The intersection of wildernesses

The view from my backyard in southern Arizona was striking. We lived on the foothills of the Santa Rita’s, a small mountain range south of Tucson.  

Our house was about 2000 feet up the mountain, with peaks that rose to 9500 feet. This was Madera canyon, known for its an annual hummingbird migration.

To the south we would look out over the flat desert sand toward Mexico, and watch the monsoons blow in from the gulf of Mexico. 

These seasonal storms, coming every July and August were spectacular although uneven, bringing rain to one area while many others just watched, parched for relief that would not come. 

And to the west I watched one glorious sunset after another, day after day. 

The Sonoran desert is glorious.

But the desert is also dangerous. 

Across the same mountains that provided beauty, was also violence - people traveling in the dark shelter of night to enter this country, desperate for a safer life,  but unable to secure proper documentation. 

Many were subsequently killed in this mountain range - tied up, raped, robed, and left to die  - or abandoned in the flat hot desert sand - by the very people they had paid to help them cross over.

To the west were copper mines, and a byproduct of the mining was poisonous arsenic, which would blow in the desert sand when the winds were strong. 

The desert was dangerous and beautiful at the same time.

In our reading from Exodus we hear the story of the Israelites in the wilderness. They have been freed from Egypt, travelled through 18 chapters of challenges - lack of food and water, hot and exhausted, worn and afraid. 

Being back in Egypt as slaves now seems easy compared to this life, although it was not.

God hears their cries of hunger and God responds with food. God is teaching these people that they can trust in God. 

Learning to trust God is not easy. For the next 23 chapters Moses goes up Mt. Sinai to receive instruction from God. 

When Moses does not return soon enough the people become restless. 

By the time we get to chapter 32 in Exodus, the people have convinced Moses’ brother Aaron that Moses is not coming back,

 and fearing for their lives they return to what they know, worshiping the idols of Egypt. 

They melt all of their jewelry and construct a golden calf. 

Uncertainty is a breeding ground for idolatry. 

False idols always lead one away from God, enticing people with ulterior motives that reinforce that which is idolized instead of God. 

In this country today we are experiencing the failure of one of our idols, the notion that white people are God’s chosen. 

The idolatry of this concept has been with us for a very long time, but it is a false understanding of who we are, and it is melting before us. 

Like the golden calf of the Israelites, this idolization of whiteness is not of God. This is not the first time that we have clashed in this country over the value of human life. 

Every time we make a few strides towards justice, we pushback and in fear and anxiety, and we recast the calf of idolatry in the image of a superior white race.

By the end of chapter 32 Moses has come down from the mountain, seen the calf of idolatry, ordered it dismantled, 

and told the people that now he had to go back up the mountain, and atone for their sin, 

ask God to restore them back into relationship with God. 

This will not be easy work. 

With Moses back the people feel great remorse, they acted out of their anxiety instead of their belief in God. 

Eventually, through Moses’ effort,  God came off of the mountain and joined the people. God came into their midst, in the temple of meeting, in a pillar of cloud. 

God came so that God could go with the people.

The arc of the covenant is established in the tabernacle, in other words, God now dwells with the people and will travel where they travel.

No doubt we live in wilderness times, made worse by the intersection of two viruses - the virus of racism and virus of COVID-19,  as well as climate change. 

For 400 years people in this country have invested a lot in the false premise that white people are better than black or brown.

 Now these old ideals are once again revealing themselves to be as poisonous as the arsenic blowing in the dust from the copper mines. 

At Christ Church, this is not our first foray into the wilderness. 

For the first hundred years of our history we struggled to be the Episcopal church in Dearborn, to bring the values and beliefs of the Episcopal church to this community. 

There were many times when we nearly died,  but we hung in there. Finally the auto industry boomed, the population of Dearborn grew and the economy stabilized. 

That enabled a mission enlivened by Clara and Henry Ford and the rector of Christ Church from 1925-1951 - Hedley Stacey to secure Christ Church as the Episcopal Church in Dearborn. Ed Green followed Stacey and kept that mission alive. 

Our sense of purpose and mission changed with Ward Clabuesch, who moved the church into a more social justice paradigm. 

And Dan Appleyard embraced and advanced the purpose of Christ Church into having a significant role in the interfaith dialogue in Dearborn. 

Now we recognize that the building that Christ Church and Mother of the Savior share is a community center,

 a building that up until three months ago was alive and vibrant with people, from civic groups to AA to Martial Arts and stretching, to voice and music lessons to parish events, our doors were open and we were very much a center for lots of community activity.

 Mother of the Savior had many plans and hopes for community events as the Arabic speaking Christian church in Dearborn. 

Perhaps the building will one day return to that vibrant ministry.

In the meantime, it may seem like we are lost in the wilderness, the building dark, and our time together spent in a cyberspace reality. We are in our own little Raphidim place. 

Raphidim was a place where the Israelites wondered about God and if God was trustworthy. 

It was a place of great need to which God provided working to build trust.  

It was a place of both pain and provision, a place that called people through the pain, into the wilderness and therefore into new experiences, new challenges, and new revelation. 

Like the Israelites, we are leaving Raphidim, heading into the unknown, and wondering what will happen. 

There is an element of fear as we look toward an uncertain future. 

I am confident that we will still work on building the Partnership in Faith, that we will share this building as a community center. 

I believe these are foundations God has provided, our food in the wilderness.

As we move into this uncertain future, we cannot return to exactly what we were. That’s the risk and the danger. 

The risk is that we will try to do things as we always did and the danger is real that this will fail. 

We have to rebuild the past into something new. 

As individuals, as a congregations, as cities, as countries, 

God is calling us all to Mt. Sinai, where we can be formed as a people and discern what it means to live as God desires.  

There is a global initiative to reconcile racism so that all people can live with the kind of  justice, freedom, and equality that God created us for and desires.

Like the desert I knew, like the desert of the Israelites, there is risk and danger, but also beauty as we do this deep work on ourselves - 

 dismantling the ways that racism continues to live in and through us. 

The risk and the danger is that we will be stuck embracing the false calf of idolatry, that whiteness is preferred by God.

 The risk and the danger is that we - all the people of God - will be unable to be fully who God is calling us to be. 

The primary burden for this work lies with white people, who must change the systems created by our ancestors 400 years ago. 

But, the beauty is we do not go alone, as we do this work, uncomfortable though it is. 

God is with us. Every single one of us. 

The beauty is that this hard work leads to wholeness for all of God’s creation. 

It’s hard and it’s risky because it requires being vulnerable enough to get uncomfortable, to have difficult conversations, in order to do the deep, 

but very necessary work to see how racism lives inside and shapes and forms thoughts and perception and action in me and in you. 

The beauty is, when we do this work, as we do this work, 

God will bear us up on eagle’s wings,

 exhale at last the breath of dawn in a new reality,

 help us to shine like the sun of hope in a troubled world, 

and hold us in the palm of God’s hand. 

Us, human kind, God’s creation-  lifted up into what is yet to come, into God’s people one and all. 

A reflection on the Exodus reading for Proper 6A