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.
Rev Laurie Kraus
Pastor Riveria Presbyterian Church, Miami
http://www.rivierachurch.org/
(305) 666-8586
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