“Is the Lord Among Us or Not?” - Fr. Pete's Sermon for September 27th, 2026, the 18th Sunday after Pentecost

Exodus 17:1-7

Many years ago after graduating from college, I worked for the West Virginia Hillbilly weekly newspaper. One early morning in 1977 I reported to my legendary boss, Jim Comstock, and he dispatched me to Washington, D.C., 300 miles way, to cover a coal miners’ march on the Capitol the next day. So I had to hit the road right away! It was at least a 6 hour trip. Now, I was young and foolish. And apparently I didn’t worry about details as much as I do now.

Off I drove from Richwood, W.Va. taking twisty mountain roads before I could get on the interstate. I had a gas station map. Remember those? A real paper map that you had to unfold across the steering wheel, try to maintain control of the car, and then could never quite fold back up again? I knew I was supposed to report on this miners’ march, but I wasn’t sure where the march was going to start. I didn’t know where I was going to spend the night, I didn’t have a hotel reservation. I just headed toward Washington figuring somehow I would work it out.

But as I was midway through Virginia, hours after I’d started, and still hours away from Washington, my confidence began to fade. Where would I stay? How would I know where to go and what to do? I began to wonder whether launching out on faith without actually having a plan had been such a brilliant idea.

As my worries increased, I just happened to notice a purple MG ahead of me. Huh, my big brother Greg had a purple MG just like that. But he lived way over in Annapolis, Maryland, which was miles and miles away. What were the odds? Impossible. Even so, I sped up to get alongside the car, looked over, and nearly drove off the road.

Well what do you know! It was my brother! I honked and waved. He looked over at the idiot in the next lane, and the look on his face was priceless! He nearly drove off the road! We pulled over, hugged, and laughed. Turns out he and his wife had been at her family event in Western Virginia and just happened to be heading home at precisely the moment I was driving toward Washington. We made a quick plan: I followed them home to Annapolis, about 30 miles from DC, spent the night at their house, and using their local newspaper the next morning, figured out how to get where I needed to be.

Now, at that young age I had absolutely no difficulty interpreting what had happened. God provided! It was a miracle! Case closed! But… was God really arranging interstate traffic and our schedules so that my brother and I would meet at precisely that moment? I like to think so, but I don’t know. I do know that when I was anxious and had no idea what I was going to do next, suddenly there he was. And I received it as a gift.

In our reading from Exodus this morning, the Israelites have a much bigger problem. They’re making a much longer journey in the wilderness, and there’s no water to drink. So they turn on Moses: “Give us water to drink!” Moses says, “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the Lord?” But the people keep complaining. “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?”

You know, it’s easy to make fun of the Israelites because they complain so much. Last Sunday they were hungry. Now they’re thirsty. Moses is probably asking himself, what are they going to gripe about next?

Last week they were saying, “If only we’d stayed in Egypt, where we sat by the barbecue pit and ate our fill of malasadas!” Well, that’s not exactly what Exodus says, but that’s how they remembered it. They had forgotten slavery pretty quickly. They were hungry, and suddenly Egyptian slavery seemed wonderful. So God acted, providing quail in the evening and this strange flaky substance called manna in the morning. They looked at it and said, “What is it?”—which is essentially what the word manna means. God was in a sense giving them a breakfast cereal called “What the Heck Is It?”

But now, they’re thirsty, and that’s a big deal. They really do need water. Their children, their livestock—they need water! They’re scared. And fear does strange things to us. It narrows our vision. It makes yesterday look better than it really was and tomorrow look worse than it may actually be. Fear makes us focus so completely on what we lack that we can no longer see anything else.

Finally Moses cries out to God, “What shall I do with these people? They’re almost ready to stone me!” And God tells Moses to take some of the elders, go ahead of the people, take the staff he used to strike the Nile, when he turned the river to blood back in Egypt before they escaped, and strike the rock at Horeb. And water flows out. God provides.

But I wonder if the most important thing God provides in this story is really the water. Moses names the place Massah and Meribah, because there the people quarreled and tested God by asking one of the most fundamental questions of faith: “Is the Lord among us or not?” And haven’t we all asked that question? “Is God here with me or not?”

Well, my Washington adventure turned out fine—I made it back to Richwood and filed my story. Some years later, back in the late 1980s, I was working for a Christian organization in Atlanta where the work culture had become increasingly difficult and, I believed, dysfunctional. Unhealthy. One Easter weekend I was told to stay in Florida to oversee the editing of a video series we were producing. My kids were still little, and I was missing Easter with them! And me working for a Christian organization! A week later I finally came home exhausted and angry and told my boss I couldn’t keep doing this. It was the last straw.

But I couldn’t quit! I had a family to support, though that job didn’t pay much to begin with. I didn’t know what I was going to do. But that very same day, I got a phone call from a man I’d done some freelance advertising copywriting work for. “Pete, would you be at all interested in coming to work for me as my senior copywriter?” Would I!

I took the job. I figured I’d work in advertising for a year or two, lick my wounds, and find my way back into some sort of ministry. Instead, I worked there 11 years. I loved the creative work, my boss, and the people I worked with. We worked with Christian organizations and publishers and secular clients. And during those years I found the Episcopal Church, which changed the direction of my life and eventually led me back into ministry in ways I could never have anticipated.

So God provided, yes. But not in the way I had expected. And perhaps that’s something I understand better now than I did when I was that young reporter driving toward Washington. Sometimes a purple MG appears just when you need it. Sometimes the phone rings with a job offer on precisely the right day. But, dear ones, sometimes it doesn’t. Those were only two days in my life of over 70 years.

Sometimes the answer doesn’t come. Sometimes the manna doesn’t fall. Sometimes the diagnosis isn’t what we hoped. Sometimes the relationship isn’t repaired. Sometimes the money really is tight.

Sometimes we strike the rock and, at least for now, we don’t see any water. “Is the Lord among us or not?” What do we do then?

Well, during these weeks at St. Timothy’s we’re praying, “Lord, widen our hearts.” And maybe part of having a widened heart is learning to recognize God’s presence and provision where we didn’t expect to find it. We can become so focused on what we lack that we fail to notice what God has already set before us.

The thirsty Israelites saw only dry wilderness. God saw a rock with water in it. And maybe the deepest answer to their question wasn’t finally the manna, or the quail, or even the water. God’s answer was that God kept going with them. Through their hunger and thirst with them. Through their fear and complaining with them. Through forty years of wilderness. God stayed with them.

So, I can’t promise you a purple MG will appear just when you need one. I can’t promise the telephone will ring with the perfect job offer. I can’t promise that God will solve every problem in the way we want or on our timetable.

But I do believe this: the Lord is among us. God is with us through it all!

God is with us in abundance and scarcity. In clarity and confusion. When the road opens beautifully before us and when we haven’t the slightest idea where we’re going next. The Lord is among us. God is with us.

And perhaps faith is learning to trust that God enough to keep going.
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Amen.