The Fourth Sunday in Lent: Year B – Rev. Aimee Baxter - March 14, 2021

When our daughter Isabel transitioned out of her crib into her toddler bed, she would fall out of the bed every night. The little rail that comes with the toddler bed just wasn’t enough to keep our girl in! So, we decided to get one of the larger rails that you put on a standard size bed to prevent these falls. It fit the bed perfectly and left just enough room for her to get out when she needed to, but protected her from any unwanted falls in the middle of the night.

However, our precocious little girl would go to the space we’d left her and stop between the two rails exclaiming, “I stuck. I stuck.” every time she would get in and out of the bed. She wasn’t stuck. She was just unhappy with the boundaries we had put in place to protect her. She saw the rails as a means to limit her. She didn’t realize the sweet freedom she had to fully relax into a deep sleep at night with no fear of falling out of the bed.

We are all guilty of that feeling and proclamation of being stuck when things feel like they are closing in. It’s hard being limited or told what to do. None of us like it. I think we can all especially relate now that we’ve experienced this last year together.

The truth is it is hard and I feel stuck. I want to rip off the mask, hug all the people and get on an airplane again. I feel so trapped and stuck in this wilderness of precautions and distancing. Can things just be normal again?

Our Old Testament reading illustrates for us one of the many stories of the Israelites wandering in the wilderness. It doesn’t take long for us to see that they are impatient with God and Moses. They are just over it. “Why did you bring us up out of Egypt to die out here in the wilderness?” That’s a direct quote, folks. Poor Moses.

We humans can be so predictable, can’t we? They are just like my two year old protesting, “I stuck.” Was he really going to have to remind them what life was like back in Egypt?

Then they say, “For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.” Did you catch that? “There is no food and water, and we detest this miserable food.” Makes me think of when someone in my family opens up a fridge full of food and declares there is nothing to eat. As we’d say in our house, “Dramatic much?” 

It’s not that there isn't food, there just isn't food that they want. There's a big difference in needs and wants. Relief from poisonous snakes that are sent after all this complaining – that’s a need! Eating a particular type of food – well, that’s a want. 

This new way of life isn’t denying them the essentials, it’s making them uncomfortable because it’s not what they are used to.

The wilderness was never meant to be comfortable. Discomfort leads to growth.

One thing we know about all of our wilderness stories is that in the midst of the grumbling and fear there is always provision from God. Things going bad with these snakes? Here’s a way to find healing and live. Just look to the bronze serpent.

 

Provision is available in the wilderness if we choose to see it as a place where God is present and growth can happen. The snake in the wilderness encourages the people to see their situation differently. Maybe wandering around eating this bland food wasn’t so bad in comparison to the poisonous snakes biting them? The power of perspective and the way we choose to view things is undeniable.

 

Reading this story in light of the pandemic is both convicting and a bit humorous. I have to giggle because there really is nothing new under the sun. When we feel limited, our first instinct is to feel like we are being infringed upon. That things would just be better if we could go back to the way they always were. To proclaim with all of our bravado, “I stuck.” Or something like, “Did you bring me out here to kill me?”

Today is the official one year mark of the pandemic changing how we worship and live together as a church. One year ago, we entered the wilderness of a new way of life together. Throughout this past year, I know that I have felt stuck in a lot of ways – stuck in the middle of my own anxieties while tending to the greater anxiety in the world. Stuck managing my wants knowing that it may not be what I or others need. Stuck in the pandemic rut of fatigue.

Here’s the thing – I’m not and we aren’t stuck any more than the Israelites were. We are in the wilderness - forging our way to a new experience of God and growing through the discomfort. Are we weary and anxious? I’d say yes. Are we stuck out in the wilderness left to die alone? No.

When we are tired, it all feels too heavy. Everything is harder when we are spent. The wilderness feels impossible and never-ending.

I am encouraged today that the Scripture gives voice to the weariness that comes in the wilderness and speaks to a God who as the psalm for today reminds us is good, and merciful, and delivers us from distress.

Walter Bruggeman has written a beautiful prayer entitled, “You” Beyond Our “Weary Selves,”  for such a time as this. I invite you to pray it with me.

You God, Lord and Sovereign, You are God of all our possibilities.

You preside over all our comings and goings, all our wealth and poverty, all our sickness and all our health, all our despair and all our hope, all our living and all our dying.

And we are grateful.

You are God of all our impossibilities. You have presided over the emancipations and healings of our mothers and fathers.; You have presided over the wondrous transformations in our own lives. You have and will preside over those parts of our lives that we imagine to be closed.

And we are grateful.

So be your true self, enacting the things impossible for us, that we might yet be whole among the blind who see and the dead who are raised; That we may yet witness your will for peace, your vision for justice, your vetoing all our killing fields.

At the outset of this day, we place our lives in your strong hands.

Before the end of this day, do newness among us in the very places where we are tired in fear, we are exhausted in guilt, we are spent in anxiety. Make all things new, we pray in the new-making name of Jesus. Amen.