Exodus 17: 1-7
Listen here:
We have a new morning ritual in my home in the last year. It goes like this. I make coffee first thing while Angela checks the news. As the coffee begins to gurgle, I ask with trepidation, “What awfulness broke in the news while we were sleeping?” Then there is usually a deep sigh. And Angela begins to tell me the latest as we caffeinate ourselves enough to wrap our heads and hearts around it all.
This week included the horrifying disaster in Puerto Rico made so much worse by our government’s basic failure to treat Puerto Ricans as people, let alone as actual U.S. citizens. It included the nightmarish health care repeal threat that would have slowly killed millions. It included the unfolding spectacle of the NFL “take a knee” protests that baffled so many and revealed once again, as one Facebook friend summed it, “Racism is so American that when we protest racism the average American assumes we’re protesting America.” It included mixed messages from our federal administration as to whether LGBTQ people can be fired for being LGBTQ. Meanwhile in Minnesota, deportations of beloveds continued. Pipeline proposals threatened our water. The list goes on.
What I love about Lyndale UCC is that I’m probably not actually telling you things you don’t already know when I rehearse this litany. You are engaged deeply in the world through your work lives, through your day to day reading habits, through your parenting or loving the people you consider family and community. This is the air we breathe. It’s also the air that’s threatening to choke us with its heat. It’s kind of like a desert at high noon. You have to pace yourself and drink lots of water. For many of us, this community is the place we refuel, the place we are sure to find clean, living water to rehydrate our souls together so that we can keep on building God’s Realm of Justice and Love.
To paraphrase Denise Levertov:
That fountain is here among its scalloped
green and gray stones,
it is still here and always here
with its quiet song and strange power
to spring in us,
up and out through the rock.
Our ancestors in our scripture story from Exodus today lived a much more literal version of the choking desert heat as they wandered in the wilderness. This passage builds on our scripture story from last week, when we read about their struggles for food. The people railed against God for bringing them out of the slavery of their lives in Egypt only to let them starve in the supposed freedom of the desert. But through a combination of noticing the resources God had provided and not hoarding more than their basic needs required, the people discovered there was enough for everyone. The story continues this week with a similar struggle, this time for water. We can’t survive as long without water as we can without food. The situation is more desperate in this story. No wonder the people protest. Water is Life, remember?
What’s interesting, though, are Moses’ and God’s response. First of all, Moses does what most of us in leadership do when people complain to us. We turn inside ourselves and then go to God in a little bit of a huffy state with a combination of a prayer and a deep whine, “What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me.” And God reminds us, sometimes with impatience, the cardinal rule of leadership: Go ahead and keep leading, but don’t do it alone. Take your elders. And I will meet you along the way.
My friends, how many of us have fallen into the trap of thinking we have to figure it all out by ourselves like Moses? Who has been taught that we have to bear hard things alone? These are not rhetorical questions. Let’s see a show of hands. This is a trick of empires past and present, from Pharaoh to his incarnation who thinks he sits on a throne in our oval office. These leaders and the systems they inhabit teach us to see ourselves and our own problems as purely individual – both in terms of what caused them in the first place and in terms of how we deal with them. You can see it if you look hard enough at any of the headlines these days. If you are sick and can’t afford medications or a doctor visit, it’s because you didn’t get the right job or save enough money, not because our health care system is structurally set up to offer people of more financial means better health care. If you are a person of color who was shot by a police officer, it’s because you must have behaved rudely or posed some kind of threat, not because policing was first set up in our country to catch run-away slaves and has continued to hold that purpose in its structuring DNA. If you have been sexually assaulted, it must be because of what you were wearing, not because rape culture has taught some people to believe they have access to other people’s bodies without consent.
I too have fallen into this trap of self-blaming hyper-individualism. And I have fallen into it right in front of you in our very beloved community. I have fallen into the trap of believing it is up to me and my leadership to solve the financial struggles of our church community. I was brought into leadership at Lyndale, after all, to help us grow our presence in the world, in large part to help us be more sustainable. I take this charge very seriously. I have fallen asleep many nights lately going over stewardship and fundraising strategies in my head to increase our giving and decrease our draw on our shrinking savings that at our current rate of spending will only last another five or six years. I have tossed and turned visualizing spreadsheets of pledge numbers past and present, numbers that grew by an astounding and hope-filled 30% last year and yet need to grow more. I have drafted new grant proposals and campaigns to expand our funding base while dreaming. I have mentally reworked online giving forms and visuals so they are more user-friendly as I slip into sleep.
As it turns out, my own obsessive fundraising worry is not unique. There are a bunch of us faith leaders getting all screwed up in our heads and in our hyper-individualism like Moses. Recently I was sitting in a meeting with about 20 white clergy of different faith traditions and we found ourselves all bemoaning our financial struggles as faith communities, all similarly stressed out with our own versions of my late night sleep struggles.
And then one clergy person of color spoke up in this room full of white folks. He said, “Wow, I’ve always wondered what money conversations were like in white faith communities. I just don’t get it. How do you all have so much more than us and yet you have so much trouble with giving? It’s really just not an issue in my community. We all know that what we have belongs to God and all of us and so we take care of each other. We are blessed and we bless each other by giving. End of story. We have other problems, but really, there is always more than enough money.” You could have heard a pin drop.
There is something about the tyranny of the white supremacy culture we live amidst, capitalism and these empire times that is a toxic combination. This tyranny teaches us to smash our own rocks together in our own corners or against each other and expect the water of life to flow. As Hannah Arendt once posited in her 1951 classic The Origins of Totalitarianism, tyranny creates organized loneliness. “One of the primary concerns of all tyrannical government is to bring this isolation about,” said Arendt. “Its hallmark is impotence insofar as power always comes from [people] acting together…; isolated [people] are powerless by definition.”[1]
The black faith community my colleague belongs to knows this truth. They live it every day – and they lived it every day long before this particular tyrannical administration took over. If we are going to be a financially sustainable community of resistance, what can we learn from them about where our power really comes from? What can we learn alongside Moses from God about where our power not only to survive but to thrive comes from, about how to sustain the water that gives us life in the choking heat of these times?
God reminds Moses when he is feeling isolated and powerless, go ahead and keep leading, but don’t do it alone. Smashing your own rock to smithereens won’t give you any water, just blisters and bruises. You can’t do this alone. In fact, you are not meant to do this alone. That is the whole point. Instead, look for the water together with your elders and I, God, will meet you there.
One of my wider community elders is Ricardo Levins Morales – most of you probably know him by his gorgeous protest art. He told a small crowd recently that we need more true elders, especially in these times of tyranny. He said we have a lot of veterans – people who need to tell their own war stories. But what we lack are true elders, people who have lived enough life to be able to listen well and help those around them discover their own stories. I imagine these are the kinds of elders God is telling Moses to bring with him on a scavenger hunt for water in the midst of the choking heat. These are the people who listen so well and deeply, they can hear water inside rocks. We can all be those elders, no matter our age. We can all listen so well that we can hear the water of life gurgling up in each other, waiting to bubble over, longing to be released into community, up and out through the rocks.
Don’t say, don’t say there is no water.
That fountain is there among its scalloped
green and gray stones,
it is still there and always there
with its quiet song and strange power
to spring in us,
up and out through the rock.
Beloved Lyndale, today we enter the season of giving to this community that sustains us and our resistance to all that threatens our humanity and creation. Ask yourself how you would give to this community if you believed in your very bones that needing each other was not a sign of weakness as the tyranny of these times has taught us, but an act of building our power of resistance? How would you give if you let yourself truly listen to “the quiet song and strong power” of the water waiting to “spring in us” here and now at Lyndale, “up and through the rock”?
[1] https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/12/20/hannah-arendt-origins-of-totalitarianism-loneliness-isolation/
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