Exodus 16:1-3, 11-15, 35
Introduction
As we step off into the season of Lent it is good to remember this season of 40 days plus Sundays is modeled after Jesus’ time in the wilderness immediately after he is baptized. A time during which he is also confronted and tempted by Satan. Both were important first steps for Jesus to take just prior to his ministry beginning as they became the final pieces of Jesus’ divinity to become fully recognizable to the people he would share his Good News with over the next three years. It was a transformational process for Jesus—his baptism and his time in the wilderness, just as the wilderness wandering of the Israelites was a transformational process they were led out of Egypt.
Now that word, “transformational” is a favorite word of preachers. And because it is, unfortunately it has been so over used that the mere mention of it has become rote and cliché. And because this is the case, I try hard not to use it. It has gone the way of the word “journey” when talking about the season of Lent. “We are about to go on a journey…”
I don’t mean to be negative, but it’s just that every year I go through this same struggle, and I am compelled by my contempt for rote clichés in preaching and liturgy to find new ways of saying the same message. It all becomes a theological “Wordle” puzzle that never revels any clues and never gives you a final answer. (Apologies for that analogy if you don’t know the game “Wordle”.)
So maybe I should just forget it and talk about Lent in all the uncreative ways preachers have for decades and say, “Friends welcome to the season of Lent where we as a church will embark upon a transformational journey!” That’s fine, right? It doesn’t matter that it doesn’t have any meaning; that it’s not going to fill our spirits; that it will in no way motivate us or get us remotely interested in observing this incredibly important season of our faith, right? Doing things, saying things like we always have done and said gets the sermon word count to where it needs to be, and allows us to check our weekly Lenten observations off the to-do list.
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Now y’all know me and my sardonic sermon style that has me saying we should “just do something” and then with some preacher razzle-dazzle I flip the script and say, “Of course we can’t do that!” So for the sake of a lesser word count, let’s pretend I did that preacher razzle-dazzle flipping of the script and just get to me saying… Lent is here. And like it always does, Lent offers us a profoundly unique opportunity for spiritual growth, renewal, and yes, even transformation… if we are willing to embark on such a journey. But if we are not…well… then Lent can simply be a time when the preacher wears his robe, we get our Easter Sunday plans figured out, and maybe we give up chocolate for a month.
Lent comes down to a choice… a choice between the Egypt mindset or stepping into the wilderness.
Move 1
I imagine we’ve all been on a trip where someone kept impatiently asking “Are we there yet?” Or maybe on a trip you were that someone who kept asking “Are we there yet?” The Israelites have been on their Exodus journey for just over two months and are clearly perturbed they have still not arrived at their promised land and are impatiently asking “Are we there yet?” Consequently, they no longer trust Moses to get them there, nor Yahweh to provide for them. The journey has been too long, too far, too foreign, too uncomfortable, and they are ready to be done with it—but it has not even been three months of what will be 40 years. They are even saying it would have been better to stay as slaves in Egypt and just died there because at least there they had bread and fleshpots.
Now we can easily distance ourselves from the story and comment about the ungrateful complainers and how awful it is that they couldn’t appreciate what God was doing for them. Or we can choose to come in the side door of this story by honestly putting ourselves into it and admit that our judgement actually comes from a place of objective hindsight, and that truthfully we ourselves have often complained from our own time of “Are we there yet?” wilderness wandering. But we don’t, do we? Which may be the real reason why our Lenten journey becomes rote and cliché. It’s not the verbiage preachers use. It’s our own proclivities to just stay in our Egypt mindset.
Move 2
Perhaps you have heard the saying, “When God closes a door, God opens a window.” And as true as the adage may be, the problem for us is that sometimes when the door closes, we are left hanging out in a dark hallway longer than we expected or think necessary. We want a window to be opened immediately. And when it’s not, we begin to wonder if God has forgotten us, and we start to get confused, impatient, frustrated, and doubtful. And that’s when we get really uncomfortable and start stumbling around trying to find that closed door to go back through because that is how badly we want to get out of the confusing, frustrating, uncomfortable darkness of transition.
We’d rather go back to a place we wanted to leave, than be in an unfamiliar, uncomfortable place of transition—forgetting that transformation cannot, and will not happen, without transition. Which is maybe why Lent has often become rote and cliché. It’s why we get to Easter as the same people we’ve always been—people who still have an Egypt mindset.
MovE 3
Biblical scholar Alan Roxburgh writing about the Israelites’ forty-year journey through the wilderness, says, “The point wasn’t that it took forty years to get Israel out of Egypt, rather the wilderness time was necessary because it took forty years to get ‘Egypt’ out of the Israelites.”
This is true for every transformative experience. We worship a God who can do anything. So if God could get the Israelites out of Egypt, God could get them to the Promised Land faster than forty years. But if God had simply beamed them over to Canaan, they would have arrived as slaves in their own land.
Think about it: missing the fleshpots and the daily routine of Egypt, unwilling and unable to engage in a new way of being, the freedom, and the risk of it—of course it would take time to break their old identity and create a new relationship with God and each other.
This is a profound point of transformation. If we quickly jump from the closed door to an open window, that is only a change of circumstance or program or structure. There would be no time to adjust the behaviors or thinking that are necessary for us to see what new way of being God has brought us to.
Transformation is not an event. It really is a journey— an unfolding process whereby we make our way through, letting go of the old to make room for the new, so that we might be available for God’s transforming grace—whenever and however it comes. But we have to understand it’s not likely to look or feel like anything we expected, and it rarely comes in the timetable we demand! Which means on a transformational journey we will ask, “Are we there yet? Are we on the right road? Shouldn’t we be there by now? Is God still with us?” But it further means we will need to be prepared to be surprised by God’s answers, just as the Israelites were. Doubt, confusion, frustration, and impatience all need to be welcome companions on the journey because they motivate us to keep moving through the transition.
The hope and trust in God’s promise of doing a new thing is why we stay in the transforming process. But we have to be willing to stay in the wilderness until we have changed the way we think about things, and have given up previous definitions of who we are and what our limits are, before God can bring us into that promised land. There is no shortcut. There is no bargaining. There can only be trust and perseverance. It’s the only way to break the Egypt mindset.
Conclusion
In your bulletin is a purple insert that says, “And Still We Rise”, our Lenten theme and focus for this year. You’ll see it also says, “Still In Egypt” and “In The Wilderness”. With this paper, let us ask ourselves, and honestly answer, “In what ways am I still in Egypt? How am I being held captive by old ways of doing or thinking that are keeping me from moving into what God has for me next?” Ask yourself these questions and write down your responses under “Still In Egypt.”
Then ask, “In what ways have I moved into the wilderness? What changes or transition has not been fully discovered? What is challenging me? What mindset do I need to let go of?” Ask yourself these questions and write down your responses under “In The Wilderness.” Then consider how it feels to be in the wilderness, while remembering how Jesus spent time in the wilderness, and would often retreat into the wilderness in preparation for further ministry. Consider what practices could give you the needed patience to stay on the journey and move from asking, “Are we there yet?” to “What is God trying to do in me?”
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This exercise, if you choose, can be a step into the profoundly unique Lenten opportunity for spiritual growth, renewal, and yes even transformation. However, it will require you to make the effort to give up the Egypt mindset.
But if we can, then no matter the confusion, impatience, frustration, doubt, or uncomfortableness, we will be able to say, come Easter… And still… we rise.
So friends, welcome to the season of Lent where, I hope and pray, we as a church will embark upon a transformational journey. Amen.
Pastoral Prayer, February 26, 2023, Lent 1
Gracious and loving God, we stand once again at the beginning of the holy season of Lent—the season of the church year when we are invited to embark upon a journey—not of body, but of mind, heart, and spirit. It can be a transformative journey with you guiding us through your Son, our Savior, Jesus. It is a journey that will take us through a wilderness wandering that will most assuredly have within it confusion, frustration, doubt, impatience, maybe even despair or anger. But even more assuredly, it will have us, by the end, rising up to new and renewed life. Maybe not in situation or status, but certainly in perspective and faith, for you will always show us the way through our wilderness wanderings.
This is, however, all a risk. It is a risk to step deeply into the wilderness, follow your Son, confront our own sins and failures and then confess to them. It is a risk, always, to put ourselves in places of vulnerability. And taking those risks is hard, because how many times have we risked doing something new or unknown, only to wish we could go back to something familiar?
It has happened so many times. And we admit, many of those times we did just go back to that something familiar, even though we wanted to leave it so badly.
So remind us again, and then remind us again and again, that you have never, not once, forgotten or forsaken your children—even when they complained against you and lost faith in you. Remind us you are there always, guiding us, always providing for us in all the ways we need.
Set these reminders within our minds, hearts, and spirits, so much so that we are emboldened, that we are eager, that we are excited for the opportunity this holy season presents.
Hear now O God, the prayers that come from our spirits, as we offer them to you in this time of Holy Silence.
All this we pray in the name of Christ Jesus, the one who will guide us through the wilderness, helps us rise up anew, and taught us to pray, saying, “Our…”