THE SACRED JOURNEY

2. Provisions

March 18, 1990
8:30 and 11:00 a.m. Worship Services
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
John 4:5-15
Exodus 17:1-7

“Behold, £ will stand before you...and you shall strike the rock, and water
shal} come out of it, that the people may drink." -Exodus 17:6 (RSV)

Bruno Bettelheim died last week, one of this city's pioneers and
saints. What an adventure his life was! An Austrian Jew who grew up in
the Vienna of Sigmund Freud, Bettelheim did pioneering work with disturbed
and autistic children. Along with most of the Viennese inteiligencia he
was rounded up by the Nazis, spent a year in Dachau, and was released
through the efforts of Eleanor Roosevelt and others who had heard of his
work with autism. He came to this country, to the University of Chicago.
Here he continued important research and treatment.

In addition to directing a residential treatment center in Hyde Park,
he wrote a number of popular books. The most widely read by non-profes-
sionals is The Uses of Enchantment, in which Bettelheim explored. the
importance of fairy tales in the personality development of children. It's
a good book and when I took it off the shelf on the day he died last week,
IT found these opening words which caught my attention because I had been
thinking about that wonderful story in the 17th chapter of Excdus when the
people are in the wilderness and they are hungry and thirsty and scared and
they complain and God provides. Bettelheim wrote:

“If we hope to live not just from moment

to moment, but in true consciousness of our
existence, then our greatest need and most
difficult achievement is to find meaning

in our lives. It is well known how many

of us have lost the will to live, and have
stopped trying because such meaning has
evaded them." [p. 3]

Bettelheim wrote a fascinating and somewhat controversial account of
his Dachau experience for the New Yorker in which he concluded that the

people who survived the concentration camps were those who were able to
live for some cultural or religious goal other than mere survival. That
is, in the concentration camps, when the total meaning and focus of one's
life has been reduced to survival - food and drink - the battle has been
lost. Human life has become something less than human. When the
oppressors, the captors, or when life itself, reduces human existence to
survival terms, humanity has already lost. That is not to say that those
who survived were morally superior to those who died. It is, he said,
simply to observe that our humanity resides in something bigger and better
than the physical needs of our bodies. A relevant observation, I thought,
about those people complaining about their thirst in the wilderness.

T continued to skim through the book into the section where he
analyzes the familiar fairy tales. Those stories, he taught, often provide
children with a safe way to express and deal with basic fears and worries
and desires. Hansel and Gretel, whose parents essentially abandon them
because they are poor and can no longer feed them, speaks to childhood's
“dominant anxiety," the threat of desertion and the loss of security.

[p. 159]

ft is a common motif in many of the stories we heard as children.
Bettelheim observed: "in many fairy tales, being pushed out of home stands
for having to become oneself. Self-realization requires leaving the orbit
of home, an excruciatingly painful experience fraught with many ,
psychological dangers." [p. 79]

That process, he taught, is inescapable and not confined to
childhood. “Separation anxiety - the fear of being deserted - is not
restricted to a certain period of development. Such fears occur at all
ages." [p. 15]

And that 1 concluded, with a timely assist from Dr. Bettelheim, is
exactly what happened one day in the wilderness of Sinai, when the children
of Israel assembled in front of Moses and said: “Why did you bring us up
out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and our cattle with thirst?"

It's actually the third time it occurred. In fact, it happens so
much that the Old Testament scholars have a name for it... “The murmuring
in the wilderness motif." Free of Egyptian slavery, wandering through the
desert, the people are murmuring all the time: “What shall we drink?"
[15:24] A little later they are hungry and the whole congregation murmurs
against Moses and Aaron and this time it's eloquent.

"Would that we had died by the hand of the
Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by
the fleshpots and ate bread to the full:
for you have brought us out into the
wilderness to kill this whole assembly
with hunger.” [16:3]

For several weeks during this Lenten season we are thinking about the
idea that life is a Sacred Journey, an adventure to which we are calied.
I suggested last Sunday that the story of Abraham and Sarah is the basic
Bible story. In that very old saga, God calls two peaple who are mature,

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established and settled to pick up all their belongings and move. God
promises them a future and when they trust God, the adventure of faith
begins. I suggested that God calls each of us to a similar adventure and
promises to be with us, that God has been there all along, urging us on,
pulling us from the future, inspiring our hopes and dreams. I suggested
that your Jife is a Sacred Journey because of God's presence.

The theme runs throughout the Bible, beginning to end. It appears
again in the great saga of the Exodus. What a wonderful story it is, with
what seems to me an endless variety of ways to surprise us with its
relevance and contemporaneity.

Remember that Abraham and Sarah end up in Egypt for a while because
there is no food where they are. Several generations later the Israelites
are back in Egypt again, once again because there is famine where they
are. This time there are a lot of them, tribes of them, and this time they
stay in Egypt, settle in, and thrive some more: thrive so much that the
Egyptians become concerned and gradually turn them into slaves. It happens
slowly, of course; first one right, then another is taken away. First they
aren't allowed to live in certain neighborhoods, next they have to live in
a ghetto and in a few decades they are the slaves, making the bricks for
Pharch's ambitious construction projects.

Moses organizes them: stirs them up, presents their demands to
Pharoh: argues, negotiates, threatens - all the while God is urging him
on. After several false starts, Pharoh finally relents, and one night,
under the cover of darkness, they leave. They pack up their belongings,
gather their sheep and cattle, get the children and the elderly organized,
look around at the old neighborhood one last time and walk into the
Wilderness.

Now the point is that even though they complained a lot, Egypt wasn't
ail that bad. As a matter of fact, Egypt was home: had been home for them
all their lives, and their parents before them and their grandparents. It
might look like slavery to a young radical like Moses, but it was also
home. And so not long after they leave they begin to have second thoughts.
“What in the world have we done? Traded our security, our stable, safe
life for what? This is wilderness. There's nothing out here. Egypt
isn't wonderful but at least we had a roof over our heads, and food to eat
and water to drink."

And at the same time, Pharoh is having second thoughts too. His
economic advisers, in the clear light of day, remind him that he has just
allowed the labor force to walk out scot free. And so Pharch changes his
mind, mobilizes his forces and sends the army out to catch the people of
israel and bring them home.

One of the best parts of this story happens when the people who have
made it to the banks of the Sea of Reeds - a broad, shallow swamp — see the
dust of Pharoh's army approaching. This time it's not a murmur but a shout
of terror:

rer]

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“Is it because there are no graves in
Egypt that you have taken us away to die
in the wilderness. What have you done
to us? It would have been better for us
to serve the Egyptians than to die in
the wilderness." [14:11-12]

What comes next is the unlikely escape at the Sea of Reeds and then
the beginning of forty years of wandering in the wilderness of Sinai and
the murmuring: “What will we eat? What will we drink? How will we
survive, cut off from the security of home?"

It is a universal theme. A universally human question. It has to do
with our development and maturity as persons, Bruno Bettelheim taught. It
has to do with living life to its fullest. And this we must not miss, it
has to do with faith, with living in responsible relationship with the one
who has created us, given us our lives, and who calls us to live them with
integrity and intentionality and courage. In fact, several thousand years
before it was developmental psychology, it was good Biblical religion.

There is a sense in which life always calls us to leave security and
comfort behind if we are to do and be all we can: a sense in which life is
diminished to the degree that we invest it in the provision of comfort and
security only.

The Outward Bound movement began when, Curt Hahn, a Jewish refugee
from Nazi Germany and the founder of Gerdonstown School in Scotland,
observed that young British sailors were perishing, after their ships were
sunk by Nazi U-boats in the North Atlantic, in dramatically larger numbers
than their older, more seasoned mates. The young sailors were not
surviving physical hardship because they didn't have any experience with it
or apparently with the spiritual toughness for the will to live. The whole
culture - the whole world - after the First World War, had becone
comfortable, Hahn concluded. So Outward Bound and a number of popular
similar outdoor education programs structure physical hardship, challenge
and discomfort for people of all ages. It is an intentional wilderness
experience and for many people it is life enhancing and spiritually
deepening.

It is also an oceasion of no little murmuring very much like the
wilderness murmuring of the children of Israel. I was a guest of the
Outward Bound School, Hurricane Island, Maine, for a five-day course last
summer, along with twenty other adult professional people. It was not
forty years in the wilderness by any stretch of the imagination but I'll
not forget any of it, including a memorable occasion of murmuring.

Robin Lester, the Head Master of the Latin School, also a guest and
participant, and I had a few moments to chat. We had just come in fram
three days in a thirty-foot open sail boat. We hadn't slept much: we were
cold, wet, hungry, tired, slightly queasy from the ocean swells, and now
Robin and I were pulling a large cart full of dirty pots and pans to an
open faucet where our jeb was to scrub them all. On top of everything it
was pouring rain. Robin chose that moment to ask something terribly
incisive: "What do you suppose our wives are doing right now?" And then,
in spite of the fact that we both knew better we began an only slightly

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tongue-in-cheek recital of what we would be doing: how warm and pleasant
and comfortable it would be in Chicago. “Murmuring in the wilderness is a
universally human experience."

The stories of Harriet Tubman and the underground railroad and slaves
running away and living in the wilderness for months - traveling at night,
hiding during the day, living off the land —- are powerful and inspiring and
instructive because for many runaway slaves, slavery began to look
appealing after a day or so of freedom. Plantation life might be cruel,
inhuman, demeaning, but there was food and shelter and security. The
wilderness is the place where we are able to see with clarity how dependent
we have become on security, safety and comfort. But, says this wonderful
old story, the wilderness journey is also the place where we find God or
God finds us.

God comes to Moses in a burning bush in the wilderness. Ina period
of tempting in the wilderness, Jesus encounters subtle temptation but the
angels also come to him in the wilderness and it is in his wilderness
experience that his sense of the meaning of his life and therefore his
courage and determination is given to him. Part of the wilderness
experience is the solitude in which mind and heart and spirit turn to God.
Part of what all the outdoor education programs include is a period of
solitary time: an extended period for aloneness, reflection and quiet.
And for most, eventually, it is a spiritually significant time.

The mystics, the people of deep spirituality, know that to experience
God you must detach, back away, let go of everything. That is part of what
Israel learns in the wilderness. And it is not an easy lesson for those of
us who are privileged and blessed with abundance.

Henri Nouwen has a wonderful little book on prayer which makes the
point that you cannot pray with your fists clenched. It's an important
observation. Prayer is less than a vital spiritual exercise for most of us
because we feel threatened by letting go of our securities and standing
before God with our hands empty and open. Nouwen talks about seeing a
woman brought into the emergency room of a psychiatric hospital with her
fists tightly clenched, holding on to one small coin, as though she would
lose her very self if she let go of that coin. Nouwen writes:

“When you are invited to pray you are asked to open
your tightly clenched fists and give up your last coin.
You hold fast to what is familiar, even if you aren't

proud of it. You find yourself saying: ‘That's just
how it is with me. I would like to be different but
it can't be now...' Once you talk like that you've

already given up believing that your life might be
otherwise. You feel it safer to cling to a sorry past
than to trust in a new future."

[With Open Hands, p. 4}

The old story suggests that God calls us to be on a journey, to let
go of the securities upon which we have become dependent, to trust Gad for
our security and in the process to become the free and whole people God has
created us to be.

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The story also makes a very daring promise. God wil] provide. God
will give us the resources we need for the journey. God will provide, not
necessarily what we want, but what we need. God will provide water for our
thirst ~- living water for that profounder thirst deep inside everyone af
us.

But, Moses discovers water only when the people are in the dryness of
the desert. Manna is provided only in the wilderness. The Samaritan woman
who encounters Jesus at the well is thirsty. She is an outcast, not fit
for polite company in her own village. She's at that well at high noon
because the other women get water in the evening and she is not welcome.
She is desperate. "Give me living water," she asks Jesus - "Give me food
and drink that will sustain my spirit."

“The threshold of religion," one commentator proposes, “is at that
point when the thirsty soul stands squarely in front of the hopeless, barren
desert, the seemingly impossible."

God's gifts are given only when we know our hunger and thirst; only
when we need them.

So, for each of us comes a day when we must leave security behind,
a day like the one years ago when we walked down the sidewalk, away from
the insular safety of home on the way to school and began the adventure of
becoming, a Sacred Journey that is still going on.

- or the day years later when our parents
dropped us off at college and drove away;

~ or the day when we started a new life with
a stranger to whom, standing in the front of
a church, young, immature and terribly unprepared,
we just committed our lives "for better or worse,
in sickness and in health, as long as we both shall
live";

- or the day in middie years when our company down
sizes, realigns management and we find ourselves in
the wilderness of unemployment or an unplanned second
career;

~ or the day when we and our other decided we could no
longer cling to the old realities and remain alive and
we find ourselves alone and starting again;

~ or that day when the mortgage is paid, the dog has died,
the last youngster has left for college and instead of
the promised land you find yourself in a new wilderness
of loneliness, purposelessness, depression and remorse;

- or the day when the reality of aging becomes unavoidable,
a dear friend dies, or a routine task becomes difficult,
or a life-long dream has to be abandoned and you know in
a final way that you are not going to live forever.

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Comes a day for all of us - and each of us - when we know that our own
resources are no longer adequate: that if all we have going for us is our
own strength, vigor, intelligence, or our professional accomplishments, our
position in the community, or our possessions, our bank accounts, stock
portfolios, and pension plans, we really are rather poor and weak. Comes a
day for all of us when we are hungry and thirsty and know it; when we are
powerless to deal with the realities of our humanness, particularly our own
mortality, our own death - at the hands of the approaching Egyptians, or the
hunger and thirst burning within us, or simply the inevitable ticking of the
clock... And on that day the promise is that God will provide.

The mystery of faith is that in Jesus Christ we are called to lives
of intentional insecurity.

The greater mystery of faith is that when we trust God... when we
open our hands... when we know our hunger and thirst... there will be bread
and life and living water.

God calls us to a Sacred Journey. God provides what we need...
Thanks be to God. Amen

# # #
God of love: you call us into the future, sometimes away from
everything we use to establish our security. Give us courage to live

faithfully; give us the food and drink we need to: live in Jesus Christ
our Lord. Amen.

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