About ten years ago, Xavier and I had a couple of friends from Seminary who moved out of Northern Virginia where we used to live, when he was called to become an Associate Rector in Pasadena. A few months after that, we decided to visit them and take the opportunity to see Los Angeles for the first time. And one of the things we really wanted to do what to visit the Paramount studios. We had decided it was only short distance from Hollywood Boulevard, and so we ended up walking for two hours in the California heat of November but we finally got there, very excited to discover the place where so many great movies had been shot. Our guide welcomed us in a surprising way though, she starting by saying to us: “I am going to explain to you how we make a movie and I’d rather tell you, it really takes the magic out of the whole thing. Last week, I had a lady who broke down and cried when she saw the decors because she was so disillusioned.” It made everybody smile, of course. And then we started the tour, and we really enjoyed it all, the studios, especially little New York, where our guide told us they have to cut out the palm trees off the horizon, and then we passed what seem like a random parking lot. Our guide stopped there and she said: “See this parking lot, it’s used everyday by the staff. But there is something special about it. It has a foot high wall. Because we don’t have a pool that’s what we use instead when we need a large body of water. This parking lot is where the Titanic sank, it is also where Charlton Heston parted the Red Sea. We filled huge tank of water that we poured on the parking lot on each side and then we just reverse the film, so it looked like the water was going from bottom to top, instead of top to bottom.”
Now I didn’t cry, but I have to admit it took the magic out of it. I could never watch the movie again without thinking of the staff parking lot. Of course I knew from the beginning it wasn’t real but still, the greatest miracle God made for the Hebrews, the bedrock of Jewish faith that has been celebrated in countless psalms, hymns, festivals, the foretelling of Jesus’s victory over death Christians have come to see in this episode of the parting sea, it deserved better as a shooting location. Maybe, at least the Niagara Falls. And so, I mourned the innocence I had before I was educated in movie making. In the meantime though I realized that I started to enjoy having a better appreciation of what is going on on screen. I learned to notice details and hidden clues, I started feeling more detached from the story but instead I could appreciate the art in itself and feel closer to the work of the Director.
But why am I saying all of that today, aside from the very obvious fact that out passage from Exodus today is about the parting of the Red Sea? I am saying all of that because I am a little worried that, when we break down this story as it is told in the Scriptures, we can also end up taking the magic out of it. In the meantime though, we’re going to do just that this morning because I also think that studying in depth a passage we know so well we barely pay attention to it anymore, could give us give us some renewed insights about what’s going on in our lives as well as a better understanding of God and God’s ways. So let’s dive in!
One of the things we need to know and that the commentators of the Scriptures and a lot of theologians have noticed is that our passage today is not a linear story. In fact, many times in the Bible, we find two or three versions of the same story, which have been understood as pertaining to different traditions, or also, maybe it’s because one version of the story gives us the facts, what happened or supposedly happened, and the other version gives us the interpretation, the theological meaning it has been given. It’s a pattern we see a lot: For example, everybody knows that the Book of Chronicles is a retelling of the book of Kings, from the exile perspective. Now when it’s a whole book, it’s easy to spot. Sometimes though, the same story is told twice in the same book. The most famous example would be the story of the simultaneous creation of man and woman in Genesis, followed directly by a story about how the woman was taken from the man’s side. And then sometimes, and it’s even more difficult to see because the two versions of the story have been collapsed in the same passage. That’s very typical of the story of Noah: The passage about the Ark says that Noah brought a pair of each specie of animals as we know well, and the story also says that Noah brought seven pairs of certain animals. And the fact is many commentators believe that this is also what is going on in our passage. There are two versions of the story collapsed inside the same story. In one version of the story, Moses stretches out his hand and opens a highway in the Red Sea split in two, with walls of water on each side. The other version of the story that is found here as well, is that the Lord drove the sea back by a strong East wind all night, and it dried the waters. In one case, the Lord tosses the Egyptians into the sea, in the other one their chariot wheels got caught in the sand. And so we know for sure that the crossing happened because it’s too big a story it would never have made it to us if it wasn’t historical at some level, but we don’t know how the crossing happened and it is possible that we mix the actual facts with their theological interpretation. What has led many commentators down that road is that the “Red Sea” can also be read in Hebrew “The sea of reeds”, a kind of swamp if you will, and there were probably plenty wet lands in Egypt, swamps which indeed could have looked impassable at first but could also have become practicable after a strong wind dried them up, although the moving sands would have certainly become a trap for anyone walking in it with heavy equipment, like Pharaoh’s army did. Commentators go on saying that’s probably what happened historically, and then the Hebrews have built on that to see God’s hand at work in this miracle that may have been due to natural circumstances. There is, if you will, the on screen version, with its magic, and the parking lot version with its crude reality.
Now I guess I am like most Christians and the first time I heard that theory I didn’t like it very much. Although it provides a good explanation to the parting of the sea, in my opinion it was a lot of rationalization, but certainly took the miracle out of it. I generally think that if God has created Heavens and Earth and raised Jesus from the dead, which I very much believe God did, there is certainly nothing that God cannot do, and that includes miracles great and small. So I never really had a problem with the Charlton Heston version. And yet, something I read recently opened my eyes on the fact that as we cling to the miracle itself, we can also become blind to the way God concretely works in the world, in us and through us, in the same way we ignore the work of the Director when we are dazzled by the Hollywood magic. I came to this realization by reading the beautiful book “Knowing God” by J.I Packer. Packer doesn’t talk about movies and he doesn’t talk about the parting of the Red sea, but he says something that made me pause for a while and I want to share it with you today.
So what does he say? Well, Packer notices that Christians don’t let God guide them and then he adds: “Christians do not let God guide them not not because they don’t believe in God’s guidance but because they believe so much in God’s guidance”. And then Packer explains: he says that the problem is that we wait for God to talk to us directly, to show us signs, to make things so obvious that we wouldn’t have any doubts. Basically, we wait or God to open a highway before us so we would know it’s the right direction we need to take. But then he observes that most of the time, God does not use anything else than what God has already created to guide us: Natural occurrences, other Christians giving us advice, the use of our common sense, and of course the reading of Scriptures. He even warms us that sometimes believing too much in God’s guidance in the obvious, highway version of guidance can even lead us to confusion and even lead to our downfall. Packer was also a priest and he takes the example of one of his parishioners who was attracted so strongly to a woman, he became convinced it was coming from God. And yet Packer says, if this married man had only opened his Bible, he would have known adulterous desires couldn’t come from God. And he goes on talking about people who lose their way by being constantly on the look for the extraordinary signs, coincidences and revelations. But Packer wants to reminds us that God works through the ordinary most of the time. To use the image we have been playing with, God can certainly open a highway, generally God leads us trough the swamp. God’s guidance isn’t loud or shiny, and maybe it wouldn’t make for a very good movie, and yet God is by our side all the same, and God shows us the next dry step where we can land on in the wet lands. Packer advocate again for what we called last week a kind of “no nonsense spirituality”, grounded in every day life where one thing flows from the other, and yes it may not feel very miraculous but when we turn around after a while, we can see the how God has been working in our lives and where God has taken us, in the same way the Hebrews saw and knew for sure that God had brought them from slavery to a safe place.
The passage we have today is up for interpretation, there are two versions of the story, we can believe God opened a highway through the Red Sea, we can also believe God guided the Hebrews through a dangerous swamp. As I have already said, I believe God can do both. As many people, I have my version of the parting of the seas in my life, where something so unexpected happened that all we can do is see God’s hand at work, and I also experience that on a day to day basis God guides us through the obstacles because God does not want to do things for us, but to do it with us. We keep looking for magic and signs when God wants us to use our common sense, to listen friends or leaders, or just to look at the nature surrounding us and to learn from it and we would be fool to discard all this wisdom. Yet what draws me now to the second version is because of the number of times I have felt for myself or heard people experience problems so big they might as well have been stuck in front of the sea, and then they prayed and God held their hand and they took the first step and when they finally turned back after crossing it was like God was telling them: See, it looked like the ocean, but it was just a dried up swamp.