Comfort or Trust

How many of you have a routine that you follow on a daily or weekly basis? You have places that you go, people you see, and things that you do. I think to a degree we all have our routines that we get into and they serve as a comfortable basis for our everyday life. It is when those routines get disrupted that we then get put off because of it. Or another similar example is going places and doing things out of the ordinary. I personally am not a big fan of driving places that I have never been to before especially when it is something important like an appointment. I know it’s been a year since we moved down here but there are still plenty of areas that I have not been to Mesa and finding them isn’t always fun.

I remember the first time I went to get my blood drawn so that my doctor could look over my results, and even though I had GPS, I panicked becuase my GPS said I had arrived at the lab but I did not see a building with the name of the lab on it. So I parked and walked around and eventually found where the lab was. Now had the GPS taken me to the other entrance of the parking lot I would have seen it from the road, but the route it took me brought me behind it and other buildings so I ended up parking on the side. There are so many different things in life that take us out of our comfort zones and out of our ordinary paces of life and sometimes that can be hard and it can be harder for certain people.

Or to give a more concrete example that relates to what I want to say about the Israelites is the crisis that is happening in Ukraine. Millions of people left the country after Russia invaded. They did not expect or want that to happen but it happened to them. It disrupted the routines of their lives and displaced them as people in foreign lands. And now that Russia is mobilizing their citizens a similar thing is happening as mostly men of fighting age are doing whatever they can to leave the country. Everything they had known about what their lives were like has been completely disrupted and they now have to learn what life in another country will be like. Many of them in both circumstances didn’t have any time to do anything other than grab the most essential items and leave.

This is what has happened during the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt. As we recall from another part of the story, God, through Moses, tells them to eat in a hurry and be prepared to travel with sandals on and a staff in their hand. In other words, it’s time to move. Pharaoh had agreed to let them go so now it’s time to go. They too were people being displaced from their land. Of course we could say that it was a good thing, because they were slaves in Egypt, but you have to realize that they were leaving everything they had known. Exodus 12:40 tells us that they had lived in Egypt for a total of 430 years. Whether or not they had been slaves that entire time, I think we can all agree, that to some degree, Egypt had become a home for them. Before Joseph’s brothers had entered Egypt and they settled here they were even foreigners in the land of Canaan where they had come from. So if we look at it from that perspective, Egypt had really become the only home they had know for the longterm, and obviously it was the only home this current generation of people had known.

The reason I’m really driving this idea of living in Egypt and leaving their comforts behind is because I want us to understand how incredibly hard it must have been for them. Yes they were slaves, but they had food, and water, and the land produced plentifully. It was the life that they knew and as we know well it is hard for the majority of people to up and leave the world and life they know. While the people had come to believe in God through Moses’ signs he had done I have to believe it still wasn’t easy. In fact we even get the Israelites saying that very thing as they are fleeing Egypt. They see the Egyptian army coming with all the chariots and soldiers and they don’t want to die, they want to go back to Egypt and work as slaves instead of dying in the desert.

The reason I believe they feel this way is that, yes they had come to believe in God through Moses, but that faith and that relationship is brand new for them. They are traveling into uncertainty and what they feel in that moment is the certainty of death at the hands of the Egyptians. They wish for the comfort of their homes even if it means being in slavery at the hands of the Egyptians. We see that later after the escape through the sea they say it again. They are hungry and remember being full in Egypt to which God sends manna to the earth. Then in Numbers they complain about eating too much manna and remember again all the wonderful food they ate: Numbers 11: 5 “5 We remember the fish we ate in Egypt for free, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic.” Even though freedom and a relationship with God was what they had, it was different from their normal life, from their comfort zone and they had a hard time dealing with it.

Through it all, though, God stays steadfast with God’s people. God was there with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and had given God’s covenant, God’s promise, with them, and God will continue to fulfill the promise of the covenant with their ancestors, the ones who God is now bringing through the sea into freedom. Even though the journey will be hard and will test that relationship between God and the Israelites, God keeps the covenant promise to bless them and to bless all people through them.

That same promise continues with us today, and so does the struggle. Do we trust in God’s promise to bless us and bless all people of the world through us, or do we want to stick to what is comfortable and enjoy the meats, drinks, and comforts of what we have? What is incredible is that no matter how we answer God will never stop fulfilling God’s covenant promise to the world. God will never stop promising to bless us. God will never stop loving us. God will never stop doing what is best for us even if it brings us out of our comfort zones and into a world that we don’t recognize and into parts of the world we have never been to before because that is where we belong. We belong in the world to be a blessing to the world. No matter how nice and comfortable the old life might have seemed we have a God who works tirelessly to show us a new way to live, a better way to live. A way that may not be easy, a way that may make us want to run back to the life we used to live, a way that may make us wonder, at times, if God is sending us to die alone in the desert. Yet in reality God knows what is best for us and that perhaps the old comfortable way needs to die for us to live and grow and be that blessing to another person, or people, or to help that next generation know and see God’s love the way that we came to see and know God.

God will do whatever it takes to make God’s love known, and as Christians we see that abundantly clear in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Who in our Gospel today actually fled to Egypt in order to live so that he could return one day to die for our sake. So again, I say that no matter how uncomfortable it may seem in the moment, God will stop at nothing to free us and save us from anything in this life that keeps us from the love and freedom that only God can offer. Amen.