Chris Taylor’s Sermon – 9/14/08
Overcoming the Insurmountable
Exodus 14:19-31
The word “homecoming” conjures up all kinds of wonderful images – veterans returning home after serving in harm’s way; alumni coming back to the schools that helped shape their lives; homecoming kings and queens riding in the back of convertibles on a chill fall evening. The word itself has the scent of fall to it; of apple cider, raked leaves, and wool sport jackets pulled from the closet.
For us, “Homecoming” marks the end of summer and the kick-off of a new program year. Over the summer our members were scattered around the country in places like Chautauqua, Maine, Cape Cod, and the Jersey beaches. Our students went off to their various camps; soccer, football, lacrosse, or Summers Best Two Weeks. Now is the time when we come back home. In these first few weeks of September as school starts up once more, we reconnect with each other, and begin to gather our energies for the challenges and opportunities of the coming year. Above all else, “Homecoming” for us is a time of celebration. It is good to be back!
As a congregation, we want to keep moving forward. We know that settling for the status quo is unacceptable; the first step in the long, slow march towards death. Our city is pockmarked with the empty hulks of churches that failed to keep moving. We won’t find God’s Spirit in settling for the comfortable and the convenient. God’s Spirit, rather, is in the movement – that’s God’s call; to move out beyond ourselves and beyond complacency, and to take this great unchanging message of the Gospel and find new ways to communicate it to our ever-changing world.
Sometimes the barriers to that movement can feel daunting. How do we begin to discern what God is saying, or where God is moving in this community? Where are we going to find the energy and the resources when there are already so many other demands that fill our lives? Yet our very health and vitality as God’s people rests on our capacity to do precisely that.
There are great challenges ahead for any church that seeks to be faithful, but we are hardly the first to face them. In our first lesson, it was the Hebrew people caught between the Egyptian army on one side and an impassable sea on the other. In the second, it was Paul and Silas beaten, imprisoned and facing the possibility of death.
What do we do when we are faced with something that’s bigger than us? Faced with something that we aren’t going to be able to fix through any efforts of our own? For some of you the challenge may have come with the downturn in the financial markets that have had a tremendous impact on your investments or your retirement; for others maybe it is a habit or addiction that you just can’t seem to break. It could be a marriage caught in a tight, descending spiral and plummeting towards the abyss; or a problem at work that is threatening your future or the future of your company. The challenge can come in all kinds of different forms, but at some point almost all of us are going to face it. The question is, when it happens what are we going to do?
The people of Israel knew what to do. They blamed Moses. Take a look at 14:10ff:
In great fear the Israelites cried out to the Lord. They said to Moses, “Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness? What have you done to us, bringing us out of Egypt? Is this not the very thing we told you in Egypt, ‘Let us alone and let us serve the Egyptians’? For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness.”
When trouble comes our way, one of our first instincts is to look for someone else to blame. For these trapped Israelis, disaster looming right there in front of them, the answer was obvious. It must be Moses’ fault. But the first verse of this fourteenth chapter makes it clear that Moses was simply doing what God had instructed. This wasn’t Moses’ fault. It wasn’t the people being disobedient. No, it was God who had led them there; God who had seemingly set them up for destruction.
The same was true of Paul and Silas. They hadn’t gotten it wrong. They were doing exactly what God had asked them to do. They were proclaiming the Gospel. But then the people of Philippi had turned against them. The authorities had chosen to have them stripped and beaten and ultimately thrown into prison.
The fact that we are faced with the insurmountable, the fact that life has sharp turn towards the south, doesn’t necessarily mean that we’ve missed God’s will. It certainly doesn’t mean that God has abandoned us. Like the people of Israel and like the Paul and Silas, it may be that we are exactly where God wants us to be doing exactly what God wants us to do. Sometimes what it all means is that God is about to do something wonderful – something that only God can do.
Years ago Lockheed Martin was faced with a problem. They had invested in a massive new machine, but when they turned it on they found the machine was plagued with vibrations. They brought in engineers who studied it and ran their calculations and came up with some different solutions, but none of them worked. Lockheed Martin was faced with the seemingly insurmountable. They had invested in this machine, but they couldn’t get the machine to work.
The plant manager at the time was a friend of mine; a guy named Clarence. Clarence had been raised in an orphanage. He didn’t have the advantages that so many of us take for granted. He made it through high school, but from there went straight into the work force. Because he was bright and diligent, and very hard working, in the years that followed Clarence was able to move up through the ranks and ultimately become plant manager.
It was Clarence who ultimately found the solution. His suggestion was to run steel cables to an enormous plate that would hang from the ceiling. There was nothing particularly elegant about his solution. It didn’t come from a lot of complicated formulas, and hanging a plate from the ceiling is no one’s idea of technical beauty. But of all the solutions that had been offered, this was the one that worked. The last I heard, that plate was still there, years later – its weight dampening the vibrations and allowing the machine to work.
Faced with the insurmountable we usually look for the big thing; the great miracle like the parting of the sea in Moses’ time, or the earthquake of Paul and Silas’ own. But a lot of times God’s answer doesn’t come in that form. A lot of times it comes in something seemingly far more ordinary: the outstretched hand of a friend; the insight or idea that wakes us up in the middle of the night; the change in heart of someone we’ve been working with. This wasn’t the first time that Clarence came up with an answer that no one else had found, but it was after this time that his boss approached him and asked how he kept coming up with these ideas when he didn’t even have a college education. Clarence didn’t hesitate: “I go home and pray about it,” he said, “and then, one day, the answer comes.”
The insurmountable, by definition, means something we can’t fix or overcome on our own. It is something that is bigger than us; something that no amount of effort on our part is going to change.
What did Paul and Silas do that night in prison? Scripture tells us they sang hymns and prayed. They didn’t know what God was going to do, but they knew that God was there and at work, and that was enough.
What did Moses’ do when the destruction of his people seemed imminent and unavoidable? He placed his trust in God. Rising above the fear and the confusion he called out to the people, “Do not be afraid. Stand firm, and see the deliverance that the Lord will accomplish for you today…” He didn’t know what God was going to do, but he knew that God was there and at work. And that was enough.
What Moses, Paul and Silas all share in common is that at that critical point when it would have been so easy to give up, they chose instead to focus their eyes upon the Lord. They placed their hopes in God, and God did not disappoint them.
That’s the key for us as a congregation on this Homecoming Sunday with all the challenges and opportunities that this next year will bring. It is the key for us as individuals; whatever the obstacles we might face in this great pilgrimage of faith. Keep your eyes upon the Lord, and then make that choice to follow him. God can fix what we can’t. God alone can do so much more than we ever hoped, or dreamed or even imagined as we make that choice to place our trust in him.