You split the hard rocks in the wilderness

and gave drink as from the great deep.

You brought streams out of the cliff,

and the waters gushed out like rivers.

(Ps. 78:15-16, The Saint Helena Psalter)

What a vivid, wonderful description of God’s grace! I can’t think of a more powerful image of new life or deliverance from danger than the sight of running water in the desert—assuming it’s not a flash flood! One of my favorite places in the world is the spot where the Virgin River emerges from its canyon in Zion National Park. All around are masses of dry rock. But there, hanging from the cliffs, are maidenhair ferns and columbines, nourished by seep springs and mists, and the beautiful, cold river flowing through the midst of it. In the middle of the desert, there is life and delight and awe. 

But the people of Israel were deeply fearful when they came to Rephidim and found no water there. They didn’t grow up in the desert, but in the Nile Valley, where there was never any shortage of water or and their gardens had kept them amply fed. Now they wondered how they were going to survive. Moses, an old desert hand, was probably wondering, too. He had no power to solve this problem. All he could do was go to God and complain about the problem and about how the people were tormenting him. It’s God who solves the problem. Indeed, our Psalm, when it says “You split the hard rocks in the wilderness,” is speaking of God, not Moses. 

So this is one of the great miracle stories of the Exodus, one so memorable that people have been coming back to it for millennia to have their spirits refreshed and renewed. What you may not remember is that there’s also another, almost identical story about Moses’ striking the rock and bringing forth water. It’s not as well-known because it takes a distressing turn.

That story, found in the 20th chapter of Numbers, begins the same way with the complaints of the congregation. They say to Moses, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt, to bring us to this wretched place? It is no place for grain, or figs, or vines, or pomegranates, and there is no water to drink.”

As before, Moses brings the problem to God, who tells him, once again, to take the miracle-working staff and strike the rock. Let me read the rest of it for you:

So Moses took the staff from before the Lord, as he had commanded him. Moses and Aaron gathered the assembly together before the rock, and he said to them, “Listen, you rebels, shall we bring water for you out of this rock?” Then Moses lifted up his hand and struck the rock twice with his staff; water came out abundantly, and the congregation and their livestock drank. But the Lord said to Moses and Aaron, “Because you did not trust in me, to show my holiness before the eyes of the Israelites, therefore you shall not bring this assembly into the land that I have given them. These are the waters of Meribah [which means “Quarrel”], where the people of Israel quarreled with the Lord, and by which he showed his holiness. (Numbers 20:9-13 NRSV)

Poor Moses! Shut out of the promised land—the goal of this whole long, aggravating, trek through the desert—for what he had just done.

But what went so wrong here? Moses, whose patience was exhausted, effectively took credit himself for the miracle. “Listen, you rebels, shall we bring water for you out of this rock?” He even struck the rock twice, when once would have done the job, which makes me think he’s expressing his anger with the people—and maybe with God as well. 

As you may have heard me say on another occasion, Moses was a man with an explosive temper. Like all saints, he was a real human being with real human imperfections. And it’s hard to blame him, given the immense burden of leadership he was carrying. I don’t think God was primarily interested in punishing Moses for this failure; but it was very important that Moses understand what he had done and how deeply important it was.

Moses’ fault was actually one common to many religious people, maybe all of us at one time or another. We can become so closely identified with our experience of God that we find it hard to tell where God stops, as it were, and we are left with just our own over-inflated egos. It leads us to think that what we believe and do has to be right. It gives us license, we think, to impose our views on others. In fact, much of what has brought religion into disrepute for so many people in our time comes from this confusing of ourselves, our communities, our doctrines with God. 

We know about church leaders who thought it more important to maintain the church’s facade of perfect purity than to protect victims of abuse. We also know some who think it more important to grasp political power than to proclaim the good news to the poor and weak. There are always religious people who think that being religious is mainly about how good we are, not about how good God is. 

Jesus was dealing with this same reality in our reading from Matthew’s Gospel this morning. He had a collision with the chief priests and the elders of the people. These were members of the Sanhedrin, the supreme religious authority of Jesus’ time and place and people. Among other things, they had authority over the Temple and whatever happened in it. No wonder they wanted to know what authority Jesus claimed for teaching there. Since he was attracting big crowds, he posed a potential challenge to their own authority at the very heart of the religious community. If a popular preacher tried the same thing in the Vatican or the National Cathedral, you can bet that there would be a committee of dignitaries asking a few questions‚ and maybe a few police ready to evict them.

“By what authority,” they ask, “are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?” They want to see his documents. They expect to pass judgement on them. But Jesus responds by putting them in a very awkward spot with a question of his own about John the Baptist: “Did the baptism of John come from heaven or was it of human origin?” In other words, “Where do you think John got his authority?” 

And, as you remember, they can’t answer him. If they say “from God,” he’ll say, “Why didn’t you take him seriously?” If they say “from human authorities,” no one would be fooled—John never claimed any human authority—and the crowd who had taken John so seriously would be very angry.

Now, I have a lot of sympathy for the chief priests and elders in this situation. There were plenty of crazy, dangerous preachers rambling around Judea in Jesus’ time, looking for an audience—as there are in our world, too. There is a place and a purpose for religious officials. I’m one of them. So I guess I would think so. But there’s also a particular danger for them—as for all religious people. We can too easily mistake the status quo for the will of God. For that matter, we can mistake our own authority for the will of God. The chief priests and elders are on the verge of making that mistake. They’ll do it, in fact, before the week is out, when they haul Jesus before the Roman governor with a trumped up charge of sowing civil disobedience. 

They’re in an awkward position. But Jesus offers them another way to judge the situation in his Parable of the Two Sons. Both sons behave badly in this parable. The first son refuses to go work in the vineyard. This point blank refusal could only be seen as a rejection of the father’s authority—not acceptable behavior in that society. The other son, by contrast, made the appropriate response: “I go, sir.” He just didn’t do it. That was probably a more acceptable way of refusing to do the work, but it didn’t change the facts.

And, yet, when Jesus asks the question “Which of the two did the will of his father?” there’s only one possible answer. And the son who kept up appearances isn’t the one who wins the prize; the one who did the wrong thing and repented turns out to be the good son after all. Jesus sums his point up in withering terms: “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you.”

How embarrassing! How impossible to believe! We’ve been good faithful people all along. Why should those worthless folk, those tax collectors and prostitutes, be more pleasing to God than we? If we are the custodians of all that is sacred, then surely God is pleased with us. Those people have done nothing to deserve such favor. We had better defend true religion against such outrageous ideas!

But, of course the problem is to distinguish what we’re really preserving. Is it really the will of God? Or is it an orthodoxy that has come to seem self-evidently true and beyond question? Is it even our own power as leaders of a community? 

Even Moses, driven to distraction by the burdens of his task could confuse the boundaries, could act as if it was he and his own magic wand that brought the water, not the grace of God. Even the great leaders of ancient Israel could make the mistake of thinking that they had everything sewn up and under control, that they could be sure who was in God’s favor and who was not. Christian leaders have made the same mistakes in our history—and still today. 

Now it feels very odd to be preaching all this to the people of Good Shepherd. Many of us, in fact, have felt the sting of exclusion or oppression by other religious people, and we are united here partly by the common bond of that experience. Do I really think we’re guilty of Moses’ sin? No. I just think we need to understand this dynamic and recognize that we’re not immune to it. I could tell stories, but this isn’t the time or place.

But the Gospel, happily, also points us toward the antidote. John the Baptist came preaching God’s grace and mercy: Come one, come all! Jesus came preaching God’s love, a love God is happy to pour out on all sinners, including ourselves. All God really wants in return is our love—for God, for one another, for our neighbors, for this world of which we are all a part. That message is what Jesus claims for his authority. And there’s no church or synagogue that will ever have anything better to offer than that.

A sermon preached at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley, California

17th SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST, SEPTEMBER 27, 2020

Proper 21A: Exodus 17:1-7; Psalm 78:1-4, 12-16; Philippians 2:1-13; Matthew 21:23-32