[00:00:00] Foreign welcome to the collective table where we celebrate the intersections of Jesus, justice and joy.
[00:00:15] This podcast is brought to you by Oceanside Sanctuary Church. Each week we bring our listeners a recording of our weekly Sunday teaching at Oceanside Sanctuary, which ties scripture into the larger conversations happening in our community, congregation and even the podcast.
[00:00:31] So we're glad you're here and thanks for listening.
[00:00:39] For those of you who might be new, my name is Jason Coker. I'm one of the co lead ministers here and we just recently started a new teaching series. So this is our grown up teaching time, as I'm sure you have figured out by now.
[00:00:52] And the series that we're going through, we're calling Unseen Witnesses. We're really focusing on some of the lesser known figures in scripture and these may not all be lesser known to you. You may have heard of these characters. Maybe you'll be very familiar with these stories, but they do, in our sort of view, represent sort of less appreciated, less sort of publicized narratives from scripture. We're doing this from both the Hebrew scriptures as well as the Christian New Testament scriptures. So we're going to be bouncing around quite a bit. We are incredibly blessed in this church to have an, I think an amazing teaching team. And so you won't just be hearing from me, you'll be hearing from Janelle and Travis and Mark and Larry. We twisted Larry's arm. He's going to teach this series again too. So we're excited to be able to get different perspectives on this today. I want to share with you a passage from Exodus, chapter 18 verses 13 through about 23. If you don't have your Bible, we'll go ahead and put it up on the screen so you can see it. For those of you who are, that says John 6.
[00:02:08] So that may be my fault, but that is not what we're reading today.
[00:02:13] I'm happy to like take the blame for that, but here's what we are reading. Exodus, chapter 18, verses 13 through 23.
[00:02:21] So let me just read it to you and then I want to share with you three things that I'm really getting from this passage this week. And of course, if you have the chance, I'd love to hear what you're getting from it at some point.
[00:02:31] Exodus chapter 18 verses 13 says this. The next day Moses sat as judge for the people, while the people stood around him from morning until evening. And when Moses, father in law, saw all that he was doing for the people, he said, what is this that you're doing for the people?
[00:02:50] Why do you Sit alone while all the people stand around from morning until evening. Now, quick pause. If you were to back up and read sort of the little story that comes before this at the beginning of Exodus 18, you would be introduced to the character of Jethro in Exodus chapter 18. Jethro is Moses's father in law. So, you know, a quick little reorientation of Moses's story. He's raised as a prince of Egypt. Some of you saw the movie. I highly recommend it. If you haven't seen it, it's very good, right? And it's actually, you know, pretty decent representation of the. Moses grows up as a prince in Egypt. Even though he's a Hebrew, he doesn't realize that he's a Hebrew. Hebrews are slaves in Egypt. At one point, he discovers who he is. He gets angry because of the way one of his ethnic siblings is being treated. So he strikes down and murders one of the Egyptian guards. Now he's fearful, so he escapes into the wilderness, right? So he goes into self imposed exile into the wilderness.
[00:03:48] So Moses's story is a story of somebody who was born into great privilege and then committed a terrible crime and then went into a self imposed exile in a foreign land. Now the foreign land is literally across a body of water from Egypt, right? So he went across what is essentially like where today the Suez Canal would be, right? The canal wasn't there at the time, right across that gulf onto the Saudi, the Arabian Peninsula, and lived in the wilderness.
[00:04:18] And in the wilderness there were all different kinds of ethnic groups. And so Moses is essentially a stranger, a foreigner in a strange land.
[00:04:28] He ends up marrying a woman named Zipporah. Zipporah is a Midianite, which is one of these ethnic groups that lives on the Arabian Peninsula. And so this character Jethro is actually Zipporah's father.
[00:04:43] What's interesting about Jethro that we learn in Exodus 18 is that Jethro is not only a Midianite, not only a foreigner, this sort of, you know, member of this ethnic group that lives in the wilderness as a kind of like, you know, caravan sort of tribal group that moves around. But Jethro is also a high priest.
[00:05:05] So Jethro is one of the high religious figures in this sort of Midianite tribe.
[00:05:12] So Moses's family is complicated, is my point. Like Thanksgiving must have been wild, right?
[00:05:19] He's, he's, you know, raised Egyptian, Egyptian royalty, discovers that he's actually a Hebrew, a part of an oppressed group of people, and then escapes into the wilderness after committing A serious crime. And then marries into another ethnic group entirely. And essentially lives for 40 years as a shepherd in the wilderness, working for his father in law, working as a shepherd for Jethro.
[00:05:48] Fast forward 40 years.
[00:05:50] Moses encounters God in the desert, in a burning bush. You know the story. He gets called to rescue his own people from Egypt, goes back to Egypt, rescues them, brings them across the Red Sea, onto the Arabian Peninsula. All of that, you know, it's very wild, spectacular, succeeds. Jethro, Exodus chapter 18 at the beginning, comes out to meet Moses in the desert. Now Moses has dragged a million plus people into the desert and Jethro comes out to bring Zipporah and Moses children back to him. So that's sort of the setting, right? All of that has happened.
[00:06:22] And Jethro comes and brings to Moses his wife and his children. And while Jethro's there, he sees this thing that's happening.
[00:06:31] And the thing is, is that Moses is the de facto leader.
[00:06:36] He's the default leader for, you know, a million people who are literally camping in the wilderness.
[00:06:43] And if you took a million people camping, let's make this more relatable, if you took your spouse and two kids camping, you would encounter some conflicts.
[00:07:01] Moses took a million people camping into the wilderness and they had some conflict.
[00:07:06] And so every day they brought those conflicts to Moses. Every day they came to Moses and said, hey, can you tell us who's right, who's wrong? What does God say about this situation?
[00:07:17] Well, you can imagine Moses is very, very busy every day.
[00:07:22] So back to the passage when Moses's father in Law, verse 14, when Moses, Father in law, saw all that he was doing for the people, he said, what is this that you're doing for the people? Why do you sit alone while all the people stand around you morning until evening?
[00:07:41] Moses said to his father in law, because the people come to me to inquire of God. And when they have a dispute, they come to me. And I decide between one person and another, and I make known to them the statues and instructions of God.
[00:07:56] Moses, his father in law, said to him, what you're doing is not good. You will surely wear yourself out, both you and the people with you. For the task is too heavy for you. You cannot do it alone. Now listen to me. I'll give you counsel and God be with you.
[00:08:11] You should represent the people before God and you should bring their cases before God, but teach them the statutes and instructions and make known to them the way that they are to go and all the things that they're to do. And you also should look for able men among you. I know able men is a stretch, but look for able men among you. I'm just trying to acknowledge the inherent patriarchy of the text. Go with me. Okay.
[00:08:36] Find able men among you to serve who fear God, who are trustworthy and hate dishonest gain. And such men over. Set such men over them as officers over thousands, hundreds, 50s, and tens, and let them sit as judges for the people at all times. Let them bring every important case to you. Right? The big stuff. Bring the important stuff to you, but decide every minor case themselves so it will be easier for you, and they will bear the burden with you.
[00:09:07] And if you do this, and God so commands you.
[00:09:11] That's not a question. If you do this and God so commands you, then you will be able to endure and all these people will go to their home in peace.
[00:09:22] Okay. Would you pray for me? I need it. All right.
[00:09:26] God, we thank you for today, for this time in this space and the community that's represented here, and the way that each of us has come here today with a bit of hope and faith, taking the chance that there might be something good for us to nourish ourselves with.
[00:09:51] So we ask God that you would feed us today, that you would nourish us, that you would grow our hearts in faith so that we might not lose heart.
[00:10:06] We pray that in Jesus name, amen.
[00:10:09] Okay, 37 years ago, like, right about now, I was starting the fall semester of my senior year in high school.
[00:10:20] And just for fun, I took a drama class.
[00:10:25] And I took a drama class partly because I grew up as a teenager, crushingly shy, socially fearful. And I thought if I could learn to get up in front of people, that might help. And so I took a drama class. And the first day of class, I sat all the way on the left side of the class. And I noticed towards the end of that first day of class that all the way over on the right side of the class, there were three very pretty girls in an empty seat in between them.
[00:10:52] And so the second day of class, I sat in that seat and generally made a nuisance of myself to those three very pretty girls and pulled out all my best stuff, which wasn't great, right?
[00:11:09] And one of them utterly ignored me.
[00:11:13] And she was a, you know, odd girl.
[00:11:17] She wore interesting clothes. Sometimes she would wear, like, jean shorts with suspenders, and her hair was always, like, really wild.
[00:11:27] And she wore boots, like, cowboy boots, unironically, to a Southern California high school in the fall of 1980. 8. Because it turns out she actually had horses. And so the boots were practical, not just a fashion statement, although they certainly were that, too.
[00:11:43] And I thought that this wild creature was very interesting. And so I pulled out my really good stuff and tried to, like, make an impression. And she still utterly ignored me. And then one day, she got up in drama class to perform a monologue. You know where this is going, don't you? She got up to perform a monologue. And that monologue. Because it was drama class, right? You perform monologues in drama class. And I don't remember what the play was. I don't remember what the monologue was. I just remember that she was talking to a fake parrot perched on her shoulder. And I thought, this truly is the strangest creature I've ever seen in my life. The girl, not the parrot. And at the end of the monologue, she was supposed to set the bird free, but it wasn't a real bird. So when she threw it to be set free, it just hit the wall and then dropped on the floor as though she had magically killed it in some way.
[00:12:38] And I thought, I'm not really sure what to think about this wild, bizarre creature.
[00:12:47] And then we became friends and hung out together. And I remember, I think, the day that I realized that I could trust her.
[00:13:03] And I think that day was when we went to visit the local community college, and we walked around the community college and talked about our futures, talked about our dreams and kinds of families that we might want. And I realized that she was my person, and I couldn't ruin that with romance.
[00:13:27] So she became my best friend.
[00:13:31] And, you know, long story short, that strange, bizarre creature was Janelle.
[00:13:46] Here's why I tell you that story.
[00:13:48] Because our relationship didn't start out as a relationship of vulnerability and intimacy and trust.
[00:13:58] It started out the way most romantic relationships begin, with a lot of, like, fearfulness and a lot of posturing and a lot of, like, clumsy, awkward attempts to impress.
[00:14:12] But at some point, I realized that this wild creature could be trusted with all of my hopes and dreams.
[00:14:25] And I think that thing that happens is kind of magic.
[00:14:31] And I'm not a big believer in magic. Right? Like, I'm an enneagram5, you know, like, I'm very analytical. I like to believe that I understand everything, and if I don't, I want to understand it.
[00:14:42] But there is really something magic, I think, that happens between two people who at some point learn that they can trust another human being to not hurt them.
[00:14:57] And sometimes that happens between spouses Sometimes it happens between good friends, sometimes it happens between business partners, sometimes it happens between churchgoers. It's always good when it happens, but it's always hard to get to that place.
[00:15:14] I think it is.
[00:15:17] So this story is classically a story about how to organize churches.
[00:15:25] That's usually the takeaway from the story of Jethro in Exodus, chapter 18.
[00:15:30] Like, if the church is growing and it gets bigger, like, this is a strategy for figuring out how to, like, lead bigger churches or lead bigger businesses or, you know, govern nations. And that's true, I think, but that's just not what interests me today about this story.
[00:15:50] There are a couple things that I want to share with you that I'm taking from this story that have to do with the magic that happens when you discover that you can trust another person.
[00:16:04] And it's this first Moses, and this is, I think, a miracle.
[00:16:12] Moses listened to Jethro.
[00:16:18] Moses listened to him.
[00:16:20] Jethro was a wild figure.
[00:16:24] Jethro came from the wilderness from an entirely different ethnic group than Moses represented. Moses represented the height of civilization. He was a prince of Egypt. He came from royalty in the biggest, most powerful civilization that existed in the known world world in that region at that time. He understood technology, he understood warfare, he understood governance. He understood everything that comes from being a part of a place of power.
[00:16:51] Jethro was, to use Janelle's words, a wild mountain man.
[00:17:00] He lived in the wilderness. A part of an ethnic group that lived in the wilderness that was known for, you know, traveling from place to place, that was known for being a part of, like, a pagan way of worship, that was known for lying in wait on the side of the road for travelers to come along so that they could rob them.
[00:17:22] The Midianites were a wild group.
[00:17:26] And on top of that, Jethro wasn't just a Midianite. He didn't just come come from the wilderness on the Arabian Peninsula. He was a high priest in this other religious group.
[00:17:39] He represented all of the indicators of danger.
[00:17:45] Jethro was not by any appearance one of Moses's people, but he also was Moses's family.
[00:17:58] He was Moses's family because Moses married Zipporah. And so Jethro as wild and as sort of like risky and vulnerable as he was to Moses, he was Moses father in law.
[00:18:10] Moses married into this wild group of people because he had, you know, put himself in a self imposed exile.
[00:18:18] And on top of that, in addition to being his father in law, Midianites were distant cousins of the Hebrew people.
[00:18:26] Midianites were the descendants of Abraham's son, Midian.
[00:18:32] Abraham had six sons with his second wife after Sarah died. We don't tend to pay a lot of attention to her. Those sons went on to found tribes all over the region, and one of them was the Midianites.
[00:18:48] And so he was family to Moses in more ways than one.
[00:18:54] This reinforces to me that no matter how wildly different we might be to each other, no matter how much we might disagree about anything or everything, we are all deeply connected.
[00:19:11] I am connected to you in some way, shape or form, whether I like it or not.
[00:19:20] The other thing that I get out of this passage is that Jethro, who represents this sort of wild strain of the Abrahamic line, also represents the wildness of God.
[00:19:36] And this is a kind of biblical motif that I think we see reflected in this passage. And that motif is this, that God, or whatever it is that we call God, whatever it is that we think of when we think about God, that God often comes from the wilderness.
[00:19:54] You've seen this before, right? Exodus, chapter three. Moses encounters God in the burning bush. We mentioned that already. Moses goes out into exile into the wilderness, and he wanders up onto Mount Sinai and he sees a bush that's burning. It's on fire, but it's not being destroyed, it's not being consumed. And there in the fire, in the middle of the wilderness, in the middle of his self imposed exile, he encounters God.
[00:20:19] He doesn't encounter God in the powerful halls of Egypt. He doesn't encounter God in his own privilege, his own position. He doesn't encounter God in the greatest civilization on earth and all the order and power that it represents. He encounters God in the wilderness, in a burning bush.
[00:20:42] Abraham has a similar encounter In Genesis chapter 18, when three strangers visit him at his tent.
[00:20:49] And so he invites them in, he gives them hospitality, only to find that two of them are angels of the Lord, and one of them is the Lord.
[00:21:03] God comes in the form of strangers first. Kings, chapter 19. Elijah encounters God in the wilderness. Janelle taught on that passage not too long ago.
[00:21:14] In the middle of hiding, in the middle of the wilderness, when he's facing danger, Elijah encounters God as that still small voice. Matthew, chapter 4. Jesus encounters faith in the Roman centurion. Acts, chapter 10. Peter encounters the spirit of God in Cornelius's household, another Roman soldier. Again and again throughout Scripture, the motif is that when we encounter God, we encounter God in the places we least expect to find God.
[00:21:48] So despite our best efforts, despite Moses best efforts, God is not bound by our borders.
[00:21:58] God is not bound by our faith, our Christianity. God is not bound by our doctrines. God is not bound by our religion.
[00:22:07] God is not bound by our ethnicity or our nationality. God is not bound by our gender or our sexuality. God is not bound by our imaginations. Every single time we attempt to draw boundaries around God, God frustratingly, annoyingly, pops up on the other side of those boundaries.
[00:22:30] God is both with us and completely and wholly other than us.
[00:22:43] I love this quote, by the way.
[00:22:45] This is my clumsy way of plugging the book club book for next month. It's Holy Disruption by Amy Butler and Dawn Darwin Weeks.
[00:22:54] And I think it's a timely book for our church to read because we're just going to be finishing up, like, the revision of our, like, next mission commitment or sort of goals and values and all that good stuff. And this book is all about disrupting our normal way of doing things, which we have to always be willing to do, because God is always outside of our normal way of doing things.
[00:23:15] I was really excited to see that they quoted Frederick Buechner in this book, one of my favorite sort of mainline Protestant theologians from the middle of the 20th century. And I have this quote I want to read to you. It's a little bit long. I'm going to do my best to make it sound interesting. Are you ready?
[00:23:30] Are you with me?
[00:23:32] Okay.
[00:23:34] Those who believe in God can never, in a way, be sure of him again once they've seen him in a stable. They can never be sure where he will appear, or to what lengths he will go, or to what ludicrous depths of self humiliation he will descend in his wild pursuit of us.
[00:23:57] If holiness and the awful power and majesty of God were present in the least auspicious of all events, the birth of a peasant child, then there is no place or time so lowly and earthbound, but that holiness can't be present there too.
[00:24:19] And this means that we are never safe, that there is no place we can go to hide from God, no place where we are safe from his power to break into and recreate the human heart. Because it is just where he seems most helpless, that he is strong, and just where we least expect him, that he comes most fully.
[00:24:51] What I love about that quote is it illustrates something else that I see in this passage. And that is that the work of God is done not just by God, but also by us.
[00:25:04] And this, I think, is the hardest lesson to take from this passage. If Frederick Buechner is right, if God is relentless in pursuing us to the point where there is no boundary or border that God won't cross in order to be present with human beings, that there is no hidden human heart, that God is not willing to debase God's self in order to break through that sort of crusty exterior of who we are, then it means that God's method, God's plan, God's strategy for solving these problems is you and me, and God help us. That seems like a terrible plan.
[00:25:50] But it's just, I think, what this teaches.
[00:25:56] It's really hard, I think, to not be discouraged today.
[00:26:05] It's hard to see our neighborhoods and our cities in our country eroding the civil rights of people like the queer community who just a minute ago got the right to marry, a right that is actively being attacked.
[00:26:31] It's hard to see a right wing commentator assassinated in public on a school campus by an even farther right activist and to see the President of the United States openly blame Democrats for it.
[00:26:51] It's hard to see that on that very same day there was another mass school shooting where children were shot, and yet that barely received any news because it's just not news anymore when that happened.
[00:27:08] It's hard to see the escalation of violence in our community.
[00:27:12] It's hard to open your news reader today and feel anything, I think, but really frustrated and hopeless.
[00:27:26] I think that's very hard.
[00:27:27] It's hard for me.
[00:27:33] My takeaway from this passage is that people are the problem that Moses is dealing with.
[00:27:49] I'm not an enormous fan of the theology or the perspectives of G.K. chesterton, but maybe has uttered one of my favorite quotes of all time, which is, you know, there is only one irrefutable argument against Christianity and it's this.
[00:28:07] Christians sometimes, you know, as ministers. Janelle and I will joke, the church is great except for the people, by which of course, we mean us too.
[00:28:32] People are the problem.
[00:28:37] There is no system of justice that people won't break if given enough time.
[00:28:44] There is no group of people that people will not oppress or violate or perform violence against in order to gain power there. There is no form of violence or wickedness or depravity that people will not go out of their way to discover.
[00:29:10] And so, you know, I might be a leftist progressive Christian pastor, but I firmly still believe in sin because I see it every day.
[00:29:23] The problem is people aren't just the problem, people are also the solution.
[00:29:30] And this is where my faith is really challenged by this passage.
[00:29:36] Because in verse 17, Moses, Father in law, said to Moses, what you're Doing, trying to solve all of these problems yourself is not good.
[00:29:49] You will surely wear yourself out. And this is the part I think we sometimes miss. And these people with you.
[00:30:07] So our problem today in Oceanside, at the Oceanside Sanctuary in the state of California, in the United States, across the world, our problem is people.
[00:30:18] But the solution is people.
[00:30:22] The solution is people who have been captured by the wild goodness and righteousness of a vision of what's possible if we will give ourselves over to goodness and righteousness and peace.
[00:30:36] People who are captured by a wildly good God are the solution to these problems. And what that means is that I can't just keep my faith in God. I also have to keep my faith in people.
[00:30:56] And if I don't have faith in you to be good and trustworthy enough to solve problems in the real world, then they won't be solved.
[00:31:14] And so my job up here today is not to ask you to please believe in God.
[00:31:21] You wouldn't be here if you didn't.
[00:31:26] My plea to you today is to please, for God's sake, believe in each other.
[00:31:35] Believe that there are people that you can trust.
[00:31:41] Believe in that, like, magic moment that happens when you encounter another human being and you share vulnerably your heart, your dreams, your hopes, your desires, and they receive it, and they don't belittle it, and they don't share, shout you down, and they don't try to manipulate you into some other way of think or thinking or being. Like, believe people who listen to you and then listen to them, because that's the only place where our faith will make a difference.
[00:32:20] That's the only way we can, like, organize ourselves to actually make good things happen.
[00:32:29] And of course, like, the scale of it is important, but we can't organize ourselves according to, like, the scale and the strategy of this passage. If we just don't trust each other, believe each other.
[00:32:46] And I think what's hard about this is that you've been hurt, right?
[00:32:54] You've been hurt by other churches who held God up as the solution. You've been hurt by other Christians who told you that they believed Jesus. You've been hurt by other people who said that they loved you and then they betrayed you.
[00:33:09] I get it. I have, too.
[00:33:13] It's hard.
[00:33:16] But there are people you can trust.
[00:33:20] There are people who will listen.
[00:33:22] There are people who are exactly in the place that you are.
[00:33:27] And together you can make a difference.
[00:33:31] Amen.
[00:33:33] Would you pray with me? God, we thank you again for today and for these stories that stretch us and challenge us to think a little bit differently about our faith and our assumptions.
[00:33:53] I ask God that you would use this story today to challenge us, to ask ourselves who our people are, who we can trust, who we can be vulnerable with, who we can lean on.
[00:34:13] Who are the people that you have called us to be close to, whether it's here in a church like this, or whether it's in our neighborhood or in our workplace or our school?
[00:34:25] Who are the people who are captured by the same vision of goodness and righteousness and peace, who we can work with and maybe along with that, help us to recognize the ways that we have been hurt or betrayed or rejected because of our values, our commitments, our faith?
[00:35:02] We ask that you would heal those places, that we would refuse because of those hurts and because of those wounds.
[00:35:13] To be cynical about all people, that we would still have faith for that magic that happens when we join with another human whose heart and spirit are aligned with ours.
[00:35:28] We long for that, long for a community like that.
[00:35:35] So we pray that you would make that happen. In Jesus name, amen.
[00:35:43] Thank you for joining us for this Sunday teaching, no matter when or where you're tuning in.
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