Monday, July 21, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Red Sea
Pharaoh’s whole army caught up with the Israelites as they lay encamped by the sea. The children of Israel complained to Moses, “Were there no burial places in Egypt that you had to bring us out here to die in the desert?”
These former slaves were afraid to die. Their confidence in Moses depended on success, and as the chariots bore down on them they panicked. But Moses stood his ground.
Fear not! You will see the victory the Lord will win for you today.
Moses cried out to the Lord. Help! What do I do?
Lift up your staff and stretch your arm out over the sea. Split the sea in two.
Then the children of Israel can pass through it on dry land.
For as long as it took a million men and women to cross over, Moses held his staff stretched out above the sea. Aaron held his arm up when Moses faltered. And there were no more words, no room, no time for words, only for the parting of the Red Sea and the people’s passage through.
Words often leave us with a sense of inner defeat. They can even create a sense of numbness and a feeling of being bogged down in swampy ground. Often they leave us in a slight depression, or in a fog that clouds the window of our mind. In short, words can give us the feeling of having stopped too long at one of the little villages that we pass on our journey, of having been motivated more by curiosity than by service. Words often make us forget that we are pilgrims called to invite others to join us on the journey. Peregrinatio est tacere. “To be silent keeps us pilgrims.” – Henri Nouwen
It’s easy for anyone and especially for writers to mistake words for reality – to confuse a description of the moon, for example, for the moon. Nouwen, a renowned writer, knew his words sometimes obscured reality rather than revealing it, all the more the reality within his own soul. Moses was a man of few words, and God chose his brother Aaron to do most of the talking in Pharaoh’s court. But Moses spoke when God gave him words to say. We imagine him singing, with his sister Miriam, on the other side of the sea, having seen Pharaoh and all his chariots caught and crushed by the sea no longer held back by the power of God.
I will sing unto the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously, the horse and rider fell into the sea.
The Lord, my God, my strength and song, has now become my victory.
The Lord is God, and I will praise him, the Lord is God and I will praise him.
In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus recalled the sea and the whale which swallowed up Jonah. Can you and I set out on that sea, in a tiny boat, and watch the storm rise up around us? The water must be hundreds of feet deep, and those huge waves soon will surely overturn our tiny boat and swallow us. Will we wake Jesus, sleeping in the bow?
Help! What do we do?
I would like to be writing this in a tent anchored on an ocean beach with a storm coming across the sea, the waves crashing, lightning and thunder overhead, at last a downpour hammering on the tent, while I pound letters into words, listening as Moses did for whatever God has in mind to say.
The flood waters covered the soldiers who sought to kill us,
They sank into the depths like a stone.
Your right hand, O Lord, magnificent in power!
(Exodus 14, Exodus 15, Psalm 95, Matthew 12)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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