Now some of you may wonder why I need to tell the story of Moses this morning. It's increasingly clear in Methodist churches that we have a mix of people who grew up in our Sunday Schools and people who have never heard these stories. So all the stories need to be fully told so that we can all be on the same page.
Moses had a tough start in life. The story of Moses in the bulrushes is taught in a candy-coated version to children in Sunday School. Many of us remember using crayons to color pictures of Moses being put in the water by his worried mother and subsequently being picked up by Pharaoh's daughter. We were told to use plain brownish crayons for Moses's mother and the sparkly colors for Pharaoh's daughter. We seldom go beyond that nice version when we grow up. The real story is not nice and sparkly. So I'm going to tell the dark version of the Moses story this morning. Be prepared. It's not the story you grew up with.
The Moses story begins with a sickening exercise in religious practice. In Moses' day, children sometimes were used as human sacrifices to the gods. The Egyptians were no exception. Forget what you see on the History channel about how wonderful the Egyptians were. They sacrificed babies to the god of the Nile. Not a nice thing to think about, but it's an important part of the Moses story.
The Egyptians put the babies in little boats and floated them down the river. I don't want to think about what happened to them after that. Does the little boat sound familiar? That's what Moses' own mother did to him. Why? She had no choice.
The Hebrews in Egypt were a subjugated people. The Egyptians had conducted campaigns in what we now think of as the Holy Land. They took many captives with them back to Egypt as slaves. The slave holders feared their slaves, as so often happens. And the leadership of Egypt decided that they could control the slave population and make the river god happy at the same time by making their slaves sacrifice their boy children to the Nile. The people who first heard this story were more familiar with all this. In their imaginations, they saw the horrific sight of the Nile filled with little boats carrying crying babies to their deaths - all this to the wailing sound of their mothers.
The story of Moses begins with that image. Amidst the boats was one carrying a little boy who was already 3 months old. And this one got lucky. He was spotted by the Pharaoh's daughter, who ordered the boat retrieved and the boy saved.
In our coloring books we typically see the Pharoah's daughter depicted as a smiling teenager. But I think that her face should be drawn with defiance. She had to have known that a great injustice was being committed by the older generation. And what teenager has not challenged her or his parents at one time or another?
In our story, we are told that the daughter rescuted the boy and paid for Moses' own mother to care for him. We are also told that Moses was brought up as if he were the son of Pharaoh's daughter. I don't know what she said to her father. But she must have been tough. She had her way.
Moses had to have grown up conflicted. On the one hand, he had it made. He was adopted as the grandson of the Pharaoh. So he was rich and connected and living in the most sophisticated city on earth. We don't know the specific details but we can guess. He was like the people the New York Times social pages describe as the pinnacle: "young, rich, and social in New York," except that he lived in Egypt, of course. He had the best wheels, the best friends, and could party all he wanted.
But you get the feeling when you read this story that he wasn't happy. We've all known or known of wealthy teenagers who grow up with every advantage but who are deeply unhappy and one day loose it and disappear. Maybe they get in trouble and can't face the old man. Maybe they want to see what the so-called real world is all about. Maybe they are tired of being confined in the world of opulence. Maybe they become idealistic and can't stand the compromises that their parents make. Sometimes they run away when they see how horribly adults treat each other. And they hope that they can find a place where people treat each other like human beings. I think that this is what happened to Moses.
Moses is a young man, probably still in his teens when he sees a Hebrew slave being treated badly. Moses knows that he, too, is a Hebrew. But it's probably hard to think of that most days. I doubt if he was ever completely comfortable with the stories he heard about his rescue from the Nile. After all, in the flush of idealism, a teenager like Moses was going to wonder how a good mother, his birth mother, would put him in that little boat in the first place. She had to have known, he must have thought, that her little baby would drown or be eaten by crocodiles. Didn't she love him? How could she have done it? Shouldn't she have protected him with her life? That's how a teenager thinks.
These thoughts would have conflicted with his love for the woman who gave him life and after the event brought him up. He would have been reminded of this conflict every time he looked at his mother. He might have entered the Pharaoh's palace with relief, thinking that he was leaving his Hebrew life behind.
His mother's guilt had to have been horrible. But this is not her story.
Moses, in my view, was a teenager with strong conflicted feelings, the kind of feelings that lie just under the surface. Many young people like this have bad tempers, especially when events remind them of their conflicts. And our young idealistic conflicted teenager witnessed an event one day that pushed him over the edge.
He saw, we are told, a Hebrew being beaten by an Egyptian. He explodes in anger and kills the Egyptian. We are given no other record of his having murdered people before or after this, so what happened? We don't know what he was doing earlier that day, but we know enough to give a plausible answer. In that moment he must have seen a representation of the conflict that he felt inside. Slaves were often, we can suppose, treated poorly by their Egyptian masters. Moses, himself, probably participated in grinding Hebrews under the Egyptian heels. But this moment was different because the slave was so completely helpless. The Hebrew was at "hard labor" which meant that he was probably weak, exhausted, and completely at the mercy of his Egyptian master. The slave was as helpless as a little boy in a boat on a Nile filled with crocodiles. And the Egyptian's cruelty was as malicious and deadly as the people who condemned all those babies to death.
Moses snapped. Anger born of repressed conflict exploded into violence that cost the Egyptian his life.
People found out and Moses had to disappear. His Hebrew and Egyptian mothers must have cried their hearts out. He crossed the badlands of northern Sinai and kept on going until he met a girl.
This part of the story has a familiar sound to it if you are or have been the parent of a troubled young man. You hope that he will meet girls who will treat him well. And you especially hope that he will meet one who will help straighten him out.
Moses meets a girl, seven girls actually, damsels in distress. Now admittedly this next part seems as far fetched as the parting of the red sea. The seven lovely young things are at a well and they are being harassed by some thuggish shepherds and Moses has this big fight with them (Hollywood loves this part because they make Charlton Heston look a bit like Bruce Lee) and runs them off. And lo and behold, the grateful girls are the daughters of the local big wig named Jethro who doubled as the local preacher!
Guys, do you remember being a teenager and having to explain and justify to your father why you got in trouble? I would never in a million years have tried this one out on my father. Fortunately, Moses's family was back in Egypt so Moses didn't have to explain this to anyone. He just hung out with the preacher's daughters and ended up marrying one of them.
Now all this so far is important. But it's what happens next that we want to focus on this morning. Recent excavations of the area clearly show that Jethro's people were dyed-in-the-wool monotheists who hated carved images. They had a holy mountain somewhere nearby. They had strong feelings about honesty and honoring mother and father. They also communicated by writing on stone. These were people who lived on the fringes of civilized society. But they had a code of behavior that was uncomplicated by the kind of urban sophistication that Moses grew up in.
Moses stayed there in Midian, lived a simple life, and tended Jethro's sheep. Moses married a good woman. And Moses got religion. And the religion that Moses got would never justify the murder of men or babies. The religion that Moses got would resist oppression and terror of any kind. The religious man that Moses became would risk everything to bring his people out of captivity. Moses would stop running away from his inner conflicts and fears and return to Egypt.
And when Moses convinced the Pharaoh to let his people go, Moses would keep the urbanized Egyptian cultured Hebrews trekking across the badlands until they were ready to accept the codes of Midian, the codes given by God himself, the Ten Commandments.
On the way out of Egypt, he and the Hebrews would learn many things. Among them would be a lesson that has parallels with our Gospel lesson this morning. Moses, the Bible tells us, took his people to edge of an impassible sea. Pharaoh had changed his mind about letting the Hebrews go and was with his army in close rapid pursuit. Moses was told by God to part the waters by raising his staff. He did so and the Hebrews escaped. There is a wonderful rabbinical teaching story that fleshes out this event. It is said that the Hebrews gathered at the sea, Moses raised his staff and nothing happened! The Hebrews looked to Moses and he raised his staff again. Again nothing happened. The Egyptian army was close on their heels now. There was no time left. And a single Hebrew, the story goes, stepped into the sea. At that moment the sea parted.
A journey cannot go forward without the first step. There comes a time when we have to move forward with courage and faith, when we have to make a decision as to whether we believe in God's promises or not.
It was at a similar moment that Jesus and Peter had the exchange that is recorded in today's gospel. The chain of events started with Herod brutally executing John the Baptist during his birthday party. Jesus took this as a warning, and like Moses, took off to the badlands or as Matthew calls it, "a solitary place." Like Moses, his problems follow him and soon Jesus anonymity is broken by the arrival of thousands of hungry and sick people. Next day there are reports that Jesus healed the sick and fed the hungry with an impossibly small amount of food.
Then Jesus leaves and invites Peter to walk with him on the water. Peter, perhaps the most complicated and fascinating of his disciples, has no problem walking on the water. But he becomes afraid of the wind and starts to sink. Jesus rescues him.
In today's gospel, Jesus and his disciples have trekked further away from Herod to the territory of King Phillip, Caesarea Philippi. Jesus asks if the disciples know what the rumors are about him. We don't know for sure, but perhaps Jesus wants to know if the coast is clear. He is told, John the Baptist, Elijah or Jeremiah - three dead prophets - answers that are open to debate. But the next answer is not debatable. Jesus asks Peter a question that he asks us this morning, "Who do you say I am?"
Peter in a short time would become the church's first leader, a new Moses. But at that moment, he was not Moses, he was more like that first Hebrew at the Red Sea, the one who jumped in the water. He was ready to take his first step into a life of faith in Christ. This first step, this first acknowledgment of "Christ, the living son of God" parted the seas of doubt. And this is why Jesus took that moment to describe his action as a "rock upon which his church would be built."
This morning, each of us stands at the edge of a sea that only faith can part. Our first step of faith in Christ is also a first step towards reclaiming faith in humanity, something that we have to have if we are going to do anything about the evils of this world. We have to have faith in men and women. We have to have hope in a better future. We have to believe that love conquers hate and that education conquers ignorance. The seas of indifference, intolerance, and bigotry will not part because an old man lifts his staff. The only hope we have in parting this great sea is for us to have the courage to take that first faithful step forward into those dark and dangerous seas. And we, like Peter will sink if we give in to fear or try to act without faith. I've done enough social service work to know that ideology alone is not enough to keep you going when you're trying to change the world. You need to believe in something spiritual to sustain you in the Lord's service. There's a saying, 'God help those who try to do God's work without God's help (repeat). You can know what the right course of action is in this world, but you need spiritual fuel to get you there.
Peter was praised that day be Jesus for acknowledging Him as the Christ. This morning, the opportunity exists for us to join Peter in that acknowledgement.