Sept 25, 2011 – Exodus 17:1-7; Philippians 2:1-13
Exodus 17:1-7; Philippians 2:1-13
Water from Rock
15th Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 25) – September 25, 2011
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
Poor old Moses: this week the guy nearly has a mutiny on his hands!
The Israelites have escaped from Egypt and are now wandering in the wilderness.
Last week they complained about not having any food, and in response
God provided manna and quail.
But now they’re thirsty so they’re complaining about that.
So God provides them with water. Water from a rock.
They want to know if God is with them, or not.
That question resonates with us: In our wildernesses, is God among us? Or not?
That’s an honest question, which is often asked in the wilderness.
In depression, in unemployment, in addiction, in grief, in strife: is God among us, or not?
God doesn’t just respond with words in our story today: God responds with action.
God provides the people with what they need.
It’s funny, though, that the people, when they had plenty of water at the oasis of Elim
just a couple of chapters ago, didn’t affirm God’s presence with them then.
How like us, for whom our negative experiences so often count against God,
while our positive experiences of water, and food, and love, and joy, and beauty,
and friendship often count so little for God, but they should.
(Gerald Janzen quoted by Kathryn Huey at http://www.ucc.org/worship/samuel/september-25-2011-twenty-sixt.html)
When God takes the deepest plunge of all to come among us in
he most significant way possible, God doesn’t just use words:
words, as one of our Thanksgivings at Table says, were not enough.
God comes among us in person, as a person: the person of Jesus.
And when Jesus comes among us, he gives us water, and food, and love, and joy,
and beauty, and friendship.
But in order to do that, he needs to come to where we are,
in our dejectedness, in our forsakenness, in our illness, in our difficulty.
And so in order to be with us, Jesus, says Paul this morning in the beautiful Philippians
Christ-hymn, in order to be with us, Jesus empties himself,
Jesus divests himself of all heavenly grandeur,
he takes off the mantle of glory and leaves it behind.
He leaves behind heavenly ease so that he can enter our lives at their lowest and most difficult.
And bring healing and light and love.
Though he was in the form of God, [he] did not regard equality with God as something to be
exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.
Now that is beautiful, and for us Christians this is the key to who God is.
God is one who empties the divine self for the sake of love.
And this God’s mission is to reach out to every place and every person in this self-emptying way
in order to love, to bless, to heal, to feed, and befriend.
This is the kind of life the Israelites were being invited into in the wilderness.
God took 40 years to school them into this new way of living and being together.
The way of mercy-giving and manna-sharing.
And in Jesus all the rest of us are being invited into the same kind of life,
the same kind of community.
The kind of community in which manna – our various gifts, our time, our bodies,
our intelligence, our creativity – is shared with one another for one another’s benefit and
for the mission of loving our neighbours.
In our baptisms we are invited into this kind of community and this kind of living together.
In their baptisms today, young Mary and Clara are being invited into this kind of living.
The kind of living where we serve one another for the sake of our participation in
God’s mission to love bless and heal this world.
I read an article this week parts of which were taken from a recent piece in the Globe and Mail.
The piece in the Globe was written by a woman who was trying to decide whether or not to
have her child baptized.
She eventually decided to do so as a “first step” in carving her son’s “own spiritual path.”
As someone observed in reflecting on this, what we have here is
“Baptism as a step in the path of self-discovery, authenticity, and independence.”
Baptism, in other words, in the service of the self, where it’s all about the individual.
There is nothing here which reflects our deepest convictions about baptism:
that it has to do with transferring our allegiance from the kingdom of this world
to the kingdom of God, that in baptism we align ourselves with
the Israelites in the desert and not the Pharaoh in Egypt.
That in baptism we align ourselves with Jesus, with the other members of the church,
and with God’s mission of manna-sharing and mercy-giving as the means of
mending a very broken world. (Ryan Dueck at www.christiancentury.org/blogs/archive/2011-09/baptism)
Paul doesn’t say that the baptized are those who become self-actualized in self-discovery.
What Paul says is that the baptized are those who have the same mind as was in Jesus.
The mind that loves the neighbour.
This Jesus – and the mind that was in him – has been given to us. And that is a gift.
His love, his grace, his body, his self, his food, his water. His salvation.
Everything good has been given to us as gift.
When Paul says, “Work out your salvation,” he certainly doesn’t – he couldn’t possibly –
mean “Okay: figure out how you’re going to get saved.”
You’re already saved. Our relationship with God begins in salvation:
in baptism, as a beloved child of God.
Now, our growing into what that means for us will take a life-time.
So when Paul says, “Work out your salvation,” he’s asking:
What will the grace and love and friendship you’ve been given in Christ
look like in your life? How will that work itself out in you?
How will God’s love for you in Christ manifest itself in love of neighbour?
Our Lutheran Urban Ministry meal team knows how their salvation’s getting worked out.
Our food bank volunteers know how their salvation is getting worked out.
In the story Jesus tells the story of the two sons –
one of whom says “Sure, Dad” and then doesn’t do the thing his father asks him to while
the other says “No, Dad” but then changes his mind and does it –
the key word is that the one who says ‘no’ changes his mind. In Greek the word is metamelomai.
And really it means changing what one cares about:
Being baptized changes what you care about.
It means choosing to put discipleship first. It means putting the mind of Jesus first.
It means making sure what we say aligns with what we do, as individuals and as a congregation.
Jesus doesn’t think that the actions of the religious leaders he’s talking to are
consistent with their words.
If faith doesn’t get worked out in action according to Jesus, it’s just talk. Words are not enough.
The tax collectors and the prostitutes who followed Jesus committed themselves to
a new way of life.
They changed what they cared about. And the way they lived reflected that.
That’s how their salvation was getting worked out in their lives.
As painful as it is for someone who loves preaching to say this,
the truth is that words are often not very costly.
It’s why every other week you’ll find me at our very humble food bank for several hours.
The truth is that those outside the church often turn away from our beautiful words.
They think they’re empty.
What isn’t empty, though, are actions in which one empties oneself for the sake of another.
What isn’t empty are actions that serve.
The mind of Christ worked out in loving action is costly,
but that is what communicates the love of Christ that is given to us as a gift.
The writer and pastor Roger Lovette was once sent a bulletin by his son from
Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia who visited there one Sunday.
In the bulletin were listed the people who had
taken responsibility for various church tasks that week.
What stopped him in his tracks was this humble announcement tucked away in that list:
Rosalynn Carter will clean the church next Saturday.
Jimmy Carter will cut the grass and trim the shrubbery. (at www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=3253)
That speaks pretty loudly about a couple peoples’ faith.
It speaks pretty loudly about who they’ve come to see who God is, and who their God is.
Emptying yourself certainly doesn’t mean becoming a doormat or enduring abuse.
It means having the strength to set aside that which is not really important so that
you can do what is, it means having the strength to change what you care about.
A person in need of water doesn’t want you to talk about water: a person in need of water
wants you to care enough to give them water.
God cared enough to give the Israelites water, and the Israelites didn’t just remember that,
they remembered how God gave them water: God gave them water from a rock.
The answer to their question “Is God among us or not?” is a resounding Yes!
God is among us, bringing us, says Walter Brueggeman, “water from rock, food from hunger,
life from death, joy from sorrow, Yes from No, well-being from anxiety.”
(quoted by Kathryn Huey at http://www.ucc.org/worship/samuel/september-25-2011-twenty-sixt.html)
God cares enough about us to give us Jesus, who is living water,
who brings us water from rocky places.
I did a funeral recently for a family in which there was estrangement.
At the funeral, I worried about what would happen. I needn’t have because God is among us.
While everyone was getting ready to leave after the reception,
I witnessed right in front of me two brothers shake hands who hadn’t done that
in a long time, figuring they should get together for a coffee sometime.
Water from rock, life from a literal death, resurrection from a tomb.
Is God among us? Oh yeah. Can we change what we care about? Oh yeah.
So let the assembly say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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