A Fourth Church Sermon by John Wilkinson

September 10, 2000 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Holy the Rock

John Wilkinson
Executive Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Exodus 17:1–7

“Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink.”

Exodus 17:6 (NRSV)

O incognito god, anonymous lord, with what name shall I call you?
Where shall I discover the syllable, the mystic word that shall invoke you from eternity?
Is that sweet sound the heart makes, clocking
life, Your appellation? is the noise of thunder, it?
Is it the hush of peace, the sound of strife?
I have no title for your glorious throne,
and for your presence not a golden word,
only that wanting you, by that alone
I do invoke you, knowing I am heard.

“Gates of Prayer”
The New Union Prayer Book

[Sung:] If I could I surely would stand on the rock where Moses stood. / Pharaoh’s army got drowned, O Mary don’t you weep. / O Mary don’t you weep, don’t you mourn. / O Mary don’t you weep, don’t you mourn. / Pharaoh’s army got drowned. O Mary don’t you weep.

If I could I surely would stand on the rock where Moses stood. O really.

The worst job I ever had lasted three days. During the summers of my college years, I served as a recreation leader for our parks and recreation department. It was a great job. But the summer season ended and I still wanted to work, so my boss made a suggestion. Our town had just cleared land to construct a soccer field, an old flood plain. It was filled with rocks. Would I care to pick rocks for a little money? The more truthful question should have been would I like to sit in the hot sun, in the wondrous August humidity of central Ohio, and fill bucket after bucket, no apparent end in sight, with rocks. It lasted three days, and not really three full days. I quit. You know the phrase as dumb as a box of rocks? I am living proof.

If I could I surely would, stand on the rock where Moses stood. O really.

It is a primary biblical image: the rock. Biblically speaking, as in all of life, it carries a wide permutation of interpretations. A piece of the rock. Loves me like a rock. Rock of ages. Biblically, the imagery is a little mixed, but generally positive. Hannah’s prayer in 1 Samuel tells us “there is no Rock like our God.” God alone is my rock, my salvation, my fortress, the psalmist tells us over and over and over. Jesus tells us to hear his word, and listen, like the wise ones who build their house on a rock. And that stunning interchange: “Thou art Peter, Petros, thou art the rock—and on this rock I will build my church.”

And yet. And yet. If I could I surely would stand on the rock where Moses stood.

Rock as stumbling block. Rock as instrument of condemnation for Stephen the martyr, for others. The tomb hewn out of the rocky side of a mountain.

If I could I surely would stand on the rock where Moses stood. O really.

We know the extraordinary story well. Moses, raised by Pharaoh’s daughter, fleeing from Egypt, the burning bush, the return to Egypt, the plagues, the first Passover, the exodus. We know the story well.

And now we are in those wandering moments, those wandering days, those wandering years. The wandering is extraordinary, as is the very reaction of the people who have been liberated from slavery, whose freedom has been won at inestimable cost, through miraculous, mighty acts, whose leader has laid it all on the line and whose God has moved, literally moved, heaven and earth and wind and fire to let the people go.

And now they are wandering. And they turn into a bunch of whiners. First, there is hunger. “If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt . . . when we ate our fill of bread . . . for you have brought us out into the wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.” And rather than respond to the whining, which at some point would seem quite reasonable, God provides, manna from the sky, enough food. God hears the complaints of the people and God provides.

And then they get thirsty. The people quarrel again with Moses. “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?” Extraordinary. Moses’ rage mounts and finally spills over. His behavior is not inappropriate, we would say. “What shall I do with this people?” he cries to God. “They are almost ready to stone me.” An interesting juxtaposition. “They are almost ready to stone me.”

And God hears the quarrelling voices of the people, and God hears the pleading voice of the one whose obedience has been tested for decades now. And God responds. And God provides. “Go ahead of the people and take some elders with you as witnesses and I will choose a rock for you and you will strike it with a stick and water will spring forth from the rock and the people will thirst no more.” Extraordinary.

If I could I surely would stand on the rock where Moses stood. And yet.

For many churches, this day is called Rally Day or Homecoming Sunday. Sunday school is open for business. The choirs are fully back. We will reflect another aspect of homecoming today as we welcome visitors for lunch and an open house. For us as well, this day marks the beginning of our seventeenth Festival of the Arts, a fortnight designated to celebrate the gifts of creativity and imagination and, more deeply, the response of artists and all of us to God’s creativity and imagination. This year the central theme is “Response to the Holy,” and so we shall be invited to consider how we respond to God’s holiness with acts of gratitude, with acts of provocation, with acts of charity, with acts of humility, with acts of joy and courage and faithfulness.

As Christians, as Protestant Christians, as Presbyterian Protestant Christians, we get a bit prickly when thinking about these things. God is holy, we are glad to say, we are compelled to say, even. Our tradition punctuates this for us—listen to these big words from the Westminster Confession—“There is but one only living and true God, who is infinite in being and perfection . . . immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty, most wise, most holy, most free, most absolute—he is the lone fountain of all being, of whom, through whom, and to whom are all things, and hath most sovereign dominion over them, to do by them, for them, or upon them, whatsoever himself pleaseth. He is most holy in all his counsels, in all his works, and in all his commands.” Well then. We know God by God’s holiness, by acts of creation and redemption. Words could not begin to describe, and yet we choose the biggest words to describe, or attempt to describe, who God is, what God does, knowing full well that any description borders on the ridiculous.

But this arts festival and, indeed, this much broader journey of faith that we receive as a gift and share one with another is about response, responding to the holy. Every day is about that, I would submit. Holiness, in our tradition, has not been about attaining perfection, about living life so righteously, so apart from the world, so distant from fellow travelers. We are concerned, to be sure, about how we live our lives, about ethical behavior, about morality, to use the current term, about, in point of fact, our response to the holy. But we live in grace, and so such behavior has not, does not now, shall not and should not, entice us into thinking that we jump-start grace a little bit, earn God’s favor, by what we do or what we believe or what we say.

Long ago John Calvin wrote that “the more eminently that one excels in holiness, the farther one feels from perfect righteousness, and the more clearly one perceives that nothing can be trusted but the mercy of God alone” (Commentary on Psalm 32). Nothing can be trusted but the mercy of God. Our response is trust. And if this sounds overly pious, it would still be true that blessing is not an accomplishment but a gift, to which we are invited to respond, gratefully, in every conceivable way.

We read the Exodus story, don’t we, and we say we would never be the ingrates those Israelites were. What’s a little hunger and thirst after all that oppression? But they are us—their response is our response, in withholding gratitude, in withholding love from the God who led them to freedom, in withholding respect for their comrade who engineered it all, in withholding love from self, even, their inability to step out of the moment into the longer view.

A highly theological movie drove it home for me over the summer. Perhaps you saw it: Chicken Run. A bunch of chickens are trapped, enslaved, on a chicken farm, their fate to produce egg after egg after egg and eventually to be turned into chicken pies by the awful Mrs. and Mr. Tweedy. I will not spoil it for you, lest you are planning a viewing of Chicken Run in the near future, but near the beginning, as another escape plan is quashed, the leader, the Moses figure, Ginger Chicken (get it?), makes a stirring speech, to which one of her fellow chickens responds, “Well, maybe we are better off in here after all.” It is the Israelites all over again. Maybe we were better off in Egypt. Maybe slavery, slavery, wasn’t so bad after all.

And yet the response each time is love, unmerited love, and grace, manna from the skies, water from the rock, providence, to use the old-fashioned term, holiness regardless of our ability to respond appropriately, to “get it.”

That is to say, if the response of the holy were ever based on our response to the holy, we would still be wandering, hungering, thirsting. But it is not, and so we are not.

In his majestic new Theology of the Old Testament, Walter Brueggemann writes that even in the face of a “recalcitrant, doubting Israel,” God “makes the necessary arrangements so that all of creation and all creatures will have what they need in order to live. . . . This is no absentee ruler, but one who plans ahead, thinks ahead and works ahead, so that the world of real possibility is ready and waiting in God’s enormous generosity” (p. 352–353).

And so to that enormous generosity, that rock. And that water. Water from the rock. Just as the rock that produces water is different from our well-ingrained perceptions of the omniscient, omnipotent God, so is our notion of holiness transformed by that very God who provides, who transforms, who offers refreshment in the midst of hunger and thirst, fully in the face of our recalcitrance.

On this day I can’t help but imagine the waters flowing from that rock to be baptismal waters. In A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean writes that “the river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops.”

And so, dear friends, we could not separate water from rock even if we wanted to. We could only be our truest selves as we embrace love, as we respond to the holy by living into our baptism promises. We might quarrel a bit, fuss a bit, whine a bit. God seems to tolerate that. But at the end of the day, fully in the face of our recalcitrance, God says to strike the rock, and we do, and what we need flows forth, and we drink and are sustained.

Maya Angelou’s great poem “On the Pulse of the Morning” reminds us of the rock’s invitation:

But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, / forcefully,
Come, you may stand upon my / Back and face your distant destiny,
But seek no haven in my shadow, / I will give you no hiding place down here.
You, created only a little lower than / The angels, have crouched too long in
The bruising darkness, / Have lain too long / Facedown in ignorance,
Your mouths spilling words / Armed for slaughter.
The rock cries out to us today; / You may stand upon me;
But do not hide your face.

And so if we could surely we would, stand on the rock where Moses stood. The holy rock, where providence is accessible, where grace is a gift. Holiness as all the ways that God responds to our wandering and gives us what we need—and to respond to that is life’s greatest joy, to drink that water gratefully.

One more story, a story of response, rightly and sweetly made. Several years ago, a church school teacher approached me after worship with several of the children in her class. And she gave me this. What’s that, I asked. Why, it’s a rock. A painted rock. And then this explanation: “We have just read the Palm Sunday story, and we heard funny words about even if all of us could not talk, could not shout, could not sing, that the very rocks themselves would start to sing and shout and say how much they loved Jesus. And so we have imagined what a singing rock would look like, and this is it.”

Shall we be singing rocks, standing where Moses stood, standing where those first followers stood, standing with the precious hope of children and the promise of perfect freedom. And to such holiness may we respond, that our lives would be made whole and that the world might hear our song. Amen.