Advent is a season of new beginnings, and Scripture is inviting us to see ourselves in two particular biblical stories of new beginnings – both tales briming with hopeful expectation and debilitating fear.
In last Sunday’s opening scene of Luke’s Gospel, an angel surprises a faithful priest, Zechariah, with word that he and his wife, Elizabeth, will at long last be blessed with a child who’ll come of age as John the Baptist.
As we learned earlier in the service, Luke’s scene two follows the same scenario: An angel shocks one of Elizabeth’s distant relatives, a teen-ager named Mary, with perplexing pronouncement that she will conceive and bear a royal son, Jesus, of whose Kingdom there will be no end.
“Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you,” the angel assures. “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.” (Luke 1:28, 30) The Word of the Lord! Meanwhile, from the Old Testament comes the next installment from the story of the exodus, the epic tale of God’s people fleeing slavery to Egypt’s Pharoah.
When we left them last Sunday, a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night had led the Israelites to the edge of the Red Sea. Ahead lay a perilous crossing between parted waters, and moving forward in faith will bring hazards more than physical. So also are the dangers of taking that first step both spiritual and emotional, both heartfelt and gut-wrenching.
Because God’s people are walking on eggshells through precipitous change; they are slogging toward a “new normal,” if you will, and differing expectations for that new normal are making for prickly relationships. And here’s the secret hidden in plain sight: “Normal” is difficult to define, and chasing normal does precious little to help one move forward.
“Normal,” it seems, is a continuum, and sometimes it’s OK not to be OK.
To wrap your head around a new normal, one first must evaluate, understand, and then possibly change one’s thinking. The size and scope of life’s disruptions – economic, social, and political – profoundly influence our thinking about what’s what and challenge our preconceived notions and expectations about what should or shouldn’t happen.
Rather than affirm expectations, rapid, profound change instead shatters expectations – at least among a plurality of souls, anyway. And that’s more than a little distressing and problematic. Because when our brains sense heightened physical distress, our bodies trigger fight-or-flight rushes of adrenaline, which in turn create a long, sustained release of the stress hormone cortisol. High levels of cortisol are linked to stress, and worrisome stress often pops a slow leak in one’s resilience.
Don’t fault yourself. It’s a confounding time, because so much of what affects all our lives is beyond our control. What we can control is our response to unfolding events and uncertainties and how we relate to each other. Perhaps so also this is a great time to ask ourselves deep questions of faith, belief, and their daily practice: Holding out the possibility, as with the Israelites, that, while you might not be totally “wrong,” neither let no-longer-valid expectations trick you into believing you’re entirely “right.”
The 20th century psychologist Kurt Lewin polishes a helpful lens for viewing the story of the exodus: “If you truly want to understand something, try to change it.” Hear the Word of the Lord from Exodus chapter 14.
We lived in Dubuque for four years while I was in seminary.
On a beautiful Saturday our first summer there, we got a call from Julie’s Uncle Marvin and Aunt Jan in Cedar Rapids. They were bringing their speed boat up to Dubuque for an afternoon on the Mississippi River, and they asked if we wanted to join them? Uh, yaaa!
Within a few hours of hanging up the phone, we were cruising down the river like we owned the place – sun shining bright in a cloudless sky, hair blowing in the breeze, a cooler filled with delicious refreshment in the stern.
After an hour or so of juking around other boats, jet-skis and barge tows, Uncle Marvin suggested that we beach the boat on a sandbar and have ourselves a shore lunch. So he carefully steered toward an empty stretch of sand on a small, downriver island.
When the boat’s bow nudged the sand, three or four feet of water still separated us and dry land, so someone was going to have to jump out and pull the boat the rest of the way to the beach. As the second-oldest male on board that day, the dock-boy duty fell to me. So, up to the bow I went, and over gunwale I peered. Mississippi river-water isn’t known for its sparkling clarity, so I had no clue how deep the water would be when I jumped overboard.
It wasn’t exactly a white-knuckle moment, but it WAS my first time out on the Mississippi, so nervous anticipation had me erring on the side of caution when it came to jumping into waters of an unknown depth. But, really, there shouldn’t have been reason to worry. The boat was already hitting the sand bottom, so there couldn’t be much more than a few inches of water below me, right?
So into the water I went with bowline in hand, ready to pull us fully onto the beach. And I was right. I stepped off the boat into just a few inches of water. No harm, no foul; other than –
When my aqua-socked feet hit bottom, they didn’t land on firm sand. I hit soupy quicksand that wasted no time in sucking me down up to the middle of my calves. Of course, my three kids thought the sight of old dad stuck in quicksand was incredibly amusing, and so in a valiant effort to save some sense of my fatherly dignity, I managed to pull one leg out of the quicksand, and with one aqua-sock now missing from my foot, I took a brave step forward – only to get sucked down even farther into quicksand – almost up to me knees.
By now, the jeers and jokes at my expense were flying from stem to stern of Uncle Marvin’s boat. Apparently when you’re NOT the one stuck in the mud, you suddenly become an expert in the fine art of freeing yourself from quicksand. But no worries. With sloppy, stumbling grace, I managed to stagger and belly-flop my way to dry land and got Uncle Marvin’s boat fully beached, and everyone enjoyed our time on that little spit of sand. Tra, la-la, la-la.
Even so, the whole sordid quicksand affair remains, to this day, a dark stain on the dignity of American fatherhood. But what could I do? I was caught between Uncle Marvin and the muddy Mississippi shallows, and someone had to be the first to take the first step.
Someone had to be the first to take the first step that fateful day on the west shore of the Red Sea, too.
Being caught between Uncle Marvin and the muddy Mississippi shallows is one thing, but when you’re caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, most everything you believe, or thought you believed, gets put to the ultimate test.
In times of crisis, all the old pat answers, all the most tried-and-true sayings, all those seemingly sturdy slogans on motivational posters that had supported you in the past suddenly begin to feel brittle. Others figuratively crumble to dust. When your back is to the wall, even those things you yourself once said to people – “hang in there,” “you can do it” – sound only irritating when others now speak them to you in your own dark night of the soul.
When you are between the devil and the deep blue sea, much of what you believe will be tested, refined, and clarified. Hopefully, your faith will come out stronger and more honest as a result. But there is also the possibility, grim though it is to admit, that your faith may be so badly shaken as to lead you, however briefly, to doubt and despair.
Whether we understand the panic the Israelites felt, whether we can identify with the dreadful things they said about God and about Moses’s leadership, the fact is we know what happens: The sea opens up, and the Israelites pass through safely. Pharoah and company are defeated by that same sea, and the people repent of their doubt and give thanks to God for revealing the fullness of his might.
We know what happens, but do we know why it all happens?
Why does God need to subject the Israelites to this watery crossing? Perhaps, as another suggests, because God’s people needed to be baptized.
Over and over again in the Bible, water can be at once the source of death and the source of life. God draws life out of the waters of death, using water to preserve Moses and Israel by carving out a path of safety in a vast sea of chaos. God’s people don’t fully avoid the threatening waters but are somehow preserved through them. Were it not for God’s grace, the Israelites would have been consumed.
Water is dangerous. It can suck you in. And the Israelites had good reason to feel scared when their only escape route from the chaos of Egypt is blocked by the chaos of the sea. When God tells them to “move on,” it surely looks like the Lord himself is intent on drowning the whole bunch.
“Move on!? … Move on to precisely where?”
Death is behind us, death is before us. We’re caught between the devil and the deep blue sea! That is our painful human lot in our fallen world. Death is all around us, and on our own, no matter which direction we travel, we sooner or later will bump into barriers from which there is no escape.
It is at that moment when the words of Moses, now heard in light of Christ, need to ring in your ears and take root in your heart: “Do not be afraid. The Lord will fight for you. You need only believe that.” Or as from an angel, “The Lord is with you. Do not be afraid, for you have found favor with God.”
Or as Jesus himself puts it: “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in me for I am the way, the truth and the life.”
A blessed assurance to be sure, but the way, truth and life of Jesus lead through a cross – through the chaotic waters of death, if you will. Baptism ensures that we journey with him through those stormy waters, but like Moses, Israel, Jesus, and untold numbers of Christians since, new life emerges from the waters of death. Which makes Jesus our very own Red Sea!
We live in a world of death and fear and distrust and division.
But Christians of all people – marching as we do under the sign of a cross – should know that we CANNOT ignore and DO NOT escape the realities of death and fear and distrust and division. If there is new life to be had, a new and better country in which we hope one day to arrive, it will emerge through the waters of death, as somehow the water that drowns all that is evil becomes for us, by an alchemy of grace, a river of life flowing from the throne of God.
That walk of faith isn’t easy. Death isn’t something we take lightly. We baptize our children and believe that the power and might of our Lord Jesus will preserve our little ones come what may. And we send our children out into a world of violence so intense that we cannot help but fret, cannot help but wish it were a safer world, cannot help but think that longer walls, more guns, and better-trained soldiers will somehow, someway, keep us safe. That’s the way life often feels in a dangerous world. But in faith we go on.
We press forward and do what the Israelites had to do: Live by the promise of God’s might. Move on knowing God will fight the battle. Sally forth believing that love is stronger than death, that the One who said “Surely I am with you, always” meant what he said. And that the waters of baptism THROUGH WHICH we have already passed and IN WHICH our sinful selves have drowned will somehow become for us a source of unending life. Those same waters of baptism assure that we are finally safe somehow.
There’ll always be times when we feel caught between the devil and the deep blue sea – or simply hung up between Uncle Marvin and the muddy Mississippi shallows.
But thanks be to God that, in Christ Jesus, the way through that sea has opened wide as we follow our risen Lord to the fullness of mighty glory that he has prepared for you and me. And getting to that glorious place demands that someone be the first to take the first step – following behind that gracious pillar of cloud by day and pillar of fire by night, come hell or high water.
Listen to the Word that God has spoken.
Pastor Grant M. VanderVelden shared this message on the Second Sunday of Advent, November 17, 2024, at First Presbyterian Church in Waukon, Iowa, USA. Scholarship, commentary, and reflection by B. Janet Hibbs, Scott Hoezee, and Anthony Rostain inform the message. Video and audio of Exodus 14 is by Gideon Films.