NORTH BALWYN UNITING CHURCH
SUNDAY 1 October 2017
Exodus 17: 1-7; Psalm 25: 1-9; Matthew 21: 23-32
Rev Anneke Oppewal
Here they are, in the wilderness near Rephidim, without water. Apparently, according to research, people can go without water for about one hundred hours. Unless it is very hot. Then that time very quickly halves to fifty hours. Add some vigorous exercise to that, like carting luggage around in a desert, that number halves and halves again, and is soon down to about seven hours. All up. That’s the estimated survival time for someone tracking through the Sinai desert, carrying of their belongings what they can, with no water. No wonder they are grumpy! They are facing certain death. They and their livestock – if something doesn’t happen very quickly. And how could something happen? As far as the eye can see, there is only rock, and more rock. And as anyone knows, extracting water out of rock is seriously difficult.
Grumpy as they are, they face an even grumpier Moses. A leader running out of options fast, facing a people that has put their faith in him and that he feels responsible for. How is he going to save them? In spite of all the miracle working that’s happened before, even he is probably struggling to see how God is going to turn this one around. He asks them, “Why do you test the Lord?”, which to me sounds a bit like: O for heaven’s sake, leave me alone…….. what can I do? And then, when he turns to God, we discover just how grumpy Moses is: “What do I do with these people? They are almost ready to stone me!” Or, if I would put it in my own words: For heaven’s sake God, can’t you give me a break?
Under pressure from both sides, Moses is the typical leader caught in the middle. He is desperately wondering and worried about his people, and he is the one who needs to keep the faith. He is the one the people turn to for reassurance and help. He is the one they expect to stay cool, calm and collected, and simply tell them that somebody is on it, that the issue will be resolved soon, that there is nothing to worry about. He is expected to be on top of it, a champion of faith, au fait with God’s plan and planning, unconcerned and unperturbed. Even if nobody else does, he has to show faith, and trust, and conviction, and pull everybody else through. God expects it of him. The people expect it of him. And worst of all, he is probably expecting it of himself as well. Here he is, in a stony desert, no water in sight, temperatures that can rise to well over 40 degrees, mustering faith. I imagine that if Moses knew something about meditation and mindfulness, this would have been the time he would have been trying to practice some deep breathing and relaxation exercises to not lose the plot. “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the Lord?”
Well, we’ve got seven hours, Moses, and we all know the clock is ticking and all we see is solid stone and shimmering heat. It is a bit daunting……
Reading the story, my mind wandered to pictures I have seen, we all have seen, of refugees, the air shimmering with heat and dust, their belongings piled high on their heads and shoulders, walking, hungry, thirsty, scared, lost in the in between of a world where they are not welcome or wanted. And I wondered just how grumpy, how angry, how annoyed, how desperate, that would make you feel, and how terrible and challenging and difficult it would be to be a leader in a situation like that. In the wilderness, with no option but to trust that somehow God will provide, even if everything points in the opposite direction.
In the gospel reading, there is also a lot of grumpiness. The Jewish leadership is grumpy, and Jesus is grumpy too. In the chapter leading up to this story, Jesus has entered Jerusalem in triumph, with people singing and dancing and rejoicing around him. There has been an incident in the temple where Jesus has kicked out money changers and other traders and disrupted the day to day, well-established, traditional business of worship. In the process, he’s rubbed up against the leadership in very unhelpful ways. They are after him now, grumpy, angry, annoyed and seeing if they can’t find ways to get rid of him. He’s taken over their temple, disqualified their way of doing worship, and is attracting the crowds and taking their place in teaching them. “By what authority are you doing these things?”
They challenge Jesus’ authority, his right to do the things he is doing. To invade their space and take over their worship, their places of teaching. How dare he? And before we judge them, let’s be clear about this: for the leaders of the temple, Jesus was, by that time, becoming a major head ache, a liability, and a danger. And like Grumpy the dwarf in the story of Snow White, they care. They care about the threat of the Romans coming down on them and their people if they make too much noise. They care about their people. They care about their tradition, the proper way of doing things, about ways of worship and teaching they’ve been adhering to for centuries. They can see Jesus is inviting trouble, testing not only the tolerance of the Jewish leadership, but drawing unhelpful attention from the Romans governing Jerusalem and the temple precinct, who most definitely would not hesitate to shut the whole place down if there was to be more than just a bit of ancient, harmless ritual going on. What’s your authority? Who gave it to you? Or to put it in the words of the people of Israel in our Exodus story this morning: Is the Lord with you or not? What do you think? asks Jesus, Was the Lord with John the Baptist? And if he was, is he then with you or with me? A tricky question they respond to with caution. It shows their political acumen….“We do not know…….”.
They can’t say yes, and they can’t say no, and stuck between a rock and a hard place, they go for an “I don’t know”. And we can all, probably, feel them get even grumpier than they already were. When you imagine yourself to have authority, an “I don’t know” response is uncomfortable, it makes you lose face, and undermines your feeling of being in charge.
Jesus forces the Jewish leaders into an uncomfortable spot: “We don’t know…..” if the Lord is with you or not, if the Lord was with John, because if the Lord was with you and John, we’d have to change something, have to admit we don’t know everything, acknowledge that with all our authority and with history and tradition behind us, we may be missing something, ….. and we would find that difficult…… In a therapeutic setting, an “I don’t know” can be a great entry point into a change of track or mind. “I don’t know” opens the door to possibilities outside the either or of black and white thinking. If it is a genuine, puzzled and puzzling ‘I don’t know’, it creates possibilities. But unfortunately, we have to assume that this is not the case here. The “I don’t know” of the Jewish leadership is not an opening up towards different possibilities, but more of a closing down, said through gritted teeth. They think they know, but they can’t come out with what they think they know. They believe that the Lord is with them, exclusively. That theirs is the authority to decide what is right and what is wrong, in worship, in teaching, in tradition, in culture, in faith.
Jesus responds with a puzzling parable: There were two sons…….
The people who are around him would have known many son stories from the first testament. Kain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers, David and his brothers and many, many others. Stories that forever circle around that same question of who the Lord is with. Who do you think? Which son? The one who says yes and does no, or the one who says no and does yes? The one who does righteousness, or the one that only talks about it? What do you think? Which side am I on, do you think, Jesus asks them. You didn’t accept John, but others could see that he’d come in the way of righteousness. You talk a lot about faith, but can you see where true righteousness is practiced and accept it for what it is? Can you make room for it, stand up for it and respond to it, even if it is outside your immediate frame of reference and comfort zone? Can you open yourself to new and different ways of righteous living, new and different ways of God entering into community and life, new and different ways of God being present than just exclusively in the way that you’ve been raised to find comfortable and keeps you in charge?
The Jewish leadership of Jesus’ day were, metaphorically, in the wilderness. With very little water. Their people thirsting for righteousness, longing for nourishment, seeking guidance in bewildering and complex times, drifting away from tradition and the established order, and looking elsewhere. On the banks of the Jordan, in the hills of Galilee, drinking in the words of Jesus and feasting on the prophetic voice of John. Finding leadership there, guidance and nurturing they didn’t get in that same way from the traditional, time tested rituals of the temple. A situation not dissimilar to ours. Loving the old and afraid of the new. Reluctant to change, reluctant to admit that there may be something to these fresh expressions of faith that are popping up in their front yard. John the Baptist, a voice calling in the wilderness for repentance, Jesus of Nazareth, generously sharing of God’s provision, showing leadership with authority, teaching truth and hope in a very different way than they have been used to. Not based on age old privileges and tradition, but on preaching and teaching with integrity. With practices to match. They struggle. They can’t bring themselves to accept that there is something new in the wind, that the spirit of God is finding new ways for God to be in the world and with his people. That there is water springing from stone.
For me, the passages this morning spoke strongly about leadership, and about looking at wilderness, at dryness and emptiness, at situations where there don’t seem to be that many options left but to clench our jaws and hold on, instead of perceiving them as places of hope filled with possibilities. What was wrong with the religious leadership in Jesus’ day, is what established religion and religious institutions are forever struggling with: to see outside limited frameworks, to open themselves to new and different ways of doing faith, of new and different ways God is manifesting in the world. A struggle to trust in anything but ourselves and the ancient routines and rituals we have always relied on. The Jewish leaders can’t see and accept John, or Jesus, they can’t see and accept that God may be trying something different and that all they have to do is make room for it. Open the doors and let it in. Be more like Moses and less afraid of what the Romans might do. Trust that, although they may not be able to see how, God will provide and help them to continue their journey, perhaps in a different direction, and in new and unexpected ways, but nevertheless. Is the Lord with us or not? In the desert, even from stone, God’s faithful presence and providing is manifested. Water, nurture, new paths to travel, different ways of doing things, opening the mind to the possibility that in the places where our eyes can’t see anything of God’s promise, something could be about to burst into life if only we are prepared to give God some space to work God’s miracles.
Water from the rock, who would have thought? A prophet on the edge of the wilderness calling people to repentance and getting through? A Messiah from Galilee, who would have imagined? Life from death, the cross a tree of life……
The Romans that were considered such a threat by the Jewish leadership, to their people, and to their way of life eventually did turn the temple to dust, forcing the Jewish leadership to let go and change direction. Alongside Christianity, present day Judaism was born in that era of cataclysmic events and survived in new and unexpected ways. Until the present day, people have that tendency to hang on to what they know, to comfort, to the authority of tradition, culture and custom. More than asking what it actually achieves and how it nurtures people and their faith. People as reluctant now as they were then to trust water could spring from solid rock, to have faith that what is needed to feed and nurture God’s people will be provided even if we can’t see how.
Discovering that what we thought we knew may not be all there is to know about God’s providing, God’s leading, God’s guiding, about new life and new possibilities.
What we need in the Church are not people who are grumpy about their loss of authority and stature in all things religious, who pine for a glorious past and dream of a future where everything will return to what it once was, but people of flesh and blood who will listen, and explore with others, people prepared to look outside their immediate frame of reference or comfort zone as to what it means in this time, in this place for God to be a faithful, loving and providing God. What it means here and now is for God to be with us, part of the journey, nurturing and supporting and showing new ways of travelling into the future and give shape to justice, healing and wholeness in this world. Open to seeing things differently, doing things differently, open to creating space for God to be, not only with us but with others who may be different from us. Amen.
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