February 18, 2018 “Stop and Go” – Numbers 9:15-23

Numbers 9:15-23
“Stop and Go”
February 18, 2018 – First Sunday in Lent

Red lights flash ahead and you come to a stop. They go out and you creep forward. It’s 5 p.m. on Beltline Road or on the Santa Monica Freeway where I grew up or on I-5 through Portland or on the Eisenhower Expressway in Chicago. I’m pretty sure you’ve experienced it: “stop and go.” That’s what we call plodding along in heavy traffic hoping that somewhere up ahead the road is clear.

The good thing about stop and go on a roadway is those brake lights ahead of you. They make it pretty clear when it’s time to stop and when it’s time to step on the gas and move forward. Without signals like that, or traffic lights or stop signs at intersections, driving would be chaos. We wouldn’t know when to stop and when to go.

My first impression of our text today from Numbers 9 is that the children of Israel were given pretty clear signs of when to stop and when to go as they travelled through the wilderness. The raising and lowering of that cloud over the Tabernacle was as plain a signal as any red or green light you might see on the road. Whenever the cloud lifted up, it was time for them to get up and go. Whenever and wherever the cloud settled down, it was time for them to stop and make camp. What could be simpler?

Read on to the next section there on page 221 and you find God even commanded them to make silver trumpets to signal the people. The cloud lifting told them when it was time to go and trumpet blasts directed how they did it, kept them in order as they set out.

God gave His people direction. Back in Exodus 13 at the bottom of page 104 in Beginnings, as Israel left Egypt God sent a pillar of cloud and a pillar of fire in front to lead them out into the wilderness, guiding them by day and by night. Now years later in Numbers, that direction has settled into a regular and expected routine, centered on God’s presence in the Tabernacle. The cloud and the fire remained as constant indicators of when and where to go and when to stay.

That presence of God in that cloud and fire was foreshadowed back in Genesis 15 on page 21 in Beginnings when God first made a covenant with Abraham. Abraham offered the Lord animal sacrifices cut in half and laid out along either side of a path. Human beings made covenants with each other that way, walking together through the middle of the slain animals. The idea was that if either side did not keep the covenant, it would call down the vengeance of heaven to chop them in half like the sacrifices.

But something different happened for Abraham. What went between the halves of those carcasses was a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch. As the Lord predicted the enslavement of Abraham’s descendants in Egypt, He also showed him the very signs by which God would lead them out, cloud and fire.

When I read all this, I find myself wishing for that same sort of plain, clear direction for my own life, for our church. Sometimes when I’m wondering what to do next, or our church council is wrestling with a difficult decision, it would be really nice to look out and see an obvious distinct pillar of cloud or fire showing the way.

As Christians we believe that the Holy Spirit is our guide now. As we read in our Gospel this morning from Mark 1, the Holy Spirit guided Jesus Himself. We heard how the Spirit came down on Him like a dove and then, almost immediately, flapped His wings and drove Jesus out into the wilderness just like the cloud and fire led Israel out. The Israelites spent forty years out there. Significantly, Jesus spent forty days out there. But it was all so plain. Cloud or Spirit, the direction was clear. They knew when to go and when to stop. I wish we could know that too.

We do have some direction. As we remember every year at Pentecost, the Spirit came down on our Lord’s church in flaming tongues of fire. That Holy Spirit is given to every believer in Jesus and that gift is shown and confirmed in baptism. He is here with us to guide us if we will only listen to Him. But, as you probably know, it’s not that simple, not that clear. Much of the time it’s hard to know if we’re listening to the Spirit or to our own feelings or to the culture we live in. It’s frequently pretty difficult to know if He is saying “go” or “stop” or whatever.

Maybe the fault is with us. Maybe it should be clearer. I certainly know that sometimes I could do a better job of slowing down, praying, and listening for what the Spirit has to say before I head off in one direction or another. This season of Lent is partly about doing that, about letting the Spirit lead us into the wilderness with Jesus for forty days. But I wonder if our own failure to seek and listen to God’s guidance is the whole story about why it all seems so unclear, so cloudy, if you will.

So I’d like to share two thoughts that came to me this week about the children of Israel and the cloud and the fire, about their stopping and going there in the wilderness. The first is that maybe it wasn’t as clear to them as this little bit of the story we read today makes it seem. When you look at the bigger picture, the whole narrative of Israel’s exodus from Egypt and journey through the wilderness, you don’t exactly get the impression of folks who were carefully listening to God and confident about what He was telling them. It’s a story filled with doubts and confusion and rebellion, a story for which, if we didn’t already know the ending, the outcome is pretty unclear.

Maybe even those signals that I compared to traffic lights in their simplicity and clarity weren’t as obvious as we might think. Look at what it says there at the top of page 221, starting with what is traditionally verse 20. “Sometimes the cloud would stay over the Tabernacle for only a few days… Sometimes the cloud stayed only overnight… Whether the cloud stayed above the Tabernacle for two days, a month or a year, the people of Israel stayed in camp and did not move on.” Now let’s think a bit about how that might feel in practice. Put yourself in their shoes, or sandals maybe.

You’re an Israelite. You know the drill. The cloud goes up and you break camp and go. The cloud settles down and stays and you make camp and stay. But suppose that cloud does hang in there for a year, like we’re told it sometimes did. But suppose that last time it only remained for a few days, like we’re also told it sometimes did. Wouldn’t you start to wonder after a couple weeks? Wouldn’t you really start to wonder after a couple months? “Maybe we’ve got this wrong. Maybe we don’t understand the signals after all. Maybe we missed something. Maybe we’re not right with God and He isn’t communicating with us anymore. Maybe this whole business is a big mistake.” And those feelings, those questions don’t get quickly resolved. That confusion and doubt goes on and on for months and months, until, finally, one day the cloud lifts and you are on the march again.

That kind of doubt and lack of clarity over the long stops sounds a little bit more like what my spiritual life feels like, a little bit more like what most of us experience of the Holy Spirit’s guidance. It’s just not always that clear, and maybe it’s not supposed to be. Maybe those long periods without any clear direction are about learning something else, about learning to trust God in the wilderness when we aren’t getting any signals, aren’t hearing His voice directing us on to the next step in the journey.

Which brings me to the second thought about all this, about Israel stopping and going in the wilderness and you and I stopping and going through our own lives. It seems to me like life happens during the stopping, not during the going. We’ve often heard it said that “life is in the journey” or something like that. But maybe that’s wrong. Think about the logistics of it all. Israel had to spend more time stopped than they spent walking through the deserts and the valleys and the hills.

Look at what it says in what is verse 19, about a quarter of the way down on page 221. “If the cloud remained over the Tabernacle for a long time, the Israelites stayed and performed their duty to the Lord.” It was while they were stopped that they did all the things that God had commanded them about offering sacrifices and worshipping and purifying themselves. That didn’t happen on the road. It happed in camp, when they were stopped.

Look at Jesus’ temptation and victory over Satan again. It didn’t happen while He was walking out to the wilderness. It happened while He stayed out there for forty stays, while He was stopped there waiting for the Spirit, for God to show Him what He was supposed to do next. I submit to you that most of our real life with God happens when we are stopped somewhere, not when we are going somewhere.

Our problem is that we’re not very comfortable with stopping. We all hate sitting trapped in our cars waiting for traffic to clear or the train to pass or for whatever is forcing us to stop. We really have believed that life is in the journey, when it’s actually not.

We get uncomfortable when we don’t see the signal to move on, when we can’t discern when or where to go next. We say we are “stuck” or “trapped” or “bogged down” when it feels like we aren’t going anywhere. And we are missing the signal that God is right here, that the cloud has settled down. He expects us to stay put and perform our duty to Him and be with Him right where we are.

Let me sadly say to you that some of the unhappiest people I’ve encountered in over thirty years of pastoral ministry are folks that never quite settle down. They are always looking for the next business deal which will make them rich or always searching for the soul-mate who will bring them true love. They can even be constantly seeking the next step in spiritual life which will bring them truly close to God. I ache for these restless souls. They never seem to be able to let themselves stop and camp for awhile where God has brought them to that point. They are always anxiously looking for the cloud to lift and the opportunity to move on to whatever is next. I don’t think God means for His people to live that way. I don’t think that’s how Israel actually lived in the wilderness.

Most of our life with God happens in camp, not on the road. The cloud of His presence settles down to be with us as we settle down to stay awhile and be with Him. We talk sometimes about our forty-day journey during Lent, but maybe we need to look again at Jesus’ forty days and realize that it wasn’t really a journey. Jesus went out, but then He stopped and stayed where He was to wait for God, to be with God.

Please don’t get me wrong. I may be getting it wrong, may be misleading you a bit, because I typically like staying put. After moving around several times in the first half of my life, I’ve stayed here with this church, in this place, for twenty-five years. But I know for sure that’s not what God wants for everyone, that it may not be the signals or the guidance that He is giving to you. As the text says about Israel staying for a year, we all need to be ready and willing to move on when God says it is time. Stop and go. Stop or go, all according to the Lord’s direction, by the Spirit’s leading.

I believe it’s not always going to be clear. In fact, it’s not always going to be clear most of the time. If God brings you or I to settle down for a long stay, we will have to wonder now and then if it’s time to go. If God signals us to get up and go somewhere, then we will be left wondering if we got it right or if we should have stayed. The cloud guiding us will often be cloudy.

The beauty is that looking back we will see it all much more clearly. The going and the stopping will come into focus and we will know what God was up to, why He had us stop here or go there. It will be uncertain and unclear at the time, but when we finally and forever stop and stay with God, it will be plain and bright as the sun.

Browsing this week through David Bentley Hart’s The Story of Christianity, I came across a story I didn’t know. It’s about how Christianity came to Ethiopia in the early fourth century. Two brothers, Frumentius and Aedesius were Christian merchants from Tyre on the Mediterranean. They got on a ship thinking they were headed for India to do business there. But their ship failed and stopped in the Red Sea off the coast of east Africa. They made it to shore in Ethiopia, where they were taken captive and sold to the royal house as servants. They did not go where they expected and they stopped where they did not expect.

Aedesius became cupbearer to the king of Ethiopia and Frumentius was made the tutor of the king’s son, crown prince Ezanas. When the king died and Ezanas took the throne, he took to heart what he had learned from Frumentius. His whole household converted to Christianity. The two brothers probably expected then to stay there in the royal palace the rest of their lives. But Ezanas sent Aedesius home to Tyre and sent Frumentius to Alexandra to ask the patriarch to appoint a Christian bishop for Ethiopia.

Frumentius may have wanted to go home like his brother after obtaining a bishop for Ethiopia, but God had a different plan. The patriarch turned the businessman into a bishop and sent Frumentius back to Ethiopia to evangelize that nation and guide the new church. Frumentius stayed there the rest of his life. He refused to go when a Roman emperor tried to replace him with an heretical bishop. His life was uncertain and confusing at several points, but God was showing Frumentius when to go and when to stop and stay.

That’s how I think it is for all of us. Clear signals are nice. Sometimes we get them, like Israel had the cloud and the fire in the wilderness. Much of the time, though, God simply wants us to wait and trust and depend on His Spirit to guide us when the time is right, whether He is ready for us to make a move or wants us to stay somewhere awhile longer. Mostly we will find His presence, His Spirit, hovering in one place, calling us to be faithful and do our duty to God and to those around us. As long as we are ready to go if He signals, if He calls, then that is normal, that is good.

As we will read together this year, the aim of Israel’s story was to stop, to stay in one place in the land of Canaan, the Promised Land. As you will read from Numbers this week, even before they got there God was helping them plan for settling down, for dividing up the land between the tribes, for stopping and staying.

The aim of our story is to stop and stay as well. Those silver trumpets signaled the people of Israel when it was time to get up and go. The New Testament teaches us that a trumpet will also be the signal for you and I to get up and go for the last time. When we hear it sound, then God will raise us all up to meet Jesus in the air. But we won’t stay there. He will lead us in glory back to this earth which will be made over into the final, complete and perfect Promised Land it was meant to be. All our traveling will be over. There will be no more cloud because we will see Him clearly. And we will blessed to stop and stay forever with our Lord.

Amen.