Sermon preached at evensong 13 January 2008 at St Mary’s Welwyn by Stephen Fielding

‘And the Israelites went through the sea on the dry ground’. (Exodus14:22).

Tonight’s wonderful first reading took us to the climax of the most important event for the children of Israel.

I don’t know whether the exodus story impresses you, as it impresses me, as the really decisive event shaping Israel’s understanding of God. But again and again the Jewish people came back to it as the assurance that God acts to save. What God did at the exodus out of slavery in Egypt, they said, he would do again. Indeed he did do it again when he brought them out of exile in Babylon. So the story of God’s wonderful providence in bringing them out of slavery serves as a recurring theme of the Old Testament scriptures, sung by them repeatedly. And there are three points which I want to bring out of that great story tonight.

First, that God hears the cry of his people.
Second, that God acts to save his people.
And third, that the proper response of the people is praise and thanksgiving.


1. God hears the cry of his people

Tonight’s reading brought us the climax of the exodus story. We need to retrace our steps a bit to see what came earlier. The Jewish people are in slavery in Egypt and they are having a very rough time of it. To a people already weighed down making bricks, Pharaoh adds fresh burdens, burdens which weigh heavily and painfully on them. And they cry out. Theirs is a public and visible complaint. This is how it is put in Exodus 2.

‘And the people groaned under their bondage. They cried out, and their plea for rescue from slavery ascended to God. He heard their groaning and called to mind his covenant.’

Sometimes I think that in our sufferings, our pain, our hurt, our anxiety, our fear, we imagine that God has gone on leave of absence, that he does not hear, as if he is distant, unmoved, unhearing, unseeing, unfeeling. We imagine that we are alone – terribly alone.

The Jews felt it, they were suffering dreadfully, and nobody seemed to care. But then the silence is broken, and the signs of God’s powerful intervention begin to be seen, begin to inject a measure of hope for the children of Israel. The silence has been broken. The pain, the protest and the complaint have reached up to heaven and God is not silent. The candour of the Jewish people in voicing their complaint has brought forth a powerful response.

2. God acts to save his people

The answer God gives is the answer of the God who delivers. ‘I am the Lord, and I will free you from the burdens of the Egyptians….I will deliver you with an outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgment.’ (Exodus 6:6). God will bring them out – he is the agent of deliverance from oppression and alienation, from everything that prevents their well-being. He will snatch them out of the grip of evil. He will redeem them from their apparently settled life of slavery and free them from hardship and risk. He raises Israel up. And it is God doing the acting – it is His intervention, His rescue, His deliverance.

God is known in an actual, concrete event and he will be remembered for this – remembered persistently as the one who in a specific time and place acted to make the children of Israel what they were – a genuine people, loved by God, and saved by God. Over and over again they never tired of repeating this fact – that God acted to save them when he parted the Red Sea and led them through. They saw their history as a people through the exodus lens. God did not act just once in an exodus like way. He did it repeatedly and reliably in similar circumstances throughout Israel’s life. So for example when the Jewish people suffered the catastrophe of exile away from Jerusalem in Babylon, Isaiah’s prophetic texts can inspire the Jewish people to believe that God’s earlier action in the exodus will most surely be repeated by like actions bringing them out of exile.

God is, in fact, a God who performs like acts, and may be relied upon to do so again and again. The whole exodus memory saturates the memory of the Jewish people. God’s intervening power refutes despair about what may seem to be unchangeable, and it utterly rejects the arrogant claims of those who say things need not be changed.

Is there a message for us Christians? Why yes. Both in the miracles of Jesus but still more in the transforming power of his resurrection, we see how the liberating event of the exodus is once more decisively worked out afresh for our salvation. God in Jesus has led us from the slavery of sin into the glorious liberty of the children of God. What is the proper response?

3. The response of praise and thanksgiving

If we take up the story of the exodus, we are presented with two lyrical responses to God’s saving action. The children of Israel break out in song.
‘Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously, horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.’ (Exodus 15:21)

This is echoed by Moses: ‘The Lord is my strength and my song, and has become my salvation’.
God is to be praised – he is to be sung. And those who sing are those who have had their slavery ended. As they sing, freedom breaks out. God has enabled this particular freedom, and the singing prolongs and extends it. The people sing because they have been given new life. Losers have become winners.

This giving of glory to God in song and praise is powerfully liberating. It is not just a response to what God has done, though it is that. It is itself a mode of liberation. Giving God glory liberates us towards God and away from our selves. It liberates us towards the God who is sovereign. And this praise articulates the praise of all creation. We sing, and we notice we do not sing alone. All the choirs of heaven sing – the same song to the same sovereign Lord. Angels and archangels all sing to the possibility of new worlds and possibilities.

The song we sing to God and in praise of God is a praise of his abundant newness, of his abundant creation, of the abundant overflow of goodness into our lives.

So may the God who hears our cry and rescues us as he rescued the children of Israel at the exodus, give us hearts and voices to sing his praise and experience his newness of life – to that same God, be praise and glory for ever and ever.

AMEN