Sermon: A Story Twice Told
Date: February 27, 2005
Text: Exodus 17: 1-7
By: Kendall Brown Kendall's Notebook Page 42
Today’s Old Testament Lesson is a traditional text to appear during the Lenten season. It has all the right themes and connections, with the most important one being the setting of the story itself. Lent wouldn’t be Lent without reference to the forty years spent in the wilderness by the twelve tribes of Israel.
Reading sermons is a habit of mine; whether that is a good or bad habit, I am not sure. Many collections of sermons include at least one based on today’s lesson form the Old Testament. Reviewing a number of those sermons this week, I was struck by the limited number of themes that many preachers over the centuries have been confined to when preaching from this lesson.
There are two basic preaching themes that are encountered over and over again as one checks out how this text has been interpreted over the years. The first basic theme is the lack of faithfulness of the people. The Israelites and Christians have received a lot of bad press from the pulpit over the years with this text being the proof text for having nothing good to say about either the Israelites or congregations. This text can elevate the preacher to the highest levels of ranting and raving about their congregations’ griping, gossiping, not being able to follow directions,
being faithless, not respecting their leader when their leader was one of the greatest leaders of all times, Moses himself, and their narrow-mindedness. Congregations because of this text have received verbal lashings from the pulpit for all sorts of sins. You only follow God when your stomachs are full. You should get over your God in the trenches mentality, forgetting about God in the good times, but turning to him in the bad times even if it is only to complain. How horrible you are that you would rather be back in slavery than to live out the freedom that has been offered to you. Some phrases have been connected to this experience over the centuries including the name “stiff–necked people.” If I ever get to the day when I simply attend church as a regular worshipper, I might be inclined to skip the third Sunday of Lent on year A of the lectionary cycle, knowing full well that the chances are high that a guilt trip probably awaits me in church this morning.
The second most popular treatment of this text is to focus on Moses and make a hero out of him for some reason. The story offers plenty of ways to go with this idea. There is the loneliness of Moses trying to lead his people through a difficult time. There is Moses’ ability to accept the gripes and complaints of the people and move beyond them. There is his long suffering. Not only are the people beating up on him, but is wife Miriam had just died, and the people didn’t even have the decency to let Moses finish a time of grief and mourning before they were beating up on him for the horrible job that he was doing being their leader.
If I were to take this second approach to today’s lesson, I would feel more comfortable preaching the resulting sermon to a room filled with seminary students than to my congregation in any parish. It is hard to get into this theme without looking like a whiner or someone with an ego problem. No wonder that the most popular treatment of this text among preachers is to focus on the people and their problems.
Given the experience of this past week or so here at Christ Church, I am left with little inclination to go with either one of those two usual approaches. This morning, I don’t need to talk about the wilderness experience of the Israelites for we have been having our own wilderness experience with all that has been happening among us. The list of concerns earlier in the service is a heavy one that leads to the same sense of abandonment by God and dying of thirst felt by the Israelites long ago.
The moralistic lessons in these two popular treatments of the story of Moses and his thirsty people, left me dry and searching for more. So I decided to take a different look at the story. Bible study and reading can be looked at like an exercise of examining a specimen under a microscope in a Biology Lab. After pouring over the slide and drawing as many pictures as you can of what you see, you can switch to another level of power and see another whole picture of the same specimen slide. That is the way it is with reading the Bible. If after pouring over a story, like today’s OT account, for a lesson or an idea or an inspiration, and not finding such, you can switch to a different power so to speak and look at the lesson from a different perspective.
So I stepped back, and took a look from the wider historical critical view of the Scriptures. First I discovered that this story in Exodus 17 is repeated in Numbers 20. Taking a look at the second presentation, one has to be a little obtuse not to notice the many differences. The story in Numbers is where we learn that Miriam had just died prior to the Israelites round of grumbling about water. In Exodus, Moses stands alone as the people come to him with their quarrel. In Numbers, Moses brother Aaron is a on the scene and an important player throughout the scene. In Exodus we are told that Moses simple prayed to God, or as the story says, “And Moses cried out to the Lord, “What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me?” In Numbers, Moses and Aaron turn to God but the picture is completely different and much more detailed. In Numbers, Moses and Aaron go to the tent of meeting,
the portable sanctuary, fall on their faces and the glory of the Lord shines around them. In numbers, we find no mention of Moses words or prayer. The only words offered in the story are those spoken by God in the form of instructions to Moses.
When we turn to the water from the rock part of the story, there are striking differences between the two accounts. In both accounts, witnesses to the event are found. In Exodus, the witnesses are some of the elders who go with Moses to the proper place. In Numbers, the whole congregation is witness to the water from rock miracle. In Exodus there is specific reference to another important witness. The Exodus account tells us that God himself will be present to Moses in this time of trial and God is present. As God says to Moses in Exodus 17:6, “I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb.” There is no mention of God’s physical presence in Numbers. In both accounts the staff is an important prop in the story.
But there is a different story in each account about the staff. In Exodus, God commanded Moses to take the staff and with it strike the rock from which water gushes. Moses does just that and that is the end of the story. But we get a different picture, in Numbers. In the Numbers version, God tells Moses to simply command the rock to offer water. However, in this account, Moses fails to follow God’s command to the letter and consequently pays a high price. He does not command the stone to offer water as God told him to do. Instead, he strikes the stone, not once, but twice with his rod and the water gushes out. For striking the stone instead of simply commanding the stone to offer water as God told him to, Moses and Aaron are punished. The punishment is that after all their hard work to bring the people through their forty years in the wilderness, Aaron and Moses will themselves never enter the promised land.
The presence of these two very different accounts of the same story in Numbers and Exodus is explained by the different traditions that were a part of the history of Israel. The story as told in Exodus is dated from around 800BC. And the story as told in Numbers comes out of a tradition with close ties to the Priestly class and the maintenance of the temple in Jerusalem. This accounts for Aaron’s presence in this story for Aaron was looked to as the first high priest in the established cult around the temple. The origins of the second story in Numbers had to be after 1100BC or the time of the building the building of the temple in Jerusalem under David and Solomon and the establishing of the Jerusalem temple as the center of the Jewish faith and life.
To maintain the authority and centricity of the temple, many rules, regulations, and rituals were held in high regard. Even Moses was subject to the cultic practices and correct ritual as the priestly class reinterpreted and re-presented the community’s ancient stories in their own time. Thus, his chastisement for not properly following the instructions as to how he was to bring the water from the rock is recounted. He struck it, instead of commanding the rock to yield water.
The Exodus rendition is an older account. This form of the story was told in days prior to the kings who ruled from the time of Saul or the establishment of the temple religion in Jerusalem during the reigns of David and Solomon, the second and third kings of Israel. Thus in the Exodus story, Moses is accompanied by the Elders or the representatives of the different tribes of Israel instead of Aaron the representative of the established religion of the land.
The anointing of a king for Israel and the centering of the communities life in Jerusalem did not happen without controversy and argument. There were those who felt that the King would take the place of God and the Jerusalem temple would remove God from the many worship centers such as Bethel and others. In the older story in Exodus, we find Moses in conversation with God, representing that closeness of God with the people. In the Numbers account, such closeness disappears. Moses no longer converses and complains himself to God. He and Aaron fall on their faces in the tent of worship. A glory surrounds them. They can only listen. Conversation with God is no longer a two way street.
The differences between the stories are many but so are the similarities. Both tell a story of a people lost and a people found. Both are also stories about a community and how that community is bound together. For one storyteller, it is the heroic leader who allows himself to be a vessel for God’s work. For the other, the cultic ritual is the all important tie that binds. But in both, there is that underlying principle that no one can do it alone. The earlier story expresses it the better. When Moses complains to God about the people, God turns him back to the people to gather the leaders from them before going to the rock at Horeb.
Moses cannot do it alone, and no one can do it without God whether the reliance is on the prophetic voice of the leader or the priestly and worship practices of the sanctuary. In both stories, no matter how hungry the community, no matter how lost the people are, no matter how unpleasant the experience of the wilderness, God is still present.
Yes, we ourselves have had a wilderness week. Any many of our members have had wilderness experiences. But in it all there is no need for anyone to do it alone. In both stories, water pours out of rock. In that way, the quenching of thirst, the balm in Gilead, is found in the hardest place.