Sermons
October 4, 2026 (Proper 22)
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
Exodus 14:5-7, 10-14, 21-29
Most of you know, I think, that I’m a pretty big Star Trek fan. Not to the point of putting on a costume and going to a convention (although I did dress up as Mr. Spock for Halloween when I was in fourth grade), but I generally watch the older series, at least, in syndication whenever I can. There’s a channel on my TV service that plays the five classic series every night, beginning with the original series (the one with William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy) at 7:00, and continuing with The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and finally Enterprise at 11.
The newer series, I’m afraid, aren’t as familiar to me; I started trying to watch Picard when it was first out, but didn’t make it past the first episode for some reason, and I haven’t seen most of the others, besides a couple episodes of Strange New Worlds when Mike was watching and I happened to be in the room.[1]
My all-time favorite of any of the series (we won’t get into the movies, for now) is one from The Next Generation called “Darmok.” The story is that the Enterprise comes upon a ship full of Tamarians, a race of people the Federation has been trying to establish relations with, but communication has been a major roadblock. (For this to make sense you have to be aware that in Star Trek everyone has a universal translator,[2] which allows everyone to understand everyone else—but in this case the universal translator made the words understandable, but their meaning was still completely hidden.)
The Tamarians, you see, speak entirely in allusions to stories from their people’s past and from their body of myth and legend. For instance, when one person wants to give another person something, the giver says, “Temba, his arms wide,” and every Tamarian recognizes this is referring to a story in which somebody named Temba gave somebody something. The trouble is that outsiders, not knowing the Tamarians’ stories, have no clue what the people are saying. But the Tamarians want to make friends, so they organize an encounter between their Captain, Dathon; Captain Picard of the Enterprise; and a strange beast on an otherwise uninhabited planet—just as, once upon a time, a man named Darmok and a man named Jalad met, fought a common enemy, and became friends.
It takes some time, but both Picard, who is rather well-versed in the stories and myths of Earth, and the Enterprise crew, armed with a vast computer database (not to mention the android officer Data), figure out how these folks communicate, and at the end Picard is able to speak to the Tamarian crew about what happened on the planet. He doesn’t say, “Dathon and I were on the planet, and there was this strange creature who was sometimes invisible. We fought it together, trying a strategy in which we split up and when it attacked one of us the other could attack it from behind. But it didn’t work, and Dathon died.”
What he says instead is, “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra. The beast of Tanagra. Uzani, his army with fists open. Shaka, when the walls fell.”
Then at the end, their story becomes a part of the Tamarian language: “Picard and Dathon at el-Adrel.”
That story doesn’t really have anything at all to do with our text from Exodus today, except to remind us that we do the same thing, inside and outside the church, although perhaps more subtly and interspersed with other kinds of statements. What, for instance, do you think I would be saying if I were relating an experience from my own life, and I said, “It was like Paul on the Damascus Road”? That would have been a moment when my life was suddenly and dramatically turned in a very different direction. Or if I was speaking of someone and said, “She was like George Washington when his father asked him about the cherry tree”? In other words, she was honest when telling a lie might have saved her from trouble.
Most of us know enough about American history—or I probably should say American patriotic legend, because we actually have no evidence whether the whole deal with Washington and the cherry tree really happened—to know what that one’s about; and a lot of us here know enough about the Bible to know what happened on the Damascus Road.[3]
But there is one story that tops them all for us Christians, and also for our Jewish siblings—one story that shapes how we view a great deal of our faith lives—and that’s the story of the Exodus. There are allusions to the Exodus story, images from the story, throughout our hymnals. I’ve heard people describe the experience of having a crowd just seem to open up for them to pass through as similar to “the parting of the Red Sea.”
You might even be able to make a case that some of our American stories are told in a way that evokes the Exodus story. Think about the way we sometimes talk about the American Revolution: The colonists were oppressed by a mad tyrant across the water, King George III, held in bondage by his laws and taxes; but we defeated him and became one nation under God in the new Promised Land of North America.
Can you hear it? We were slaves in Egypt, oppressed by a cruel Pharaoh, but God led us out, defeated the Egyptian army, and made us into a nation in the Promised Land.
Of course there are other Biblical allusions besides the Exodus story in our history, but that’s a primary one. Black folks, of course, spoke of their freedom from slavery as a new Exodus—and one of the more famous people from that era, Harriet Tubman, was often referred to by escaping slaves as “Moses.”[4]
The story of the Exodus contains a number of images, including a baby in a basket floating among the bulrushes of the Nile river banks; plagues of locusts, frogs, and darkness; the angel of death passing over the houses; and of course the giving of the Ten Commandments, which we’ll hear more about next week. But the images we have today include the pillar of fire and cloud signifying God’s presence with the people, and the parting of the Red Sea, which ends with Pharaoh’s army drowned in the waters and lost.
Modern folks sometimes have a problem with this part of the story. For one thing, we want to know if there’s a natural explanation for the waters being parted. Some have suggested there’s some place other than at the Red Sea where this actually happened, maybe just a marshy place where the ground clears off when the wind blows really hard. But there’s no way to know for sure, and there’s a really important theological reason why it’s the Red Sea that the Israelites cross on dry land.
Remember how the second thing that happens at creation in the first chapter of Genesis—right after there is light that makes it possible to know when it’s day and when it’s night—is God pulling the waters back, separating them, and making dry land appear. The ancient Israelites were afraid of the sea; to them it was a visible symbol of chaos, of a force that was always waiting to do them harm. And in creation, God took control of the chaos. So here in the Exodus story God does it again—takes control of the sea, parts it so the Israelites could go through, but not the Egyptian army that was chasing them.
Another reason modern people have trouble with this story is because of all those Egyptians who were drowned. We don’t want to think about our loving God doing such a thing. We’re not alone in this, actually: there’s a very old rabbinic story, a story in which Jewish thinkers tried to figure out what kind of a God would do such a thing. In this story, the angels are up in heaven watching the children of Israel cross the Red Sea on dry land. When the waters close back down on the Egyptian army, they send up a great, triumphant cheer.
But then they look around, and they notice that God is weeping. They ask why: “After all, your children the Israelites are safe now.”
And God says, “Yes, but my children the Egyptians have been drowned.”
It’s a fair consideration—after all, we believe in our minds and our hearts that God loves everyone without regard to what race or nationality they are. And most people who’ve read the Exodus story have struggled with how God is portrayed as hardening Pharaoh’s heart—God made Pharaoh treat the Israelites like this, and then God punished Pharaoh and his entire army. It really does seem strange.
But if this is the formative story not just of the Jewish people but also of Christians—we can argue that no, our story is Jesus, the Cross, and the empty tomb; except that the story of Jesus, the cross, and the empty tomb itself is told in a way that calls the Exodus to mind—if this is our formative story, then we dare not ignore it because we’re worried about the drowned Egyptians. Whether or not this event really happened, whether or not it really happened this way, Egypt functions in the story as a symbol of all that opposes God and God’s people. And the important point doesn’t have anything to do with how the enemy got what was coming to them in the end.
At the start of the Exodus story, the Israelites are utterly powerless. They are slaves to the most powerful empire on earth. Official policy is to work them to death, and to control their population by killing the male babies.
But into the midst of their powerlessness steps Someone powerful. By the time the story gets to where we pick it up today, the Israelites, having been allowed to go, are now being chased by Pharaoh’s army after he realizes the consequences of allowing his cheap labor pool to leave the country.
And Israel finds themselves in an impossible situation. They’re between the devil, as it were, and the deep blue sea. Between a rock and a hard place. In front of them is the sea, the living reminder of the chaos that always lurks, just waiting for God to fall down on the job so it can take back over. Behind them is Pharaoh and his army, seeking to do them damage.
There’s no way out. They’re doomed! They can think of no solution, nothing that will get them out of this mess.
But in this they are having a failure of imagination—and a failure of trust. Do they think they’re the ones who got themselves out of Egypt in the first place? Do they think they’re the ones who will get themselves to the Promised Land? Do they think their salvation depends on their own efforts?
They are only a few miles out of Egypt, and already they’ve forgotten that it was God who freed them from slavery. Already they’ve forgotten that it was God who rescued them from their oppression. Already they’ve forgotten that it does not depend on them.
A few weeks ago we commemorated the 25th anniversary of an event that shattered our country’s confidence and security. Terrorists flew planes full of our loved ones into buildings full of our loved ones, and many of our loved ones died. Four years later a massive hurricane slammed into the Gulf Coast, and many more of our loved ones died or were left homeless, hungry, thirsty, and afraid. There were warnings about both, and people are still arguing about whether those warnings were heeded as they should have been.
There have been more frightening events since—not least of which is the covid pandemic of six years ago, a new virus we didn’t know anything about, experts coming up with the best advice they could given what they did know, and changing it soon afterward as they learned more.
Twenty-five years ago, six years ago, we found ourselves in the midst of a frightening mess. We may want to argue about whether or not we were prepared for what happened, whether the steps we took in the midst of them were effective or did more damage, but the fact remains that we have learned what safety and security we have provided for ourselves hasn’t always been enough. We discovered that for all our power, all our wealth, all our abilities—and these are all considerable—we still ended up, like the Israelites, between a rock and a hard place. We still ended up in an impossible situation, knocked to our knees, with no idea what to do next.
We are a can-do kind of people, and we learned in an instant, and more than once, that sometimes we can’t do anything to save ourselves.
When the Israelites got to that point, standing facing the Red Sea with the Egyptian army breathing down their necks, something happened. God told Moses: Tell the Israelites go to forward—to walk straight into the sea! The Lord will fight for you, Moses told the people; you have only to keep still.
And in the words of the praise song our choir sometimes sings, God made a way, where there seemed to be no way. The people didn’t get themselves out of the impossible situation they were in; all they did was quiet down and go forward.
When we are in a mess, and we can’t see the way forward, along with the Israelites, our instructions from God right now are: Go forward. The Lord will fight for us—will fight for us against Egypt, against despair, against terror, against poverty and fear and death. God will bring forth leaders—some of us might discover that we are those leaders—and give them the wisdom and skills needed to lead us, just as he did with Moses, Miriam, and Aaron. Our instructions are simply to go forward, to be still and know that the Lord will once again make a way somehow—just as he did on the Red Sea shore.
[1] Strange New Worlds is a prequel to the original series; Christopher Pike is the captain and Kirk is a junior officer.
[2] This is true in all the classic series except Enterprise, in which the universal translator hasn’t yet been invented; in its place the Enterprise has a crew member named Hoshi Sato, who has an almost supernatural gift for quickly learning languages.
[3] If you don’t know, see the ninth chapter of Acts.
[4] Maybe you remember the 1970s TV miniseries A Woman Called Moses, starring Cicely Tyson as Harriet Tubman. There were quite a few TV movies and miniseries about historical events in those days. They should bring them back; they’d certainly be more mentally and spiritually nourishing than endless series of Survivor or The Real Housewives of wherever.