June 28, 2026 - Fifth Sunday after Pentecost: The Long Way Around

June 28, 2026  Fifth Sunday after Pentecost
Ladue Chapel Presbyterian Church
Exodus 17:1-7
“The Long Way Around”
Douglas T. King  

Moses named the place Massah and Meribah which means quarrel and test.  I have often thought that Massah and Meribah would be good names for twin teenagers.  And this story in Exodus has all of the pathos of the tug-of-war that occurs between teenagers and parents.  

We all know, either raising teenagers or being one ourselves at some point, that the teenage years can be a little adventurous as we make our way from childhood into adulthood.  And they should be.  It is an in-between time.  It is a journey from the known parameters of childhood to the unknown parameters provided in the freedoms of adulthood.
 
And what we have in our story from Exodus is a people in the midst of the in-between.  For many generations they had lived as slaves in Egypt.  Their entire community had been circumscribed and controlled by a mighty empire.  Their choices were few.  The expectations upon them were clear.

And now their lives have been completely turned upside down.  Yes, they have received this miraculous gift of freedom, and a promise of a home and nation of their own.  But at the moment, they have been led into the unknown of the wilderness.  The text says they journeyed by stages, frankly it might as well have said they were traveling in circles.  We are told several chapters earlier that God specifically did not bring them directly to the Promised Land because they were not yet ready.  They were not ready to be a nation.  They were not ready to live as God’s chosen people just yet.  

Today we hear tale of the growing pains.  This is one of many accounts where the people whine and complain and wonder if life would not be better back in Egypt.  I particularly like these kind of stories because they have a strong ring of truth to them.  These people have received so much in this act of liberation and yet they find it so difficult to trust in what is to come next.  

I get it.  I totally get it.  No matter how many undeserved and unearned blessings I have received, it does not take much provocation at all for me to whine and complain to Go; to be anxious for what will come next; to doubt that God is sufficiently present with me as I move forward in this life.  I think we all carry a little bit of this in us.  We find ourselves living in between two high falutin’ theological terms, justification and sanctification.  

Justification is the idea that through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ we have been reconciled to God.  Whatever mistakes or shortcomings which we have played out in our lives have been forgiven.  We are offered freedom from whatever weighs us down, freedom from the guilt and regrets we carry, freedom from the ways we have been bumped and bruised by this life.

And then there is sanctification.  Sanctification is when we respond to this remarkable freedom we have been offered by growing into the followers of Christ we have been called to be. Sanctification is when our lives reflect the light of God’s graceful and merciful ways on those around us.  

I don’t know about you but I am pretty keen on the justification.  I love the idea of being freed from all of the muck and dreck of my mistakes.  It is the sanctification that gets a little trickier.  It is not that I do not want to be a reflection of God’s love.  I am just not all that good at pulling it off.  I have received this promise that I have been forgiven and freed from my sins but I still live like I am trapped by my sins.  In the midst of having received this amazingly liberating gift of justification and having not yet responded with the life of sanctification I could be offering in return, I whine about where and how God is present in my life.  I throw up my hands and complain to God about how lost I am.  

You see this freedom we have been offered is a brand-new mindset for many of us.  We are not quite ready to live as the Children of God we are.  It reminds me of when I was learning to ride a ten-speed bicycle.  My previous bicycle’s brakes worked by pedaling backwards.  The new brakes were on the handlebars.  On more than one occasion, as I was learning to ride the ten speed, I would be furiously trying to break by backpedaling, to no avail.  Riding around in my backyard I became intimately acquainted with several bushes which crossed my path.  Lucky for me I was bumping into things in my backyard and not on the local highway.  My backyard was a much safer place to learn how to ride a ten-speed.

And the same is true for these freed Jewish slaves.  Before they are ready to enter the Promised Land they need a time and a place to learn how to be the people of God.  The Jewish Scholar, Avivah Zornberg writes this about wandering in the wilderness.  

“Their ‘crooked road’ into the wilderness gives them, paradoxically, a freedom to think, to ask their subversive, sarcastic questions.  It gives them, also, the outrageous freedom to ‘zigzag,’ not only geographically but intellectually, emotionally.  The road that is akuma (‘crooked,’ ‘devious’) threads through places of vision and faith adjacently, places of doubt and revision…These discontinuities cannot be avoided, or dispelled.” (Zornberg, pp. 204-205)

So what does that mean?  Sometimes we need to get lost.  Sometimes we need to wander around a little bit.  Like it or not, we may not be quite ready for what is to come next.  God may have plans for us that take us in directions we do not see coming.  But the journey will provide blessings yet seen.  

I am reminded of an old story by Sue Monk Kidd in her book When the Heart Waits.

“When I was a child, my parents hired a woman named Sweet.  Sweet cared for my brothers and me as if we were her own.  One summer day we went to visit my grandmother.  While we were playing in the backyard we found a wheelbarrow full of rainwater, and in the rainwater were hundreds of tadpoles, the three of us ran to the kitchen, asking Sweet for three jars.  Grandmother appeared at the door and said with a laugh in her voice, ‘Why Sue, girls don’t catch tadpoles.  Why don’t you come with me and I will teach you to play chopsticks on the piano.’  So the two boys ran off to the joy of the wheelbarrow and I ended up on the piano bench.

“Several days later, Sweet and I headed off for one of our frequent visits to the city park which was only four blocks away from my home.  The park was a special place to me and I could not go often enough.  I was surprised when Sweet took my hand and we headed off to the park in the wrong direction.  Sweet said, ‘I think we will go the long way this time.’  The long way, her words sounded like a curse on my ears.  Why would anyone go the long way?  I made a scene but Sweet would not relent.  So we headed off on the eight block walk to the park, the long way.  Soon we came upon a ditch, filled with rainwater, and full of tadpoles.  And Sweet pulled out of her pocket, a small mason jar, holes already punched in the lid, and said to me, ‘Now aren’t you glad we came the long way?  There aren’t any tadpoles the short way.’  I hesitated but Sweet put the jar in my hands and soon I was elbow deep in the brown water with the rich dark brown life darting to and fro.  That remained one of the most glorious memories of my childhood.

“I grew up and moved away, and forgot about the tadpoles, until recently, when I ran across a line from a poem by Thoreau, ‘we went to heaven the long way around.’  The line caused me to think about the wheelbarrow, the mason jars, Sweet, and the tadpoles.  And I still recall how musical Sweet’s voice sounded to me as she said, ‘Now aren’t you glad we came the long way.  There aren’t any tadpoles the short way.”  

God’s people have always struggled with being led through the unknown, the long way around.  The ancient Israelites complained about being led from Egypt around in circles in the wilderness while they thirsted for the Promised Land.  The young Sue Monk Kidd made a scene about her lengthened journey as she anxiously awaited the park.  Each of us faces times in our lives when we are lost in some way and desperately want to understand what is coming next but still cannot see it. Justified but not quite yet sanctified.

Sometimes the long way around is part of God’s plan.  Sometimes getting lost along the way is how we are prepared for what is to come.  We may quarrel with God about it, at least I know I do, but it is the nature of journeying through this life of faith.  The one thing I think we can hang on to in such times is that though the journey may be longer than we like, and more confusing than we want, God is present with us on every step; present with those Israelites, providing them water to quench their thirst, present with Sue Monk Kidd, in the compassion and kindness of Sweet, leading her to tadpoles; and present with each one of us, providing us with blessings along the way.  

Thanks be to God.  Amen.
 
Kidd, Sue Monk, When the Heart Waits, HarperOne, San Francisco, 1990.
Zornberg, Avivah Gottleib, The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus, 
 Image/Doubleday, New York, 2001.