The Exodus is truly a journey, and there are some basic
things about this journey that can’t be avoided
A first lesson is this.
The way up is often the way down
Think about the first thing that happens when Moses finally
gets back to Egypt
Moses and Aaron talk to the people, and they get everyone on
the Exodus agenda.
They have the people of Israel behind them,
And then….
He and Aaron go to Pharaoh and say, "This is what the
Lord, the God of Israel, says: 'Let my people go, so that they may hold a
festival to me in the desert.'"
And the Pharaoh says, “well if that is that God want, far be it from me
to get in the way…. You’d better get going!!”
Right? Wrong!
Pharaoh said, "Who is this God, that I should obey him
and let Israel go? I do not know the Lord and I will not let Israel
go." Moses and Aaron don’t give
up, they make a further plea. In fact they
make threats. “Let us take a three-day
journey into the desert to offer sacrifices to the Lord our God, or he may
strike us with plagues or with the sword."
But still Pharaoh is not impressed. In fact he is so unimpressed that he makes
the life of the people of Israel worse, much worse. He gave an order to the slave drivers and
foremen in charge of the people:
"You are no longer to supply the people with straw for making
bricks; let them go and gather their own straw. But require them to make the
same number of bricks as before; don't reduce the quota. They are lazy; that is
why they are crying out, 'Let us go and sacrifice to our God.' Make the work
harder for the men so that they keep working and pay no attention to
lies."
Have you ever seen a brick, made the way they made them in
Egypt? Well let me tell what a key
ingredient is, what kind of holds the brick together and gives it
substance. Straw. You take away straw,
and it is way more work. You have to
have more clay, and the clay cracks.
Frankly it just doesn’t work.
So here we have the great start to the process
The beginning of the Exodus
And it is marked, by failure!
And the people are not happy. They blame Moses. They attack him.
Not a good start!
Isn’t it interesting, how often in the Scripture God hints
at the fact that movement, growth, change, restoration, so many good things,
involve a journey through struggle. Even
failure?
So often what we see in the Bible is not a straight line
toward renewal, but a crooked line, often involving loss, that leads to
renewal.
It is almost as if we have to lose something, something
important, profound, before we can move further in our spiritual lives.
A job, a fortune, a reputation has to be lost
A death has to be suffered
A disease has to be endured
They may sound weird, but I think the “always blessed” are
at a disadvantage.
Because it looks to me as though some kind of falling, what
Rohr calls necessary suffering is programmed into the spiritual journey we see
presented in the Bible.
Think about Moses, and Aaron.
Would they have been the same leaders?
Would they ultimately have had the same relationship with
God,
The same trust in God, and what God could do
A trust they would definitely need, time and time again in
the desert,
If they had not had this first moment of loss?
Where they lost their voice?
Lost their influence? When Pharaoh made them look like abject failures?
But we are scared to death of these moments. We think they are bad. We think they are evidence that God is not
with us, or that we don’t have enough faith.
We work so hard to avoid them. In fact the spirituality of far too many
people is essentially made up of a journey where the main task is to avoid bad
things, avoid sin, avoid mistakes at any cost
How far do we get… tip toeing through life, scared to death,
looking over our shoulders, spiritually speaking? If the Israelites had done this, they would
never have gotten out of Egypt, and in fact they barely did… for that very
reason….It was more comfortable to stay safe, and stuck…
It was clear from the beginning that they, the people, would
not be in charge of this journey
They were not going to be able to plan the itinerary
Oh no…. They had no control, they could not engineer their
own safe passage…
They fact is, they learned more from the initial failure of
Moses and Aaron
Then they would have learned if things had gone well. If Pharaoh had just let them go.
Moses, when he essentially tried to do it his own way….”all
we want to do Pharaoh is just go out for a little 3 day retreat” thought
small. How far a 3 day retreat gotten
them?
Learning to trust God and depend on God, they learned to go
all the way, to freedom.
They learned more, and grew more, by doing it wrong, than by
doing it right
Rohr notes that some people have called this principle of
going down to go up a “spirituality of imperfection” or the “way of the wound”.
I like that. And
where it takes me is to those words of Jesus we heard earlier. Matt 10:34-39
"Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the
earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn a
man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law
against her mother-in-law— a man's enemies will be the members of his own
household. Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of
me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and
anyone who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever
finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find
it.”
Here-in is the mystery of the Christian faith.
When we fall, we are raised
When we die to the old, we find a glorious new
When we fail we discover forgiveness
When we are lost in the dark, the light shines.
Rohr calls this “falling upward.”
What happens is we learn that the path is crooked
And we learn that bad things happen
And we learn we can fail
And we learn that God, in grace and love can turn everything
around.
Salvation, being raised to new life, is not sin, or failure
perfectly avoided (this is where we with our spiritual egos would like to go)
No salvation is sin and failure turned on its head and used
in our favor.
God used the failure of Moses and Aaron
He used the stubbornness of Pharaoh
We would use the whining immaturity of the people of God
All, to get them wonderfully, beautifully, to the Promised
Land
To keep them moving
To turn sin and failure on its head
There is only one constant in all of this
God
Present and acting
Through it all, the people of God are never alone.
And God’s primary job description, Jesus’ too, is one of
constant renewal of bad deals.
This past week this all kind of hit me, so I wrote this
little piece for my blog
I’d like to end with sharing it with you now.
The way up is the way down
It really bugs me God
that life doesn't come with a handbook
I always thought it would have been nice
if you would have given me a little tome
Tips for the Road
I spent so much time trying to do it right
I was taught
by well meaning parents
and well meaning pastors
that this was the way to go
strive
do it right
follow the rules
I learned a spirituality of perfection
and I was miserable
and frankly....
well frankly I became spiritually challenged
But you taught me a big lesson God
somewhere along the way
You taught me that it is OK to strive
and work to do and be my best
but you taught me it is also OK to fail
and forgive
and include imperfection
For God it has been from the depths
that I have been able to reach feebly for the heights
Thank you God for the spirituality of imperfection
For teaching me that I grow spiritually much more
by doing it wrong than by doing it right (thank you Richard
Rohr)
it is when I fall apart
and my carefully engineered life collapses
it is in losing, failing, falling, in sin
that I find the mystery of grace
and you
the way down
my God
is often the way up
to grace
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