Exodus 14:10-31, 15:20-21 + John 17:1-11
Today’s service is briefer than normal (in case you hadn’t already noticed!). This is to allow time for everyone to gather after worship to discuss the very important challenges and opportunities facing United Lutheran Church. Thank you for your flexibility!
What biblical story could be better for us on this Vision Sunday than a story that at its heart wrestles with the tensions of oppression and liberation, change and risk, fear and freedom? The story of the Exodus has inspired visions of hope for over three thousand years, and hopefully once again, today, this story can offer us guidance as we seek to uncover what the way forward is for us.
We heard this story told at the Vigil of Easter this year--it is one of the twelve possible readings that are appointed for that wonderful service. And this year I as I heard it again I was struck by the questioning fear of the Israelites as they approached the Red Sea. Here they are, finally free from the system of slavery that placed them at the bottom and that kept them powerless--and what do they do? They complain! They want to go back to slavery! They say, now we are in the wilderness—with no direction, with nothing in sight that looks like a new home. Back in Egypt, even though it was slavery, at least we knew to expect. At least we were safe. At least we could depend on nothing changing. “What have you done to us [Moses], bringing us out of Egypt?!” (Ex. 14:10-12)
In many ways this is the point at which ULC stands. We stand at a liminal place—a place where we know we cannot go back. We cannot go back to the glory days. We cannot go back to the days when the institutional church was at the center of American life and culture. We cannot worship nostalgia. I can’t imagine what it has been like for each of you over the past ten to twenty years to see this church go through the challenges it’s been through, especially with declines in membership, participation and now with severe financial hardship.
But I think God says something to Moses that offers us hope. God does hear our cries, and our yearnings, and our questions. God says to Moses, “Why do you cry out to me?” as if to say, “Do not doubt that I have called you here for a purpose. Do not cry out to me without also trusting that what I have said I will accomplish through you, I will do.” We can have doubts about the future of this church, dear people. But we need not doubt that God can do amazing things through us. Like the Israelites, we do not know what the path before us to freedom looks like exactly. But we do know this: the possibility of change, of being the church that God is calling us to be, here and now, and into the future, is possible. I do not doubt for a second that you all have the imagination, the gifts and the skills to dream God’s dream for United Lutheran’s future. In all my time with all of you I have never doubted that you have that desire to listen for and follow God's vision that is wiser than our own vision. God wants something both for this congregation and for the people we serve in this community and in the world...and God will communicate those desires...if we take the time to listen—listen to one another, and to the Holy Spirit. We will also need to wrestle with the questions of how we will live out what God desires for us. But I have no doubt that as we step out in faith into the wilderness, that God will not let our hearts turn to stone, but that God's promise of deliverance will keep our hearts open to God's future for us. God is ready once again to deliver God's people from fear to hope.
Jesus, in the night he was betrayed, prayed a prayer to God on our behalf that he prays for us when we cry out. It's a prayer from today's Gospel text: “Protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.” (John 17:11b) As we now enter a time of walking in the wilderness together as United Lutheran Church, discerning our future, Jesus will keep us one. We have many voices, but Jesus intercedes on our behalf to make us into one people—one people whom whom he will deliver, in the same way that God kept the Israelites as one when God delivered them through the Red Sea. As Jesus makes us one with God, Jesus promises: even as we take those risky steps into the wilderness, he will keep us one with himself, with God, and each other.
I, for one, am excited to see the future vision God has in store for us! I hope you are too. Amen.
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