A sermon on Exodus 14:19-31 & Matthew 18:21-35 by Nathan Nettleton
A video recording of the whole liturgy, including this sermon, is available here.
In the reading we heard tonight from Paul’s letter to the Christians in Rome, Paul addresses a dispute they were having over whether some days should be celebrated as sacred, or whether all days should be regarded as the same. This debate occasionally continues in the churches over whether or not we should observe the feasts and festivals of the liturgical year. It is something of an irony now that each time this reading comes up, it’s on or around the eleventh of September. Many of the same churches who quote this passage against the observing of the liturgical year will nevertheless be making a special observation of this week’s 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attack on the USA.
The quarter century anniversary is almost impossible to let it pass without some reflection and taking stock. 9/11 has been etched deeply into the psyche of the western world, and to many of us it feels difficult to believe that it is already that long ago. There’s been a chat on Cloud of Voices about what we were doing when we first heard the news, and some of those stories are still quite raw and vivid.
But the truth is that 25 years means that there is now a whole generation who have grown up in a post 9/11 world. You might have seen some of those snapshot interviews with current uni students on the TV this week about what they know of 9/11. They’ve all heard of it, but they have no experience of a world before it. In the first years after 9/11, we imagined that the invasive surveillance at airports, the proliferation of CCTV cameras in the streets, and the new commando-look police uniforms were just short-term measures. But for today’s young people, that’s the only world they’ve ever known. They can barely imagine a time when it wasn’t normal.
The so-called “war on terror”, which was always a problematic concept, metastasised into what now seems like a never-ending series of forever wars, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, and now Iran. Ukraine’s not connected in quite the same ways, but to those growing up with it, it probably doesn’t feel much different.
Perhaps even uglier still is the way that that “war on terror” became hostility towards everyone who might want to cross our borders in search of a better life. Now as we see growing numbers of people being displaced by the impacts of climate change, they are being treated as terrorists simply for heading out in search of a safe place to live. You can almost imagine them feeling much like the ancient Hebrews in our first reading, stuck between an angry sea on one side and hostile border guards on the other. At least for the ancient Hebrews, the sea stayed in one place; for some of today’s refugees, the sea is literally swallowing up the land behind them.
Clearly we are not the first people to live in a time gripped by fear and uncertainty. Those who have lived through war, or under the threat of it, know something of this. Some years ago I visited Dresden, a German city bombed to rubble in a few days near the end of the Second World War, more than forty thousand people killed, most of them civilians. The buildings have mostly been rebuilt. The scars in the psyche of the population have not so easily healed.
And those Hebrew slaves I just mentioned from our first reading — our forebears in the faith — they were gripped by fear and uncertainty not 25 years ago or 80 years ago, but a few thousand years ago. They were trapped between the rage of a pursuing militia and the rage of an apparently impassable sea. The army pursuing them had held them in the grip of oppression for generations. To surrender and go back was to return to a hell they knew. To plunge into the sea in front of them looked like a different kind of death. It was crisis, in the fullest sense of the word.
In more ways than we like to admit, our own predicament is not so different. Ahead of us is an angry ocean of chaos we cannot calm. Unlike beach-loving Australians, the ancient Israelites always regarded the sea with trepidation — wild, unpredictable, home to monsters real and imagined, capable of rising up without warning and swallowing whoever stood in the wrong place. We are no less afraid of the murky chaos that lies ahead of us now — the cycle of violence and retaliation that keeps escalating, the accelerating climate chaos we can see coming but cannot make ourselves stop.
And behind us, we are pursued by our own history — by centuries of trying to hold violence in check by the threat of greater violence, a system that has provided a measure of order, but that now seems to be failing, at exactly the moments we need it most. Our tried and trusted mechanisms for containing the chaos seem to be doing the opposite — inflaming it, not settling it. Our own history pursues us, and ahead of us there is nowhere obvious to go.
And yet, God has already opened a path before us. Opening paths through the raging chaos seems to be one of God’s signature moves. Most of the time we don’t recognise it, and those who point at it — “look, the waters are parting” — get dismissed as naive dreamers, or worse, as traitors.
We who follow Jesus ought to be able to see it more readily than most, but we still find it difficult. Matthew’s gospel keeps casting Jesus as the one like Moses, come to lead people out of slavery toward a promised land. But the path this new Moses opens is strange to us, almost scandalous. It offends our sense of how justice is supposed to work. When we glimpse it, we react against it, and go looking for some other way. But the one with arms outstretched offers no other way. It is follow him, or let the waves close over us.
What makes it scandalous is not the promise of rescue — everybody loves that part — but who else the rescue is offered to. In the story as it has been passed down, the rescue wrought by the first Moses was rescue for one group, and death for the other. But this new Moses stretches out his arms over the whole chaos, not just over the friends of God. The mercy on offer is not at all selective. It runs even toward the very people who drove us into the sea.
Jesus’ way through is this: to renounce retaliation, and to expose the cruelty of the world not by matching it, but by copping it and then extravagantly forgiving it. Seventy times seven, Jesus tells Peter, which is to say, stop counting. This is not a naive cure for the world’s violence, and Jesus never pretended otherwise. He knew this path still runs through the terrifying sea. He knew that those who meet violence with violence, and those who meet it with radical grace, can both end up crucified. He never promised that following him would keep us safe. He promised that following him would lead through the cross, but that unlike the alternative, it would not end there.
The mercy Jesus offers and calls us to is something almost everyone finds hard to accept, on any side. We are glad enough for mercy when it’s aimed at us. We get uneasy the moment we notice it’s also aimed at people we’ve written off — the people who tear down what we build, or build what’s tearing us down. We want a seat at God’s table for ourselves and the people we love; we’re less than happy when we notice God has been setting a place for people we can’t bear to be sitting anywhere near.
God comes to us embodied in the land itself, and in the peoples who cared for it long before we did, offering the wisdom of a more careful relationship with the earth. Mostly though we have not listened, and now watch chaos rise from the very ground and sea and sky we treated as endlessly forgiving.
God comes to us in the stranger and the displaced person, inviting hospitality and solidarity. Mostly though we have preferred our borders and our sense of having earned a safety others haven’t. We would rather have security bought by keeping people out, than reconciliation that costs us something.
None of this is said to pile on guilt for its own sake — guilt has never yet made anyone more merciful. It’s said because the mercy that keeps coming toward us, even now, isn’t cancelled by our refusal of it. And the honest response to a world getting uglier and more frightened is not louder outrage to match it, but the harder, quieter work of building something beautiful in its midst anyway — a garden instead of a grievance, a longer table instead of a higher wall, a friendship across a line that isn’t supposed to be crossed. That is not naivety. It is closer to what it would look like to actually take the mercy seriously, rather than just admire it from a distance.
There’s a Gethsemane echo worth sitting with here too. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus stood on his own version of that Red Sea shore, enemies closing in, and he didn’t suppress his dread. “Father, isn’t there some other way than this?” he asks. Only after that does he say, “not my will, but yours.” I suspect that if he had refused to let that voice of despair speak, the temptation would have been to start engineering his own way out instead of watching for the pathway God was opening.
That’s usually the danger for us too. The Hebrews had, as far as they could see, exactly two options — surrender, or fight to the death. Had they taken either, they would probably never have noticed the sea beginning to open.
For us now, increasingly huddled on our latest version of that Red Sea shore, with the angry seas of climate catastrophe threatening us from one side, and the growing threat of violence spilling over from forever wars on the other, the temptation is probably no longer fight or surrender. It’s now more like a prepper hell or denial and paralysis. Isolated bunkers and stockpiled ammunition, or fiddle on like nothing’s the matter while Rome burns.
But once again, even now, there is another option, not one we can manufacture for ourselves, but one we can trustingly anticipate. We can take the seemingly crazy option of continuing to love one another and continuing to forgive one another and continuing to share generously with one another with our trust placed firmly in the God whose signature move is opening paths through the raging chaos.
In a few minutes, we’ll hear again the invitation to the Lord’s Table. It can seem, in an online gathering like ours, as though each of us makes a private connection with the screen, and the bread and the cup, and God, on our own. But underneath that, something else is happening: each of us is being asked, one more time, whether we’re willing to take our place at a table alongside everyone else Christ has invited — including the people we would rather not sit near. It’s not an easy yes. But every time we manage it, even partially, the dry ground opens a little wider, and the chaos on either side looks a little less like the last word.
I don’t know exactly how God will open a way through a sea as furious as the one in front of us now. But I don’t think the way out is ours to engineer. I think it’s already there, held out toward us in scarred hands, waiting to take root in us — and through us, in the world.