Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] To invite all the kids to come forward. I'm going to need some. A lot of extra help today.
[00:00:09] I will tell you.
[00:00:12] Yeah, y' all come forward. I also need my offensive coordinator, Travis Helms, to help.
[00:00:19] Travis going to organize an offensive line and a defensive line while I talk for just a little bit. So I'm going to let him work on this. And then remember, we need a quarterback, a running back, and a linebacker.
[00:00:36] So I will tell you, all of you, I will tell you that for 59 minutes and 35 seconds of regulation play yesterday, I was beating myself up for choosing football as the metaphor for today's sermon because the Longhorns came out looking terrible.
[00:01:02] And then we beat the Ohio State Buckeyes in the last 25 seconds of the game, and I was, like, redeemed.
[00:01:13] So here's what I can tell you guys about here's what I can tell you guys about this story that we've heard. If you've been around church for the last several weeks, you know, we've been following this story of the life of Moses, and we've gotten to the point where Moses is leading Israel through the Red Sea.
[00:01:37] My offensive coordinator is not that great.
[00:01:42] Probably going to have to fire him and replace him with someone else next season.
[00:01:48] Okay, so we've been following this story about Moses leading Israel through the. Well, Moses childhood, all the way through these plagues. And now we've finally gotten to the part where Israel will be liberated from slavery as they move through the Red Sea, this moment that we call the Exodus, which is where we get the name for this book. And what I can tell you is that it would be very easy.
[00:02:16] That's a really big offensive line, but we have a lot of players on the field.
[00:02:21] Yeah.
[00:02:22] Okay, here's what I can tell you. We have these stories. We have these stories from the Bible, and they're sacred to us here at church. And they're so sacred that we refer to these stories as living word.
[00:02:41] And lately, in my own practice, what I've been doing as I engage these stories is not working just with the plot, but I've been treating these stories, these Bible stories, like they are alive, like the story itself is alive, and that it has consciousness. It can think for itself, and it might bring something to me or something to us when we study it. And so I've asked myself, like, okay, Exodus story, what are you bringing me? And on the surface, all of us seems to have this sense of that this story is about, like, two teams, right?
[00:03:21] Israel and Egypt, and Israel is like God's team, and Egypt is like a godless team. So we know how this plot is going to go, right? God always wins in the end. And so we expect at least in the last seconds of the game to. To Israel to score a touchdown and win the game. And everyone's like, yeah, but that's a very simplistic and somewhat surface reading of this story. And there are two details in this story that I want to point out to y' all that I think are very important.
[00:04:01] There are these two details in the story. One of them comes from Moses, and one of them comes from God, and the first thing that comes from Moses. And we're going to play a little football here for a second. Where's our offense? And where's our defense?
[00:04:15] Quarterback, running back. Quarterback, running back.
[00:04:19] Okay, and are we. We moving this way down the field? Okay. Quarterback, running back. Sorry. And get here. Quarterback.
[00:04:26] Quarterback. Okay, come. Come here. Let's move you guys up. Let's move you guys up.
[00:04:36] Maybe. We'll see. Okay. Quarterback, running back.
[00:04:41] I like it. The Bulldogs. Nice. Great. Okay, and then I need a linebacker.
[00:04:48] Tight end right here. Okay. And Ellie's the linebacker. Great.
[00:04:54] We don't. We're not throwing the ball. We're handing it off. We're running it.
[00:04:57] Yeah, yeah.
[00:04:59] That's why we have a running back.
[00:05:02] Okay, so here's the deal.
[00:05:06] The first thing. The first thing that Moses says to Israel, as they are on the shore of the Red Sea and the Egyptian army is bearing down on him, he gives Israel one piece of advice. He says to them, this word that we get, translated, it's translated in a few different ways in our reading of it. He says, stand firm.
[00:05:31] Stand firm.
[00:05:32] What he means to communicate is like, be still, be patient.
[00:05:40] Like, I know that fear is pressing in on you right now, but I am inviting you to take a moment. And the idea in this moment that he takes, it's like the way that I like to talk about it is like, there is this moment where we can get calm.
[00:06:00] And when we get calm, what the invitation that God is bringing to us is that we might see the same things differently.
[00:06:12] Or you might say it like this. If you are in a place of fear and anxiety, if you're at the shore of the Red Sea and the Egyptian army is bearing down on you, you might be worried, right?
[00:06:27] And so in this moment of stand firm, God, Moses, through God, through Moses, is inviting us to turn our worry into wonder.
[00:06:41] And so when you find yourself in a moment of fear, a moment of chaos, A moment of confusion.
[00:06:47] I want you to stand, I want you to get still, and I want you to say, okay. God, I am worried. I am afraid. I am anxious at what is coming for me.
[00:07:03] And I wonder.
[00:07:06] I wonder what you are going to do about it. For me, it is this opportunity to turn worry into wonder. To see the same circumstances.
[00:07:19] The circumstances haven't changed, but to see the same circumstances differently. We're at the shore of the Red Sea. The Egyptian army is bearing down us most assuredly. We're toast.
[00:07:32] We, Israel, the team, are going to lose this game.
[00:07:36] And then something beautiful happens, right?
[00:07:40] The quarterback hikes the ball and gives the ball to the running back.
[00:07:48] Okay, now just stay. I want you to come right here, right here.
[00:07:56] And these offensive linemen see what you're doing.
[00:08:01] So these guys are going to move forward. Move with me.
[00:08:06] And then here, you push him this way.
[00:08:11] Yeah, keep going. Keep pushing him. Keep pushing him. And Peter gently pushing this way.
[00:08:17] And then, Ellie, you come here. Okay, here's the running back.
[00:08:22] Just chill. I'm working here. I'm working.
[00:08:26] Help me, help me. Okay, so here, the running back. Now there's a hole, right? We've created a hole here.
[00:08:36] But what's the running back's job now?
[00:08:40] To be still, to stand firm. Because, look, we're talking like 6, 4, 2, 3, 5. Is that what you like?
[00:08:51] Gorilla linebacker is about to demolish this somewhat undersized running back. What are you, like, 5, 11, 195?
[00:09:00] I mean, I like a running back that's a little bit bigger, but, you know, we go with what we have, right?
[00:09:08] And then all of a sudden, while we're standing firm, while we're being still here, here comes the tight end.
[00:09:21] Yeah. So you're going to take Ellie out, okay, Move her that way.
[00:09:29] Ellie's okay. Gentle, gentle. Yeah.
[00:09:34] What do we see here now?
[00:09:36] What do we see here?
[00:09:38] We see the same thing differently right now. I wonder what's going to happen.
[00:09:47] Moses says, stand firm. Then God says to Israel, go forward.
[00:09:56] Okay? I want you to take that ball all the way to the end of the aisle.
[00:10:07] Okay, y' all sit for a second. And we're going to wrap this up.
[00:10:10] Sit for a second. Huddle, huddle.
[00:10:20] Brian, get your agent to send my agent your number. I'm going to replace Travis at the end of the season here. Nice touchdown.
[00:10:28] Here's what I want you to know. If you were around this church last Sunday, you heard Travis Helms preach a sermon about his experience on the Leadville 100. Running 100 miles. Crazy, but he did it.
[00:10:41] He did it right. And Travis brought to us this idea of, like. In life, we face both beauty and agony. The agony of running a hundred miles. The agony of, like, not getting your favorite teacher when you're starting the third grade this year. The agony of not having pizza for lunch, but having that fried fish in the cafeteria that they have. Life.
[00:11:09] Life brings us episodes of chaos, of crisis and fear.
[00:11:17] And when we ask the story, give us more, give us more than just two teams. The story shows us what liberation looks like.
[00:11:31] That first step that we have, that first step is for us to just pause, just to take some time, to stand firm, to be patient, to turn that worry that we feel into wonder, to invite a different scenario with the same circumstances.
[00:11:53] And then all of a sudden, it works, right?
[00:11:57] The offensive lineman move the defensive lineman to the left and to the right.
[00:12:04] And in good football, what do we automatically see? Here's Ellie. Six, five, two, four.
[00:12:12] You got bigger.
[00:12:15] She's standing right there, right?
[00:12:18] But in this moment of pausing, we wait for the tight end to do her job and move that linebacker away. We just give God a little bit of time to take the hard circumstances that working with and turn them into beautiful, loving circumstances.
[00:12:43] That hole opens up, and then in a moment, if we are running backs and all of us are running backs, when we have that ball, we have another job.
[00:12:56] And that job is not to be brave. I don't mean that we, like, we're fearless people and we just run forward. I mean that we are courageous people. Being courageous. Courageous and being brave is different. Being brave just means that you're not afraid. You're not afraid of anything. Being courageous means that you are afraid, but you act anyway.
[00:13:21] You do it anyway. You listen to the voice of God who is calling you forward through the fear, through the chaos, through the crisis that we might be encountering.
[00:13:38] I'm going to wrap this up. I'll tell you a story. On Friday morning, I went and had coffee with a guy named Wayne Turner. Some of you know Wayne Turner. Wayne Turner is the executive director of Teton Science Schools. He's a great guy. And we were talking about. I was telling, sharing with Wayne, how important Teton Science Schools and Mountain Academy were to my daughter Jade, who's now 20 years old and in college. And how it was so helpful. And Wayne told me, he said, you know, Jimmy, he said, I meet with all sorts of parents and grandparents all the time. Parents and grandparents who bring their kids and grandkids to our summer camps or to our schools or to our out of school programs if they're visiting somewhere else. And I tell them I have one job, my one job is to bring their kid back to them dirty, tired and hungry.
[00:14:40] Like my job as the executive director at Teton Science School is to return these kids back dirty, tired and hungry. I was like, man, Wayne, can I use that?
[00:14:49] I might even want to use it like this Sunday.
[00:14:53] Because when we come to church, oftentimes we with our minds in the west, we think like, we're supposed to come to church and like, oh, all the fear and anxiety and chaos in our lives is just supposed to disappear. And we're supposed to be that guru and lotus position with bliss across our face. But in reality, when we are embodying the faith, when we are practicing God's love with our bodies, that work, that work should make us dirty, tired and hungry.
[00:15:33] That's the way we want to live church.
[00:15:37] We want to live out this faith with such vigor and such flourishing that our joints wear out and our hearts are as big as watermelons on our last day.
[00:15:58] Thank you for letting me play football with you this morning.
[00:16:03] Thank you for letting me talk to you about patience and fear and chaos and courage.
[00:16:13] I want you to think about this and I want you to think about how you might embody the God love life in such a profound way that at the end of the day, you find yourself dirty, tired and hungry.
[00:16:30] Amen.
[00:16:33] All right, gang, you can go back.
