About ten years ago, Xavier and I had a couple of friends from Seminary who moved out to Pasadena to start working in a new church. 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 planned to do was to visit the Paramount. On that day, we had decided it was only a short distance from Hollywood Boulevard, and we ended up walking for two hours in the California heat 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 started saying something like that: “I am going to explain to you how we make a movie and I’d rather tell you, it takes the magic out of it. 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 edit the palm trees off the horizon, and then we passed by what seemed like a random parking lot. But 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 tanks 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 when I heard that, but I have to admit it took the magic out of it. I could never watch the movie again without thinking about the staff parking lot. Of course I knew from the beginning the scene 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. Interestingly enough though, I also realized that I started to have a better appreciation of what is going on on screen. I learned to notice details and hidden clues, I may have started feeling more detached from the story but instead I could appreciate the art in itself, the work of the Director.
So why am I saying all of that today, aside from the very obvious fact that our passage from Exodus is about the parting of the Red Sea? I am saying all of that because I am a little worried that when we try to understand how the story was written in Exodus, we can also end up taking the magic out of it. And yet, we’re going to do just that this morning, because I believe that breaking down this passage can give us some renewed insights on an episode we know so well we don’t pay attention to it anymore. More deeply, I am also hoping this study can help us have a better appreciation of God’s works and God’s ways.
So let’s dive in!
The thing we need to notice is that our passage today is not a linear story, it has several layers or maybe several versions. In fact, many times in the Bible, we find two or three versions of the same story, Some say it’s because each version pertains to a different tradition, or 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 spiritual meaning it has been assigned. For example, the Book of Chronicles is a retelling of the book of Kings, after the Jews went in exile and they try to understand what went wrong. Now when it’s a whole book like that, 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, 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, and then the story also says that Noah brought seven pairs of certain animals. And so the fact is many commentators believe that this is also what is going on in our passage today. There are two versions of the story collapsed inside the same story. In one version of the story, Moses stretches out his hand and split the Red Sea to open a highway, with walls of water on each side. In the other version of the story found here as well, the Lord drove the sea back by a strong East wind all night, and it dried the waters. And then again, in one case, the Lord tosses the Egyptians into the sea, and in the other one their chariot wheels get 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 true at some level, but we don’t know how the crossing happened and it is possible that we mix the actual facts with their spiritual 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, even if the moving sands would have become a trap for anyone stepping in it with heavy equipment, like Pharaoh’s army did. Commentators say that’s probably the facts, 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 more prosaic 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, and it certainly took the miracle out of it. I tend to 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 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 Packer say? Well, Packer starts by noticing 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 he explains: 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 Packer 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. Packer 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, but 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 patch where we can land on through the wet lands. In fact, Packer advocates 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 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 delivered them from slavery to bring them to a safe place. So many times I have heard people experience problems so big, and then they prayed and God held their hand and they took the first step and when they finally turned back, they saw they had crossed and it was like God was telling them:See, it looked like the ocean, but it was just a dried up swamp.
Again, 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. God can make wonders, but let’s remember Packer’s words of caution and remember that on a day to day basis God also guides us each step at a time through the obstacles, rather then removing all obstacles. It is in fact the most usual way in which God guides us, because God does not want to do things for us, but to do it with us. We keep waiting for magic and looking for signs and praying for miracles, when God is already there by our side, begging us to use our common sense, to read the Scriptures, to listen friends or leaders, to look at nature surrounding us and to learn from it. We would be fools to discard all this wisdom.