Worship
Service for September 17, 2023
Prelude
Announcements:
Call to Worship
L: When the tides of fear seem to overwhelm
us, we cry out…
P: Lord, come to us and lead us to paths of
safety!
L: When we feel lost and alone and we wonder
if anyone cares about us, we cry out…
P: Lord, come and heal our wounded spirits!
L: When turbulence within and without seem to
threaten us, we cry out…
P: Lord, bring us peace. AMEN.
Opening Hymn – Holy, Holy, Holy #138/3
Prayer of Confession
Lord, we confess that we don’t
always turn to You in our troubles.
Sometimes we are paralyzed by fear and anxiety. We cannot see “the light at the end of the
tunnel”. For us, there is only the
ongoing darkness and hopelessness. Clear
our sight, O Lord. Bind up our wounded
spirits! Fill us with your mercy and
love. Forgive us when we stray; when we
fear; when we falter. Pick us up and
place us on pathways of peace and hope, for we ask this in Jesus’ name. (Silent prayers are offered) AMEN.
Assurance of Pardon
L: No matter what befalls us, the Lord walks
with us on the path, bringing us courage and hope.
P: No matter what, we belong to the Lord, now
and forever. AMEN
Gloria Patri
Affirmation of Faith/Apostles’
Creed
I believe in God the Father
Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth; And in Jesus Christ His only Son our Lord;
who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under
Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried; He descended into hell; the
third day He rose again from the dead; He ascended into heaven, and sitteth on
the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence He shall come to judge
the quick and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Ghost,
the holy catholic Church; the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins; the
resurrection of the body; and the life everlasting. AMEN
Pastoral Prayer and Lord’s
Prayer
With
our hearts, minds, and souls we praise you, O Lord, for we are fearfully and
wonderfully made. How grateful we are
that you love us with a love that will not let us go even though we have, by
design and default, resisted you. What
is it about us that causes such resistance?
We know, O God, even as we ask, that it is the rebellious spirit within
us. Help us. Don’t leave us to the consequences of our own
foolishness. When we come daily before
your throne of grace with repentance and humility, pour out upon us the
cleansing power of your forgiveness and fill us anew with the joy of Christ’s
victory over death. Then, Lord, help us
not to be just receivers, but givers of these same blessings. Sensitize us to those who need the merciful
touch from you that we ourselves have received.
Grant us, we ask, the courage to extend it even to those who have
wounded us deeply. In so doing, may they
then be drawn to Jesus Christ whose forgiveness was, is, and always will be
boundless.
Hear
our prayers this day as we pray for our loved ones and friends. We lift up to you….
And
in this time of silence listen to the beatings and groanings of our heart’s
desire and replenish us O Lord.
We
pray these things now in his precious name, who taught us to pray boldly
together……Our Father who art in heaven, Hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, on earth
as it is in heaven. Give us this day our
daily bread. Forgive us our debts as we
forgive our debtors. And lead us not
into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. AMEN.
Hymn – Open My Eyes, that I May See #324/563
Scripture Reading(s):
Exodus
14:19-31
Matthew
18:21-35
Sermon
Lessons of the Red Sea
(Exodus 14:19-31)
The crossing of the
Red Sea during the Israelites flight from Egypt is one that most of us recall
hearing about during our Sunday School lessons many years ago. It is one of those lessons that even those
who didn’t go to Sunday School probably know from the great movie, The Ten
Commandments, starring Charleton Heston.
Let me make this comment upfront – I’ve never liked the story. I still cringe every time I read it. I’ve never liked stories where one group of
people have to die or be killed in order that another group of people is saved;
especially, if that killing seems to be sanctioned by God. So, as you can imagine, there are a lot of
Old Testament stories that I don’t like as well as any story told today that
puts the same spin on an angry God killing people out of spite versus a loving
God that would prefer for all to be saved. That said, however, it doesn’t mean that there
aren’t things to learn from these stories imbedded in the stories themselves.
There has been much debate from Biblical
scholars, scientists and archaeologists for exact where and how this parting of
the Red Sea took place. If you look at
the picture of the map of the Red Sea, you’ll notice the tiny finger at the
northern edge almost connecting the Indian Ocean to the south with the Mediterranean
Sea to the north. This is where the
current countries of Egypt and Israel meet.
And right about where the V is, lies Mt. Sinai where Moses took the
Hebrew people.
There have been many theories about
whether the parting of the Red Sea was strictly a miraculous event by God who
whether there is some scientifically based theory behind it. About 15 years ago, Carl Drews, a software
engineer looked at past events that mirrored the story in Exodus which occurred
in Lake Erie and also in the Nile Delta itself where strong winds from the East
going at about 60 miles an hour pushed the water away, opposite that of a hurricane,
leaving the harbor completely dry.
Last summer at Mont Saint Michel in France,
which I showed in the first picture of our PowerPoint slide, I saw a similar phenomenon
and couldn’t help but think of the Red Sea Crossing by Moses and the Israelites. The biggest difference was that at Mont Saint
Michel, this phenomenon of dry land and then surrounded by sea was simply
caused by the regular rushing in of the tides. The entire delta surrounding Mont Saint Michel,
from morning till dusk, is completely dry with a few streams running here and
there. During this time, you can drive
to the island or walk there. You can even
take a stroll out on the sandy floor for miles.
But, at dawn and at dusk, the tide comes in. And within 20 minutes, I watched and filmed it
from my bedroom window, the entire delta fills with thigh-high water faster
than a horse can gallop to escape it. It
was at that moment that I wondered about the Israelites that had walked to
safety on dry land, while the Egyptians and their chariots in hot pursuit later
got mired in the quickly sucking sand, and overcome by water in the Red Sea and
drowned.
Whether or not this was a naturally occurring
phenomenon, or one that was completely against nature and a miraculous event,
Moses led his people one step closer to the promised land because he had
listened to God and the people had followed.
However, that doesn’t mean that this
crossing of the Red Sea for the Israelites was a piece of cake. Although, they had crossed on dry land and had
been spared the fate of the Egyptian Army, the Israelites still had to prove
themselves worthy of a relationship with God as they would soon discover in the
wilderness. Besides, this walk through
the sea marked a transitional period in their lives, not always a simple and
painless process. They were caught in
what Victor Turner, a British anthropologist, would call a liminal state. A liminal state is a situation in which one
stands between what is dead or no longer of any value and what is not yet born
(or unknown). This is a fearful place to
be. The Israelites had been enslaved in
Egypt for nearly 400 years. For countless
generations, this was all they knew.
They had hoped in and prayed to God that one day they would be saved
from that bondage. As the years passed,
I can’t imagine how that spark of possible freedom and salvation or that God
would ever hear their cries, had remained kindled in their cultural identity
and in their faith.
Yet it was the will of
God that the Israelites, even after 400 years of slavery, should be spared and
given the chance to prove themselves true to that relationship. God had heard their cries and sent Moses to
bring them to the holy mountain – Mt. Sinai. And although the people were in awe of God's
grace and believed in the Lord and his servant Moses, they were in a liminal
state – turning away from what they had known for 400 years that was of no
value to them and facing an unknown future.
As you read through Exodus, the people will rebel over and over
again. They will quarrel and
complain. They will lose faith and gain
it again. And they will wander from one place
to another for 40 years with little direction, no firm future in sight, no real
sense that their hope in God has been rewarded.
At least, not yet. It is a
fearful time.
It has been written
that when the great explorers began navigating their way through the great seas
of our world, their mapmakers invariably drew dragons and other great sea-beasts
in the areas where ships failed to venture.
Some seafarers thought
the strange creatures actually lurked in the deep to devour unsuspecting
sailors if they entered the waters. Others,
who refused to be put off, made history with their tremendous discoveries of
new worlds. They, too, were caught
between old ideas of no value and the unknown, which had yet to be born in
their lives. But, for those who were
willing to risk it, found themselves in the history books of exploring new
worlds.
For the Israelites,
their exodus from Egypt, was the long hard road out from slavery to freedom. They were a wandering, bedraggled, forlorn
people. They were just a very large band
of slaves. They were nothing, let alone
a nation. But God’s power to create from
nothing, from formlessness and void, is the same power by which God saves and
transforms. It reveals a path for God’s
people and builds walls to protect them from the chaos and death of the sea.
But to be in a liminal
state between the old and the new, remains treacherous. There is both light in the new creation and
darkness in the remembrance of the old and what is left behind. This passage portrays slavery’s end in vivid,
violent detail. Chariots, technologies
of conquest and visible signs of royal power and status, become a trap for
Pharaoh and his armies.
For the Israelites,
whether by miracle or by using the perfect order of creation, God rearranges
sea and land. The Egyptians think to
pursue their former slaves, but as they enter between the walls of water panic is
created among them, their chariot wheels get stuck in mud and sand, and they
cannot retreat. When the Israelites have
crossed to safety, and the water returns, they see the bodies of their former
masters cast up dead upon the shore.
I have a difficult
time justifying God’s violence in this passage against Egypt, of Pharaoh’s
destruction or of the deaths of his soldiers and horses. That part of the story is hard to read and hear.
However, it is part of
the consequences of rulers time and time again, regardless of what nation, what
circumstance and the grasping for control and power over others. It shows the end result of an economy built on
forced labor, exploitation, and domination. In refusing to let an enslaved people go for their freedom, Pharaoh leads his
people to their own destruction.
The two lessons I’d
have you remember about today’s story. The
first is about being in a liminal state – the between time. Letting go of what no longer has value and being
part of the creation of what will be born in the future. I think, we as Christians, are in a liminal
state right now. For the Israelites, it
was easy to look at this passage and know exactly what had no value for them
anymore. They were no longer
slaves. They were no longer under the
oppression of another. They were free. And yet, as you read through Exodus, it isn’t that
easy for them. They’ll want to return to
their own ways and their old masters, because of difficulties that lie ahead. Perhaps one hundred years from now, history
books will record the very same thing about this time in history for
Christianity. They will look back and
say, how obvious, Christians back in the 21st Century had to let go of
– fill in the blank - but living it in now, sometimes it’s very difficult to
know what to put in the blank space. To
know what to let go of that no longer has value, to know how to say goodbye to
things we’ve held onto for so long, through generations, and yet those things
that don’t really define us. But, I
think it is something that we as followers of Christ, in the broad sense of the
term have to figure out. As well as our specific
church, rooted here in this community, have to figure out, too.
And the second is
this, no matter how difficult it might be, we need to stand up for those who
have no voice, who have oppressors that continue to enslave them, even in this
21st Century.
These are the lessons
of the Red Sea. Thanks be to God. AMEN.
Offertory –
Doxology –
Prayer of Dedication –
Lord, You have blessed our lives in so many
ways. In gratitude for all these
blessings and in confidence that our gifts will be used for ministries of peace
and hope, we offer these gifts. AMEN
Closing Hymn – Now Thank We All Our God #555/788
Benediction –
Go in peace into God’s world
to serve and help others. Go in
confidence of God’s presence with you.
Go into this world with messages of hope and reconciliation. Go in love.
AMEN
Postlude
