister,
mother,
And
spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer
(us) not to be separated
And
let (our) cry come unto Thee.

Amen.