We have been in the midst of another deluge, this time from a ferocious guy named Ike.  We were without power like much of the city all night, so that is the reason for no bulletins this morning.  I never print them until the last minute in case I need to change something.   Many in our part of the world still have not fully recovered from Gustav, and our prayers are for all those who have come face to face with the wrath of Mother Nature.  Floods are the leading cause of disaster related deaths both in the US and in the rest of the world.  More people drown from floods than die from wind, earthquakes, tornadoes, fire, ice and the like.  We certainly understand afresh this morning that it is the storm surge that poses the greatest threat from hurricanes, along with torrential downpours of rain.  Incidentally, over the last decade and maybe before that most flood deaths have been in Texas, at least up until Hurricane Katrina.  And as we speak this morning, rescuers are trying to rescue thousands in Galveston and nearby who ignored evacuation orders for one reason or another.  It is estimated that 140,000 people are stranded, although thankfully it is believed that the loss of life is low so far.

Hurricanes remind us of how powerful the sea is, and how powerful water is.  Ike has reminded us of that today and has set our context for high drama with a most famous passage of the power of the deep blue sea to destroy, and in this twist of fate, to also deliver something:  salvation.  The Lectionary text today is the setting for the most dramatic miracle to grace the pages of the Old Testament, the parting of the Red Sea, and the delivering of the Children of Israel from bondage in Egypt.  We pick up our story today that after Pharaoh had let the children of Israel go. He begins to regret his decision.  In fact, the text says that God had a role in the whole deal as he hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and in effect set up the battle between God and the Egyptians.  God seems to be picking a fight.  So Pharaoh ordered his mighty army to pursue them in the dessert to hunt them down and kill them.  Now since Pharaoh had a great army with horses and chariots and weapons, and the children of Israel had nothing but a bunch of animals and stuff they had stolen from Egypt, it seemed as though their fate was set.  I like the way the story is told in the Message:

When the king of Egypt was told that the people were gone, he and his servants changed their minds. They said, “What have we done, letting Israel, our slave labor, go free?” So he had his chariots harnessed up and got his army together. He took six hundred of his best chariots, with the rest of the Egyptian chariots and their drivers coming along. . . .As Pharaoh approached, the Israelites looked up and saw them— Egyptians! Coming at them!  They were totally afraid. They cried out in terror to God. They told Moses, “Weren’t the cemeteries large enough in Egypt so that you had to take us out here in the wilderness to die? What have you done to us, taking us out of Egypt? Back in Egypt didn’t we tell you this would happen? Didn’t we tell you, ‘Leave us alone here in Egypt—we’re better off as slaves in Egypt than as corpses in the wilderness.'”  Moses spoke to the people: “Don’t be afraid. Stand firm and watch God do his work of salvation for you today. Take a good look at the Egyptians today for you’re never going to see them again.
God will fight the battle for you.  And you? You keep your mouths shut!”  God said to Moses: “Why cry out to me? Speak to the Israelites. Order them to get moving. Hold your staff high and stretch your hand out over the sea: Split the sea! The Israelites will walk through the sea on dry ground. “Meanwhile I’ll make sure the Egyptians keep up their stubborn chase—I’ll use Pharaoh and his entire army, his chariots and horsemen, to put my Glory on display so that the Egyptians will realize that I am God.”  The angel of God that had been leading the camp of Israel now shifted and got behind them. And the Pillar of Cloud that had been in front also shifted to the rear. The Cloud was now between the camp of Egypt and the camp of Israel. The Cloud enshrouded one camp in darkness and flooded the other with light. The two camps didn’t come near each other all night. Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea and God, with a terrific east wind all night long, made the sea go back. He made the sea dry ground. The sea waters split.  The Israelites walked through the sea on dry ground with the waters a wall to the right and to the left. The Egyptians came after them in full pursuit, every horse and chariot and driver of Pharaoh racing into the middle of the sea. It was now the morning watch. God looked down from the Pillar of Fire and Cloud on the Egyptian army and threw them into a panic. He clogged the wheels of their chariots; they were stuck in the mud.  The Egyptians said, “Run from Israel! God is fighting on their side and against Egypt!”  God said to Moses, “Stretch out your hand over the sea and the waters will come back over the Egyptians, over their chariots, over their horsemen.” Moses stretched his hand out over the sea: As the day broke and the Egyptians were running, the sea returned to its place as before. God dumped the Egyptians in the middle of the sea. The waters returned, drowning the chariots and riders of Pharaoh’s army that had chased after Israel into the sea. Not one of them survived. But the Israelites walked right through the middle of the sea on dry ground, the waters forming a wall to the right and to the left. God delivered Israel that day from the oppression of the Egyptians. And Israel looked at the Egyptian dead, washed up on the shore of the sea, and realized the tremendous power that God brought against the Egyptians.

            Wow. What a tale.  It is my favorite part of the movie “The 10 Commandments.”  The Children of Israel have their backs to the wall, between the devil and the deep blue sea, and the situation looks like a major logistical mistake.  Yul Brynner then says my favorite line as he is licking his revenge chops, “The God of Moses is a poor general. This is a job for a butcher, not a Pharaoh.”  The people start to whine and cry, “why did you bring us out here in the dessert to die, Moses, we had it pretty good back in Egypt.”  And even God says to Moses, “Why are you whining and crying to me, move those people forward.” And then, well then you know what happens next.  The whole thing is portrayed as a battle between Yahweh and Pharaoh as a type of god.  The people seem to be incidental pawns in a cosmic struggle which is the larger lesson. 

            Now Biblical critics have a field day with the Exodus, offering all kinds of natural explanations of what did or did not happen.  The most popular “scientific explanation” suggests that the biblical reference to the “Red Sea” is actually a mistranslation of an ancient Hebrew word which meant “Reed Sea” — a now-dried body of water — he hypothesizes that the seismic activity caused by the earthquake may have temporarily raised a land bridge for safe passage and the pursuing Egyptians were the unfortunate victims of perfectly-timed tsunamis approaching from the Mediterranean.  OK, whatever.  I tend to think that if it really was a historical event then it was a supernatural instead of a natural phenomenon.  But less we get sidetracked with the logistics of the story and the critical problems of dating the event, dealing with the logistics of the shear numbers of people involved, lack of collateral historical or archaeological verification, etc.,.  The point here is that God does indeed set the captives free, and that he will go to any lengths to do so.  The Egyptians became an object lesson of the powerful being humbled in the sight of the Almighty.

            But I think that this story means something else to me today, it is a story that is about more than the proverbial leap of faith, as most of the whining, murmuring children of Israel seemed to have little faith. It is a story of a leap of action, and that is an all together different lesson.  In verses 15 and 16 we read, “Then the LORD said to Moses, ‘Why are you crying out to me? Tell the Israelites to move on. Raise your staff and stretch out your hand over the sea to divide the water so that the Israelites can go through the sea on dry ground.’” 

            God said enough is enough, quit your whining and get those people moving.  Why are you coming to me again in prayer, you know what to do, get those people moving!  If I were Moses I would think “you have got to be kidding.  There is a great sea in front of us, and a powerful murderous army behind us. Cut me a little slack if I whine a bit.”  But Moses simply turned and parted the Red Sea, and things got to looking better from this point on.  Yet the people would continue to whine and complain all through the book of Exodus. It is hard for us to believe in miracles, but it may be just as hard for us to take action after living through one.  So maybe a leap of faith is only a leap of faith if it involves leap of action. This story is the quintessential action story in the entire Bible.  The plagues, the Passover, the lust, the power, the spoils, and the exodus all are high drama that would even sell in Hollywood.

            It seems to me that 95% of faith in America is talk.  It is belief.  It is valuing something. It requires very little of us other than to show up. We have a spectator religion that seems to be going nowhere.  We only seem to do things that reinforce our need to believe certain things.  We spend money on ourselves so that we can crank up the belief machine to more efficient levels.  I ask you, what are we changing?  How are we making a difference in our world?  I would suggest to you today that we need to take a leap of action, and not just a leap of faith.  It is high time that we put some bite onto our Christianity if we are going to make a difference in our world.  It is time to move from spectating to participating.

            I was privileged to hear Millard Fuller speak this past week at Entergy’s Low Income Advocates Summit.  Fuller started Habitat for Humanity and now runs the Fuller Center for Housing.  He told his story, and it was a remarkable one.  As a young man, he attended Auburn University where he met his wife Linda. He then graduated from the University of Alabama Law School, and shortly thereafter became highly successful.  He was a self-made millionaire by the age of 29.  But he and his wife were not happy and their relationship was drifting apart.  Linda suggested that they were happier when they were poor, and Millard said, let’s give all our money away and be poor again.  Linda astonishingly said OK.  In 1968, after giving up their wealth to refocus their lives on Christian service, Fuller and his wife, Linda, moved with their children to an interracial farming community in southwest Georgia. Koinonia Farm, founded by Clarence Jordan became home to the Fuller family for five years until they moved to Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) as missionaries in 1973 with the Christian Church.  After returning from Zaire, he decided to do something about the substandard housing that so many of the poor had to call home.  So he started Habitat, his first meeting was in a barn.  They had no money, not even for chairs, so they sat on the ground.  He took minutes of that first meeting and still said that he had them to this day.  He asked us in the audience the other day, if we wanted to know what those minutes said on that paper in that first meeting sitting on the ground.  He said it simply said goal number one – want to know what goal number one was?  It wasn’t to get chairs to sit on, it simply said, to build 1 million houses for the poor.  He said they did just that as they built their one millionth house in 2000.

Fuller said that the key to getting things done was to just start.  Just start! Period.  He told the story of a town soliciting his help, and he told them that they had talked enough, that they just needed to start on a house.  The folk there replied we have absolutely no money, how can we start.  Fuller said just start doing something, just start.  So they erected a sign on a vacant lot with the Habitat for Humanity logo, and with some of Habitat’s slogans on it.  Fuller asked them if they had shovels, and they said yes.  He said to just start digging the foundation with the shovels.  He then said that if nothing happened by the time they got the foundation dug to then go around and fill it in and start digging it all over again.  So two of the men went there daily to dig.  Then one day a man pulled up in a car and asked them what they were doing.  When they told him, he replied “y’all must be crazy don’t you know you are going to need a lot more help to build this house,” to which they replied “yes, sir, we sure do.”  Fuller said the man ended up paying for the house to be built. 

You see, the truth is we need to understand the leap of action if we are to ever experience the leap of faith.  We need to commit, we need to do.  There comes a time in all of our faith journeys that we all the crying out to God in the world doesn’t make a difference.  We have to just start doing something, sometimes anything.

Religion today is about spectating, not participating.  It is obvious by the types of houses of worship that are popular, they are meant for the edification of those inside the walls. We come to be entertained, not to worship—and even the entertainment is easy as you don’t even have to open a book in most churches.  Popular religion today is egocentric and not missional, it is about right beliefs and not right actions.  It is narrow in that it is meant to build up the membership and avoid everyone else.  It is not about a culture of service to the least, the last and the lost.

There was a time when we as Baptist were about action.  We built things, we were doers.  We built mighty hospital systems such as Baptist, we built colleges and schools, and we built orphanages, children’s homes, nursing homes and other social agencies.  These are not being built much anymore, and they scrape by on little money while the average church has millions to spend on itself.  We are people of easy belief and little action.  We have not impacted our city, state, country or world proportionally to our resources at hand.

I would suggest to you today that we will never do what needs to be done, we will never occupy a place of significance in our world, we will never make a difference in Jesus’ name, we will never impact the big issues of this planet until we learn what the children of Israel had to learn: That the leap of faith always means moving forward, it always includes a leap of action—always.  And how do you take the leap of action? Just start.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.