Margie Quinn
One hundred hours. That’s the commonly cited statistic for how long a human body can typically survive at “average” temperatures without access to water. That is roughly four days. The temperature in the Sinai Peninsula, where Moses leads the people in this story, is 81 degrees today. You can imagine how hot it was just a few months ago and even 81 degrees in the desert…I would be grumbling. In such extreme heat and exposure to sun, the timeline for survival shortens considerably. Claude Piantadosi writes: “At 90°F survival time with limited activity easily can be decreased by a factor of two.”
Now we’re down to fifty hours. Exertion — such as walking long distances in the day time, carrying one’s belongings, tents, and small children, and wrangling livestock along the way — shortens the timeline even further. “Sustained high sweat rates can reduce estimated survival time without drinking water to as little as seven hours, or approximately the time it takes to walk twenty miles,” Anathea Portier-Young writes. “One long, day’s march on an unusually, but not impossibly, hot, June day was all it would take to finish God’s people.” Because they had no water.
On our immersion trip to Tuscon back in June, Jeff, Dair, Liam, Meda, Quinn, Calin and a few other friends and I learned the impact of what it looks like to walk in the desert with no water. One morning, we woke up very early and met up with a guy named Joel in the Sonoran Desert. Joel wore a baggy, Hawaiian shirt, aviator glasses and pants that were too big for him. He told us about his dog named Noodles. Joel wasn’t some flashy guy in a crisp uniform. He was just a concerned man who told me, “I don’t believe in any religion, I just don’t want people dying in the desert.”
Joel was with an organization called Humane Borders, whose mission statement as it reads on the website is: to save desperate people from a horrible death by dehydration and exposure. Every week at the crack of dawn, even this week, Joel drives around in his beat-up truck in the Sonoran Desert, checking on the water barrels, testing the water pH and refilling any that need water because just in 2023 alone, we have lost 500 of our siblings in the desert to exposure and dehydration. Joel knows the name of every water barrel in the desert (they give all the barrels a nickname). He does this because he doesn’t want people dying in the desert. There should be water.
When we meet our Israelites in Exodus today, they wonder, too, “Why is there no water?” But let’s back up.
In 15: 22, Moses has crossed the Red Sea, led the Israelites out of enslavement, saved them from the wrath of the Egyptians and after three days in the wilderness, they begin to complain. They can’t find any water and the water they DO find tastes bitter. So, Moses cries out to God who shows Moses a piece of wood. Moses throws it in the water and the water becomes sweet. And there is enough.
How quickly we forget that there is enough.
Two weeks later, the Israelites complain again, going as far as to long for their time in Egypt under captivity where at LEAST they could eat scraps of food, even if they were enslaved. So, God hears them and rains bread down from heaven, asking them to gather just enough for that day. They look at it and go, “What is it?” God tells them to gather what they need, no more and no less but of course some of them gather a little bit more, like those people who hoarded toilet paper during Covid. Rightfully so, the folks that gathered more than they needed looked at their leftover bread at nighttime and find worms in it. It’s like when I open my pantry and forget that I had purchased a loaf of bunny bread and see that is blue from mold. God makes their bread foul-smelling, too.
How quickly they forget that there is enough.
Right before we get to our passage today, we learn that God was going to provide manna for the Israelites for the next forty years. Now we get to Exodus 17, and again, the people start whining that there is no water to drink. Interestingly enough, the Hebrew syntax here actually favors, “There was not enough water for the people to drink. In fact, geographically, if they had just turned the corner, they would have found a stream.
I call this “spiritual amnesia.” We forget the crossing of the Red Sea, the manna and quail, the bitter water turned sweet and God’s ever-present faithfulness to us in times of scarcity and need.
And yet, I would quarrel and grumble, too! I’m exhausted, my feet hurt, my mouth is parched and when I get to my next resting place, I discover again that there is no water.
Is God among me or not? As Anathea Portier-Young writes, “If God is supposedly with you, in the midst very organs, blood stream, and cells that require water for nutrition, metabolism, temperature regulation, waste removal, shock absorption and more — why is there no water?”
So, Moses cries out to the Lord. The Hebrew word here is tsa’aq, a word that is exceptionally strong, often used in response to life-threatening circumstances, like when the Egyptians were gaining speed on the Israelites as they fled for the Red Sea and Moses cried out to the Lord. “What am I to do?” Moses cries out here. “They’re gonna stone me!”
God’s response leaves Moses in a vulnerable position. God asks Moses to put himself out in front: “go on ahead of the people” (Exodus 17:5). The Hebrew verb is ‘br, “to cross over”, followed by the preposition liphnê, literally “to or before the face of.” That is, Moses must cross in front of the people, and witness their anger, fear, and insistence. “In so doing,” Anathea Portier-Young writes, “he will also see the need that is written upon their bodies and in their faces, and he will have to confront and respond to the magnitude of their thirst.” Moses takes that walk, probably one of the longest of his life, and heads up to the rock of Horeb.
He doesn’t go alone, though. He grabs his trusty shepherd’s staff, the same one that has played a role in multiple miracles involving snakes (Exodus 4:2-4), blood-red water (7:14–25), thunder and hail (9:23), locusts (10:13), and the splitting of the sea (14:16). Perhaps the staff is weathered and stained, like a well-worn Hawaiian shirt.
In any case, God commands Moses to go to Horeb with some of the elders of Israel. Remember, this is the same place where Moses got his call, where God met Moses from within a burning bush, “signaling both God’s attention to the people’s suffering and God’s choice to be in the fiery midst of it,” Anathea Portier-Young continues. God shows up in this surprising way as if to say, “I see you, and I am right here.” God’s standing before Moses upon the rock is a bodily testament to God’s presence in the place of contention and thirst.
Strike the rock, God says, and water will come out of it for the people to drink. And it will be enough. Moses obeys, even begrudgingly as he decides to name the place Massa and Meribah: testing and quarreling. This is a reminder to God’s people that when they continue to ask, “Is the Lord among us?” the answer is always yes.
Yes, there IS enough. There is enough water from the rock. There is enough manna and quail. There is enough from a mysterious man who takes a little boy’s loaf and fish and turns it into plenty. There is enough from a guy named Joel in a Hawaiian shirt who checks those water barrels even today. There is enough.
The life-giving gift of water is symbolic of the ultimate goal that God’s children may not only survive in this wilderness but that they might flourish. Even as they remain in a wilderness place, God provides water and says that there is enough.
Today is world communion Sunday. As we celebrate this table with Christians all over the world, I feel convicted that for me, there has always been enough. Today, not everyone in our world has enough bread or enough juice to partake in this Holy feast with us. I think I want to remain convicted as I come to the table every week that my commitment as a Christian is to take as much as I need (and not more) and then to go out and to strike the rock so that others, like our friends at Room in the Inn, like our friends in Flint and Louisiana and in Grundy County might have enough. I come to the table, and I try not to take more than I need and then I go out and find my own staff and put on my own Hawaiin shirt or my own wacky pair of earrings and I look for places where there is still thirst, where people are still asking, “Is the Lord among us or not?”
Church, who are those in your midst who thirst for water, who lack what they need to survive? What surprising resources will your landscape yield to meet their needs? On what rock are we as the Church ensuring that everyone may know that the Lord is among us because the Lord is working through us. We aren’t waiting for people “out there” to do it. We are going out to the woods and finding our own stick, whittling it down and looking for the places in our lives where people thirst. We come to this table to get reinvigorated and re-fed and then to go out and have enough stamina and courage, like Joel, to check the water barrels and to be reminded week after week that when we sit with our friends at Room in the Inn, when we find the places where people thirst in Nashville and beyond, that the Lord is among us and working through us. All we have to do is strike the rock. Amen.