As for you...

 On Tuesday I sent my son an Easter basket, and inside was an Apple AirTag for his luggage. But how fun, I thought, to activate it now, name it “Owen’s Easter Basket,” and watch it travel across the country all week to him!  

At first this was fun. It’s in Toledo! It’s crossing into Pennsylvania! But then it got bad. On Friday: why is it sitting in that building on the port of New Jersey it was supposed to have arrived?  On Saturday, why is it now at that address? Was it misdelivered? Is someone else eating his Cadbury egg?? 

And then the final hours yesterday afternoon were the worst. I watched Owen’s Easter Basket zigzag and crisscross his neighborhood, circling within a mile from him but bypassing his street again and again. And I couldn’t stop obsessively checking on it. This had become zero fun.

When the basket finally got to him I was exhausted. But I realized tracking that Easter basket was a familiar feeling. Checking in on its progress every three minutes was not unlike how I have been obsessively reading articles, refreshing my newsfeed, following every breaking story however small. Do I think watching it all so closely will change anything? Why do I keep choosing anxiety instead of presence?

I asked people the other night at Church Chat how they were doing, and we had some fun catching up on the various catchings up, but later one person commented on how it’s hard to answer that How are you? question these days when it feels like every minute there’s a new way our country seems to be falling apart or hurting someone, but I’m good I guess, they answered.

It is not easy to be a modern person in a complex world, with a window to it all in our pocket at all times. It’s easy to feel like the challenges of this time are uniquely bad, and of course they feel that way to us because they’re what we see and are experiencing. But in the scope of human history, we are no different than our human siblings. 

We’re all given a life filled with joy and connection and pain and suffering, in these miraculous, resilient bodies that are also really fragile and complicated, inside particular families and communities with their own blessings and curses, subject to whatever befalls the place and time we happened to be born in. All of us encounter evil, behold marvels, face deep struggles, taste delicious joy, and bear acute loneliness, and we do it all within whatever larger forces are at play in the world at the moment.  Life is hard, and death comes for us all. 

But by golly, I am going to keep tabs on it anyway. With all my monitoring of the world, now adding on a cross-country road-tripping Easter basket too, I don’t have the attention span for Easter.  I am too busy, and worried, and busy being worried.

 

Our Lent theme has been, Be Still and Know I am God

Did you ever play that nerdy grammar game where you emphasize different words in a sentence, and it changes the meaning?

Here is an example:

Let’s EAT, Grandma! Quit working on that puzzle and come to the table! 

LET’S eat, Grandma!  C’mon! Everybody else is already eating except us! 

Let’s eat GRANDMA!  a completely different meaning altogether.

BE still and know I am God – don’t perform stillness, actually just BE, like a baby, the very you-ness of you, unfiltered.

Be STILL and know I am God – quit hurrying, assessing, achieving and maneuvering, stop, and watch what happens next

Be still AND know I am God – don’t just sit there numb and disengaged, let your resistance go and be open to what wants to come out of the stillness 

Be still and KNOW I am God – really trust it, in-your-bones believe it

Be still and know I am God –not you, not anything else around you, not the long arm of the government or the deep voice of your shame, but ME, I am God. 

Be still and know I AM God – not I was God a long time ago in the bible days, or I will be God eventually in heaven after you die, but always right now this is true, in fact it’s my name, AMness; when everything else is trapped in time, I AM and AM and AM

Be still and know I am GOD – not a great idea for you to grasp, a message for you to spread, or a religious concept that needs your defending, but GOD, beyond you and without your say-so, the Divine Source of life and final authority over life and death

And there we have it, Isaiah’s message to the Israelites, living in exile and captivity for decades with no end in sight:

Do you not know this? Have you not heard? Who stretched out the heavens, and filled them with stars? All life comes from me and returns to me and in between, guess who holds all of it? ME. I am GOD. 

The leaders of this age? They’re barely planted in the ground before they’re ripped up by the next storm. But look up to the vastness of the sky - I am the architect of the cosmos.

 Sometimes you say God doesn’t care and God isn’t listening. Haven’t you heard? There is nothing I do not know! When you’re exhausted and afraid, turn to me, wait for me, I give strength to the powerless, you will mount up like an eagle and ride on the wind.

This is GOD we’re talking about. Be still and know it.

This God came into all of it with us. He came weak, and took on our suffering, our pride, our alienation and division, our whole power-hungry sinful structure that sees healing for the sick and freedom for the slaves and good news for the poor as a hostile threat to the order of things. And on Good Friday, we heard the terrible story told so gently and powerfully by so many of you: there is nothing Jesus did not inhabit with and for us—he was taunted and humiliated, he was tortured and executed. 

And when he died, his beloved friends, family and followers were crushed with grief and disillusionment. For all intents and purposes, the world had ended. What more evil and hopelessness for humanity is there than for us to kill our God who came into this life alongside us to save us? There is no turning back from that. Darkness and evil prevailed. Death won. But it wasn’t really over. 

So here we arrive to our destination, Easter morning, to celebrate the resurrection of our Lord.  And it turns out if we shift the emphasis to different parts of story, we’ll hear different things, and all of it is good news. 

 

Our text begins with the words, “After the sabbath…”

which is to say, right in the midst of the greatest, most terrible drama humanity, the earth, the angels and the cosmos has ever witnessed, while the leaders kept scrambling to keep the power and shape the narrative, the followers of Christ, and as Martin Luther points out Jesus himself in the grave, stopped for the sabbath, the great interruption that puts us back in right relationship to God and each other. They paused it all to be still and know that God is God.  Jesus died, they held vigil, then everyone stopped to rest in the obedience of trusting God.  And then, “as the first day of the week was dawning,” the women returned to the work of grieving the dead. 

 

There is nothing so great, so important, so essential, that we cannot stop and rest in the obedience of trusting God. There is no evil or horror, no righteous errand, and no pressingly urgent obligation that demands so much of our constant, vigilant attention, that we are unavailable to our Creator, our fellow human beings, or the whispers of our own souls.  Did you create the sky and the ocean?  No you did not. When the flailing and the scrambling kick in, Be still and know I am God.

 

What about the words of the lightening-clothed angel, who comes down in an earthquake, slides back the enormous, sealed, stone, and takes a jaunty seat, while the military professionals with the boring gig of guarding a dead man, they shake like the earth itself with terror and became like the dead themselves? With a nod at their passed-out bodies the angel says, “But as for YOU, stop being afraid. I suppose you’re looking for Jesus who was killed? Well, he’s not here; he has already risen, just like he said he would. Come see for yourself then go quickly and tell his disciples Jesus will meet them back in Galilee. This is my message for you.” 

 

The powers that be are afraid. This is always true. In fear they hustle, and scramble, and never stop striving to keep power. Money is god, the weak don’t matter, this is the way of fear and sin, and human history has no shortage of stories where it appears that the wicked prevail, those who say otherwise will be silenced, and the dead do not live again. 

But do you not know? Have you not heard? God who rules the cosmos has broken down, torn open, and shaken apart the very foundations of everything. Death itself is overcome, and things are not what they seem. 

So as for YOU, quit being afraid. As for YOU, return to community and together go to the place where you last saw Jesus – because he will meet you again there. The places where the lost are found, and the least are most, and the wrong people are chosen, and the things that do last, like - love and hope and peace - happen, inexplicably, in weakness, and show up in suffering, and the most vulnerable people are the ones through whom the Spirit of the Most High moves, bringing healing and hope, drawing ordinary people into God’s salvation of the world.  As for You, stop being afraid. Go tell the rest of them to meet Jesus where he is already doing his thing.

 

And shifting the focus to just after that, how about when the scared and joyful Marys run right into the risen Lord who seems to be intercepting their mission, like he couldn’t wait one more second to see them? Our translation has him saying, “Greetings!” like he is delivering their mail or something, but in scripture, this word most often means, “Rejoice!”  So, Jesus throws out his arms and shouts “Rejoice!” and the women shriek and embrace him and fall at his feet weeping with incredulous joy at this glorious impossibility. Jesus pulls them up and repeats the same message the angel gave them, “Ok, now, don’t be afraid any longer. Go to my brothers and sisters and tell them to go back to living their lives, and there they will see me.”

 

Right now, we could put the emphasis on any part of the sentence of life.  Things are either bad, or they’re good, because that’s always true. Always we could watch and obsess over every nuance of evil unfolding, and we could be available to our Creator, our fellow human beings, and the whispers of our own souls. Our lives are shaped by what we give our attention to. 

This is an invitation.

Christ has risen. 

The God who holds the cosmos brings new life out of death, love indestructible by hate, and hope born from despair - there nothing humans or evil can do that is greater than what God has done and will keep doing until it is complete.  

So as for us, may we quit being afraid, invite each other along, and go meet Jesus in our real lives, just as they are, in this beloved world, just as it is. 

And from time to time, no matter what else is happening around us, let’s be still and know who is God.

Amen.

Telling Stories, Choosing Who

Psalm 46 & Joshua 24:1-18

One evening last week Maisy asked me to tell her the story of Andy's and my trip around the world. That happened the first year of our marriage, 15 years ago.  I began to tell her the story and both kids got really interested. They kept leaping from their seats and going to the art piece on the wall that has thumbnail photographs asking, Was that here? Is this a picture of that?  

When I had finished they asked if I would fill in the time between then and now, with stories.  I started to talk, and they listened with laughter, gasps, shouts and rapt silence, we went on and on, through our time in New Jersey, our new puppy, longing for a baby, Owen’s birth and moving to Minnesota, getting a new home and making friends, and by the time I got to Maisy as a baby, an hour and a half had gone by and we all leaned back with a satisfied sigh.  

I think that somehow Andy and I got cooler in their eyes (You lived in California!? You’ve been to Rome!?) But also, they had a better sense of who they are and where they came from, the narrative of their lives and their family, and I noticed in the telling of it all the places I said, “And we prayed for…” or  “And it was just what we needed…” or “We didn’t know what to do…” and “God took care of us.”

Last week we talked about the Ten Words – the words God gave to the people to define them no longer as slaves, now as free, as belonging to God instead of Pharaoh. These were rules for the free life, the life of living free for relationship with God and others, as wholly fully who the people were created to be. 

Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as knowing or hearing them, they had a very difficult time believing and trusting that God would care for them, and seeing themselves as responsible parties in the relationship – that who they were and how they lived mattered to God. 

Repeatedly they distrusted God, turned away from God, begged to go back to slavery, complained about what was happening, doubted God’s provision. When they finally did arrive at the doorstep to the Promised Land, Canaan, they didn’t believe God could get them in.  So God tells that generation that what they’d feared would happen all along would come to pass after all, and they would indeed die in the wilderness. It is the next generation, their children, who will enter the Promised Land.

In the middle of all this, Moses dies, and leadership changes to Joshua, who leads them in the bizarre conquest of Canaan and all the battles that follow as they begin to establish themselves in the land and their identity develops.  And now, we come to the point in their story where Joshua is coming to the end of his life, speaking to the children of those who passed through the waters about the choice set before them now that they’ve arrived in the longed-after promise. So he gets up and gives a speech.

 Except, it’s not a speech, it’s stories. 

He tells the stories of who they are and where they came from, by telling them the story of God with them. Their own story. He reaches way back and begins, God says, Long ago, your ancestors lived beyond the river… and he begins to tell them about Abraham and Sarah, and Isaac and Rebekah, and Jacob and Esau, and Joseph in Egypt, and then Moses and Miriam and the Red sea and how God delivered them. 

He stands there and tells them the stories that brought them to this point, the situations and experiences that made them who they are.  But these stories are not just about them, they are God’s story, God’s love and faithfulness and anger and forgiveness and how God has dealt with them all through the past to this very moment, the fulfillment of the promise that has shaped them for a generation.  

And he reminds them of the covenant God made with their parents, and says to them, Now it’s your covenant, and it’s your turn to respond to God. Choose this day who you will serve. There are, and always will be, many options from whatever lands we’ve come and those we bump up against, but as for me, and my household, we will serve the Lord.

You are invited, always invited, to claim your own chosenness, to live in the covenant with God, to participate with God in what God has built you for – life in the freedom of God, life that shares in hope and healing, life with God as God instead of whatever other gods rule the land. 

And in the hard times along the journey they’ve remembered the covenant, and now, in a good time, when it seems they’ve reached what they’ve longed for, the people are reminded again who it is who holds them, who has been faithful in the past and promises to be faithful in the future.

God is our refuge and strength. No matter what happens. 

If the very mountains themselves crumble, God is our help.  Bigger than nations and armies and might, bigger than deadlines and pressures and test scores and test results, God is the one who holds us – the Lord of Hosts is with us, the God of Jacob is our stronghold. 

Be Still and know that I am God. 

This is the same advice given to theIsraelites just as the Red Sea opens up – be still and watch me be God for you. Be still and know that I am God.

There are always plenty of other gods vying for our attention and our worship, gods of commerce and power and winning, gods of competition and jealousy, gods of selfish satisfaction and disconnected apathy.  The world is always ready with an answer to tell you who you are and who you really belong to, or don’t. Take your pick, there are plenty to choose from.  

But know that you are choosing. 

There is no ignoring that.  So be intentional about it. 

Will you serve the gods that seek to enslave you again, or will you serve the God who sets you free? The God who has been faithful to you for generations and who sees you and knows you even now?

I spent this week at a conference on storytelling –but not just stories, our own personal stories. True stories. Stories of meaningful things in our lives, things that end up making us who we are.  Stories that have shaped us. And it was a reminder that ordinary-looking people are all extraordinary: brave, weak, complicated survivors, filled with so much beauty our eyes brim up and overflow when they reveal even a small part of it to us.  

Big stories or small, funny or sad, it turns out we all have more stories than we could ever count hiding underneath our skin. And we hardly ever revisit those stories, but when we do, they are wells, springs that bubble up, that continue to feed and nourish us.  Our old stories can tell us new things, show us new insights, be places God meets us again in completely new ways. When we revisit our stories we remember who we are and are reminded whose we are. 

The conference included one evening when seven of these people stood up in front of strangers in a restaurant, sharing stories under the theme “Love Hurts.”  The organizer had gotten a local music group to play at the breaks between stories – though the musicians didn’t know anything about the event until they arrived.  

After hearing about a broken-hearted college crush, a father and son struggling to be close, a child showing someone the way home on a dark night in a foreign place, a friend’s suicide attempt, and an estranged friendship that is longing for closure, the musician got up and said to the crowd, “There is more power in this room than all the electronic devices in the world.”  Our stories are powerful. It turns out that through the telling and receiving of these stories we experience God.

But how often do we stop, in our crazy-busy lives, to receive our own, or anyone else’s, stories?  We’re so forward-focused and driven that we struggle to look back, unless it’s with regret or the briefest bout of nostalgia. Consequently, we miss the rich gift that is our lives, and the way God’s story is played out within it.  God has always been with us, and is always up to something in our lives, even when we haven’t recognized it.  

This is the 4^th commandment, by the way.  Stop. Remember, Observe. Do this regularly. See again that you belong to God; see again that you are free to love and live.  Live in the story you are in, soak it in, share the stories of others. Pay attention.

Tonight we are lingering on Psalm 46.  Filled with scenes of God’s deliverance and care, God’s promise and God’s presence.  Times of turmoil, fear, unknown, when the things around us seem too big, or when we ourselves act as though we are bigger than we are. God is a refuge, strength, a present help, nourishes us like a stream making glad a whole city, dwelling among us, holding us steady.  Cease striving, it says, be still, stop running, and know.   Be still and you will know. 

Being Still with our Stories: 

Now it's our covenant. It's our turn to respond to God.  We are going to take a few minutes and hold open our lives to God, inviting God to help us to remember God’s presence, to meet us in our own stories, in the ways God has been present to us in the past.  So that we may be fed from that spring, so that we may move into our week with a deeper sense of whose we are, and how God has brought us to this place, and a wider welcome for who we are, and who God has made us to be.  And we will do this by being still, and letting the Spirit of God speak to us through our own memories, imagination and open hearts.

We moved into a guided prayer time, from an exercise shared by Mark Yacconelli, "Praying Sacred Moments," that asks people to recall a moment they felt was sacred, to engage the senses in remembering the moment, to allow the sense of God's presence from that moment to swell within them even now, to consider a symbol they could take from the moment to help them recall and connect with how God met them in that time, and finally, to discern if there is an invitation from God in the experience that could impact their life now.  Our time ended with floating tea lights on water - representing all that we are carrying in prayer to God - as a way of entrusting ourselves to God's care.

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.