"Be Still and I'll Show You"

 

Devotion for Being Apart -
September 13

I will share new devotions from time to time,
and invite you to browse through devotions that have been posted on this blog.

Exodus 14:10-14, 19-31

My wise friend Peter recently asked, “Why do we always act like ‘sustainable’ is a positive thing? There are a lot of things that are sustainable that are not good.  Racism, clearly is sustainable. We’ve sustained it for a long time.” Then he asked, “Instead of asking if things are sustainable, why aren’t we asking if they’re ‘life-giving’?”  “The broken systems that perpetuate injustice in this country are sustainable, but they sure are not life-giving. And a frenzied, way too busy pace of life that drains my soul, I sustained that just fine. But it wasn’t life-giving. “ 
 
When we’ve lived in brokenness for so long, it shapes our understanding of what’s possible for a good life to be. We stop asking what a good life is, what is life-giving, what brings wholeness or fullness to our lives and to the world. We shrink down within the walls of our collectively enslaved minds and hearts and we grasp the tiny reprieves and little escapes that keep our lives sustainable.
 
But when we find ourselves in unknown territory, forced out of our sustainable patterns, possibility opens up for something previously unimaginable.  And there are some experiences so significant, so deeply formative, that they change how we define ourselves and become a lens for how we see the world from then on out. 
 
The Red Sea moment is that for the Israelites.
 
All of our scripture – all Judaism and Christianity in fact – comes through the lens of this story. Even the things that happened before it are seen in retrospect through this part of their story. It’s the starting point: God is the one who delivers. We are the people of a God who saves.
 
So it’s almost impossible for us to imagine what it was like in the moments before this moment, because we are not given anything from that angle.  But I want us to try to imagine it anyway.  Because before this moment, their trust in God was hypothetical trust, it was trust in theory, inherited more than personal. The stories of creation, and the ancestors--Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Leah, Rachel, Jacob and Rebekah--were a long time ago, far removed from daily life. 
 
They practiced their faith every day and they believed that God was real and they were the people of God. That was true in the big picture.  But what was true for them on the ground, day in and day out, and had been for their parents and grandparents and grandparents’ parents before them, was that they were slaves of Pharaoh.  They were valued only for their capacity to labor, cherished less than a chariot horse.  They belonged to God, sure. But really, actually, daily, they belonged to Pharaoh for a life of constant work and no rest. 
 
So yes, they’d seen the seven plagues that convinced Pharaoh to release them, they’d seen themselves spared from the angel of Death. Moses said God was leading and they were going to follow Moses. They were ready to be free.  Let’s do this.  But their trust in God was more abstract then applied.  Their right-now-God-is-real-and-God-has-got-me-and-I-am-in-God’s-hands muscles were just starting to get exercised.
 
So it might have been that they set out on this escape with some brand new baby hope, tentatively trying on, inside themselves and with each other, a new identity that does not involve slavery but is something else, something ancient and true, wondering a little awed about what this might mean.
 
But now that Pharaoh has unleashed the entire Egyptian military against them, and is running them down in rage, with mighty chariots racing and terrible weapons drawn, they tend to agree with Pharaoh.  Who do they think they are to go against the Empire and imagine they could be free? Of course Pharaoh is going to come after his property, his workforce!  And of course he is angry! 
 
And now they find themselves on the banks of the Red Sea, with nowhere to turn, and the Egyptian army fast approaching. There is no escape, and they are terrified.  And—I love the sarcasm that often comes through, revealing across the centuries the feisty personalities of the Israelites—they say, ‘Hey Moses, were there no graves back in Egypt you could bury us in? You have to drag us into the wilderness to die? Didn’t we say, just leave us alone and let us serve the Egyptians? Huh? Didn’t we say that?” 
 
Life in Egypt was sustainable.  This feels like sure and certain death.
 
When we are in a dark and terrifying place, we’d rather go back to what was, even if what was sucked out our souls. Even if we lived like slaves, working for what doesn’t matter, wasting our lives for something we don’t believe in, grinding away for survival far removed from our deepest belonging and highest calling, with no real rest.  Because as bad as that is, at least it’s not death in the wilderness.
 
And when God is a religious concept that we hang onto but don’t really experience as a real, all-powerful, all-loving being who hangs onto us, it makes us much less thrilled about the risks of really living, and much more willing to settle for merely being alive.
But Moses answers the terrified Israelites, "Do not be afraid, stand firm, and see the deliverance that the Lord will accomplish for you today; for the Egyptians whom you see today you shall never see again. The Lord will fight for you, you have only to keep still."

And then, against all instinct – both as slaves defined by their labor, and as people filled with terror and adrenaline – they are still. They stand still and watch.  And before their eyes a re-creation happens. Hemmed in by light and cloud of darkness, there is evening and there is morning, a new day, and this God who formed the earth moves again and the waters are separated, and dry land appears. 
God makes a way where there was no way.  
And they are brought from death to life.
And then, not only does God save them, but in front of their eyes, God destroys all that would destroy them.  God wipes out the enemy entirely, with a bodies-scattered-on-the shoreline kind of finality.  The invincible powers dominating them for centuries as an indisputable fact of life were obliterated by the hand of God.
 
You are MINE. God says decisively. Be still and I will show you this is so.  

On either of the Red Sea, life is no picnic. Life is full of hardship and unknown. There is struggle and pain in life no matter what. But on one side fear is dominant, and God seems a nice, sustainable notion while the tangible threats to our stability feel far more powerful than an unreachable God.  On that side we are slaves who never stop, whose life is only for existing, whose worth is defined by our doing, who have settled for a small, rigid world with emaciated hope.

But when we pass through the waters to the other side—when, in a moment of terrible need and difficult stillness, God comes to us, and saves us from what was certain to destroy us--we are redefined as people held by God no matter what. We are led into something new and also returning to our identity, ancient and true: we belong to this God. We belong to each other.  Heading into the wilderness, as hard as that will be, we are made free. 

God begins us in love, and ends us there too. And along the way God grows in us enduring trust, and forms in us expansive hope. God shapes us for a good life—a life of belonging to God and to each other. This life cannot be earned or lost, but only received and enjoyed.
 
The other side of the Red Sea is not about what is sustainable, but about what is life-giving.  Salvation is described in scripture as resting in God’s care.  And this is trust too.  As the continuation of the Israelite’s story makes clear, learning to live as the people who rest in God’s care, who trust in God, never ends.  But it begins here:  God saves. God saves us. We are those who are saved by God.  We belong to the God who acts to save us; we are the people who rest in God’s care. That is who we are. That is our story.  
 
There is no mustering that faith, or crossing that sea on our own.  God must do that.  God will act for us.  That’s who God is. That’s what God does.  So when we are ejected from our sustainable patterns into the unknown, when it feels like persistent and powerful fear will undoubtedly capture and destroy us, when death feels sure and certain, don't be afraid, be still.  God will make a way make a way where there is no way.  The terrors we face today will not prevail.  The Lord will fight for you.  You need only Be still. 
 
Amen.

 

CONNECTING RITUAL:

Perhaps tonight before we go to bed, whatever time that is in each of our homes, we can pray in this way, and so join our souls with each other and the people of the whole earth:

A simple way of praying that frees us from having to figure out how God should solve things, and allows us to grow in trust that as we hold people and situations up to God, God hears and will act.

This works especially well as a walking prayer.

Here now,
with you,
for _______

For example:

Here now,
with you,
 for those sick with covid.

Here now, 
with you,
for those fighting fires.

Here now,
with you,
for the hungry and afraid.

Here now,
with you,
for (name).

Fight, flight, sloth or still

LNPC is moving through the Old Testament via the Narrative Lectionary.  Last week's sermon was a retelling of the Joseph story (Genesis 37-50), interspersed with the personal stories of people in the congregation, as we pondered together, How do we hang on in times of darkness? How do we know God is hanging onto us?  What does faith look like in the midst of struggle? How does God meet us inside these experiences, and how do we learn to trust God?

People's stories were gathered throughout the week and shared with the congregation with permission.  I will not be posting them online, however, to honor privacy, but I am so grateful to those who were brave and vulnerable enough to let their stories be shared in community, that we all might search for God in our own stories.

Psalm 46: 8-11, Exodus14:10-14, 21-31

Since the Joseph story, Jacob’s family – whose name was changed by God to “Israel,” so the Israelites- settled in Egypt and prospered.  But time goes by, and down the road the latest Pharaoh didn’t remember Joseph and what he had done, and only noticed the huge population of Israelites thriving in their land, and he became concerned, that one day in the event of war, they could rise up and fight with Egypt’s enemies.  So the Pharaoh enslaved the Israelites and put taskmasters over them and used them to build mighty cities, but still, the Israelite population grew. 

Distressed, Pharaoh told the Israelite midwifes Shiphrah and Puah, to kill any baby boys that were born.  But they feared God and wouldn’t do it, claiming that Israelite women were so “vigorous” that they delivered before the midwives could arrive.  So Pharaoh told the Egyptians to drown any Israelite boy they found – and then we have the story of Moses, and the basket in the Nile, and the princess rescuing him, and Moses growing up in Pharaoh’s own house, right under his nose…

Again and again we see the power of the empire threatened and thwarted by the subversive and upside down power of God, coming through the unexpected, the unprepared, the unacknowledged, the unimpressive.  And the tension builds in the standoff between Pharaoh and God.  It escalates with the seven Plagues – when Moses stands before Pharaoh and demands that he let God’s people go- and Pharaoh refuses, and all sorts of gruesome terrible things happen until he finally relents and lets them leave, and they do, in the middle of the night, all of them, with their cattle and everything, and our story picks up here, at the climax to the brewing battle between Pharaoh and God – who will have the souls of the people? Who will own them? To whom do they belong? Who will win?

And the very newly delivered Israelites have already begun their grumbling to Moses, and say aloud what very many of us think on the brink of something new, transformative and terrifying: they wish they were back in slavery – why couldn’t we have just kept serving the Egyptians? We’d rather have died there.  At least we would have known what to expect.  At least we know who is in charge. At least we understood that our lives, such as they were, had some kind of purpose. Anything but this surely impending death!

And here they find themselves, as our story picks up, in a cacophony of chaos  - roaring, churning water on either side, Egyptian army bearing down on them with hooves and flying dirt and shouts of rage, cries of fear, and they are in prime fight or flight position – in fact, it seems like just the situation that the fight or flight instinct was designed for, and the word to them is: Be Still. The Lord will fight your battle.

Be still. The Lord will fight your battle.

Aouple of things occur to me here.

One- I suck at being still.  I like to think of myself as good in a crisis.  I hate to admit it,  but every time I pack for a trip, I imagine that one of my kids gets injured, or a minor accident occurs – not a bad one, just a dramatic one, and I have EXACTLY the right first aid supplies and know how to cope perfectly in the moment. It gives me a special thrill to have a band-aid at the ready, or to know just what to do when the power goes out.  I am a woman of action.  Plunk me between walls of water and enemy soldiers and I’d want us to MacGuyver our way out of it- there has to be something we can rig up to escape, or fight back.  I’m the type to go down swinging.  And I like having the last word.  If you can’t win, you can at least come out as the righteous loser, the one who should have won, and if you can get the other guy to acknowledge it, all the better. 

The very last thing I would want to do in this situation is to be still. The very hardest thing in a moment of chaos, in unknown or fear, is to stop and let God fight for me.  

The second thing that occurs to me is how it's easier not to care, not to be in it at all.  It is said that one of the seven deadly sins is sloth, which is an only slightly more modern way of saying what the early monastics called, acedia.  Spiritual carelessness. A state of listless weariness and indifference, which manifests often as laziness.  Acedia is a state of disconnection from the life you are living in.  In today’s day and age, it more often manifests as frenzied, disconnected, pointless activity.  Souls asleep, body going through the motions – lots and lots of motions. 

How are you? 

So busy! You?

In the midst of a crisis, I suspect we ramp up in to high gear the state we are already existing in, which for many of us, much of the time, is a state of acedia.  The Israelites demand to return to slavery where they don’t have to care, don’t have to hope, don’t have to risk that their lives could be lost dramatically when their lives can slip away slowly instead, against their will, Oh well, what can be done?

For you and me, when things get hard or the way ahead is unclear and frightening, we too ramp up into high gear: WebMD is great for obsessing about every symptom, testimonial and side effect to pretend we can fix things until we give up, and when we do there are millions of ways to be busy and distracted.  How about food, alcohol, and hours and hours of TV?  Maybe we go wheels churning, battle raging, or maybe we go numb, but whether it’s shut down or amped up, we end up more disconnected from ourselves and our reality and our God.

What we don’t do, most of us, is be still.

 Awake, attentive, aware and still.

This is not the first of the counterintuitive commands, and it wont be the last.  What God is after all along is a relationship where the children of God trust God to care for them, and live in cooperation with one another and the world around them. And moving from slavery to freedom, they are going to have to do that in a whole new way, in uncharted, undesired, unknown territory. What happens when they get to the other side, when Egypt recedes in the distance with the waters? Then what? 

The trust is just beginning.

Be still, and the Lord will fight for you.

This is what they are told to do.  

And so they do.  

And then God does. 

And they get to see God fight for them. 

In front of their eyes, the pillar of fire and cloud of smoke, the enemy falling behind them and the spray of the ocean on their cheeks as they shuffle quickly through the valley of the shadow of death.  

The battle between Pharaoh and God for the Israelites is won decisively and indisputably by God.  And as much as they may have wanted to, they didn’t need to know what was coming, to have faith in the final plan, or in their own wisdom and strength.  

All they had to do to obey, to wake up, to be human and to be in shalom – in total relationship with God, in that moment, was to be still. All they had to do was pay attention and watch God fight for them. 

And when they do, they become people moving toward a future which God will make known to them.  They become the generation that all future generations will remember in awe.  And these women and men became people that day – they stopped belonging to the empire to be used up and discarded, and their lives became precious, worth fighting for, worth moving heaven and earth and sea for, valuable and involved.  

This is the defining story in all Jewish history and scripture, and everything that is about to come after this begins here – at their impossible deliverance, at the decisive victory, the sweeping triumph over their enemies and oppressors.

Who are we to trust?  The God who delivered us out of Egypt. Why can we trust God? Because God parted the waters, defeated the Egyptians, rescued us from our enemies, who delivered us from slavery. 

And I’d like to point out the water. 

The water that the Spirit hovered over at Creation, dividing the watery chaos and drawing out from it the settled order of dry land.  The water that again crashed down and filled up the earth when God uncreated, and Noah’s family bobbed on top of it in the ark, the water the baby boys were to be drowned in in Egypt and that Moses was saved out of, and that Jesus will later be baptized in and walk on and fish from, and the water that you and I have poured over us to tell us who we are and whose we are.  The ordinary, life sustaining, cleansing and filling and earth-defining water that the Israelites must pass through in order to move from slavery to freedom. 

We must pass through the waters of chaos, the waters of trust, the waters that ask us who is more powerful, Pharaoh or God? We must be still, sometimes, and let God fight for us.  Sometimes we must be still and watch what God will do.  

And then when God says, move. We must move.  We must walk forward. Take one step in front of the other – while the roaring sea rises on either side in deference to your path, and the enemy is barreling down upon you, walk, don’t run, to the nearest exit, and trust God to deal with the elements and the evil.

What a panicked, anxiety-filled, fear-driven world we live in. (What a panicked, anxiety-filled, fear-driven time in the church!)  Death lurks around every corner, threat and competition and alarm, Isn’t it all going down in flames? 

What an acedia-saturated culture we’re part of, lulling us to apathy, inviting us to disconnect, tempting us with toys and technology to separate soul from body, to go through the motions, to move faster and faster, or to stop moving at all, and just give up. It’s too overwhelming to care.

Hear this story, let it tremble the water under your skin, because it lurks inside all the rest of scripture from here on out, which is to say, this story lives inside everyone who comes along after this crowd, whose story is told in this book, whose faith is tested or born, whose relationship to God is opened up for us to see, this story in some way defines who God is and who we are, for all the generations to follow, including Jesus Christ, raised from birth on the promises of “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:2-3).

In the struggle between Pharaoh and God, between slavery and freedom, between acedia and fullness of life – who will have the souls of the people? Who will own them? To whom do they belong? Who will win?

Be still. The Lord will fight for you.

When the whole world seems to be convinced that we are about to be destroyed, Be still.  When we seem to be convinced that soulless mindnumbing is preferable to the risk of being truly, painfully, joyfully awake to what God might do, Be still.

What happens when we are still?  Perspective happens.

When we’re still, we are forced to acknowledge reality. The good and the bad.  And we stop overestimating our own power to fix, change or escape things.  We recognize that we are not God.

When we’re still, our selves to settle back into ourselves. It wakes us up to everything we’ve been numbing or rushing past.  Our feelings catch up with us and at first we’re raw: Fear, sadness, grief, guilt, frustration, we have to face them. And when we do we discover they can’t smother us, and we’re stronger for coming out the other side; we're rinsed out and ready.

And when we are still, the way forward is made clear, even if it’s just the very little next step to take.  

Sometimes, all you and I have to do to obey, to wake up, to be human and to be in shalom – total relationship with God, in that moment, is to be still. All we have to do was pay attention and watch God fight for us.  

When we’re still, that’s where God can meet us. That’s where we can discover we are not alone. Because sisters and brothers, we too are people of the water. 

May we be still and know who is God.

Amen.

Today, set a time for ten minutes, and be still.  

What do you notice when you do this?

Restlessness? Calm? Frustration? Sadness? Gratitude?

Give what you notice to God.