We continue this morning through these weeks in the book of Exodus, tracing this journey that in so many ways is the creation story of God’s people and the prototype for the journey of faith, with each event or encounter in the physical world of the people illuminating some spiritual challenge or crisis that will feel familiar to all of us at some point. This is true even when we consider the length and direction of the journey itself.
I.
Scripture tells us the people journeyed for 40 years, a generation, before they were able to enter the Promised Land. And it’s reasonable to ask why it took them so long? If you look at a map of the area in question, it would be easy to trace a direct route from Egypt to Canaan, but that is not the route they chose—or rather, it’s not the route God chose for them. Why is that?
As we noted last week, one reason is that the real work of the Exodus was not getting the people out of Egypt, but getting Egypt out of the people—for them to shed all the impulses and reflexes and habits of bondage and take on a new posture in the world as free people. Before, they had to serve Pharaoh with his threats of violence and constant demand of production and toil. Now they serve God, who invites them into a covenant of love punctuated by a command to rest. This was the real work of the exodus: for the people to let go of these tools of survival so they take hold, abundantly and freely, to this new life with God. But the ancient rabbis understood just how difficult this can be. Those old habits die hard, and we often have somewhere deep within us an impulse for self sabotage. As the Apostle Paul would later put it, “I don’t understand my own actions—why I don’t do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” When given the choice between milk and honey and making bricks—which was the people’s toil in Egypt—we will often choose the bricks, for reasons we cannot easily explain.
And so the rabbis wondered if God may have chosen this long and winding route so that the people would not have been so easily tempted to return[1]—so they couldn’t have found their way back even if they wanted, like Hansel and Gretel without the breadcrumbs.
II.
The chapters that follow suggest God was probably correct in this assessment of the people’s nerve. The stories that follow the dramatic parting of the sea repeatedly tell of a people ruminating on their life back in Egypt and wondering if they might have been better off if they’d just stayed! Last week they were complaining about a lack of food, saying, “If only we had died by the hand of the lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread, for you’ve brought us out into this wilderness to kill us!” This leads God to provide quail in the evening and manna each morning, this strange flaky, bread-like substance that arrives with the dew. So strange is it that when the people see it they say in Hebrew, Man hu? Which means What is it? Which is where we get the word manna—from the Hebrew word for “what,” which is really more of a “why”— “What is this?” is really “Why have you given us this?”
And here we have a companion story a chapter later when the people complain that there is no water. Their concerns, again, are dramatic. “Why—which in Hebrew literally is ‘for what’—did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?”
And at this point, Moses has had it—in the vein of the parent who’s riding shotgun on a road trip with children. God is there in the driver’s seat moving the car forward, and here is Moses serving in the role in our family we call “the flight attendant.” He’s hearing the concerns of a restless, weary people in the backseat—restless and weary as he surely is himself—which come in the form of these petulant outbursts.
Moses tells God he’s had it, the people are about to start throwing their snack cups at him—I mean, they’re about to stone him. God tells Moses to go a little bit ahead of the people with his staff and a group from the elders, where he’ll find what must have been an unmistakable rock. God tells him to strike the rock with his staff and water will flow from it. Moses does this and the water flows as he was told it would. They call the place Massah and Meribah, which means “test” and “quarrel”—and this word translated “quarrel” is a strong word. It has a sense not just of being a complaint, but an honest to God disagreement, likely around the question we’re told they asked, “Is the Lord among us or not?”
And on the one hand, this question seems kind of strange given all that we’re told the people have witnessed: a parting of the sea allowing them to pass over to safety, quail miraculously appearing in their fit of hunger, bread arriving at their doorstep each morning. Now fresh water flowing from a rock at Moses’ command. What’s with them? we might ask. Surrounded by these miracles? Everything they need to make it through, falling out of the sky, landing within their reach. Why can’t they see it? But even as we say the words, we know this is the challenge each of us faces every day of our lives, that our own spiritual journey is meant to help us learn: to see how God is among us, providing for us, present to us, in so many countless ways. How manna arrives when we need it. Maybe not in the form we would want it—we might even look at it and say “What is this?” But it gets us through. How water arrives when we think we can’t be any drier.
III.
Reading the Exodus story as we receive it, even over a number of chapters, can give the sense that this is a fast-paced story, with one miraculous event after another. But we’re just told the highlights. If we you read closely, in many places we’re told how much time has passed between events. Three days between the passage through the sea and the first miracle of water. Maybe two months later come the quail and manna. Here, we’re told they “journeyed in stages at the Lord’s command,” dividing up this long journey into small pieces to help give a sense of order and structure amid the endless road ahead—again, family roadtrips are instructive. Hang tight, we’re almost to Meridian.
Time has collapsed in this story we’re told. Most of the journey is not worth reporting. The people are simply walking through the wilderness, doing whatever it is each of us does in the hour of a day. Putting down camp, staying there for a time, and then walking some more. And we say that the people are journeying through the wilderness, but when you are I imagine the wilderness we likely imagine dense forested areas. But that’s not the terrain they were in. In the geography of scripture, the wilderness is a desert. Wide open spaces. Barren nothingness as far as the eye can see. So for the people on this long journey, their physical environment is also their spiritual state: emptiness.[2]
This may feel familiar when you imagine your own seasons of wilderness. It may be the terrain you find yourself in right now. I think of the wilderness of grief; of this new and terrible, all-consuming loneliness. How that initial time of intense sorrow gives way to something more like numbness. Everything is open. I think of the wilderness of young adulthood, or other periods of life when we enter, or are often forced into, open terrains we did not ask for. When the structures that once gave us a sense of order and meaning are gone and we’re faced with what are either limitless possibilities or no possibilities and we can’t tell which it is. We think of chaos as a state of churning, directionless activity, but chaos, or disorder—a complete lack of order—can also be what theologian Avivah Zornberg calls “empty space.”
And it need not even be something as intense as grief or loss or turbulent change. It can be that feeling that may come upon us on any given Tuesday—the monotony of the week, the passing of days. Other times or seasons when we may feel what the French call ennui, a listlessness, a lack of direction or purpose, even a sense of boredom—which is so much a part of life. The poet John Berryman said, “Life, friends, is boring. [But] we mustn’t say so.”[3]
These seasons or periods of time can be painful. We will fight against them with every distraction we can find, and our world is full of them. But if we can fight off that urge, that impulse to distract or stimulate endlessly and reluctantly, the promise is that this empty, unstructured space can become a creative space. A place or a time when new possibilities can emerge.
Just this morning I saw an Op-Ed in the New York Times that I could only skim but will come back to, entitled, “In Defense of the Detour: On craft, AI, and what gets lost when we skip the slow part.”[4] The author works in design and raises the concern of what happens when we use these new technologies to speed up the creative process. The connections or possibilities we miss that only become available to us “when we lose our way,” as the author puts it.
And what of the design of our own life? How many of us can think to a detour we took, a change in direction, perhaps that we did not seek at the time, that opened up possibilities and introduced us to people we cannot imagine living without? A friend of mine who is a wonderful therapist, mostly working with teen boys and young adult men, told me once that two of the most important things we can do for our children is to teach them how to be sad and how to be alone—how to live in these empty spaces. How do we manage these spaces ourselves?
IV.
This is how the rabbis understood the people’s thirst on this journey through the desert: as a metaphor of the long periods in life when miracles are not so readily at hand.
The people were given these moments of transcendence—some of them dramatic—as they made their way through a vast, open wilderness. The challenge was learning how to hold onto the memory of those moments of transcendence to sustain them after they pass. To learn how to make their way through those long periods when there is no water. To find ways to take that water with them as they go. And perhaps even to pay attention to what is revealed in them only in their thirst. It’s a little thing that we might skip over. But when Moses comes to God on behalf of the people he says, “You’ve got to do something, the people are almost ready to stone me.” The people are standing there with rocks in their hands, and what does God tell Moses to do, but to go out ahead of them to a large rock—a rock from the same stones the Israelites are threatening to throw at Moses in their fear. It’s from that rock that water would be revealed. And so the thing the people reach for in their desperate thirst becomes the very thing that will save them.
“Is the Lord among us or not?” they ask. A question of doubt, yes. But an honest question that revealed a new answer.
We would like the road to be straight and clear, but so often it is crooked and clouded. We would want always to be full, but the work of our life is to see what is only possible in our emptiness. The joy of our faith, hidden as it often is, is to come to know the God who is with us through it all.
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[1] Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg makes this point in her commentary on Exodus, The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus, Chapter 4. Her work has greatly informed and enhanced this sermon.
2 Zornberg, again.
3 John Berryman, “Dream Song 14,” found in Zornberg, 234.
4https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/09/27/opinion/ai-art-creativity.html