I can’t think of a time in my life when it’s been easier to identify with the Israelites trudging through the wilderness than it is right now. It feels like we have been in this wilderness of pandemic for years, not months. Many days it feels like our leaders have absolutely no idea what they are doing and might well be leading us along a path that will end in death. It feels like my hunger for community and my thirst for justice will never be satisfied.

By nature, I think I’m an optimistic person; I’m definitely someone who believes in the power of hope and joy to change the world. When this shutdown began, I knew it was going to be hard, but I also felt some genuine excitement about the creative possibilities it presented.

I thought that maybe it could be like pushing a giant reset button and the world that emerged on the other side would be a better, cleaner, more just world, a world more closely aligned with the core values of caring for the earth and one another.

Increasingly, though, like a lot of us, I find myself weary, and wary, and worn out. It’s not just the pandemic (did you ever think those words would come to sound so commonplace—“just the pandemic”?). Maybe what I mean is it’s not just the shutdown, the social distancing, the mask wearing, the constant fear of what it means if someone gets sick. It’s also the wildfires. It’s the climate emergency. It’s systemic racism. It’s the increasing ugliness and toxicity of our political system. Not to mention the various individual burdens and family tragedies that each of us carries, things that will never make the news but that often weigh heaviest on our own hearts.

It’s…all of it.

The grumbling of the Israelites, the quarreling, the testing of God and one another—now that we too are wandering through our own wilderness, I’m a lot less inclined to get judgmental about that behavior. “Is the Lord among us or not?” That actually feels like a fair question these days. “Is God present here with us in this mess–or not?”

In the Godly Play lessons we share with our children, we often hear the phrase, “The desert is a dangerous place.” The explicit reference is to the physical dangers of thirst, of extreme temperature, of shifting landscapes that can lead to disorientation. Now, though, I’m becoming more aware of the internal dangers of time in the desert—how our social cohesion can fray, our trust in one another erode, our resilience wear down to nothing.

The physical threat that the Israelites faced was thirst, but there was a deeper threat—the threat of turning on each other, of going from a community to a mere group of individuals, with competition rather than collaboration driving their every move.

When the Israelites begin to question whether God would provide for them, you might notice that God’s response is not to take direct action, but to work through the community to provide for their needs. It took both Moses and some of the elders gathered together, using resources they already had (in this case, the staff that Moses had brought with him from Egypt), to bring forth water from the rock. To be sure, God is the ultimate source of the water, but God’s intervention occurs through other people, working in collaboration and obedience to God’s plans. Once again, we are back to the idea of Beloved Community. 

Remember that, according to the Episcopal Church, the Beloved Community is “the body within which all people can grow to love God and love the image of God that we find in our neighbors, in ourselves, and in creation.”

At this point in the Exodus story, the Israelites were having a hard time finding God’s image anywhere. What they saw when they looked at the creation that was all around them was a bleak and barren landscape, not a reflection of God’s image. What they saw when they looked at Moses and Aaron were leaders who were incompetent or maybe even murderous—definitely not a reflection of God’s image. We aren’t told what they saw when they looked inside themselves, but I think we can imagine it. I think they were seeing the lost and frightened people they had become, not the people of promise and covenant that God had claimed as his own. And that must have been the scariest thing of all—to worry deep down that the image of God was no longer within, that somehow all those generations of slavery and oppression had erased their innate goodness and worthiness, had eroded their core identity as beloved children of God.

One commentator has described the journey through the wilderness that is narrated in Exodus as a “soul journey.” It is a commonplace in our spiritual tradition that journeys of the soul do not happen in a straight line and conversion does not happen all at once. Even knowing this, I was surprised when I was that this particular miracle of water from a rock was not the first time that God had miraculously provided for the Israelites in the desert. Obviously, there was the parting of the Red Sea. Additionally, God had already provided water at least twice before. God was already leading them with a pillar of cloud and a pillar of fire, insuring that they did not end up on the wrong path. And, to top it all off, God was already feeding them manna from heaven day after day after day. And yet none of this was enough to stop the Israelites from giving in to their fears. The desert is indeed a dangerous place.

Transformation takes time. Journeys of the soul take time. Becoming the Beloved Community, a community focused on loving and serving God and one another—that takes a lot of time, perhaps more than a lifetime. But that is no excuse not to begin now.

We are indeed in a moment of grave danger and it is understandable that we find ourselves asking the perennial human question: “Is God here among us or not?” 

Our faith affirms that the answer is yes, always yes. Our faith stories, though, remind us that perspective, the way we choose to look at the world, makes a difference. It took a spring of water gushing forth from a rock to remind the Israelites that they could in fact find God at work all around them. What reminders do we need, in order to see God at work in the world? What reminders can we offer one another? 

I have no doubt that it is still possible for us to turn this wilderness trek into a journey of transformation, even with all of our understandable weariness and wariness and fear. Maybe can start to transform the desert we are in by asking not “Is God here among us?” but “Where do I see God at work among us?” or even “How am I contributing to building up the Beloved Community?”

We need to remember the many, abundant resources that God is already providing, to focus on where we already see God’s image, and to help bring that image into sharper focus for others. We need to let our hunger for community and our thirst for justice motivate us, not bog us down. We need to be willing to fight hard for creation and for one another, to not accept constant danger as a normal state of affairs, and to seek solutions that are within.

A rabbi friend of mine says that when we feel that things are at their worst, we can wring our hands or we can roll up our sleeves. Beloved, let’s roll up our sleeves. Springs of life-giving water are within reach. Amen.