Lenten Place – Massah and Meribah

March 11, 2026 The Rev. Erik Parker Leave a comment

Lenten Devotions

Massah and Meribah

READING: Exodus 17:1-7

Our Lenten Journey brings us today to Massah and Meribah, a stop in the wilderness. There the Israelites have wandered and found themselves wanting, hungry and thirsty.

This journey began in Eden. In the Garden of Eden, there was an abundance. Food and water enough for all – for Adam and Eve and all the creatures of God’s making to have enough. But Eden was not enough, Adam and Eve sought to be like God. In their reaching Eden came to an end. But God did not send them away without a promise that they would not be alone.

Then in Ur, Abram and Sarai were called to get up and go. To a land that God would show them, to become parents to a nation, to be God’s people from then on. But the covenant of God’s trifold promises was not enough, and Abraham and Sarah’s descendants consistently fell from God.

Now the Israelites, after escaping slavery in Egypt because of God’s promises and leading, because of the prophet Moses that God sent, are now wandering in the Wilderness. But they long to go back, back to Egypt and the known reality of slavery over the unknown of the wilderness. They long to go back to Ur, back to before they were called to get up and go. Back to Eden, where they were not dependent on God’s providence, where the milk and honey flowed.

Looking and longing for where we once were is a very human emotion. Wanting to go back is the source of nostalgia, the source of grief, the source of our regret. The places and people, the things and experiences that we have left behind are often better in memory. Wanting to go back and experience them again is a feeling we all know well.

It isn’t just that familiarity brings us comfort, even when the familiar is not comfortable

It isn’t just that the known brings us anxiety, even when what lays ahead might be better for us, might be full of promise.

It is that we are people of story. We understand the world through our stories, we make sense of our lives through the narratives we tell, the history that defines us. Our stores are anchored to our past. It is the reason we tell the same stories again and again when they are our favourites. It is the reason we follow a known liturgy in worship, and in the hockey arena, and in the drive-thru line at Tim’s and in the Monday morning staff meetings at work and in our bedtime routines.

Stories help us make sense of the world; stories make the past into the present and into the future.

Which is why God’s promises and call are so scary. They are not yet our stories. They things yet to be, possibilities and risks unknown. Slavery wasn’t good, but at least it isn’t dying of thirst in the desert the Israelites complain to Moses. A refrain we have repeated again and again throughout the ages.

And while stories of the past are so powerful, so integral to how we understand the world and our communities, our families and ourselves… they cannot give us water when we are lost and thirsty in the desert.

This is what God knows about us. That we are people who need a story to make sense of things, AND people who water. New living water from the rock. The rock of Meribah and Massah.

That is why God’s stories are different. God’s stories help us to make sense of our world. God’s stories bring familiarity when we need it.

But God’s story is not the story of the past.

God’s story is the story of the future – promise and hope.

God’s story is the story of now – love, mercy and grace that meets us here and now. Water from the rock and a new story to tell.

The stories we tell of God are stories that help us see that God’s people have been where we are before and remind us that God is with us now. God is in our world, our lives, our communities and families now. And God is bringing us through the unknown and uncertain.

The Israelites needed to be reminded of the present and future promise that God gave them in Egypt – rescue from slavery.

The promise God gave them at Ur – a land, descendants and a relationship.

The promise God gave them in Eden – that they would not go into the world alone.

The promise that God gives us here now – that in the Christ to come, there is forgiveness, salvation and new life.

Tonight’s stop at Masseh and Meribah quenches the thirst of Israelites; it quenches our thirst. But it also gives God’s new story of promise and hope to tell… that God is with us, showing us the way through to the other side of wilderness, to new life in Christ.

Pastor Thoughts, Theology & Culture

Lenten Place – Ur

March 4, 2026 The Rev. Erik Parker Leave a comment

Lenten Devotions – Week 2

Genesis 12:1-4a

Our journey through the Lenten wilderness has brought us to important places along our way. We began our mid-week stops with the Garden of Eden last week, where Adam and Eve ate from the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil to become like God. But there they were sent on their way with God’s promise that they would not leave Eden alone, but that with them God would go into our much less than Edenic world.

Today, we begin in the oldest part of the Bible. It is here in Genesis twelve, in the land of Ur, that we find Abram and Sarai. Ur was in southern Mesopotamia, the fertile flood plains of civilization around modern Iraq today, just to the West and North of Israel.

Abram’s lineage is traced back to Shem. Shem, one of Noah’s three sons, Noah who, with his family in the Ark became the second Adam. The second ‘first’ human of creation, as God started over, blotting out all the wickedness of the earth with the flood.

The call of Abram and Sarai is an unexpected one. The Lord meets this couple, who already had a life and kindred in the city of Haran, in the land of Ur. Abram and Sarai are called by God to give it all up and go. To get up and go to an unknown place, to a land that they did not know but that would only become known in the future.

This call from The Lord is by no means an easy call to follow. Yet, this call sets the stage for the people of Israel and their relationship with the Lord God. There is a signal in this call to give up Sarai and Abram’s country, and father’s house, and kindred that the life of faith and obedience might regularly demand us to leave behind comfort and certainty.

But Abram and Sarai faithfully go. Not knowing where the Lord God will send them.

Eventually, Abram and Sarai will become the parents of Israel. Their sons, Isaac and Ishmael, and grandsons, Jacob and Esau, and their 12 great-grandsons, including Joseph and his dream coat, will eventually establish the nation of the Israelites. The people who are rooted and formed in the call of The Lord to get up and go.

But God’s call is not just one that makes demands of Abram and Sarai, that makes demands of us.

With God’s call comes a covenant. A trifold promise. The Lord promises to Abraham first land. Not just any land, but land that God will provide – promised land. Land that it takes Moses to lead God’s people to. A place to call home, a place where God’s people belong.

The second promise is that God will make of Abram and Sarai a great nation, that God will bless them with many descendants. With offspring more numerous than the stars in the sky. People who will claim that they have Abram and Sarai, or Abraham and Sarah as their ancestors.

Finally, the third promise that God makes is that Abram and Sarai will be blessed. Blessed means that they will carry with them the presence of God, that they will not go alone, but that God goes with them. Just like Adam and Eve who left Eden and God went with them, Abram and Sarai leave Ur with God along for the journey.

However, these three promises are not just any promises. They are not promises that are just for Abram and Sarai; these promises are given or all of God’s people. These three promises become the Abrahamic Covenant – the promise that is the foundation of God’s relationship with the Hebrew people throughout the Old Testament. It is a birthright that Isaac was given over Ishmael, the promise that Jacob stole from Esau, the promise that Joseph rescued from certain doom when he brought his family from famine and into the land of Egypt. The promise that Moses than carried with the Israelites into the exodus and eventually almost to the promised land.

They are the promises that Jesus would have learned as a young boy studying the Torah, listening at the feet of his parents at Shabbat, from the Rabbis in the synagogue, from the priests in the temple. The promise that the Pharisees threw in his face when he promised a new covenant.

It is the promise that becomes the through-line from Genesis to the end of the Old Testament, and again from the Gospels to Revelation. The promise that still defines the people of Israel to this day.

It is the promise that Jesus adds onto with the New Covenant of the cross, the new covenant that we receive in Bread and Wine, the New Covenant that defines us, the Body of Christ. That we too are given a place in God’s Kingdom, that we too are part of God’s family, that God is our God and we are God’s people.

From humble beginnings in Ur, two faithful people were called to get up and go, to follow God’s call out into the world. With them went a promise, a covenant, that has carried from there to us, reminding us that in this world we are not alone but always going with God.