BENCHMARKS: WANDERING IN THE DESERT

JUNE 1, 2008

JOE KUTTER

 Let’s start with a little home parable:

·        Mary is 4 months old. Who is Mom to Mary? Mom is the provider of everything including the mild from Mom’s own body. Security, love, shelter, and clean diapers when the time is right.

·        Mary is 14. Who is Mom to Mary? Milk from her own body? Clean diapers? Let’s hope not. Mom is still a provider of shelter and safety but now it often comes in the form of conversation and sometimes takes the form of rules that must be obeyed.  And there are days when Mary suspects that her Mom is really not very smart.

·        Mary is 24. Who is Mom to Mary? Mary probably has her own job and her own home and perhaps even her own child. And her Mom is still Mom but now Mom provides conversation and love and support.

·        One more age, Mary is 64. Who is Mom to Mary? It could be that Mom is some one who requires care from her daughter. After a lifetime of being Mom, the roles are beginning to reverse, just a little.

Now, I ask you, who is Mom to Mary? We are talking about the same two people and we are talking about the same mother-daughter relationship through the course of a lifetime so I ask, who is Mom to Mary?

They are mother and daughter forever but the relationship, if it is to be healthy, is forever changing. If the relationship is a good one and if they sustain the love that they have for one another, the shape of the love will change according to their time and place in life. In order for the love to remain constant, lots and lots of things have to change.

This is the point of this series of sermons: God is forever the same but because you change from day to day and year to year and decade to decade, your relationship with God must change too. God will treat you somewhat differently at the ages of 4 months and 14 years and 24 and 64.  Why? Because even though you are the same person, the changes in your life call for God’s grace in different forms and God is determined to give you the grace that you need and not just the grace that you want.

I wish that I had a proof-text but I don’t. Instead, I’ve noticed that God spoke to Jesus differently at his baptism than at his crucifixion. God gave grace to Moses differently in his infancy when Moses was floated down the Nile than when Moses was dealing with Pharo and that was different from when Moses was receiving “The Ten Commandments” which was different from the forty years in the wilderness.  I see the principle in the spiritual biographies of women and women who grew spiritually as they grew in age and maturity and responsibility.

Why is this important?  Let’s return to our opening parable. If Mary tries to relate to Mom at the age of 14 as she did when she was four months, what has happened?  If Mary relates to Mom at the age of 24 or 64 as she did at the age of 14, what happens? The relationship is stunted and Mary never grows to become the woman that God created her to become.  

In the same way, the person who forever tries to relate to God as she or he did at the age of 12 or 14 or even 21 will become spiritually stunted and never become the full grown, mature, image-of-God person that God intended in his or her birth.

Let’s return to our sermon series hero, Moses. Last week, Matt rushed through his adolescence and young adulthood to that pivotal mid-life moment when he met God in the burning bush. Today, I want to return to that moment that seems to mark the transformation from late adolescence to young adulthood. This is the moment when he left the nest and struck out on his own.

We could refer to it as an identity crisis. He was born a Hebrew. He was raised as nobility in the Egyptian court. He was born a slave. He was raised to be a master. His birth mother, the slave, helped to raise him in the home of his adoptive mother, the princess. How confusing is that for an adolescent boy?

Am I a slave? I don’t want to be a slave. I am not a slave. But am I a master? Do I really want to own my own mother? Boys always have issues with their fathers. What happened to Moses’ father? We don’t know.

His growing-up created a special place for Moses, in some ways, a really tough place. He was able to move in both worlds. He did not belong in either. In some sense, he was at home in both cultures but really not at home in either.   

What were the questions of crisis that Matt asked last week?

Who am I?

Where is my home?

Who is my community?

Who is my God?

How would Moses answer?

Who am I?  Egyptian or Hebrew?

Where is my home? In the palace or with my birth mother?

Who is my community? The slaves or the courts of the nobility?

Who is my God? The gods of the Egyptians or the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob?

So what? So what for us?  For Moses, the questions were more dramatic than they are for most of us but the questions are the same. And in that period between adolescence and young adulthood, they take on a very special intensity.

Like every young adult, Moses now had to answer the questions for himself. The answers provided by his parents and by the adults in his life were no longer adequate because those answers were not his own.

For Moses the defining moment came when he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew. Here Moses seems to have felt like a Hebrew but he acted like an Egyptian. He assumed the prerogatives of the Egyptian court and he killed his Egyptian inferior. Egyptian nobility had that privilege, or perhaps he so thought.

It was the response of a privileged young man who had been taught that he was better than others. It was visceral and muscular and it gave expression to the inner turmoil that he had to feel. On of his mother’s people was being mistreated and in a moment of righteous anger, Moses took him out.

He just chose sides, perhaps. A short time later, he sees two slaves fighting and he tries to stop them. In a moment of subordination, they ask, are you going to kill us too? He still doesn’t really belong to the Hebrews.

It’s time to leave town, quickly. Moses runs for his life into Midian where he experiences more identity confusion. He meets a Midianite priest, neither Hebrew nor Egyptian and he marries one of his daughters. Then he begins to work, neither as slave nor as master but as a shepherd. He assumes the responsible roles of adulthood with a wife and a child and so he lives until the bush burns especially for him.

Let’s return to the courts of the Pharos with Moses. As he lives with two mothers and two cultures and two religions, what does Moses need most from God? It would be nice if God would just send a memo with all of the answers but God never seems to work in quite that way.

If Moses was praying, for what would he pray? Answer my questions. Show me the way. Just tell me, who am I? The problem for God would seem to be this. If God answers too quickly, Moses then fails to develop the spiritual and emotional abilities that he would need later in life.

It is right here that Moses begins to learn to trust in God. The question is, how do you trust in God when you do not know all of the answers?  Some respond by trying to cling to the answers of their childhood but that never really quite works. The answer is, you must trust in God precisely because you do no have the answers and you never will.

You trust because God proved to be trustworthy when:

He told Abram, “Go to the place where I will show you”

When he sent the young Joseph, the boy with the coat of many colors, into Egypt

When he sent Moses into the desert

When he sent the children of Israel to the Red Sea

When he sent David to meet Goliath

When he sent the angel to the young woman named Mary

When he sent Jesus into the wilderness following his baptism

When he sent Saul on the road to Damascus and he became Paul

When he sent Peter to visit a tanner named Simon and he saw a vision that said, Do not call any of my people unclean

When he sent an Ethiopian ruler on a journey through the desert and he met a deacon named Philip who explained Jesus to him and he was baptized

God has proved himself to be trustworthy in times past and God will not fail you now, that is the message for young adults.

You will never have all of the answers but you can learn the one lesson that is necessary for all of life, God will lead you to the place where you need to be when you need to be there. And you will learn it only by learning it, by moving forward each day, one at a time and trusting that God will take you to the next place.

One night in college, my friend Jack, maybe 22 or 23 years of age, a graduate student in chemistry, stopped by my apartment. He had been running through one of the wooded places on the college campus and he reported this. He took it as a message from God for him and us.

He said, as I was running the trail, I noticed that I could not see very far. The night-time darkness was settling in. But then I also noticed that the moon-light coming through the trees provided spots of light on the trail in front. So I decided to run from spot to spot believing that spot to spot, the trail would bring me home. 

Like the rest of us, he was wondering and praying about his future. Like the rest of us he wanted to see it all. And then he discovered what we all now know, he had to run from spot to spot and trust that God would deliver him to the right place at the right time and give him just the right thing to do in God’s gracious kingdom.

May God make it so for us all.

Amen.