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.

I John 4:7-21

Acts 8:26-40

There is a Chinese blessing—or maybe a curse?—that goes may you live in interesting times. I think we’re so blessed—as was the protagonist Philip in this morning’s story from the book of Acts; and as was the theologian Dorothee Soelle, who grew up in war-time Germany, and theologically came of age during war’s long aftermath in the lives, culture, and spirituality of the German people. In her book Not Just Yes and Amen, she tells a story about a woman of her acquaintance in the city of Hamburg; a widow who had been living alone since her husband had died five years earlier. She lived in a tidy apartment, two rooms of which she rented out in order to increase her income. The only people she knew were the two renters and the nearest neighbors on her floor. Her life consisted in keeping the apartment clean, going to the market, and cooking her meals. She seldom read books, or even magazines. She watched a little television in the afternoon. She had some minor health concerns, and worried about them. She was difficult to talk with, frequently repeating the same jokes, only becoming energized when relating stories of the homeland from which she had fled at the end of the war. She rarely spoke of anyone except herself. Though she was a confirmed and self-described Christian, religion meant very little to her in the small world which made up her life. One time, she told Soelle, she had become friendly with a former colleague from work, but I don’t let her in the house.

Regrettably, I can’t say this story is an unusual one. I know people like the woman in Hamburg, and so do you. There are thousands of women and men in our city alone, I would guess, living in exactly this way—except, as Dorothee Soelle says, to live in this way is not living at all: it is, rather, a kind of death. The woman in Hamburg marks her days alone, with no meaningful connection to other people’s lives, with no participation in the world of her renters and neighbors, without her life making any difference whatsoever in the living of anyone else.

No one matters to her: and so, says Soelle, she is dead.

The New Testament letter called 1st John echoes this seemingly harsh judgment. We know that we have passed from death to life because we love one another. Whoever does not love abides in death. In other words, the person who does not love is dead, and those who want to know that they are genuinely alive, must live for and with others.

It’s tempting to read 1st John—obsessed with the idea of love—as a kind of feel-good script, eminently suitable for weddings, a kind of Bible-Barney: you know, that big purple dinosaur the very little kids watch when we are trying to socialize them into this hard world: I love you, you love me, we’re a happy family…with a great big hug and a kiss from me to you, won’t you say you love me too? It’s all soo soothing and benign, so sweet and tender and helpful. Great stuff—for two year olds, at least.

But the writer of 1st John, himself a victim of life in interesting times, has something else in mind altogether. When he is talking about love and community and God, he is not being nice, but rather, speaking about matters of life and death. Love that is something powerfully inconvenient, massively disruptive of life as we know it…something so important that it quite literally defines his world in terms that are as clear as darkness and light.

It is neither logical nor practical, and its demands are unavoidable. It is strong: strong as death, as the Song of Solomon puts it, strong as the grave from which the Christ arose on Easter.

In the story from the book of Acts, Philip, follower of Jesus, experienced this kind of love about which 1st John is speaking. Get up! yells the angel of God like some disembodied drill sergeant, go south on the wilderness road. See that foreigner? Run with his chariot and join it. Do it!

Ah, it’s always the wilderness road, isn’t it? No chance Philip could join with his neighbor for hot tea, with his buddies for a cold one at the local pub, with his beloved for a quiet dinner for two by the lake. No, to obey the dictates of love is to go out of his way. To expose himself to one who is the powerful agent of a foreign government. To place his own life and safety at risk, while upsetting most of what he believes about his religion and all of what he holds dear as a person of faith and a patriot. Listen: this is not a nice story about two buddies sharing faith and fellowship—I love you, you love me, we’re a happy… this is a story about rejection and doubt and risk, and love that is stronger than death…perfect love, that casts out fear.

The Ethiopian Eunuch was a threat to Philip’s way of life. He was a foreigner, an agent of a foreign power—a gentile, and a eunuch. He was in every way possible an outsider to Philip and what Philip held dear—and just like today, regulations governing, limiting, and defining the access of outsiders to Our Way of Life were inflexible and strictly enforced—for the good of the whole, of course. There were for such people, then as now, special possibilities and places—visas to permit them into the outside courts on the fringe of the Temple, protocols and procedures (even though they could take years to get through the process) for those who wanted to be naturalized, quotas and laws and lists of what made one “desirable,” or “undesirable.” The man the angel sent Philip was in all categories an undesirable. And Philip, a sort of immigrant-type himself, as a Hellenistic Jew—could ill afford to have his loyalty or patriotism questioned.

Within his own community, a battle was beginning to rage over the appropriateness of the inclusion of non-Jews in the community of Jesus. This was not primarily a matter of prejudice, but of, if you will, national security. Since Judaism was a protected religion under the imperial law of Rome, the attrition of homogeneity and shared culture was a threat to the privilege—limited though it was—Philip’s people enjoyed. To include Gentiles in the way of Jesus was to risk the loss of that protected status, to risk schism with brothers and sisters of like mind and long relationship, to wander off from the familiar landmarks and established shelters that make life in interesting times meaning-full and bearable, into a wilderness where nothing was sure and little was safe. Could it possibly be worth it to risk everything for the sake of one rich Ethiopian Eunuch, one boatload more of Haitians, of Mexicans, of Arabs, Pakistanis, gays, lesbians, undocumenteds, homeless, or whomever your in group needs to keep out? To even ask these questions seriously in times like those—or times like these—is a risk of love that may need to be stronger than death. And let’s be honest, it’s easier, as tired as we are of it all, just not to bother.

The writer of 1st John says there is no fear in love, for perfect love casts out fear. Philip had every reason to be afraid, every reason not to act: every cause and rationale to ignore or explain away the request of the foreign eunuch, here is water, what is to prevent my being baptized? Philip had every good reason to refuse, and only one good reason to act: whoever does not love, abides in death. And so, he chose, and acted according to the inconvenient and risky demands of his faith. He acted with no precedent, and no authority, and baptized that foreigner, that neighbor, that brother, even though he knew others would be sorting out the consequences of his actions for generations to come. And then, they both went their way: the one, having been welcomed against all odds, rejoicing because he was loved; the other, waiting and wondering, yet fearless in the wilderness of the love of God in Christ Jesus, whatever the cost might be.

The interesting times in which we live would have it that this kind of love of neighbor is a romantic notion, imprudent, foolish if not downright subversive—that love of country, of faith, of family, is about making everyone here (that is, everyone who is allowed to be here, an increasingly shrinking pool of potential neighbors) like ourselves, or, more accurately, like the idealized American selves we once believed we were. English speaking, middle class or better, similar looking, value sharing, always achieving and succeeding. The so-called War on Terrorism has made us as a people more xenophobic, selfish, and increasingly narrow in our religious, cultural, and social views that at any time previous in my lifetime, and most of yours. We dismiss most of what we don’t understand or don’t personally approve, as irrelevant to us, or worse, as a threat to what we have and intend to keep. We learn that, in order to keep us safe, the government is collecting our phone records, waylaying people who fit terrorist profiles, deporting people who have made mistakes but lived and worked in this country for long and productive years, restricting immigration, negating the rights of resident non-citizens, eroding our privacy….and we become mildly outraged, but do little or nothing—neither for the foreigner who is our neighbor nor, in the end, for ourselves and our common good. We worship a God of inclusive and radical grace…yet waste endless years on debating who can wholly belong, fully participate, in the offices of the church and at the Table that is not ours, but Christ’s own.

Sometimes it seems like we practice love as if it were going to Dairy Queen for dessert: a sweet reward for being lucky, or good…not a way of life that is risky, dangerous, enthralling: a continual adventure into worlds not our own, seeking the face of God in the stranger, the Other.

Sometimes, these interesting times seem too sad, too difficult to bear…and then I am drawn out again in hope by the ways you and I are being called—or ordered by angels!—to love, and I can go on. I see you, taking half a day of your few hours to yourself on a weekend to visit someone at the hospital, to drive another to a doctor’s appointment, to cook a meal for a grieving family, to write an impassioned letter for justice and send it to fifty friends so they can do the same, to get arrested for the rights of janitors and groundskeepers, to repair homes in Mississippi, dig deeper for yet another disaster offering, love even in the face of death. And I know that why we are together in this place, is to learn to do more of the same, and to celebrate that God in Christ calls us to reflect this path.

My friends Jack and Ruth have shared with me a couple of times during these past unbearable weeks, something a friend—maybe one of you—wrote them following their descent into what is surely one of the hardest places love can take us, into the wilderness of loss and pain after the death of a child by mischance. Jack was speaking of the idea of finding “closure”—as obsessed as our culture is with wrapping things up neatly, safely, securely—in matters of faith as in life. We spoke of how such losses, and even the threats of life in these interesting times, rip us open and place us, raw and writhing, in the path of danger and risk. Many people, it is clear, seek closures of varying sorts—just so they can get through the night. But we see that such ways of coping are not really life as much as they are a way of slow death. Jack and Ruth’s friend wrote: closure is for bank accounts. For Love Accounts, there is never closure, nor should there be.

May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Love of God, and the courage of the Holy Spirit be with you, this day and always, amen.