Massah and Meribah

Massah and Meribah
Exodus 17:1-7; Romans 5:1-11; John 5:5-26, 28-30, 39-42

Is there anything as miraculous as water? Search the cosmos for other signs of life. So far, planet Earth is the only truly blue planet. Buried ice crystals don’t count. The vast oceans of our world have made it possible for all the life forms we know to develop on our planet. The first creation story in Genesis begins with its feet wet. Before any other creating could occur, God contained the waters. We cannot perceive the primordial beginnings of life without water. And like the earth, we are three-fourths water.

The word “water” comes from an Arabic word for luster and splendor. Often it is used about the luster and transparency of the finest jewels. Water is nature’s jewelry, the very elixir of life.

The readings from Exodus and John deal with the human need for water. In the Exodus reading, the people are so thirsty they threaten Moses’ life and wish themselves back in Egypt. What the people don’t realize, however, is that the water they most desperately need is the living water of faith that God provides. Despite Moses’ warnings, the people seem oblivious to anything but the dust in their throats.

The gospel reading tells of Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well. In response to Jesus’ words about “living water,” this woman shows great enthusiasm for such a drink. Yet her first response seems to indicate that she looks at this living water as a labor-saving device freeing her from the wearying walk to the well to draw up water for herself and her household. The living water Jesus offers will make her free, but not in the way she imagines.

The two passages of scripture play off each other for a discussion of insecurity and freedom. The woman is greatly insecure because she apparently is not an accepted part of the community. The gift of living water, her acceptance of it, her telling her neighbors, and their welcoming of Jesus, brought the Samaritan woman from insecurity to freedom.

The Israelites were suddenly free from the oppression of the Egyptians. They were also lost because the routine of their lives had suddenly been torn away. Like someone newly retired after forty years in the same assembly line job, they didn’t know what to do with themselves. Being slaves and making bricks for building palaces and temples was hell, but it was their hell, a familiar framework that moved them through their days. And now, after the hurried celebration and the mad dash to the sea, the miraculous crossing through it, and the foundering of the pursuing Egyptian troops, the routine of the people was now pack, tramp, unpack, pack, tramp, unpack, pack, tramp, etc. There was no shelter, no change of scenery, no rest. There was no longer any security in knowing that as hard as it was, there were bricks to make and walls to build. At least there was an end product, however difficult the process was.

It’s not as if the people hadn’t seen any miracles. They knew of the plagues that God had sent. They had seen the results of the lamb’s blood on the lintels and doorposts over which the power of death passed. They had safely crossed the sea which became an avenue of safety for them rather than a barrier of destruction. They had seen the demise of the Egyptian army. They had danced the celebration with Moses and Miriam: “Sing to the Lord, for an overflowing victory! Horse and rider he threw into the sea!”

In the aftermath of victory, there was the realization arising from the security vacuum: “What do we do now? We don’t know what to do. We’ve never had to think for ourselves before.” That insecurity came out and got focused into the need for water. They are no longer in the lush valley of the Nile. They are in the middle of nowhere, in the wilderness. Mob psychology takes over. The chant goes up: “Give us water! Give us water! Give us water!”

The Israelites’ thirst completely wiped out their collective memories of all that God had done for them in the past. They now believed that God had, in a cruel twist of cosmic devilry, brought them into the wilderness to let them perish. So they fling up their nervous prayers to God, asking, “Don’t you love us anymore?”

How quickly they forgot the gracious kindness which God had shown them. How quickly they became ready to snatch defeat from the throes of victory. It was a pattern that would recur throughout the years in the wilderness, the years of settling in the promised land, and the years of the kings. God was constantly faithful, the people were repeatedly ungrateful, right up to the destruction of Israel and Judah by foreign powers.

There very few pastors who haven’t had their Moses moments. The same is true for anyone who has chaired a church committee or task force at the local, regional, or national level. And putting on my presbytery hat, I can say that mid-council staff experience Moses moments as well. “What should I do with this people? They are getting ready to stone me.” We usually think of church work as leading the sheep. Sometimes sheep hear the shepherd’s voice, and sometimes they are too busy looking for choice morsels of grass to listen for the voice of the master. It’s little wonder that leadership is sometimes compared with herding cats or pushing rope or swimming with piranhas.

At the same time, it is not hard to comically imagine God wondering about Moses, “What am I doing to do with you?” After all, Moses frequently ran to God with complaints about the people. His father-in-law, Jethro, had to show him how to delegate the small problems so that he could competently deal with the difficult ones.

It’s a social reality that trivialities do kidnap our attention. Sometimes that is how we cope. We can’t deal with the big problems, the elephant-in-the-middle-of-the-room issues, so we throw up smoke screens and diversions to keep us, so we think, from the unmentionable.

While the Israelites’ craving and need for water was real — water is essential for life — the water is also a metaphor for something more, something deeper. It is about relationship, connection with God. The Israelites had only experienced God indirectly through the plagues, through the Passover, through the pillar of cloud by day and fire by night. Moses had spoken with God, and would later be engulfed by God in the cloud of Mt. Sinai. In their insecurity the Israelites wanted the same level of intimacy with God. They were torn between the comforts they knew in a life of slavery and the promise of comforts yet to come in a life of freedom.

The church today lives at Massah and Meribah, arguing with and testing the Lord, wondering, asking, “Is the Lord really with us or not?” And the answer we give ourselves frequently is, “I don’t know.” That’s one reason that people don’t bother to seek out a church. It’s also a reason that there are so many “spiritual, but not religious” folk registering in surveys.

We are in the wilderness after having grown up in fertile but enslaving times of buildings full of people, classrooms overflowing with youth, organizations teeming with people locked into the routines of doing everything imaginable in the name of Christ. Now, in the wilderness, the thundering herds of youth and adults are no longer around. But the routines have to go on. Do this, do that, do this, do that, the same way we have done it for fifty, sixty, seventy years. Why isn’t it working? Isn’t God with us? Is there no water?

Do you remember the first time you ran into a faucet without any hot and cold water handles. We take them for granted now. But when they first came out with an electric eye to turn the water on and off, we were baffled. Is there no water? Moses isn’t whacking rocks any more. The water laden rocks now come in some other form. And we have to find them. It is an ongoing process.

Nearly three years ago we entered into a time of reflection on ministry, a time of appreciative inquiry led by Tim Jones. That process got us through a significant transition which is beginning to yield some wonderful blessings of the Spirit in our midst. Now is the time to take the next steps, to build on what we have learned and experienced, and to move forward with more focused study of the wilderness which is our home.

Two months ago session agreed to join seven other churches in the presbytery in an effort to answer the question, “What is God calling this congregation to do and to be in this time and place?” We could be affirmed in what we are currently doing or we could be challenged by hitherto unthought-of new possibilities. Where is God’s water going to flow for us in 2014 and the next few years?

We know it will flow. And that God’s water will change us in unexpected ways. Just ask the woman at Jacob’s well who met Jesus and learned of his living water. That meeting, that water changed her life and changed the life of her community. What would it be like for us to be changed by Christ’s living water? What would it be like for Waverly?

Massah and Meribah aren’t remembered fondly in the lore of the church. Yet they were a turning point, a pivotal expression of faithful living as the belief that God is indeed with us. Massah and Meribah offer us the opportunity to obey the ever-present God, whom we have come to know in Christ. Faithful living is not finding plentiful resources and comfortable surroundings, but knowing that God is our resource, that God is the basis of our surroundings, that God is indeed with us.

Thanks be to God.

Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com 
Copyright 2014 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.