A Fourth Church Sermon by Rocky Supinger

Sunday, October 2, 2022 | 4:00 p.m.

World Communion Sunday

Rocky Supinger
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 114
Exodus 15:5–7, 10–14, 21–29

Over the next several weeks in this service, Nancy and I are going to be sharing from some of the foundational narratives of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament. These stories are part of our story as Christians; they’re in our Bible.

We’re starting today with the ending of the story of the Exodus. A little refresher will help before we hear the story, I think.

At the end of the book of Genesis, Jacob (that is, Israel) and his whole family have moved to Egypt. When we turn the page to Exodus, we learn that a new king has since come to power who has enslaved the Israelites, all of Jacob’s descendants. God calls forth a leader, Moses, to demand that king, the Pharaoh, let the people go so that they may worship God in the land God promised their ancestors. Pharoah refuses, and a long struggle ensues that culminates in a series of plagues against the Egyptians, and Pharoah finally relents. The people gather their things and make for the desert with God going ahead of them in a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.

That’s where we begin our story.

It was March 20, 2020, when the Governor of Illinois first ordered residents to stay at home and nonessential businesses to close to slow the spread of COVID-19. Today is October 2, 2022. Nearly thirty-one months have elapsed since that order, more than two-and-a-half years now, and COVID is still not really over.

The threat level in the city of Chicago is currently low, and that’s good. Cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are all trending downward, thank God. Millions of people have been vaccinated and boosted two times. Masks aren’t required in public places, and they haven’t been for a while. In a lot of meaningful ways it feels like we are free of COVID.

But we’re not.

But I came into this space on Wednesday morning for our time of morning prayer, a small gathering of people—four, maybe five people—who pray for the members of this congregation alphabetically over the course of the year, and I wasn’t wearing a mask; I’m not wearing a mask when I’m in the building here most of the time. I sat down and greeted the small group, and the person sitting next to me interrupted me: “Where’s your mask?”

I looked around our small circle of chairs to realize that everyone was wearing one. It dawned on me that the people in this gathering have health complications—cancer, for example—that require a higher level of vigilance than I have been practicing. Embarrassed, I felt my pockets but didn’t find a mask. I actually had to walk downstairs to the security desk by the Chestnut Street entrance to retrieve a surgical mask from a box there.

I spent the rest of the day upset about it, about the way I’m going about my life free from worry about COVID (I’ve had it, and I got my second booster last month), while many, many people are required to hang on to a very real level of fear about it and probably will for the rest of their lives.

I think we’ve all been learning these past two-and-a-half years that some of the most significant struggles we face endure past the point we think they will.

The ancient Israelites in our scripture for today most certainly were learning that, as the struggle against Pharaoh, against enslavement and oppression in Egypt, is not over when they think it is.

It was already over. The story said so. In Exodus 13 we read, “At the end of 430 years, on that very day, all the companies of the Lord went out from the land of Egypt.” It’s over. After generations of misery, it’s over. A series of plagues culminating in the death of all of Egypt’s firstborn is more than the Pharaoh can withstand, and he’s finally ready to put an end to Israel’s enslavement. All the companies of the Lord went out from the land of Egypt. It was over.

Except that it’s not, because as he has done time and again throughout this struggle, the Pharaoh changes his mind. Maybe his hubris won’t let him accept defeat. Or maybe the few short days the Israelites have been gone have made it clear just how diminished the empire’s economy is without its free labor source. Or maybe the international community is taking notice of Egypt’s newly revealed vulnerability and Pharaoh needs a show of force to restore perceptions of his military’s might. Whatever the reason, Pharaoh’s mind is changed, so the exodus is definitely not over.

In fact, it’s about to get a lot worse. When we think the struggle is over and the victory already won, we let our guard down, and the powers we designated to the loser’s column of history make their way back, stronger than they were before. In our own nation’s history, the decades following the emancipation proclamation featured some of the most evil expressions of racial hatred and violence in our history. We see it over and over again: the powers that seek to subjugate and dominate do not accept conventional defeat. They often come back worse than before.

The story is very detailed about the force Pharaoh takes into the desert: all of it. Every chariot. The entire Egyptian army. This isn’t going to be a reclamation mission. It’s going to be a rampage.

So the Israelites are perfectly justified in their terror and in crying out to God. As people of faith will do—must do—in every situation of distress and danger, the freed Hebrews pinned between the sea and the full force of the Egyptian army let loose with a lament. The story doesn’t quote them, but the word they probably shouted was “Hosanna!”—God save us!

This is a cry that we should be well versed in as Christians. We sing it as part of our Communion celebration each week—Hosanna in the highest! It rehearses a part of Jesus’ Passion story, the entrance to Jerusalem when the crowds laid down palm branches and shouted hosanna to Jesus as if he were some kind of military deliverer. But I think it should be a more regular part of our faith practice than it is.

Because though we don’t like to admit it—I don’t like to admit it—we are in need of God’s saving help all the time. We face things individually that are too much for us: struggles in relationships and jobs, money and family and health. We face things collectively that outstrip our capacity to cope—climate change, war, misinformation, and, yes, COVID. A friend of mine said to me the other day that she doesn’t think we have even begun to reckon with what COVID has done to us, and I think she’s right.

The life we live today puts pressures and strains on all of us that are more than we can bear, and it is the right thing to do to cry out to God for help regularly. In fact, often it feels like the only thing we can do. The writer Anne Lamott simplifies prayer down to three words: help, thanks, and wow. Help is the first one, and it’s probably the one some of us have the hardest time saying.

There is nothing for a people pinned between death and the deep blue sea to do but to cry out to the one we know—the one we have known as our creator and our sustainer and our redeemer, the one who was for us and is still for us, all advancing evidence to the contrary.

The people cried out to the Lord. They also had some words for Moses. As they will do on the other side of this sea, the people in distress lay the blame on their leader. In the wilderness it will be about food and water. Backed up against the sea it’s about the cavalry bearing down on them: “What have you done to us?” they demand.

Yet the leader of the people does not rise to meet their accusation. Moses knows the terror driving the people right now, and he knows it personally. He will not dismiss their frantic pleas as complaining or ingratitude. Instead, he will speak the truth of God to those terrorized by the powers that be. To a people caught in the teeth of the empire, Moses has a gospel word: The. Lord. Will. Fight. For. You.

This is the word of the Lord.

There is so much about this story that feels like liturgy, like words of worship pronounced by generation after generation of fearful, faithful women and men in the face of unspeakable distress, and, to me, these six words feel that way more than any other. More than “Don’t be afraid”; more than “Stand your ground”; more than “Keep still.”

“The Lord will fight for you” rings for me like the confession of the oppressed of the ages, beginning at the Red Sea and echoing across centuries and continents. These are the words that keep light alive in the darkest of nights. Mississippi 1955. Germany 1938. In courtrooms and prison cells, at hospital bedsides and on school playgrounds. Everywhere children cower in fear; anywhere the poor are ignored; to communities abandoned to violence by the disinterest of their neighbors, the people who know this promise must speak it for those who do not know it and cannot claim it for themselves.

To say “The Lord will fight for you” is to say that there is more at work in the workings of the world than power and expediency and economic growth. God is at work here, and God is working on behalf of the ones who have only their lives to lose. The Egyptians are right to say the Lord is fighting against them, and we are right to say the Lord is fighting against any today whose end is destruction, and God forbid that is ever us.

“The Lord will fight for you” is a promise, and at times it is the only thing we have.

“The Lord will fight for you” is gospel.

It is the gospel, then, that moves the feet of this people. The words of this promise turn the feet of the terrorized away from that which threatens them and towards a way out, though before the promise there was no way at all. So the Israelites walked on dry ground through the sea, and the waters formed a wall for them on their right hand and on their left.

There was no way out until God made a way. But even then, people have to shake off fear and move into the way God has made; God is not going to pick them up and deposit them on the other side. The way is there; it’s not waiting on belief to become real. It’s real already, but we have to walk into it.

This feels like an important word for us today. Lots of people I talk with express something between malaise and dread at the state of the world today, and they wonder if there is a way out of it. Not just the past two-and-a-half years, but the past six or seven years have seemed to reveal things about ourselves and the world that are unsettling and that have shaken our sense of what is possible. There’s a tentativeness you can feel when talking with people about the future. I feel it acutely around young people, and the teachers I know say the same thing. Maybe it’s that we’re afraid to commit to big things right now.

But the Israelites walked into the sea on dry ground. For those of us gathering in a church on a Sunday afternoon, this is our story. We not only tell this story, but we live it. Some weeks just getting here, given all the things working against our gathering together, feels like walking into the sea on dry ground. And once we are here we reenact this story in song and prayer and gestures of greeting, because where there was once no way for us as a people to be together and now there is a way.

And so we are walking into it week by week. With our presence and our singing, our writing down our names on friendship pads, our giving, our pledging to the future ministry of the church (even just one year), our staying for a cup of coffee after the service—all of these are steps into the dry ground of the sea.

In this service each week a little bit of our walking is done in a circle around this table, when we take Communion. The practice of Communion is rooted in this story of exodus and deliverance. It’s the part of the story right before the one we heard this afternoon, where the Passover meal and the feast of unleavened bread are instituted to commemorate the Israelites hurried departure from Egypt (unleavened because the bread didn’t have time to rise). And it was a Passover meal that Jesus celebrated with his disciples when he instituted the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, commanding us to eat and drink to remember him

We are commanded to undertake this remembrance of Jesus because the exodus still isn’t all the way over and we still need the nourishment of God’s presence on our way. Part of that nourishment is the bread and the cup, and part of it is one another. We do this each week in this space to remind us of that, though the people change week to week. You may have never been here before today. You are just as much a part of what’s happening here; God is fighting for you, making a way for you, for us, too. Amen.