Are We There Yet?

 

Exodus 17:1-7

September 27, 2020

 

            Some of the memories that loom large over my childhood are the car trips we used to take to Minnesota. Although I did fly with my mom to Minnesota a few times, as I will do tomorrow, when the whole family went – Mom, Dad, Jill, Brad, and Amy – we piled into the car and drove all day from Nashville to Minneapolis. And when I say, “all day,” I mean “all day.” My mom would often stay up most of the night before, doing loads of laundry, cleaning, packing. My dad, who was always the primary driver, would sleep. The rest of us would sleep, although I remember hearing my mother as she worked. Before the first light of dawn could make its way across the sky, we would be in the car and on the road.

            I remember seeing Nashville go by through the car window. Jill and Brad would go back to sleep. I would move up to the front seat between my parents. This was in the days of cars with bench seats and no mandatory child restraints, so I would put my feet in my dad’s lap and my head in my mom’s lap, and once I was held down I would sleep as well. Sometime around Paducah, Kentucky, we would stop and have breakfast. Then we would keep driving … and driving … and driving. Minneapolis is a long drive from Nashville. The drive from Shawnee, Oklahoma to Nashville was about ten hours of driving. Add about four more hours of driving onto that, and you can imagine the length of time spent in our car.

            When it was light outside, you could read or color to make the time pass. But when darkness fell, it got harder. Much harder to stay still in the car. We would play games, our favorite being “I’m Thinking of Somebody,” which was my family’s version of Twenty Questions. When the game finally faded away, my mom could tell that I was getting restless, so she would say what she said on every road trip.

            “Let’s sing.”

            We sang. Generally, the most popular songs from Sound of Music were our favorites. But we probably sang Christmas carols – even in July – and anything else my mother could think of to keep me going for the last few hours of the drive. It was a long drive. And no matter how hard my mother worked to keep my occupied, I’m sure I asked more than once,

            “Are we there yet?”

            I know that this is probably not what the Israelites were asking in their 40-year sojourn through the wilderness. It probably was not mentioned in their grumbling and complaining, but I can’t help but think of these words whenever I read these narratives from Exodus.

            Are we there yet? The people thought that Moses was leading them out of slavery into a new world that was just their own, into new lives that were just their own, but they have lessons to learn. They biggest lesson they must learn is to trust God. They must trust this God who called Moses and led them out of bondage in Egypt. They must trust this God who has made it clear that they have been chosen to be God’s people and to fulfill a larger purpose in this world God has created.

            The Israelites who followed Moses of out of Egypt may have grown up hearing the old stories of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph. But those were stories. Those people who bore those names had lived a long, long time ago. They had been living in slavery for generations. Pharaoh had ruled the world that they had known, the life that they had lived. Now they were free from Pharaoh, but what next? What would happen to them now? They had to learn the lesson of trust in God.

            It was not an easy lesson to learn. In stories before our passage today, the Israelites had to trust that God would provide them with food. And God did provide. God provided manna and quail. But now their bellies might be full, but full bellies will not protect them from dehydration. I read somewhere that the longest a person can live without water is about three days. The Israelites were traveling through harsh wilderness. There was no water in sight. They were traveling with children, whose bodies would dehydrate even quicker than their own. They were thirsty. They were scared, and even though God has provided before, their thirst was greater than their trust.

            So, they argued and quarreled with Moses. Give us water, they demanded. Why didn’t you just let us die back in Egypt? Why did you bring us all the way out to this no-man’s land if you were just going to let us, our children, our livestock die from thirst?

            And even though they don’t say this in particular, you can imagine that they are at least thinking,

“Working for Pharaoh was horrible and brutal, but at least it was a horror we knew. We knew where we stood. We knew what we were in for. We knew what to expect. Better to stay in the hell you know.”

Moses is beside himself. The people are so angry. He fears that in their desperation they will come after him. But God speaks to him once more. Take some of the elders and the staff that you struck the Nile with, and go to the rock at Horeb that I will show you. Strike the rock, and water will flow from it. The elders will witness it. The people will be able to drink.

Moses did what the Lord told him to do. And the people drank. Their thirst was quenched. And Moses did what others had done before him. He named this place, this holy place. He named it Massah and Meribah because there the Israelites had quarreled God. There, the Israelites has asked,

“Is the Lord among us or not?”

Is the Lord among us or not? Is God with us or not? Has God forgotten us? Has God left us? Are we there yet?

It would be easy from this great distance to judge the Israelites harshly for their lack of faith, their lack of trust. God led them out of slavery! God vanquished the Egyptians pursuing them! God had caused miracles to happen in their midst over and over again. God fed them and God protected them. Of course, God would make sure they had water to drink. How foolish they were, how easily defeated and forgetful.

Except I am the Israelites. Aren’t we all? Doing something new sounds exciting and great. Doing something different, following a different call, a different path seems to promise so much, and at first all you can see is the promise. But then real life sets in. It gets hard. Problems arise. Challenges appear. It is too hard. There is too much unknown. I want to go back. Sure, God was with me before in other times and other circumstances, but where is God now? I’m not sure anymore. I don’t know if God is with me anymore or not. So, I want to go back. I want to go back to what I knew with a k instead of trusting God in this something new, just the n.

Are you an Israelite too?

I read a statistic that said it takes a woman in an abusive relationship at least 5 times to leave her abuser and stay gone. And that isn’t because she wants to be abused. It is because leaving is so hard. The new life she is trying to forge can feel as hellish as the old life, but the old hell was a hell she knew.

Is the Lord among us or not? Are we there yet?

I cannot condemn the Israelites and their fear, their lack of trust, because I experience that as well, more times than I like or want to admit. But that is the struggle, the challenge, of faith. Faith is not something that you get just once, and you’re done. At least that’s not how it has been for me. Faith is a process of going forward and moving back and doing some sidesteps and dance moves along the way. When I’m feeling strong in my faith, I might even do a spin or two. And when I am struggling, I shuffle, barely able to lift my feet off the ground.

Faith is a daily choice to keep going, keep trusting. And there are some days when I am better at that than others. There are some days when I feel God’s presence, and many more days when I ask, “Is the Lord among us or not?”

Writer and blogger Debie Thomas wrote that God gives us the water from the rock, but that God also gives us the wilderness. Trust in God is not something that can be infused into us. We have to learn it. We have to experience God keeping God’s promises so that our trust will grow. I am not saying, nor do I think that Thomas was implying this, that we get arbitrarily tested in our faith. God doesn’t just throw terrible situations at us and say, “Okay, let’s see how you get through this.”

No, I think the hard times come because living brings hard times. And I think God calls us to hard places and hard situations because that is where we are needed. And I think that God wants us to believe that God is with us even in the hardest, most difficult moments, so we have to work through it and look for God and trust that God is there even when our looking feels in vain. I don’t believe that God creates the wilderness moments, but I do believe that God wants us to trust that God is there in the midst of them; to trust that God does not abandon us to ourselves and our own limits. God is there with us, even and most especially, when we forget or quarrel or question. God is there. God is here. Water is gushing from the rock, we just have to trust, close our eyes, and drink.

Let all of God’s children say, “Alleluia.” Amen.