Exodus 14:10-22; Mark 1:4-11
7th Sunday after Trinity
St Barbara’s 14.07.2024 (8am)
Rev Tulo Raistrick
Most of us have some form of navigation system in our car – a sat nav or google maps, and we have come to rely on them. We can get quite lost without them.
They have got better in recent years, but I remember a few years ago that sometimes they would try and take you the most direct way, even when that route was not safe or sensible.
One time in Devon, I followed the sat nav down narrow lanes to get back to our holiday cottage. It kept wanting me to take a left and drive straight through a farmer’s field.
In my parent’s village in Suffolk, a sign stands by a tiny mud track, which says, “No matter what your Sat Nav may tell you, 10-tonne lorries cannot get through this lane!”
Well, its just as well the people of Israel didn’t have a Sat Nav when they fled from Egypt, seeking to escape from the tyranny of Pharaoh. If they had had, it would definitely have sent them the coastal road towards Canaan, the promised land where they wanted to be. That route was flat and quick, with a good road. But it was also the most obvious route, a route crammed full of Egyptian soldiers waiting to halt their escape and send them back to Egypt in slavery.
The people of Israel hadn’t yet grown in enough confidence to face that kind of challenge.
So instead God takes them on a different route, a longer more windy and circuitous route, the desert road.
And during that journey they get to trust God’s leading. You see, every step of the way he assures them that he is with them and that he is the one leading them. He sends them a big pillar of cloud by day that they are to follow. At night time, he sends them a pillar of fire, burning in the night sky, showing them the way to go.
Sometimes it is good to remind ourselves that God is with us too. Even when we may feel like we are not doing anything special. Even when we feel like we are just pottering about, not going anywhere in particular, it is good for us to remind ourselves that God is with us. God tells us: “I am with you always.”
But then things change. God takes them on a route and they find themselves doubling back on themselves. And now, over the horizon, in the distance, Pharaoh’s 600 chariots are beginning to catch up with them.
The people are terrified. They wonder out loud, “Why did we even leave Egypt in the first place? Now we are going to be in huge bother!” And yet they’ve come to learn to trust God. Their following him has prepared them for this crunch time. When something extraordinary happens, when the water that is trapping them from escape opens up, when a tidal wave of tsunami proportions is held up on either side of them, to reveal dry land, they have the confidence to walk across. They know God’s hand when they see it, because they have been following him these last few days. “The God who has been leading us these last few days, he is the one who has done this. Let’s trust him and go for it!” As the waters crash back down behind them on Pharaoh’s chariots they know they have escaped. And they can continue their journey to the promised land.
Sometimes for us, there can be times when life gets scary or difficult. We may not be chased by Egyptians in chariots, but life can get pretty difficult quite quickly – if our job comes under threat, or we are diagnosed with a certain illness, or we suddenly find ourselves caring for dependent loved ones.
Like the people of Israel, if we have come to trust and follow God in the good times, we will come to see that he is at work in the difficult times too.
Well this series has been about thinking how the early Christians would have interpreted and made sense of these Old Testament stories that were such a part of their life and upbringing. And this story, like the Passover meal that you looked at with Jeremy last week, soon gained sacramental meaning for the early Christians. For they made parallels between the people of Israel passing through the waters of the Red Sea from slavery to freedom with the act of baptism, once more passing through waters from slavery to sin to freedom as a child of God.
The ancient baptism liturgies were shaped by this. As I baptise a young child and her grandmother this afternoon, we will pray over the water: “Through water you led the children of Israel from slavery in Egypt to freedom in the Promised Land”, words that have been used down the centuries to proclaim the new life we celebrate in baptism.
For the early Christians, emerging from the waters of baptism was as significant as emerging from the seabed of the Red Sea for those Hebrews fleeing Egypt. Here was freedom, here was the prospect of a new life, here was a new beginning. Much of life may have outwardly appeared the same – they may have continued in the same jobs, may have continued to live in the same place, may have continued to eat the same food – but something inwardly had happened that was totally transformational. Their encounter with God had led them to a place of freedom, of knowing that God loved them and was always with them, that he would guide them through the good times as well as the difficult times. Sometimes, like with those early Christians, it is good to step back and reflect and give thanks for the difference that knowing Christ makes for each one of us.
