Old South Sermons:

Panic

by Rev. Nancy S. Taylor, Senior Minister

Based on Exodus 17:1-7

Sunday, July 28, 2008,
Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost

Listen to this sermon

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To panic means to be frightened. To lose your nerve. Lose control of yourself. Go to pieces. Get flustered. Break down. Collapse.

Panic is defined as a sudden fear which dominates or replaces thinking and often affects whole groups of people or animals.

The word can also mean a widespread fear of the collapse of the financial system, resulting in unreasoned attempts to turn property into cash, withdraw money, etc.

Many things can cause people to panic. Fear of thirst is one of them.

That is what we are overhearing in this story from the book of Exodus. Stranded in an unfamiliar and forbidding wilderness, the people of Israel have been too long without water.

A healthy adult can survive without water for three or four days. Children, the ill, frail elders and livestock, on the other hand, do not have that long.

They are thirsty and God is nowhere to be found. You can hardly blame them for beginning to panic.

The ache and anger expressed by so many people in the wilderness of our financial chaos shares a great deal in common with the ache and anger expressed by the Israelites in their wilderness. Like them, we are desperate for answers and for attention. Who is looking out for us? Can someone fix this? Can they make us whole? Where is God? Whose fault is this?

The implication of those questions is that our leaders – people with names like Moses and Aaron, Paulson and Dodd, Frank and Reid – can provide for our security … that they can provision us on this wilderness journey. But here’s what I know … here is the truth to which our faith gives witness: they are not up to it … not ultimately.

Don’t get me wrong. I am as anxious as the next person that our lawmakers succeed in what they are attempting … what they hammered out in the wee hours ... that to which they have laboriously given birth on the eve of the opening of the Asian Stock Exchange. If they fail, there will be more suffering to add to today’s anxiety.

You are worried. I know you are. We all are. Retirement accounts, mortgages, college funds, savings accounts, portfolios, church endowments, our nation’s international reputation … all are in precipitous decline … all are at stake.

A colleague told me yesterday that his 401(k) has been reduced to a 201(k)!

Come to think of it, it might be good medicine to pause for a moment to laugh.

Did you hear the one about Noah? Noah was a most successful investor. He floated stock, while everything around him went into liquidation.

This past week has left us reeling with startling and bad news. While our leaders have been arguing behind closed doors, we have strained to listen in from a helpless distance.

Ordinary folks are experiencing a huge range of emotions: anger, fear, shock, outrage … and, yes, panic.

People of faith are not immune from such emotions, but we are less surprised and better prepared than most to manage at such a time as this.

Woven into the very rhythms of the life faith – a worshipping and praying life – we are reminded of the fleeting quality of earthly treasure. Our faith warns us against the temptation to depend for our security on things that rust and decay. While disappointed by greed and saddened by its consequences, none of us is surprised by sin. Indeed, we are versed in the words of the prophets who pronounce judgment on societies built on wealth, while neglecting justice. 

Our ancient forebears had a way of dealing with times of calamity and disaster, times of predicament and possibility. They sang.

They sang as an anti-panic exercise. They sang to turn their attention away from those things rust and decay. They sang to turn their attention from leaders who, in the end, are as frail and faulty and limited as we. They sang to place themselves in the presence and under the power of an awesome God. They sang as a way of speaking to and with the Eternal One, God of heaven and earth, in whom alone is our security. They sang psalms … the hymn book of ancient Israel.

Imagine them out there in the wilderness … imagine if they had remembered to sing, rather than panic. Can you hear them looking up and singing Psalm 121?

I lift up my eyes to the hills— from where will my help come?

My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.

He will not let your foot be moved; he who keeps you will not slumber.

He who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.

The Lord is your keeper; the Lord is your shade at your right hand.

The sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night.

The Lord will keep you from all evil; he will keep your life.

The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time on and

forevermore.  

Singing worked for ancient Israel. I suggest we try it.

So, join me now, if you will. Join the choir and Harry. Join us in dispelling fear and panic, confusion and despair. Join us as we proclaim with our lips that which we know to be true in our hearts. You know they hymns. I will line them out for you.

Martin Luther claimed that “the devil flees before the sound of music.” Let the devils of despair and panic flee before our faithfulness. Let us sing:

Joyful, joyful, we adore you  /  God of glory, God of love;

Hearts unfold like flowers before you  /  opening to the sun above.

Melt the clouds of sin and sadness   /   drive the storms of doubt away;

Giver of immortal gladness   /   fill us with the light of day.

Sing to God, who alone is our Rock and our Redeemer …

O God, our help in ages past  /  Our hope for years to come,

Still be our God while troubles last  /  And our eternal home!

Sing to calm your anxious soul. Sing to proclaim our faith in securities that lie beyond the reach of Wall Street:

By still my soul   /  for God is on your side;

bear patiently   /  the cross of grief or pain;

Leave to your God  /  to order and provide;

In every change  /  God faithful will remain.

Be still my soul  /  your best eternal friend

Through thorny ways  /  leads to a joyful end.

Sing, not in denial of the tribulations and grief of the world, but because Christ has overcome the world:

My life flows on in endless song   /  above earth’s lamentation,

I hear the sweet, though far off hymn  /  that hails a new creation.

Through all the tumult and the strife  /  I hear the music ringing:

It finds an echo in my soul  /  how can I keep from singing.

Israel’s 40-year sojourn in the wilderness was a lot longer than it need have been. They could have departed Egypt and then made a bee-line to the land of milk and honey. They could have left behind them the stressful, panic-inducing desert decades before they did.

The story maintains that it was God who kept them in the wilderness … who moved them along in slow, deliberate stages … who delayed their speedy entrance into the Promised Land. Why?  So that out there, in the wilderness, with nothing and no one to rely upon except God, they would learn the art of faith …and come to depend on God, and not on things that perish and fade.

This economic wilderness we are in … Let us not waste its lessons. Surely it can be turned to some good. Let us use it to practice the art of faith.

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Exodus 17:1-7            From the wilderness of Sin the whole congregation of the Israelites journeyed by stages, as the Lord commanded. They camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. The people quarreled with Moses, and said, "Give us water to drink." Moses said to them, "Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the Lord?" But the people thirsted there for water; and the people complained against Moses and said, "Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?" So Moses cried out to the Lord, "What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me." The Lord said to Moses, "Go on ahead of the people, and take some of the elders of Israel with you; take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go. I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink." Moses did so, in the sight of the elders of Israel. He called the place Massah and Meribah, because the Israelites quarreled and tested the Lord, saying, "Is the Lord among us or not?"

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