First Presbyterian Church of Watertown

Exodus 14 and Romans 14

“To the Right and to the Left”

The Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry

September 14, 200

The first time Kathy and I flew together it was to New Jersey. The flight was smooth until we reached Newark. There was a storm and making matters worse there was a backlog of planes so we were in a holding pattern in turbulence. For more than an hour it was much like a roller coaster: with each pass around the airport we circled right into a series of dips and falls. Thirty minutes into the ride Kathy was starting to worry. She asked me if I was concerned and I said, “no.” And then in a less than bright moment I said, “but even if there was a problem there is nothing we can do with airplanes like this, it is what it is. If something bad happens there is nothing we can do; if you go down, you go down. But I don’t think anything is going to happen.”

Lucky for Kathy there was a man sitting next to me and given my less than stellar words of comfort he leaned forward. He introduced himself and said “I am a pilot with the airlines.” He went on to describe what turbulence is and what it is not and how safe we were and his prediction about how long our roller coaster ride would last. Essentially he just spoke kindly and took the mystery out of the moment. He did give me a look that said I needed to brush up on my being human skills, but he didn’t say anything directly.

Assuaging fear, while still not a great skill, is something I’ve learned to appreciate. Sometimes it’s just a kind word, sometimes it’s just letting people say, “I am afraid” and letting them know you share their fear. I’ve learned to do it, it just isn’t my first impulse.

One place I learned to do this is our Mexico Mission trips. In our first year here we started planning a Mexico Mission trip and I knew we would need to start with the fear factor. I started by just letting people talk about fears. Tijuana can be a rough place and taking teens across the country and into poor barrios of Mexico should make most parents pause.

I was surprised though by what worried the parents here. It wasn’t the border issues or the distance or even the absence of phones and so on. It was medical. What happens if someone gets sick? What happens if someone gets hurt? There were so many questions, most of which had the same answer- you go to San Diego and get care, there were so many questions that I decided to hold a meeting around this issue.

There were about fifty parents and teens gathered in Room 10 and after introducing the topic and the concern I took a piece of chalk and started writing potential maladies offered by the group. I asked them, what could go wrong? And they gave about two-dozen potential answers. With all the problems written on the board I turned it back to them and said, “well, let’s go one by one and see if we can help prevent any of these or at least have a plan.” Sure enough as we started to move through the list the picture came into great focus and a sense of calm came rather easily.

Themes started to emerge: drink water, wear sunscreen, eat protein, be careful of others around you, don’t goof around with tools. Most of the problems listed were answered with these. Some of the problems, like serious illness and life threatening accidents, had the same plan that they do here: go to the hospital. We were moving through the list really well until we hit a real stumper: the roof. In order to complete the house being built in Tijuana people would have to climb a ladder and walk on the roof. Granted it is only 10 feet high at its highest point, but 10 feet is 10 feet.

We tried to think of safety steps to prevent injury, but no one could think of one. Some sort of harness seemed like it would inflict more pain than prevent harm, and scaffolding was not an option. Finally we realized the only thing that could be done was to not fall off. Everyone looked around the room and nodded and then I had everyone repeat it with me, “I won’t fall off the roof.” Sometimes care is the best logic, being careful is the best thing you can do to not get hurt.

Even though there was some success here, assuaging fear is still a learned habit for me. It doesn’t come natural. What does come natural is a kind of cynicism, a blind confidence in fate and a deep sense of trust that God’s in charge. Our passage today from Romans is a good example of this . . . outlook lets call it. Paul is saying, look, our life isn’t even our own, so don’t get all uptight. If we live, if we die: it’s all good. It’s fine. I have to confess that there is something here that makes sense to me. Good times, bad times, problems, ease, life, death: they are all going to happen don’t sweat it. And being worried never adds to your life.

Hence those thoughtless things I said to Kathy on the plane so many years ago were not just insensitivity; they were something more. For good or for ill they are also a philosophy. It’s not a cheery philosophy, but it is one. I find myself nodding when Paul gets into his darker moments. Most every one of his letters has some moment where he sounds courageous but it is really just a kind of fatalism and it’s a little on the dark side. There is a kind of indifference when he says, life or death. . . it’s for the Lord. In other words I am not seeing a big need to value one over the other.

When we served our church in Washington I ran into this in spades. Just like here, the first time we took a group to Mexico there were safety concerns; there were people who were nervous. Except it really wasn’t the parents who were nervous; it was older parishioners. Mind you this is the Pacific Northwest where rugged individualism and a sense of exploration are part of the culture so it just didn’t sit right.

People in their seventies who had lived lives sailing the Strait of Juan de Fuca or climbing the Olympics or just endured so many days without any sunshine talked as if they had never left their home for fear of injury. Their fears didn’t match their life very well. My first response was to be dismissive: irrational fear cannot be assuaged with reason. But it just kept up to a degree that finally I asked one of the more vocal members what was going on. I simply said, “what is all this about? You people have not shied away from danger in your own life and while this trip isn’t free from danger we are not making an assent on Everest or skydiving.”

The member took a moment and said, there was a problem; there was an incident, a tragedy. Twenty years ago the church took a group of youth to the coast to spend the day at a beach house. All of the kids were out in the water when a freak wave took a huge log and it crushed one of the teens. She died. He then went on to describe the family how they were never part of the church and how much guilt they all felt. Mostly though what he described was their fear.

Because of fear, youth outings were curtailed. And since that time there was a deep, lingering mistrust of anything where kids outside the church itself would be involved. Given my belief that anyone is welcome to go to Mexico whether they go to the church or not I had stumbled into a real deep fear of the older members.

Unfortunately there was no way to address this fear. It was an unspeakable part of their history. And to bring it out into the open risked dredging up a lot of hurt, perhaps without good reason. I wish we could have sat down with a chalkboard and listed out all the things they had done since and all the things they could not control, but sometimes being freed from fear is not the fruit of assurance. Sometimes you just have to do it to get through it; do whatever it is that causes pause.

Taking the teens to Mexico and bringing them home was the only way to loosen the hold of fear. And that is what it did. It didn’t erase it or refute it. Going and returning simply said, it doesn’t have to be terrible. I too learned something in the midst of their lingering tragedy; I learned something about myself. My first response to the fears they expressed was very Pauline, hey, life death, good bad, it’s all there. Trust in God; don’t be timid. That was the voice I started with, but not the one I ended with. Where I ended said to someone like Paul, there is both life and death and God is in charge, yes, but sometimes the journey is not made easier by simple bravado.

I thought of this when I read our Old Testament passage- the crossing of the Red Sea. If ever there was a kind of leap of faith moment this was it. Thinking of the fears of the older members for the youth, trying to keep them from any potential harm is a very natural thing for a lot of people. Not all, but a lot. With this in mind I found myself looking at the crossing of the Red Sea from the views of mothers and grandparents and widowers with no desire to risk the life of their children following Moses into the sea.

I kept imagining how Moses’ charge for them to enter the sea must have been met with great fear, reservation at the very least. I can see parents saying, I am not taking my child in there. And mind you water in the ancient world was the great symbol of death and chaos, not adventure.

The Jewish commentators have a tradition that the sea didn’t stand in a heap until the people were a ways into the water. I find this tradition a bit of a stretch just because it would have been near impossible to get the people to walk into sea with the waters in a heap let alone just tell them to wade in. And it almost seems cruel to me that people would wade in and not walk in.

No matter where the water level the story seemed to take on new meaning when I read it from the vantage of fear. How little time there would have been to calm people, how little it would have worked had they tried. But I tried to imagine how families faced this moment, how people who had never left their neighborhood were being thrust into a really wild situation.

I found something that really helped me see this as I did my research this week. It was a video of Cecil B. DeMille. It was a speech he gave at the opening of the movie the Ten Commandments. It was a curious speech about the influences that went into the movie, but then he said something I took to heart. He said, this story is the story of whether or not people are free. Were people only free at the whim of others or are they free to follow God and live as God’s? He described it as an epic battle, a question of human destiny. And it is. The crossing of the Red Sea is the symbolic passage from tyranny to freedom, the movement from death to life. And it is as he called it, a story of divine meaning, as it is not human will that creates the victory, but God.

I believe all that and I can’t think of any other picture of the Exodus than the cast of thousands De Mille employed to portray it. And I know that freedom is only created with the kind of leap of faith in the crossing of the Red Sea. Yet like Paul’s response to human freedom with his rather cynical values there is little about this that actually resonates with the experience. I am not sure that telling the Israelites they are part of an epic battle of freedom or that they belong to God so whether they live or die in the water they are God’s children would have really been a help.

What if I had written on the chalkboard in room 10 not their fears when the kids were thinking about Mexico, what if I had written on the chalkboard: whether you return alive or dead you belong to God? Or what if I had turned to the older members who still carried a sense of guilt about the death of the teenage girl that Christ died to be the Lord of the living and the dead so she’s covered. In my failed attempt to bring Kathy a sense of calm on the plane it would have been just as much a failure had I said, whether the plan lands or crashes it is for the Lord.

I believe there is an epic struggle for freedom happening all around us, but right now I am trying to win the battle of getting down Ten Eyck Street. Two and a half months in Africa had moments of real extreme, but mostly what it had was mundane. People there don’t see themselves involved in an epic struggle; they are just looking for enough food and hoping against hope one of their kids will get through high school. People there are not inspired to hope because the U.S. has passed a large aid bill; they are hopeful when someone knows their name.

Sometimes I think we make our faith too monumental, too epic so to speak. Yes, Jesus Christ is Lord of the living and the dead; he is the Son of God begotten not made; and he was the Word made flesh, but none of those will keep you from falling off the roof.

I want an epic faith, but I also want a faith that is genteel and thoughtful, maybe even patient. The more I pastor the more I find the need for both the great and the mundane. And how they need to foster a balance.

I can’t forget that Jesus is the victorious Christ, but there is also Christ in the Jesus who washed feet and was Joseph’s son. Being the pastor of church is often like trying to get a horde of people across the Red Sea. At crucial moments there isn’t always time to assuage all fears, and all fear will never be assuaged. Yet, I was blessed this summer watching a pastor who looks more to the patient unfolding than the grand emerging. Being able to see a church, a pastor, elders wrestle with their fears and concerns and their mysterious being as a church was a great gift.

As I begin again here in Watertown I feel like I am in the midst of both the grand and the mundane. I find myself seeing things anew, yet the same. As I assess and reflect upon what happened and what will be in the next year there is a strange feeling. I feel as if I was led through the sea this summer instead of leading others. I saw the way the church moves, slowly, instead of where the church needs to leap next.

Rest assured I am just as grandiose and ready for adventure, but it’s different. It’s far less cynical and far more mindful that while the church is the kingdom of God, it is also a small village. Amen.