“The Complaints Department”
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Text: Exodus 17:1-7
Had I realized precisely what I was getting myself into, I might have declined the invitation, but I didn't. The invitation was to participate in what is known as a prison intervention. It was for those who were ministers or training ministers to go into a maximum security prison, to be locked behind the doors and to enter into conversations with the inmates. It was part of a pastoral program sponsored by both the college and the presbytery that I was in at the time, and I decided that I would want to sign up for something so fascinating. I must admit though, when I heard the clang of the doors locking behind me, and realized that I was now in a maximum security prison, I wondered if I had done the right thing.
You see the purpose was for the inmates to be able to share with us their issues and their problems, to confront us with their challenges, but also to hear from us about faith, about hope, about justice. It was a fascinating encounter. And in the midst of that encounter, we discussed, as a group, the issue of recidivism. Mainly that sometimes those who have been set free after their incarceration find themselves back again in prison. It's not an uncommon thing. Correctional Services suggest that it is a very difficult thing to analyze and to come to terms with. Sometimes people simply return because they have no idea how to live on the outside. Others will have some technical violation of their parole, which will bring them back in. Others will simply develop new problems and be charged with new crimes and return. Some of them are there by accident almost, others simply because they don't know what to do.
There is a wonderful line. I know it's repeated over and over again these days in counselling circles, but it goes as follows. “When people don't know what to do, they do what they know.” The problem sometimes arises that those who have been incarcerated don't know anything except that revolving door of crime and punishment and crime and punishment, but this is not unique. This happens not only to individuals, it also happens to cultures and to trends. When people are emancipated and set free, at times they don't know what to do with that freedom and in fact, look back at their enslavement as a time that was even better than their freedom.
Think about it for a moment. You can get to the point when you look at all of this, when people complain about their situations in life, and they look back on their former incarceration and say, “You know, those days were better than the days that I have now.” I think that's exactly what happened with the people of Israel. In today's text there is a description of the people of Israel having been set free, but now doing nothing but complaining. This is the second of three moments in the Book of Exodus where the people of Israel complain about their new-found freedom, and the fact that they have problems as a result of this new-found freedom. In this particular case, they're thirsty and they're angry that they don't have all the things that they were hoping to have.
But the problem for the people of Israel was that they were living in a gap between when they were set free from the Egyptians, from the power of the pharaoh, by God's help and by God's hand, and their eventual arrival in the Promised Land, the land where they would receive God's grace and his covenantal love. They were between these two moments, the exodus and their leaving Egypt and their arrival in the Promised Land. They're still in the Sinai, they're still uncertain about what's happening. And in this interregnum, in this period between these two great activities, they grumble and they quarrel. They lost all sense of where and who they were.
I think that there are parallels in history that follow on from that biblical lesson and it's abundantly clear that between a time of freedom and a time of fulfillment there is often complaining and grumbling. I think, for example, of the plight of the liberation of slaves in the United States. In January 1863, there was the great Emancipation Proclamation, the moment where they were no longer officially slaves, but were free. When you think about it, it took the Civil Rights Bill in July 1964, to give those slaves who had been set free their proper rights under the law.
So in 101 years, between their emancipation and the Civil Rights Bill, the people had lived in tension. Many of the slaves that had been set free in the immediate period after the emancipation did not know what to do and where to go. They hadn't been educated, they didn't know where to live, they had relied on their owners to do everything for them, and they were unclear. They hadn't yet fulfilled or reached the Promised Land. And even the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 was not exactly what one would call completely the Promised Land, but even so, they didn't know what to do and there was a time when they struggled and they wrestled with this period in between.
So often there can be liberation movements. There can be moments when people are set free from tyranny, from the hand of a dictator, only to start grumbling again. We even have a fairly recent experience. In 2004, in the Ukraine, and as in Professor Magocsi's book, that deals with the history of Ukraine, we see a very similar moment, and I want to quote from one of the passages here, because you will see how this unfolds. How people can move from freedom to complaining very quickly.
A million Ukrainians flocked to Kiev's Independence Square to demand that a new, a fair election be held to overturn the results of an earlier one, which a corrupt and thuggish government had fixed. Although facing constant danger, tens of thousands of peaceful protesters camped out in the freezing Maydan for weeks at a time until after a new vote on December 26, justice was finally done. Once a man for whom they voted was finally installed in office, they went home leaving neither gum wrapper nor cigarette butt behind.
Better than Toronto people I think sometimes. “Ordinary people had accomplished an extraordinarily thing. It is called the Orange Revolution.”
But a year later, corruption in the Ukraine was as bad as ever. The economy had taken a nose dive. Political murders and assassinations had remained unsolved and worst of all the coalition swept into office by the event of the Maydan had collapsed amidst bitterness, recrimination and accusations. An upset public complained that the Orange Revolution had changed nothing. A moment in other words when there is freedom and emancipation but then very soon complaining follows. This works its way out through history, the Israelites were not unique. They had been set free from the power of the pharaoh, but they complained.
So what does their complaining mean? What does it tell us about the Israelites? What does it tell us about Moses, who was the central figure in this debacle? What does it tell us about God? In many ways all of us, to some extent, have to come face-to-face with our complaining. Look at the Israelites. I actually have great empathy and great sympathy for them. A number of years ago, Marial and I visited the south of Israel and we stayed in the resort of Eilat on the Gulf of Aqabar. And I remember taking an air conditioned bus into the air conditioned hotel, in the relative cool of the evening. In the morning, we decided that we would go for a walk. Maybe go down to the beach and see the sights. So we got up at the crack of dawn. It was still just dark, but the dawn was arising. It was beautiful. And we thought we'd go for a nice long walk.
Well, no sooner had we stepped out onto the pavement and we realized it was not as cool as we thought it was. We looked at a thermometer in a restaurant, just about a block from the hotel, and the temperature said at 7:00 in the morning 103 degrees Fahrenheit. We walked about five or six minutes, looked at one another and said, “We give up. If we don't have bottled water with us, we're not going to get very far,” and so back we went to our hotel, all our great plans of exercise and vigour gone to pot for nothing.
You can understand then when you read a passage like this why the Israelites in Sinai, further south than Eilat, in the desert, not by the water, were feeling that they were in need with no water. Your heart goes out to them. In many ways, the history of the struggle of the people of that whole area has been about water, and you can understand why. Access to water is access to life. And so the people are complaining. They're angry with Moses. They're probably saying, and I would insert my own interpretation, “Look, back in Egypt we had running water. Whatever happens, our masters gave us running water, but now, no, we're in the desert, you brought us here, where is the water?”
I suggest to you that that is a legitimate complaint, but not all complaining is legitimate. There is a complaining that often occurs about petty things, about things that don't really matter. I couldn't believe it, knowing I was speaking about complaining this morning, when I opened the paper this week in The National Post and there was an article entitled “Giving Voice to a Chorus of Complaint: Lamenting the Losing Leafs and Other Vagaries.” And it's a story about a group of singers who went to Lawrence Market - this is true - and started to sing about all the complaints that they had, about the mayor, about potholes, about the Maple Leafs - well, again not surprised - and on and on they go. And people were upset at them for singing. And they said, “How can you make such trivial things sound so important.” But the singers were doing it tongue in cheek. They were making light of the complaints. It's a European tradition that came from Finland. Every now and again if you have a complaint, go somewhere public and just sing about it.
If you don't like my preaching, just go out there and sing all you want. If you don't like the music, don't talk to the music director; sing something of your own. It's that kind of trivialness. One lady was so upset with them she says, “We're singing and complaining about potholes when people in Japan have been swallowed up by the earth.” There is illegitimate complaining, a complaining that is trite and trivial and silly, but there is legitimate complaining. And I think that the people of Israel entered into a relationship with God and they let their complaints be known in order that God might hear them, that God might respond to them. The problem with the Israelites was not that they complained for lack of water, but they were losing their faith. They were quarrelling with one another. They were getting anxious and were full of fear. It was that, that upset Moses more than anything not that people didn't have a legitimate complaint, but that they were questioning whether God was with them.
And so it's all right to complain. It's all right to make your requests known to God. It's all right if there is legitimately something that needs fixing, to ask God to fix it. It's another to be petty, to be silly, to be trite. Moses, gosh I feel for Moses in all of this. It's hard to be a leader sometimes, you know, because sometimes the people you lead haven't got a clue what they're doing. They get anxious, they get upset and they blame the wrong source. They will return to their sins. Return to the things for which they have been set free, because often if they don't know what to do, they will do what they know.
Moses, at times, I sometimes feel was a little narcissistic. I think he personalized and internalized this way too much. He thought that the complaining and grumbling was all about him, when it wasn't about him at all, it was about the people. Moses speaks to God and says, “Look God, you need to do something about these people. They're thirsty and they're getting on my nerves. I've brought them out of Egypt, great things are happening, we've set them free and now look, they need water.” And so God instructed Moses to get the rod, the same rod by the way that he had used on the Nile River to pollute the waters and to protect the people, to use that same rod on a stone and all of a sudden water came gushing out of the stone. No one was more surprised than Moses. God had listened to his appeal. God had heard his request.
And Moses, having done this, must have realized something else and it's the great theological point of this passage. Namely that God says to Moses, “I want you to go ahead of the people and strike this rock and bring out the water, but I, I will go before you.” This is known in theology as prevenient grace. God anticipating before our expression of it what we need to know. This is God going before Moses. Moses has to go to that rock, he has to strike it, but he has to believe that God has already prepared the way.
This was then a lesson for Moses. An important lesson for Moses, that it's not all on his shoulders, that just because he's the one who has to listen to all the complaining and all the groaning, it is God who will take care of it. And I think that's one of the great lessons for us. If we're not the complainer, but we're the ones who hear a complaint, we've got to understand sometimes it is God who goes before us who will sort out the issue for us, and in his prevenient grace know the way.
We also learn something profound about God in all of this. This God who had brought the people out of Egypt was not going to leave them destitute. He would not have chosen them as a covenant people, to take them to the Promised Land, if he were not going to protect them between the emancipation and the arrival in the Promised Land. He was going to take care of them, and he did. He listened to their cries, he didn't get angry with them. He met their needs. God did not say, “Shame on you for complaining.” God heard the request and provided the water. God was saying to Moses, “I've heard you complaining about the people. I've heard it. I understand it. But you've got to trust me that I will be there for you.”
Part of the problem in all of this was that the people of Israel sometimes just simply feared God too much. That they had lost sight of God's marvellous, prevenient grace and love, and become frightened. They were like a farmer who one day was driving along the road and he had in the back of his truck his dog and he had in his trailer a horse. And he went around a bend a deer crossed the road and he hit the brakes and the truck flipped over. It was terrible what happened. The horse was injured and had broken its leg, the dog was trapped underneath the truck and was crushed beyond recognition, and the driver was actually injured and had been thrown into the field. He hadn't been wearing his safety belt.
All of a sudden, a police car comes along, looks at the carnage, sees the horse with its broken leg, realizes that the horse is in distress, pulls out his revolver and puts the horse out of its misery. He sees the dog. The dog is crushed. Its leg has been broken. Its spine had been broken. The dog could not be saved. The policeman loved dogs. He pulled out his revolver and he put the dog out of his misery. Then he comes up to the farmer and the farmer is lying in the field, he has a broken arm, he has crushed ribs, he's in the most terrible pain and the policeman says to the farmer, “Are you okay?”
The farmer looks at the smoking gun and says, “I have never felt better in my whole life.”
The people of Israel are just like that farmer and the policeman