Emerge: Letting Go
Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren
Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – October 29, 2023
Emerge: Letting Go – Exodus 16: 9-12
I had never rock-climbed before this past weekend. I was the only person in my family who hadn’t. My 11 and 9 year-olds scurried up the artificial rock face at the indoor gym and expertly belayed back down before I had even figured out how to clip in my harness. I was relieved to find that going up, while a workout for my under-used arms, wasn’t too bad on the beginner climbs I was trying. For me, it was the auto-belaying back down that was the problem.
If you’ve never rock-climbed before like me, let me explain. There’s a harness that goes around your waist and around each leg that you have to tighten securely around you. Then there’s a sturdy loop that clips into what’s called a belay line. In our case that Friday it went up the 10-30 foot wall to attach to a sort of mechanical pulley system called an auto-belay. Its job is not to hold you in place on the wall but rather to slow your fall to something safe and supposedly controlled. But the control part, it turns out, does depend somewhat on your keeping your body oriented to the wall and landing, if possible, on your feet.
Maybe you’re already imagining the movie montage some producers could have made of me landing haphazardly on my butt over and over again and then scraping the side of my body pathetically down the wall a few times, too. In fact I didn’t land successfully on my feet without falling down until the very last attempt of the day when I was so gassed I was barely making it up ten feet. But that one successful landing felt incredible after all I’d been through.
What didn’t feel incredible was the first time I realized I was 30 feet in the air and now, somehow, I needed to get back down. I started cheating, down-climbing, which you’re not supposed to do. The kids, watching of course, called me out. So, I stopped, and I froze. I clung to the holds in front of me, and I felt the sweat start to eke out. My heartbeat thumped through my whole body like someone had turned the bass up to 11 on my internal stereo.
I knew what I needed to do next. I needed to take both hands off the wall holds and let the belay slow my plummet to the ground. But I couldn’t. I didn’t trust it. Suddenly, in the air, that wall was my only means of salvation. I started wondering how long my arms would hold out, and if someone would bring me a snack, if I just stayed up there the rest of the time.
I don’t know that I was up there a long time but it felt like a long time. I heard my kids call up from the ground, “You can do it, Mom! Let go! Just let go!” I don’t know if it was my love for them or my spite at not wanting to be shown up by my preteens but those were the words that did it for me. “You can do it, Mom. Just. Let go.”
It wasn’t pretty how I got down from there. But I did then. And of course, being my overly analytic self, I saw the metaphor pretty clearly. Because there are a lot of other things in my life that I’m clinging to that aren’t actually helping me. Sometimes it’s obvious and sometimes it’s less obvious that what I’m depending on to save me is actually my very undoing.
Maybe you’ve got your own walls you’re clinging to. Whether it’s overwork, over worry, perfectionism, people pleasing, judgmental attitudes, hoarding of any kind, control over a certain situation, or the last illusion of your independence, so many of us have so many things we’d rather trust than God.
The ancient Hebrew people in today’s story were not in a well-lit gym with remixed 90s music cheerfully playing from the speakers, their worst concern losing face in front of their children. They were in the wilderness, and their worst concern was starvation. They had fled Egyptian slavery, but they were starting to reconsider the wisdom of all that, given their situation of being far from civilization and any obvious source of food or water.
They complained to their human leaders, Aaron and Moses, “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 have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.”
They were understandably afraid, upset, and unsure if they were safe. What kind of God would put them in such a situation? What kind of God indeed?
In Exodus God is a very interesting character with wide-ranging human emotions, including jealousy and wrath. In Exodus, God hardens Pharaoh's heart and either plans or allows for the deaths of many Egyptian babies. In Exodus 15, God is even described as a warrior. That was a common motif at the time with the variation that this God was a warrior for the impoverished rather than the powerful. It’s an important distinction but still this God is the one who makes things happen for good or for ill. In this understanding of God there’s a pretty strong correlation between things going well for you and God taking a shine to you, as well as the reverse. If life is hard for you then you can be sure you’ve done something wrong by God. It’s an ancient idea of a higher power, and it’s one that’s still very prevalent today among various religious traditions.
I understand why humans would write about such a God. It’s a way to give life meaning, to explain the unexplainable, and maybe a way even to control each other if you can be convinced that I have lots of power because God loves me more than you. But I don’t believe in that God. Or at the very least I can’t trust that God. If that God is my belay line, no thank you. I will find another way off this wall.
But there are other understandings of God in Exodus and throughout the Bible. God describes Godself to Moses as the Great I AM who always has been and always will be. God is very concerned about the enslaved Hebrew people. God longs for their freedom. God hears the complaints of the people in this story and provides them with the food and water they need.
One common interpretation of this story is that God is one on whom we can depend. God is the one we can trust no matter what. I wonder how true that is for you, and what kind of God it is you’re depending on.
Personally, I no longer depend on a God who will make everything go my way. I’ve let go of that. That kind of God certainly hasn’t earned my trust. Because the world, while not too terribly unkind to me, is not nearly kind enough to too many people I love. No, the only God I can practice trusting in would be the ineffable heartbeat of this incredibly blessed and broken creation. That heartbeat always has been and always will be. That God is more a force of nature than something humanoid, but it looks like us in that we bear the unbearable image of its inexhaustible, overwhelming love.
What else is there really to trust in? Nothing else remains. Even these bones that bear us up will rot in the ground before that well of love that ties the universe together will ever run dry. That’s what there will always be enough of. Even when the well dries up and the bread runs out, the universe will be made of love, and despite the reality of all that troubles us, we can trust in the rhythm of that eternal heartbeat.
About the mysterious manna in the wilderness, Moses told them what to gather: only enough for each day. Some of the people, being people, of course tried to gather more than they needed. Because what’s safer than having enough for today but having enough for tomorrow, too? I can’t fault the logic. But guess what? It got wormy and moldy like the rice and beans I thought I so smartly hoarded in 2020.
They had to learn the hard way how to trust that tomorrow there would be enough and the day after and the day after and the day after there would be enough. What does that mean to us in a country where affluence and lack live side-by-side? What if tomorrow there’s not enough regardless of how much I have today?
At least if that’s our question we’re starting to talk about the things that really matter. Who has enough to eat and how can we make it so that more people are included in that? Who is it that knows they are loved and how can we make it so that more of us know that, too? What keeps us from having enough and sharing enough and loving enough? Maybe that’s what we can let go of. Maybe that holds us back from what we don’t really need any more. Maybe that’s what we can set down. Maybe that’s what we can ask forgiveness for. Maybe that’s what we can let go of and find ourselves free to trust in what really matters and in the one who will really keep us safe in the end.
Like a hermit crab putting down a too tight old shell
like a craftsperson turning old t-shirts into a new quilt,
like a butterfly breaking free of its bonds,
or like a rock climber safely falling to the ground,
maybe we too can practice trusting
that letting go of all we do not need
and opening up instead to the sweet grace and love of God
is what will really set us free now and evermore.
May it be so. Amen.
