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.