# St. John's United Church of Christ – October 4, 2026 ## Rescue at the Sea – World Communion Sunday > [!info] Bulletin cover > "Moses" © Estate of John August Swanson, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt University Divinity Library. > The image shows Moses striking a rock as water pours out, while a long line of people and sheep crowd forward to drink. Note: this depicts the water-from-the-rock story ([[Exodus 17#6]]; [[Numbers 20#11]]), not the sea crossing. It pairs directly with the last line of Psalm 114 ([[Psalm 114#8]]).   ## Liturgical Context ### Christian Liturgical Calendar - **Season:** Season after Pentecost (Ordinary Time) - **Sunday:** 19th Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 22) - **Lectionary year:** Year A (Matthew), liturgical year 2025–26 - **Color:** Green - **World Communion Sunday:** Observed the first Sunday of October. It began in 1933 at Shadyside Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh under Hugh Thomson Kerr. The Federal Council of Churches spread it nationally in 1940. - **Feast of St. Francis of Assisi (Oct. 4):** Many congregations hold animal blessings this weekend. - **Season of Creation:** The ecumenical Season of Creation closes on St. Francis Day. - **Pastor Appreciation Month:** St. John's will celebrate Pastor Caroline on Sunday, Oct. 18. ### Jewish Calendar - **Hebrew date:** 23 Tishrei 5787 - **Simchat Torah (diaspora):** Begins at sundown Oct. 3 and ends at nightfall Oct. 4. Congregations finish the annual Torah cycle with the death of Moses ([[Deuteronomy 34#5]]) and immediately start again at [[Genesis 1#1]]. - **Shemini Atzeret:** Oct. 3 - **Context:** Sukkot (Sept. 26 – Oct. 2) just ended. That festival remembers Israel living in booths during the wilderness journey that begins right after the sea crossing. ### Ecumenical & Global Observances - World Communion Sunday (see above) - World Animal Day (Oct. 4) - World Space Week (Oct. 4–10) - World Habitat Day (Monday, Oct. 5) - CROP Hunger Walk season (Chambersburg walk Oct. 18) ### Lectionary Readings #### Narrative Lectionary (used today) - **Year 1 (Matthew), 2026–27 – "Rescue at the Sea"** - Preaching text: Exodus 14:5-7, 10-14, 21-29 - Accompanying text: Matthew 2:13-15 #### Revised Common Lectionary – Year A, Proper 22 - **Hebrew Bible (semi-continuous):** Exodus 20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20 – [[Exodus 20#1]] - **Psalm (semi-continuous):** Psalm 19 – [[Psalm 19#1]] - **Hebrew Bible (complementary):** Isaiah 5:1-7 – [[Isaiah 5#1]] - **Psalm (complementary):** Psalm 80:7-15 – [[Psalm 80#7]] - **Epistle:** Philippians 3:4b-14 – [[Philippians 3#4]] - **Gospel:** Matthew 21:33-46 – [[Matthew 21#33]] ### Connection to Today's Message - **Narrative Lectionary arc:** Today continues the fall walk through the Hebrew Bible story, moving from the call of Moses into the Exodus itself. - **Matthew 2 pairing:** The Holy Family flees *into* Egypt for safety. Egypt is the place of bondage in Exodus 14 but the place of refuge in Matthew 2. Matthew 2:15 then quotes [[Hosea 11#1]] ("Out of Egypt I have called my son"), casting Jesus as the one who relives Israel's Exodus. - **Psalm 114:** Creation itself reacts to the Exodus. The sea flees, the Jordan turns back, and the mountains skip. The final verse ties directly to the bulletin cover. - **Confession and hymn framing:** The confession opens with Pharaoh's decree against the foreigner. Hymn 574 reads the Exodus through the Amistad captives and the long Black freedom struggle. Together they frame the text around oppression of outsiders and present-day justice. - **World Communion Sunday:** The new Gillette hymn presents the table as global and connected. The Prayer of Dedication picks up the same "different people, same gifts" theme. - **Simchat Torah overlap:** The same weekend Christians read Moses at the sea, Jewish neighbors read the account of Moses' death and begin the Torah again. - **Reading selection (for follow-up):** The lection skips 14:8-9 (Pharaoh's pursuit), 14:15-20 (God's command to Moses; the angel and pillar of cloud), and stops before 14:30-31 (Israel sees the dead Egyptians; the people fear and believe). Miriam's song in chapter 15 is also outside the reading.   ## Order of Worship *\*Please stand in body or in spirit* ### Gathering #### Gathering Song – "This Is the Day" - **Words and music:** Les Garrett, 1967 (© 1967 Scripture in Song) - **Scripture:** [[Psalm 118#24]] > [!note] Lyrics > Copyrighted text – add from projection or hymnal for personal use. #### Unison Welcome "No matter who you are or where you are on life's journey, you are welcome here" #### Connections   #### Passing of the Peace **Leader:** "The peace of Christ be with you" **People:** "And also with you" #### Chiming of the Trinity #### Praise Song – "Lord, I Lift Your Name on High" - **Words and music:** Rick Founds, 1989 (© 1989 Universal Music – Brentwood Benson Publishing) - **Themes:** Christ's descent from heaven, cross, grave, and ascension > [!note] Lyrics > Copyrighted text – add from projection for personal use. #### Call to Worship\* *Written by Thom Shuman (adapted)* **Leader:** In sacred times of word, worship and awe, in ordinary days of work and play: **People:** **in every moment, God is with us.** **Leader:** Whether we are pulled toward the waves or standing strong on faith's shoreline: **People:** **in every place, God is with us.** **Leader:** In those who teach us and those who trouble us; in those who surprise us, and those who forgive us: **People:** **in every person, God is with us.** #### Hymn\* (insert) – "O God, by Your Mercy, We Come to This Place" - **Words:** Carolyn Winfrey Gillette, 2026 - **Tune:** ST. DENIO (11.11.11.11), arr. *Caniadau y Cyssegr*, 1839 - **Copyright:** © 2026 Carolyn Winfrey Gillette. All rights reserved. Used by permission. [email protected] | www.carolynshymns.com - **Scripture echoed:** [[Micah 6#8]] (stanza 1) - **Stanza themes:** - **1:** Coming to the table by God's mercy; forgiveness that leads into the Micah 6:8 call to justice, kindness, and humility - **2:** Christ makes clear we are neither strangers nor enemies at the table; a global, connected family shaped by love - **3:** Hate around the world contrasted with grace as a gift to share, pursued through justice, dialogue, kindness, and peace - **4:** *Blank on the insert* – the printed music skips from stanza 3 to stanza 5 - **5:** A prayer for the Spirit to move through the church until peace and unity cover the earth; blessing on the gifts of the table > [!note] Lyrics > Copyrighted text – add from the insert for personal use. #### Responsive Prayer of Confession *Written by Katherine Hawker* **Leader:** The Pharaoh decrees death to the foreigner. The power of fear and hate surround us. **People:** **In the face of evil, forgive us our complacency.** **Leader:** The burning bush flickers beside us. The presence of God invites us. **People:** **In the presence of evil, forgive us our lack of notice.** **Leader:** The Red Sea waters stand at attention. The threshold of grace is breath-taking. **People:** **In the company of grace, forgive us our reticence to embrace.** #### Kyrie – Hymnal Companion C-4 Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy. #### Assurance of Grace *Written by Thom Shuman* **Leader:** God's hand of mercy is stretched out to us, making a way through all that threatens us, to touch us with grace and hope. **People:** **We stand before our God, singing praise to the One who turns our despair into joy, our fears into faith. Amen.** #### Glory Be to the Father\* – #704 - **Text:** *Gloria Patri*, traditional (4th century); public domain > Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost; > as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, > world without end. Amen. Amen. *(Check the hymnal page – the setting at #704 may use altered wording.)*   ### Word #### Scripture Reading – Matthew 2:13-15 See [[#Accompanying Reading – Matthew 2 13-15]] #### Responsive Reading – Psalm 114 (*The Inclusive Bible*) **Leader:** Alleluia! When Israel came out of Egypt, from a people who spoke an alien tongue, **People:** **Judah became God's Temple, Israel became God's domain.** **Leader:** The sea fled at the sight: the Jordan turned back on its course, the mountains leapt like rams, and the hills like yearling sheep. **People:** **Why was it, sea, that you fled – that you turned back, Jordan, on your course?** **Leader:** Mountains, why did you leap like rams – you hills, like yearling sheep? **People:** **Earth, tremble before your Maker, before the God of Israel, who turned the rock into a pool of water and flint into a bubbling fountain!** #### Anthem – "My Song Is Love Unknown" - **Words:** Samuel Crossman, 1664 (public domain) - **Setting:** Carl Schalk - **Common tune:** LOVE UNKNOWN (John Ireland, 1918), 6.6.6.6.4.4.4.4 - *The choral setting may use only some stanzas.* 1. My song is love unknown, my Savior's love to me; love to the loveless shown, that they might lovely be. O who am I, that for my sake my Lord should take frail flesh and die? 2. He came from his blest throne salvation to bestow; but men made strange, and none the longed-for Christ would know: but O, my Friend, my Friend indeed, who at my need his life did spend. 3. Sometimes they strew his way, and his sweet praises sing; resounding all the day hosannas to their King: then "Crucify!" is all their breath, and for his death they thirst and cry. 4. Why, what hath my Lord done? What makes this rage and spite? He made the lame to run, he gave the blind their sight. Sweet injuries! Yet they at these themselves displease, and 'gainst him rise. 5. They rise and needs will have my dear Lord made away; a murderer they save, the Prince of life they slay. Yet cheerful he to suffering goes, that he his foes from thence might free. 6. In life, no house, no home my Lord on earth might have; in death, no friendly tomb but what a stranger gave. What may I say? Heav'n was his home; but mine the tomb wherein he lay. 7. Here might I stay and sing, no story so divine; never was love, dear King, never was grief like thine. This is my Friend, in whose sweet praise I all my days could gladly spend. #### Children's Message – Roxanne Davenport *Children's Corner will be offered following the Children's Message* ##### Children's Message Notes > [!info] Source > Auto-transcript, heavily garbled. Presenter assumed to be Roxanne Davenport per the bulletin – confirm on tape. Timestamps are clip-relative. - **Opening bit (00:29–02:00):** The presenter acts out a complainer – wanting coffee, grumbling about everything – while the children laugh. Then asks: "Have you ever met anybody who complains?" No matter what you give them, they complain, and "probably sometimes we have been that way." - **Story setup (02:10–02:36):** Connects to the fall arc – Genesis, now Exodus, "the second book in the Bible." Today's story: Moses leading the Israelites out of slavery. - **Pharaoh (02:36–03:08):** Pharaoh realizes he let them go and regrets it. (Transcript garbled.) - **Israel's complaint (03:08–03:31):** The Israelites see the Egyptians coming and complain: better off in Egypt, better to die there than here; "we have no food… we're going to starve." - **Main point (03:31–04:31):** - They had just been given freedom and were "complaining already." - Through Exodus they will complain a lot – about food, about a new law. - "God still provides for us… for families that are hungry." - The sea will part; "God is going to take care of us, no matter how much we complain." - **Breath / prayer moment (04:31):** "God, breathe in" – possibly a breathing prayer with the children. Confirm. - **Closing (04:53–05:56, garbled):** God "forbids/forgives" us for complaining "even when things are going against us"; God is there, God is on the other side; "Thank goodness you love us." - **Analysis:** See [[#🧒 Children's Message Analysis (non-scored companion)]]. #### Scripture Reading – Exodus 14:5-7, 10-14, 21-29 *Lector: Chani Wolfe* See [[#Exodus 14 Reading – Text and Study]] (text, omitted verses, and the full OIA study) #### Sermon – Rev. Caroline E. Saxton See [[#Sermon]]   ### Response #### UCC Statement of Faith – Hymnal Companion C-12 *Doxological form (1981). Read from the Hymnal Companion.*   #### Sharing of Joys and Concerns *For personal prayer use.* - **Joys:** - - **Concerns:** - #### Prayers of the People and the Lord's Prayer (Debts) > Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. > Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. > Give us this day our daily bread. > And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. > And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. > For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen. #### Invitation to Giving #### Offertory   #### Offertory Response\* – #706 "Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow" - **Words:** Thomas Ken, 1674 (public domain); tune OLD HUNDREDTH - *The hymnal at #706 may print an altered, inclusive-language text.* > Praise God, from whom all blessings flow; > praise him, all creatures here below; > praise him above, ye heavenly host; > praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen. #### Prayer of Dedication\* *Written by Thom Shuman* **All:** **We are all different, yet the gifts you give us are all the same – grace, hope, love, kindness, and so much more. May we not hoard them, but be as generous with sharing them as you are in offering them to us in the first place. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.** #### Holy Communion *Communion liturgy on the screen.* *We celebrate communion this day by intinction (dipping the bread into the cup); pre-packaged elements are also available.* ##### Communion Notes     ### Sending #### Hymn\* #574 (insert) – "In Egypt under Pharaoh" - **Words:** Dosia Carlson, 1989 (© 1989; copyrighted) - **Tune:** LANCASHIRE (7.6.7.6.D), Henry T. Smart, 1836 - **Hymnal section:** Justice and Peace - **Scripture:** [[Exodus 1#1]] (1:1-14); [[Exodus 7#8]] (7:8–11:10); [[Exodus 14#21]] (14:21-31) - **Background:** Carlson wrote the text in 1989 for the United Church of Christ's celebration of the 150th anniversary of the Amistad event. - **Stanza themes:** - **1:** Israel bound in Egypt; God gives passage through the waves; refrain on the Liberator who rescues and saves - **2:** African captives carried across the sea; God strengthens the advocates who worked for their freedom - **3:** Wherever people suffer injustice – the hungry, homeless, and hopeless; God's redeeming love lives on > [!note] Lyrics > Copyrighted text – add from the insert for personal use. #### Commission & Benediction\*   #### Postlude (seated)   ## Scripture and Sermon ### Exodus 14 Reading – Text and Study #### Exodus 14:5-7 ![[Exodus 14#5]] ![[Exodus 14#6]] ![[Exodus 14#7]] #### Exodus 14:10-14 ![[Exodus 14#10]] ![[Exodus 14#11]] ![[Exodus 14#12]] ![[Exodus 14#13]] ![[Exodus 14#14]] #### Exodus 14:21-29 ![[Exodus 14#21]] ![[Exodus 14#22]] ![[Exodus 14#23]] ![[Exodus 14#24]] ![[Exodus 14#25]] ![[Exodus 14#26]] ![[Exodus 14#27]] ![[Exodus 14#28]] ![[Exodus 14#29]] #### 📜 Verses Omitted from Sunday's Reading *The full-chapter study below works from these too.* ##### Exodus 14:1-4 – God's plan and the first hardening ![[Exodus 14#1]] ![[Exodus 14#2]] ![[Exodus 14#3]] ![[Exodus 14#4]] ##### Exodus 14:8-9 – the LORD hardens Pharaoh; the pursuit ![[Exodus 14#8]] ![[Exodus 14#9]] ##### Exodus 14:15-20 – "Go forward"; the cloud and the angel ![[Exodus 14#15]] ![[Exodus 14#16]] ![[Exodus 14#17]] ![[Exodus 14#18]] ![[Exodus 14#19]] ![[Exodus 14#20]] ##### Exodus 14:30-31 – Seeing and believing ![[Exodus 14#30]] ![[Exodus 14#31]] ### 📖 Exodus 14 Study – OIA Pass > [!info] How this study is built > - **Method:** Observation → Interpretation → Application, run through the six-phase template (Preliminary Engagement, Observational Analysis, Literary & Contextual Analysis, Interpretive Inquiry, Application Planning, Fallacy Audit). > - **Translations compared (10):** NRSVue, AMPC, CJB, MSG, NASB 2020, NMV, NLT, TLV, OJB, CEV. > [!warning] Attribution key – read before using any voice below > - ✅ = position drawn from a named, published work (title and year given). Paraphrased, never quoted. > - 🔶 = tradition-level summary. It describes how a school or movement typically reads the text. It is **not** attributed to a named person and should not be cited as one. > - 🔍 = needs primary-source verification before circulation. > - This replaces the older one-line-per-celebrity format. That format put plausible sentences in real people's mouths, which is the "right conclusion, laundered evidence" failure. #### 🙏 Phase 1: Preliminary Engagement (Observation) - 🕯️ **Prayer for insight:** _"God who makes a way through the sea, give me eyes to see what the text says before I decide what it means."_ - 📚 **Reading plan:** - Read straight through in NRSVue (closest to the Hebrew among the ten). - Reread vv. 13-15 in all ten translations side by side (see the comparison table in Phase 3). - Read Exodus 15:1-21 immediately after. The prose account (ch. 14) and the poem (ch. 15) are a matched pair. - 🧰 **Study helps:** [Blue Letter Bible](https://www.blueletterbible.org/) interlinear (Exod 14), [Sefaria](https://www.sefaria.org/Exodus.14) for Rashi, Ramban, Mekhilta, and the Talmud passages cited below. - 🏷️ **Working title:** "Stand Still, Then Walk: Fear, Silence, and the Sea" - 🔎 **Key verses:** 14:13-15 (stand firm / keep still / go forward), 14:21-22 (wind, dry ground, walls), 14:30-31 (seeing and believing). - 🗓️ **Calendar placement:** - Torah portion: *Beshallach* (Exod 13:17–17:16). Read in winter on Shabbat Shirah; the crossing is also commemorated on the seventh day of Passover. - RCL: Easter Vigil (Exod 14:10-31; 15:20-21 – the one Vigil reading that is never optional) and Year A Proper 19. - Narrative Lectionary Year 1: "Rescue at the Sea," Oct. 4, 2026 (St. John's). - This weekend is Simchat Torah, when the Torah cycle closes with Moses' death (Deut 34). ##### 🎧 Listening prompts for Sunday's sermon The Narrative Lectionary cut (vv. 5-7, 10-14, 21-29) removes some load-bearing material. Listen for whether the sermon restores or relies on the gaps: - **All three divine-hardening statements are gone** (vv. 4, 8, 17). Only Pharaoh's own change of mind (v. 5) remains. The reading quietly resolves the text's hardest theological problem by omission. - **"Keep still" (v. 14) stays; "go forward" (v. 15) is cut.** The selection ends the speech on stillness. - **The protecting cloud and angel (vv. 19-20) are cut.** - **The ending stops at v. 29.** It keeps "not one of them remained" (v. 28) but drops the bodies on the shore (v. 30) and the people's fear-turned-faith (v. 31). #### 🔍 Phase 2: Observational Analysis (Observation) - 🧭 **Main themes:** divine initiative, fear and its transformation, the nostalgia of the enslaved for bondage, stillness and movement, creation-over-chaos, divine warfare, seeing as the path to belief, service transferred from Pharaoh to God. - 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 **Characters:** - YHWH (speaks in vv. 1, 15, 26; acts in vv. 21, 24-25, 27, 30) - Moses (speaks once to the people, v. 13-14; stretches out his hand twice, vv. 21, 27) - The Israelites / "sons of Israel" (fear, complain, walk, see, believe) - Pharaoh and his officials (change their minds, pursue) - The Egyptian army (600 chariots, officers, horsemen; panic and confess YHWH in v. 25) - The angel of God and the pillar of cloud/fire (vv. 19-20, 24) - The sea and the east wind (acted upon, but described almost as agents) - 🧨 **Movement of the narrative:** 1. God orders a reversal of direction to bait Pharaoh (vv. 1-4). 2. Pharaoh reconsiders and pursues (vv. 5-9). 3. Israel panics and complains (vv. 10-12). 4. Moses reassures (vv. 13-14). 5. God redirects Moses: move (vv. 15-18). 6. Cloud and angel shift behind Israel (vv. 19-20). 7. Wind divides the sea; Israel crosses (vv. 21-22). 8. Egypt follows, panics, and tries to flee (vv. 23-25). 9. The waters return; Egypt drowns (vv. 26-28). 10. Summary, seeing, believing (vv. 29-31). - 📜 **Commands and promises:** - Commands to Moses: "turn back and camp" (v. 2), "lift your staff… divide it" (v. 16), "stretch out your hand" (v. 26). - Command to the people via Moses: do not fear, stand firm, see, keep still (vv. 13-14); go forward (v. 15). - Promises: God will gain glory; Egypt will know God's name (vv. 4, 17-18); you will never see these Egyptians again (v. 13); the LORD will fight for you (v. 14). - 🧩 **5W1H scan:** - **Who:** YHWH, Moses, Israel, Pharaoh, Egypt's army. - **What:** Escape from pursuit through a divided sea; destruction of the pursuing force. - **Where:** Pi-hahiroth, between Migdol and the sea, opposite Baal-zephon (v. 2). Chapter 14 itself says only "the sea" (*yam*). The name *yam suph* appears in 13:18 and 15:4. - **When:** Shortly after leaving Egypt; the decisive action runs overnight to the "morning watch" (v. 24) and dawn (v. 27). - **Why:** Stated motive is God's glory and Egypt's recognition of YHWH (vv. 4, 17-18); the narrative result is Israel's fear-of-God and trust (v. 31). - **How:** Moses' outstretched hand, a strong east wind all night, divine panic, clogged wheels, returning waters. ##### 🔁 Key-word chains (*Leitwörter*) Hebrew narrative signals its themes through repeated roots. These are visible only when reading closely or in a concordant translation (Fox, NASB, OJB). - **"Serve" – *ʿ-b-d* (עבד):** - v. 5: Pharaoh laments losing Israel "from serving us" (*me'ovdenu*). - v. 12: Israel says it would be better "to serve the Egyptians" (twice). - v. 31: Moses is God's "servant" (*ʿavdo*). - **Observation:** The chapter moves service from Pharaoh to YHWH. The question is not "free or not" but "whose servant." - **"Hand" – *yad* (יד):** - v. 8: Israel goes out "with a high hand" (*beyad ramah*). - vv. 16, 21, 26, 27: Moses stretches out his hand. - v. 30: saved "from the hand of Egypt." - v. 31: Israel sees "the great hand" (*hayyad haggedolah*) God used. - **"Fear" – *y-r-ʾ* (ירא):** - v. 10: "they feared greatly" (of Egypt). - v. 13: "do not fear." - v. 31: "the people feared the LORD." - **Observation:** Fear is not eliminated; its object changes. - **"See" – *r-ʾ-h* (ראה):** - v. 13: "see the deliverance… the Egyptians whom you see today you shall never see again." - v. 30: Israel "saw the Egyptians dead." - v. 31: Israel "saw the great hand." - **"Glory / heavy" – *k-b-d* (כבד):** - vv. 4, 17, 18: God "will gain glory" (*ʾikkavdah*). - In the plague cycle the same root describes Pharaoh's "heavy" heart (7:14; 8:15, 32; 9:7, 34; 10:1). - **Observation:** The heaviness that marked Pharaoh's resistance becomes the "weight" of God's glory. Chapter 14 itself uses a different root (*ch-z-q*, "strengthen") for the hardening. - **"Dry ground" – *yabbashah* (יבשה) and *charavah* (חרבה):** - vv. 16, 22, 29 (*yabbashah*): the same word as Gen 1:9-10, where dry land appears when God gathers the waters. - v. 21 (*charavah*): the word used when the flood waters dry in Gen 8:13. #### ✍️ Phase 3: Literary and Contextual Analysis (Observation) - 🧵 **Literary devices:** - Dramatic irony: Pharaoh thinks Israel is lost (v. 3); the reader knows it is a lure. - Inclusio of walls: "the waters forming a wall… right and left" frames the crossing (vv. 22, 29). - Role reversal: Egypt, not Israel, finally cries "let us flee" (v. 25) and confesses that the LORD fights (echoing v. 14). - Light/dark split: the cloud is darkness for one camp and light for the other (v. 20, though the Hebrew is ambiguous – see textual notes). - Time markers: "all night" (vv. 20-21), "morning watch" (v. 24), "dawn" (v. 27). Deliverance arrives with morning. - 🧱 **Genre and implications:** - Prose narrative paired with a victory poem (Exod 15). Scholars widely regard the poem's core (15:1-18, 21) as among the oldest material in the Bible. - Theologically shaped cultural memory, not a battlefield report. Reading it as either "pure history" or "pure myth" flattens it. - **Source layers (🔶 standard documentary analysis; boundaries vary by scholar):** - Priestly strand (commonly vv. 1-4, 8-9, 15-18, 21a, 21c-23, 26-27a, 28-29): Moses stretches out his hand, the waters split and stand as walls, God gains glory through hardening. - Non-Priestly strand (commonly vv. 5-7, 10-14, 19b-20, 21b, 24-25, 27b, 30-31): an east wind pushes the sea back overnight, Egypt panics and flees into the returning water, YHWH fights while Israel stays still. - The two pictures – a split sea with walls versus a wind-driven retreat of water – are woven together, which is why v. 21 reads as both. - **Notice:** The Narrative Lectionary selection leans toward the non-Priestly strand plus the walls. - 🗺️ **Historical-cultural context:** - **Location:** Pi-hahiroth, Migdol ("tower/fort"), and Baal-zephon place the event near Egypt's eastern frontier fortifications. Proposed bodies of water include Lake Timsah, the Ballah Lakes, the Bitter Lakes, the Gulf of Suez, and (fringe) the Gulf of Aqaba. None is settled. - **"Red Sea" vs. "Sea of Reeds":** "Red Sea" comes from the Septuagint's *erythra thalassa*. *Suph* likely means reeds or papyrus (cf. Exod 2:3, Moses' basket among the *suph*). Chapter 14 uses neither name. - **Baal-zephon:** Named for Baal of Mount Zaphon, the Canaanite storm god who, in Ugaritic myth, defeats Yam ("Sea"). YHWH defeating the sea "in front of Baal-zephon" reads as a pointed polemic: the storm-and-sea victory belongs to YHWH. - **Chariot warfare:** 600 "chosen" chariots signals elite New Kingdom military technology. Chariots are the ancient tank; clogged wheels in wet ground is the nightmare scenario. - **Historicity:** No direct Egyptian or archaeological evidence for the exodus as narrated has been found. (✅ Finkelstein & Silberman, *The Bible Unearthed*, 2001; ✅ William Dever, *Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From?*, 2003.) Others argue for a historical core (✅ James Hoffmeier, *Israel in Egypt*, 1997; ✅ Richard Elliott Friedman, *The Exodus*, 2017, proposes a smaller Levite group; ✅ Joshua Berman, "Was There an Exodus?", *Mosaic*, 2015). The earliest extra-biblical mention of "Israel" is the Merneptah Stele (c. 1208 BCE). - **Physical models:** ✅ Carl Drews & Weiqing Han ("Dynamics of Wind Setdown at Suez and the Eastern Nile Delta," *PLoS ONE*, 2010) modeled how a sustained east wind could expose a land bridge. This shows possibility only; see the fallacy audit. - 🔗 **Canonical connections:** - **Creation and flood:** [[Genesis 1#2]] (*ruach* over the waters), [[Genesis 1#9]] (dry land appears), [[Genesis 8#1]] (God sends a wind; waters subside), [[Genesis 8#13]]. - **The song and Miriam:** [[Exodus 15#1]], [[Exodus 15#20]], [[Exodus 15#21]]. - **Repeated crossing:** [[Joshua 3#16]], [[Joshua 4#23]] (Jordan crossing explicitly compared to the sea). - **Psalms:** [[Psalm 114#3]] (Sunday's responsive reading), [[Psalm 77#19]] (your path through the sea, footprints unseen), [[Psalm 106#9]], [[Psalm 136#13]]. - **Prophets:** [[Isaiah 43#16]] through [[Isaiah 43#19]] (God who made a way in the sea says "do not remember the former things"), [[Isaiah 51#10]] (drying the sea, Rahab the sea monster), [[Isaiah 63#12]]. - **Echo of v. 13 elsewhere:** [[2 Chronicles 20#17]] (Jehoshaphat: stand still and see the LORD's deliverance), [[1 Samuel 12#16]]. - **Hardening:** [[Romans 9#17]] and [[Romans 9#18]] (Paul cites Pharaoh, from Exod 9:16). - **New Testament typology:** [[Matthew 2#15]] (Sunday's companion reading, quoting Hosea 11:1), [[1 Corinthians 10#1]] and [[1 Corinthians 10#2]] ("baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea"), [[Hebrews 11#29]], [[Mark 6#48]] through [[Mark 6#50]] (Jesus walks on the sea, "It is I"), [[Revelation 15#3]] (song of Moses and the Lamb), [[Revelation 21#1]] ("the sea was no more"). - 🗣️ **Rhetoric and tone:** - Builds suspense with three movements of chase (vv. 4, 8-9, 23). - The people's complaint (vv. 11-12) is sarcastic and bitter ("no graves in Egypt?" – a sharp joke, since Egypt was the land of tombs). - God's tone toward Moses (v. 15) is brisk and corrective. - Ends in awe rather than celebration; celebration waits for chapter 15. ##### 🔗 Literary Connections by Verse - 🔁 **Repetition:** "harden… gain glory… know that I am the LORD" (vv. 4, 17-18); "walls on their right and left" (vv. 22, 29); "horses, chariots, horsemen" (vv. 9, 17, 18, 23, 26, 28). - ➿ **Continuity:** Pillar of cloud/fire from 13:21-22 carries into vv. 19-20, 24. - ⚖️ **Contrast:** Israel "going out boldly" (v. 8) vs. Israel terrified (v. 10); Israel's fear of Egypt (v. 10) vs. Egypt's terror of YHWH (v. 25); darkness for one camp vs. light for the other (v. 20). - 🪞 **Comparison:** Pharaoh's change of mind (v. 5) mirrors Israel's wish to go back (v. 12). Both sides look back toward the old arrangement. - ➡️ **Cause → Effect:** God's command to turn back (v. 2) → Pharaoh's assumption Israel is trapped (v. 3) → pursuit (v. 8). - ↩️ **Effect → Cause:** Israel's belief (v. 31) ← what they saw (vv. 30-31). - 🎯 **Means → End:** Moses' raised staff and hand (v. 16) → dry ground (v. 22); clogged wheels (v. 25) → Egypt's flight and recognition. - 🧠 **Logical conclusion:** "The LORD is fighting for them" (v. 25) – the enemy states the thesis Moses announced in v. 14. - 🌳 **General → Particular:** Promise of deliverance (v. 13) → specific mechanics of wind, walls, wheels (vv. 21-25). - 🌿 **Particular → General:** One night at one sea (vv. 21-29) → "thus the LORD saved Israel that day" (v. 30) becomes the paradigm event for the rest of Scripture. - ⛰️ **Climax:** vv. 27-28, dawn and the returning waters. - 🪜 **Preparation/Introduction:** vv. 1-4 tell the reader the outcome before it happens; suspense rests on *how*, not *whether*. - 💡 **Explanation/Illustration:** v. 25 – Egypt's own words explain the meaning of events. - ❓ **Interrogation/Questions:** "Was it because there were no graves in Egypt?" and "What have you done to us?" (v. 11); "Why do you cry out to me?" (v. 15). The text gives space to complaint, and God's question to Moses is the only divine question in the chapter. ##### 🌐 Translation Comparison – Load-Bearing Words Short phrases only, for comparison. Full texts are in the source document. | Verse / Hebrew | NRSVue | AMPC | CJB | MSG | NASB | NMV | NLT | TLV | OJB | CEV | |---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---| | v. 8 *beyad ramah* ("with a high hand") | going out boldly | left proudly and defiantly | left boldly | walked out on him without looking back | going out boldly | with an high hand | left with fists raised in defiance | went out with a high hand | went out with a high hand | proudly went on their way | | v. 13 *hityatsevu* ("take your stand") | stand firm | stand still (firm, confident, undismayed) | Remain steady | Stand firm | Stand by | stand still | Just stand still | Stand still | stand still | Be brave | | v. 13 *yeshuʿat YHWH* | the deliverance that the LORD will accomplish | the salvation of the Lord | how Adonai is going to save you | God do his work of salvation | the salvation of the Lord | the salvation of the Lord-Yehōvah | watch the Lord rescue you | the salvation of Adonai | the Yeshu'at Hashem | see the Lord save you | | v. 14 *tacharishun* ("you will be silent / still") | you have only to keep still | hold your peace and remain at rest | Just calm yourselves down! | You keep your mouths shut! | while you keep silent | you shall hold your peace | Just stay calm | while you hold your peace | ye shall keep still | you won't have to do a thing | | v. 15 *veyissaʿu* ("let them set out") | go forward | go forward! | go forward! | get moving | go forward | go forward | get moving! | go forward | move on | move forward | | v. 25 *vayyasar* ("he removed" / LXX "bound") | clogged | bound (clogged, took off) | caused… to break off | clogged the wheels | caused… to swerve | took off | twisted | took off | turned awry | got stuck | | v. 31 *vayyaʾaminu* | believed in | trusted in (relied on, remained steadfast to) | believed in | trusted in | believed in | believed | put their faith in | believed in | put their trust in | trusted him | ##### 🧾 Translation Character Notes and Flags - **NRSVue:** Closest to the Hebrew among these. Keeps v. 20's ambiguity. "Keep still" in v. 14 is reassuring rather than scolding. - **AMPC:** Stacks synonyms in parentheses, which turns one Hebrew word into a menu. In v. 8 it adds a cross-reference to Acts 13:17. Brackets "[Red]" before "Sea," importing the LXX tradition. - **CJB:** Jewish idiom ("Adonai," "Moshe"). Marks the synagogue reading divisions (aliyot) in the text. "Calm yourselves down" in v. 14 is pastoral. - **MSG:** Paraphrase. 🚩 v. 14 renders the Hebrew "you will be silent" as a curt order to shut up – harsher than the Hebrew and a ready proof-text for silencing complaint. 🚩 v. 30 adds "oppression," which isn't in the Hebrew. - **NASB 2020:** Formal equivalence. Keeps "sons of Israel" (Hebrew *bene yisraʾel*). "Stand by" in v. 13 is weaker than the Hebrew posture of taking a stand. - **NMV:** 🚩 Inserts "(Messiah Pre-Incarnate)" after every divine name and adds bracketed name meanings ("Egypt – The Narrow Place"). This writes a Christological interpretation into the text itself. The "narrow place" gloss for *Mitzrayim* is a homiletic wordplay (with *metzarim*, "straits"), not an etymology. Treat as commentary, not translation. - **NLT:** 🚩 v. 26 adds "When all the Israelites had reached the other side" – not in the Hebrew; it harmonizes the sequence. v. 20 "the cloud turned to fire" interprets an ambiguous verse. v. 8 "fists raised in defiance" is vivid and arguable. - **TLV:** Messianic Jewish, formal, readable. Keeps "high hand." - **OJB:** Heavy transliteration ("yam," "yabashah," "chomah"), which usefully surfaces the Hebrew chains. "Yeshu'at Hashem" in v. 13 sets up a Yeshua wordplay; see the root-fallacy note in Phase 6. - **CEV:** 🚩 v. 1 adds "At Etham" (imported from 13:20). 🚩 v. 14 "you won't have to do a thing" turns stillness into total passivity. 🚩 v. 30 shifts the subject: the Hebrew narrator says the LORD saved; CEV makes it what Israel "knew." ##### 🧮 Textual Notes - **v. 20 (MT):** Literally, "and there was the cloud and the darkness, and it lit the night." The Hebrew does not say *for whom*. Translations supply "to the Egyptians / to Israel" (AMPC, NMV, OJB, CJB, TLV) or rewrite (NLT, MSG, CEV). 🔍 The Septuagint reads differently (roughly "there was darkness and gloom, and the night passed"); verify against Rahlfs' LXX. - **v. 25:** MT *vayyasar* "he removed" (their wheels). The Septuagint, Samaritan Pentateuch, and Syriac reflect *vayyeʾesor* "he bound." That is why some translations "clog" or "bind" the wheels and others "take them off." - **v. 27:** *leʾetano* – the sea returns "to its enduring strength" (AMPC and NMV keep this). *Vaynaʿer* – God "shook off" the Egyptians, the verb for shaking something out of a garment (cf. Neh 5:13). #### 🕵️ Phase 4: Interpretive Inquiry (Interpretation) 🧠 **Guardrails:** Answer within textual evidence. Label inference as inference. Keep conclusions and their supporting evidence separate. ##### ❓ Question 1: Who hardened Pharaoh's heart – and why does Sunday's reading leave that out? 📌 **Textual context:** God announces the hardening (v. 4), the narrator reports it (v. 8), and God repeats it for all of Egypt (v. 17). Yet v. 5 describes Pharaoh and his officials simply changing their minds. Both claims stand side by side. The Narrative Lectionary keeps v. 5 and drops vv. 4, 8, and 17. ###### 🗣️ Contemporary Voices – 📖 Biblical Scholarship - ✅ **Terence Fretheim** (*Exodus*, Interpretation, 1991): The hardening language describes God intensifying a resistance Pharaoh has already chosen. Divine and human agency overlap rather than compete. - ✅ **Brevard Childs** (*The Book of Exodus*, OTL, 1974): The hardening theme serves the larger claim that Egypt will "know that I am the LORD." It is a theology of revelation, not a treatise on psychology. - ✅ **Nahum Sarna** (*Exploring Exodus*, 1986): Hardening reflects the ancient view that all causation traces back to God, alongside a clear sense of Pharaoh's moral responsibility. - ✅ **Walter Brueggemann** (*The Prophetic Imagination*, 1978; Exodus commentary in *The New Interpreter's Bible*, vol. 1, 1994): Pharaoh embodies an imperial system that cannot imagine releasing its labor force. Hardening is what empire does to the heart. ###### 🗣️ Contemporary Voices – ✝️ Christian Theological Schools - ✅ **Lutheran – Martin Luther** (*The Bondage of the Will*, 1525): Uses Pharaoh's hardening against Erasmus to argue that God works even through the wicked will. God's hidden purposes are not ours to audit. - 🔶 **Reformed:** Reads vv. 4 and 17 with Romans 9:17-18 as an instance of sovereign providence and, for some, reprobation. Westminster-tradition writers stress that God is not the author of sin while still ordaining outcomes. - 🔶 **Wesleyan-Arminian:** Hardening is judicial – God confirms a persistent refusal of prevenient grace. The emphasis falls on human resistance. - 🔶 **Eastern Orthodox:** Emphasizes synergy; God "hardens" by permitting the passions Pharaoh has cultivated to rule him. - 🔶 **Progressive/process:** Often reads hardening as the ancient narrator's theological framing, not a literal divine act. Risk: dismissing the text's claim rather than wrestling with it. ###### ✡️ Jewish Traditions - ✅ **Exodus Rabbah 13:3** and ✅ **Ramban** (on Exod 7:3): Pharaoh hardens his own heart through the early plagues; only afterward does God harden it as consequence. - ✅ **Maimonides** (*Mishneh Torah*, Hilchot Teshuvah 6:3): Some sins are so grave that the consequence is losing the path of repentance; Pharaoh is his central example. - ✅ **Nahum Sarna** (above) represents modern Jewish scholarship holding both agencies together. ###### ☪️ Islamic & Other Faith Perspectives - ✅ **Qur'an 10:88-92:** Moses prays that God harden the hearts of Pharaoh's circle; at the moment of drowning, Pharaoh declares belief, and it comes too late. His body is preserved as a sign. The responsibility question appears there too, framed through late repentance. ###### 🧭 Interpretive Summary - **Textual finding:** The chapter deliberately holds two causes together (v. 5 and vv. 4, 8, 17). - **Inference:** Removing vv. 4, 8, and 17 from public reading presents a morally simpler Pharaoh and a less troubling God. That may serve a sermon on rescue, but it trades away the text's own discomfort. - **For Sunday:** Notice whether the sermon mentions hardening at all. ##### ❓ Question 2: "Keep still" (v. 14) and "Go forward" (v. 15) – stillness, agency, and who is told to be quiet 📌 **Textual context:** Moses tells terrified people they will "be silent/still" (*tacharishun*) while the LORD fights. In the very next verse God asks Moses why he is crying out and orders the people to "set out" (*veyissaʿu*). Sunday's reading includes v. 14 and omits v. 15. ###### 🗣️ Contemporary Voices – 📖 Biblical Scholarship - ✅ **Millard Lind** (*Yahweh Is a Warrior*, 1980, Mennonite): Israel's foundational victory involves no Israelite fighting. Divine warfare relativizes human violence and royal militarism. - ✅ **Everett Fox** (*The Five Books of Moses*, 1995): His concordant rendering keeps the Hebrew rhythm of the stand-firm / be-still / move-forward sequence visible. ###### 🗣️ Contemporary Voices – ✊ Liberation Theologies - ✅ **Gustavo Gutiérrez** (*A Theology of Liberation*, 1971): The exodus is a political, historical act in which people participate. Liberation is not merely spiritual. - 🔶 **Black church preaching tradition:** "Stand still and see" has sustained endurance under conditions where action meant death, while "go forward" has fueled movement organizing. Both readings are survival wisdom. ###### 🗣️ Contemporary Voices – 🕊️ Peace Church & Anabaptist - ✅ **Lind** (above): "The LORD will fight for you" is a nonviolence text. Israel's role is trust and walking, not arms. ###### 🗣️ Contemporary Voices – 🧘 Contemplative - 🔶 **Contemplative tradition:** Stillness (v. 14) is receptive attention, not passivity, and it leads directly into movement (v. 15). The pattern is still, then walk. ###### ✡️ Jewish Traditions - ✅ **Rashi** (on 14:15): God tells Moses this is not the time for long prayer – Israel's distress demands action. - ✅ **Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, Beshallach** and ✅ **Babylonian Talmud Sotah 37a:** The tribes argue over who will enter first. Nachshon ben Aminadav of Judah walks into the water, and the sea splits only after he is in. The tradition makes human courage the hinge of v. 15. ###### ✝️ Christian Theological Schools - 🔶 **Quietist / holiness strands:** Treat v. 14 as a call to surrender and resting faith. - 🔶 **Pentecostal/charismatic:** v. 13-14 are frequently preached as faith declarations ("stand still and see your breakthrough"). Risk: reducing God's action to a formula triggered by the right posture. ###### ☪️ Islamic & Other Faith Perspectives - ✅ **Qur'an 26:61-63:** When Moses' companions cry that they are overtaken, Moses answers that his Lord is with him and will guide him; then he is told to strike the sea with his staff. Trust and action again appear together. ###### 🧭 Interpretive Summary - **Textual finding:** Stillness is a pause in a sequence that ends in walking. It is addressed to frightened people, not to dissenters. - **Referent inversion risk:** v. 14 was spoken *to* the vulnerable, as comfort. Its common misuse aims it *at* the vulnerable as a command to stop complaining or questioning. MSG's "keep your mouths shut" makes that misuse easier. - **For Sunday:** Notice whether "keep still" lands as comfort or as instruction, and whether "go forward" appears anywhere. ##### ❓ Question 3: What is the sea? Creation, chaos, and the polemic of Baal-zephon 📌 **Textual context:** A *ruach* (wind/spirit) blows all night; waters separate; dry ground (*yabbashah*) appears – the vocabulary of Genesis 1 and the flood. The setting faces a shrine of Baal, the Canaanite god famed for defeating Sea. ###### 🗣️ Contemporary Voices - ✅ **Terence Fretheim** (*Exodus*, 1991): Exodus is grounded in creation theology. The sea crossing is God reestablishing creation against the anti-creation forces Pharaoh unleashed. - ✅ **Jon Levenson** (*Creation and the Persistence of Evil*, 1988): Israel's God repeatedly subdues watery chaos, and Scripture keeps telling the story because chaos keeps returning. - ✅ **Umberto Cassuto** (*A Commentary on the Book of Exodus*, 1967 English): Reads the Song of the Sea against Canaanite poetic tradition while stressing Israel's distinct monotheistic claim. - 🔶 **Ecological theology:** The sea is not evil; it is creation conscripted into God's purposes. Risk: making nature merely a weapon. ###### ✡️ Jewish Traditions - 🔶 **Midrashic tradition:** The sea was made at creation on the condition that it would split for Israel (Genesis Rabbah 5:5 – 🔍 verify reference). - ✅ **Daily liturgy:** *Mi Chamocha* (from Exod 15:11) places the sea victory in every evening and morning prayer service. ###### ✝️ Christian Theological Schools - ✅ **Tertullian** (*On Baptism*, ch. 9): The crossing prefigures baptism, with Egypt's power left behind in the water. - ✅ **Origen** (*Homilies on Exodus*, Homily 5): Reads the crossing allegorically as the soul's passage through baptism. - ✅ **Gregory of Nyssa** (*The Life of Moses*, Book II): The drowned Egyptian army represents the passions destroyed in baptismal water. - 🔶 **Eastern Orthodox:** The first ode of the Matins canon is modeled on the Song of the Sea, so the crossing echoes in daily prayer. - 🔶 **Reformed / Lutheran sacramental theology:** 1 Corinthians 10:1-2 controls the reading; baptism as covenantal passage. ###### ☪️ Islamic & Other Faith Perspectives - ✅ **Qur'an 26:63:** Each part of the split sea stands like a great mountain. - ✅ **Buddhism – the Raft Parable** (Alagaddupama Sutta, Majjhima Nikaya 22): Teaching is a raft for crossing to the far shore, then set down. Comparative point only: crossing water as an image of liberation recurs across traditions. ###### 🧭 Interpretive Summary - **Textual finding:** The vocabulary deliberately echoes creation and flood. - **Inference:** The text claims that the God who liberates slaves is the same God who orders the cosmos. Liberation is presented as creation restored, not a one-off rescue. ##### ❓ Question 4: "Israel saw the Egyptians dead on the seashore" (v. 30) – how does faith handle the death of oppressors? 📌 **Textual context:** Verse 28 says no one survived; verse 30 lingers on the bodies; verse 31 links that sight to belief. Sunday's reading stops at v. 29. ###### 🗣️ Contemporary Voices - ✅ **Martin Luther King Jr.** ("The Death of Evil upon the Seashore," in *Strength to Love*, 1963): Reads the dead Egyptians as the death of an evil *system* – slavery, segregation – rather than as a call to gloat over dead people. - ✅ **Michael Walzer** (*Exodus and Revolution*, 1985): Exodus became the template for Western revolutionary politics; he notes the danger of the conquest narratives that follow. - ✅ **Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg** (*The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus*, 2001): Reads Israel's inner experience of terror, sight, and song with psychological depth. - 🔶 **Feminist/womanist readers:** Ask about the Egyptian soldiers' families and the conscripted rank-and-file. Who counts as "Egypt"? ###### ✡️ Jewish Traditions - ✅ **Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 39b and Megillah 10b:** The angels want to sing as the Egyptians drown; God rebukes them because the drowning are God's own handiwork. - 🔶 **Passover practice:** Drops of wine are removed from the cup at the plagues. A tradition also explains the shortened Hallel on Passover's later days by reference to the Egyptian dead (🔍 verify source – often attributed to Pesikta de-Rav Kahana). ###### ✝️ Christian Theological Schools - 🔶 **Patristic allegory** (Gregory of Nyssa, Origen): Moves the death into the moral interior – vices drowned, not people. - 🔶 **Just war tradition:** Uses the account sparingly; it is divine, not human, warfare. - 🔶 **Peace church** (Lind above): Israel does not kill anyone here. Divine judgment is not a license for human vengeance. ###### ☪️ Islamic & Other Faith Perspectives - ✅ **Qur'an 2:50:** God drowned Pharaoh's people "while you were looking" – the same emphasis on witnessing as v. 30. - ✅ **Sunni hadith (Sahih al-Bukhari):** The Ashura fast is linked to Moses' deliverance, which Muhammad observed the Jews of Medina commemorating. ###### 🧭 Interpretive Summary - **Textual finding:** The text does not ask Israel to celebrate the deaths in ch. 14; the response is fear and faith. Celebration comes in ch. 15. - **Inference:** Cutting v. 30 avoids the hardest image. The Jewish tradition's response is to keep the image and constrain the celebration. That approach is more honest than omission. ##### ❓ Question 5: "They believed in the LORD and in his servant Moses" (v. 31) – trust in God and trust in leaders 📌 **Textual context:** Belief in God and belief in Moses are joined by one verb. Moses has just been corrected by God (v. 15). In the very next chapters the people complain again (15:24; 16:2). ###### 🗣️ Contemporary Voices - ✅ **Jon Levenson** ("Exodus and Liberation," in *The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism*, 1993): Exodus moves Israel from service to Pharaoh to service of God, not into autonomy. Freedom here is covenantal. - ✅ **Walter Brueggemann** (*The Prophetic Imagination*, 1978): Moses' authority is prophetic and anti-imperial. It dismantles royal consciousness rather than building a new throne. - 🔶 **UCC / congregational polity:** Authority belongs to the gathered covenant community under Christ. "Testimonies, not tests." Leaders serve; they don't command belief. ###### ✝️ Christian Theological Schools - 🔶 **Catholic magisterial reading:** Moses as type of legitimate teaching authority. - 🔶 **Reformed:** Moses as servant of the Word; authority derives from the Word, not the office. - 🔶 **NAR / apostolic-prophetic networks (reception pattern, not a school):** v. 31 and Moses typology are used to tie faith in God to loyalty to an apostle or "set man." Complaint against the leader becomes "murmuring against God." 🔍 Check frequency against your sermon corpus before citing. ###### ✡️ Jewish Traditions - 🔶 **Rabbinic reading:** Moses is *ʿeved* ("servant"), the same title later given to the prophets. The title subordinates him. - ✅ **Deuteronomy 34** (read at Simchat Torah this weekend): Moses dies outside the land, his grave unknown – a canonical guard against leader-veneration. ###### 🧭 Interpretive Summary - **Textual finding:** Moses' title in v. 31 is "servant." The faith described follows seeing God act, not seeing Moses act. - **Referent inversion / lateral transfer risk:** Using v. 31 to demand loyalty to leaders flips the chapter's movement – from serving a ruler to serving God – back into serving a ruler. ##### ❓ Question 6: "Better to serve the Egyptians" (v. 12) – fear, nostalgia, and the pull of bondage 📌 **Textual context:** People who walked out "boldly" (v. 8) are, two verses later, rewriting the past. Pharaoh is doing the same thing on his side (v. 5). ###### 🗣️ Contemporary Voices - ✅ **Walter Brueggemann** (*Sabbath as Resistance*, 2014): Pharaoh's system runs on anxiety and endless production. Leaving it is psychologically hard because its anxieties are internalized. - ✅ **Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg** (2001): Reads the complaint with sympathy as a picture of traumatized consciousness, not mere faithlessness. - 🔶 **Trauma-informed readings:** Fear responses at the edge of escape are predictable, not shameful. The text records the complaint without punishing it here. - 🔶 **Deconstruction / high-control recovery:** People leaving coercive systems often feel the pull back. This is the lens you call lateral transfer risk – leaving Egypt while keeping Egypt's logic. ###### ✡️ Jewish Traditions - ✅ **Rashi** (on 14:10): The Israelites "seized the craft of their ancestors" – they cried out the way their ancestors prayed. Their outcry is read as prayer, not only complaint. - 🔶 **Rabbinic theme:** The forty years in the wilderness are often explained as the time needed for a slave generation to pass. It takes one night to leave Egypt and a generation for Egypt to leave the people. ###### ✝️ Christian Theological Schools - 🔶 **Wesleyan:** Sanctification as a process; the people are delivered before they are transformed. - 🔶 **Lutheran:** Simul justus et peccator – saved and still complaining. ###### 🧭 Interpretive Summary - **Textual finding:** God does not answer the complaint with punishment in chapter 14. The response is rescue. - **Inference:** The text makes room for frightened faith. That cuts against readings that treat any complaint as rebellion. ##### ❓ Question 7: Who gets to claim the Exodus? 📌 **Textual context:** The chapter names Israel as the rescued people. Its reception has spread far beyond Israel, to the Holy Family (Matt 2:13-15), enslaved Africans, Puritans, Afrikaners, Latin American base communities, and Palestinian Christians – sometimes on opposing sides. ###### 🗣️ Contemporary Voices – ✊ Liberation & Black Church - ✅ **James Cone** (*A Black Theology of Liberation*, 1970; *God of the Oppressed*, 1975): The God of the exodus sides with the oppressed; Black liberation is the contemporary locus of that act. - ✅ **Albert Raboteau** (*Slave Religion*, 1978): Enslaved African Americans identified with Israel in Egypt. White America cast itself as the New Israel; enslaved people saw it as Egypt. - ✅ **Eddie Glaude Jr.** (*Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America*, 2000): Exodus became the organizing story of Black political identity. - ✅ **J. Severino Croatto** (*Exodus: A Hermeneutics of Freedom*, 1981): The exodus is a "reservoir of meaning" to be reread in each new situation of oppression. ###### 🗣️ Contemporary Voices – 👥 Womanist Critique - ✅ **Delores Williams** (*Sisters in the Wilderness*, 1993): The exodus-liberation paradigm doesn't match the experience of Black women. Hagar's story of survival in the wilderness, without a decisive rescue, fits better. God does not always liberate; God often sustains. ###### 🗣️ Contemporary Voices – 🏴 Indigenous & Decolonizing - ✅ **Robert Allen Warrior** (Osage), "Canaanites, Cowboys, and Indians" (*Christianity and Crisis*, 1989): Indigenous readers identify with the Canaanites who are conquered after the exodus. The liberation story and the conquest story can't be separated. ###### 🗣️ Contemporary Voices – 🌍 Palestinian Christian - ✅ **Naim Ateek** (*Justice and Only Justice*, 1989): Wrestles with exodus and conquest texts that have been used against Palestinians; insists on a God of justice for all peoples. ###### 🗣️ Contemporary Voices – 🔮 Feminist - ✅ **Phyllis Trible** ("Bringing Miriam Out of the Shadows," *Bible Review*, 1989): Miriam's song (15:21) may be the older tradition, later overshadowed by the song attributed to Moses. Women's leadership at the sea was minimized in transmission. - 🔶 **Observation:** Chapter 14 has no named women. The women of Exodus 1-2 (midwives, mother, sister, Pharaoh's daughter) start the rescue; Miriam leads the response (15:20-21). The chapter in between is all men and machines. ###### 🗣️ Contemporary Voices – 🌈 UCC / Mainline - ✅ **UCC history:** The Amistad Committee (1839-41), formed to defend the African captives, led to the American Missionary Association (1846), a forerunner stream of the UCC. Hymn 574, sung Sunday, was written for the 150th anniversary of the Amistad event. - 🔶 **Queer readings:** Exodus as leaving a closet-Egypt; the wilderness as chosen community. 🔍 Identify specific published authors before citing. ###### ✡️ Jewish Traditions - ✅ **Passover Haggadah:** Each generation must see itself as personally leaving Egypt (based on Mishnah Pesachim 10:5). The exodus is meant to be reclaimed. - ✅ **Jon Levenson** (1993): Cautions Christians and liberation theologians against detaching the exodus from Israel's covenant identity. ###### 🧭 Interpretive Summary - **Textual finding:** The text claims the event for Israel, and the Bible itself rereads it (Joshua, Psalms, Isaiah, Matthew, Paul). - **Inference:** Every reappropriation carries a risk of colonizing the story. The honest stance holds Cone, Williams, Warrior, Levenson, and Ateek in the same room. - **Matthew 2 connection:** Sunday's companion reading makes Egypt a refuge for Jesus. That inverts the chapter's geography and complicates any reading that equates a whole nation with Pharaoh. ##### ❓ Question 8: Sea and table – the crossing on World Communion Sunday 📌 **Textual context:** Paul links the sea and cloud to baptism and the manna and rock-water to spiritual food and drink (1 Cor 10:1-4). St. John's paired Exodus 14 with communion, and the bulletin cover shows water from the rock. ###### 🗣️ Contemporary Voices - ✅ **Tertullian, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa** (see Q3): Crossing as baptism. - ✅ **Easter Vigil (RCL / Roman rite):** Exodus 14 is the one Old Testament reading that may not be omitted. The Exsultet celebrates the night God led Israel dry-shod through the sea. - 🔶 **World Communion Sunday ecumenism:** One table across national and denominational lines, which mirrors a mixed multitude crossing together (cf. 12:38). - 🔶 **UCC sacramental theology:** Open table; the meal as means of grace for all. ###### 🧭 Interpretive Summary - **Textual finding:** Exodus 14 has no meal. The table connection is canonical (Paul) and liturgical, not internal to the chapter. - **Inference:** The pairing works best as baptism-then-table: the community that has crossed is fed. #### 🔨 Phase 5: Application Planning (Application) ##### 🎯 SMART Goals 1. **Notice the gaps** (Q1, Q4) - S: Compare each Sunday's Narrative Lectionary cut with the full chapter. - M: Log omitted verses for four Sundays. - A: Five minutes during bulletin processing. - R: Directly feeds your hermeneutical genealogy work. - T: Oct. 4 – Oct. 25, 2026. 2. **Still, then walk** (Q2) - S: Pair every contemplative pause with one concrete step. - M: One stillness practice plus one action, daily. - A: Ten minutes in the morning. - R: Responds to vv. 14-15 as a sequence. - T: 21 days. 3. **Walk in solidarity** (Q7) - S: Join or support the St. John's UCC Youth team at the CROP Hunger Walk. - M: Walk or give once. - A: Oct. 18, 2 pm, Falling Spring Presbyterian. - R: The CROP flyer itself frames walking as solidarity with people who walk for water and safety. - T: Oct. 18, 2026. ##### ⚔️ Spiritual Disciplines Selection 1. **Silence** (Engagement/Abstinence) - Practice: Ten minutes of silence with v. 14 as the only text. - Guard: Stillness as receiving comfort, never as suppressing a legitimate question. 2. **Study** (Engagement) - Practice: Read Exodus 14 and 15 together; then read Delores Williams' Hagar chapter as a counter-text. 3. **Pilgrimage / walking** (Incarnational) - Practice: The CROP Walk as a liturgical act; pray v. 22 ("dry ground") at each block. 4. **Lectio Divina** - Text: vv. 13-15. Sit with the single word "forward." ##### 🔄 21-Day Challenge - **Days 1-7 – Fear named:** Each day, name one fear (v. 10). Write the "graves in Egypt" version of it – the sarcastic complaint you'd say out loud. - **Days 8-14 – Still:** Silence practice with v. 14. Notice when stillness becomes avoidance. - **Days 15-21 – Forward:** One concrete forward step a day (v. 15), however small. End with Exodus 15:20-21: write your own two-line song. ##### 🤲 Kingdom Partnership Opportunities (drawn from this week's bulletin) - **Franklin Together – Franklin County Reentry Coalition** (Fall First Fruits): People crossing from incarceration back into community – a contemporary "crossing" that needs dry ground on the other side. - **Homeless Matters of Franklin County** (Fall First Fruits). - **CROP Hunger Walk**, Oct. 18 (Team: St. John's UCC Youth). - **Franklin County Pride Festival**, Oct. 11, Wilson College (contact Pastor Caroline). - **Book study connection:** Barbara Brown Taylor, *Learning to Walk in the Dark*, ch. 8 (Monday). v. 20 – a cloud that is darkness and light at once – is a natural bridge. 🔍 Check whether her book engages Gregory of Nyssa's darkness theology; don't assume. ##### 🎨 Visio Divina Prompt - **Image:** John August Swanson, "Moses" (Sunday's bulletin cover). Note it shows water from the rock, not the sea. - **Prayer seeds:** - Who in the line has already drunk, and who is still waiting? - Where am I in the crowd – near the water, or far back? - What would it mean that the same God who stops water at the sea starts water at the rock? - **Image brief (for your own art practice):** Night scene at the edge of the sea. A pillar that is dark on the left and luminous on the right. Families, elders, children, and animals stepping onto wet sand between two standing walls of green-blue water. A single woman at the front holding a frame drum, not yet playing. Folk-art palette, flat perspective, no visible weapons. #### 🚨 Phase 6: Logical Fallacy and Bias Audit (Application) ##### 🧠 Fallacies - **🎯 Cherry picking / suppressed evidence:** - Reading vv. 13-14 without v. 15 to preach passivity. - Reading the lectionary cut without vv. 4, 8, 17, 30-31 and calling it "the story." - *Correction:* Read the full chapter at least privately before interpreting the cut. - **⚖️ False dilemma:** - "Either God acts or we act." The text has both, back to back (vv. 14-15). - "Either God hardened Pharaoh or Pharaoh chose." The text says both (vv. 5, 8). - **🔀 Equivocation:** - "Pharaoh" slides from a historical king to any opponent (a political party, a spouse, a critic). Spiritual-warfare preaching often names a "Pharaoh spirit." - *Correction:* Specify what systemic features make something Pharaonic (forced labor, refusal to release, dependence on chariots). - **👥 Fallacy of division:** - Treating every Egyptian as personally guilty of Pharaoh's decisions. - *Correction:* The Talmud's rebuke of the angels (Sanhedrin 39b) is a built-in safeguard. - **🧩 Fallacy of composition:** - One rescue → God always rescues the faithful. - *Correction:* Delores Williams' Hagar paradigm. - **🏛️ Appeal to authority (misapplied):** - v. 31 used to equate loyalty to a leader with faith in God. - **🔤 Root fallacy and illegitimate totality transfer** (✅ James Barr, *The Semantics of Biblical Language*, 1961): - "*Yeshuʿah* shares a root with *Yeshua*, therefore v. 13 is about Jesus." Shared roots do not carry meanings across contexts. - "*Mitzrayim* means 'narrow place,' therefore Egypt = any constraint." That's a wordplay, not the word's meaning (NMV's gloss). - **🕰️ Anachronism / presentism:** - "Red Sea" (from the Greek tradition) treated as a geographic fact of the Hebrew text. - "Salvation" in v. 13 read as individual soul-salvation; in context it means rescue from an army. - **🎯 Texas sharpshooter:** - Claims of chariot wheels on the floor of the Gulf of Aqaba (Ron Wyatt and successors) select ambiguous shapes and draw the target afterward. No peer-reviewed confirmation exists. - **🎲 Appeal to possibility (modal fallacy):** - Drews & Han show wind setdown *could* expose a land bridge. That does not show it *did*, or that the text intends a natural mechanism. - **🤐 Argument from silence:** - "No archaeological evidence, therefore nothing happened" overreaches. "No archaeological evidence, therefore the text is literal and suppressed" overreaches the other way. - **🧬 Genetic fallacy:** - Dismissing liberation readings because Puritans and Afrikaners also used the exodus. Misuse doesn't settle meaning either way. - **😨 Appeal to fear:** - Using v. 11-12 to shame present-day doubters ("you want to go back to Egypt"). - **🔁 Begging the question:** - "God hardened Pharaoh, so Pharaoh had no responsibility" assumes a zero-sum model of agency that the text doesn't use. - **📈 Slippery slope:** - "If the sea crossing is cultural memory, the resurrection goes next." Each claim needs its own evidence. - **🐟 Red herring:** - Debating the crossing site or the number of chariots to avoid the text's theological claims about empire and fear. - **🎭 Straw man:** - "Historical critics think the Bible is just made up." Most argue for layered tradition, not fabrication. - **🙏 Special pleading:** - Insisting on literal hardening in Exodus while rejecting the same divine-causation logic elsewhere when it is uncomfortable. - **⏩ Post hoc ergo propter hoc:** - "I stood still in faith and the problem resolved, therefore my stillness caused it." ##### 🧭 Biases - **Survivorship bias:** The narrative is told by the survivors. Generations who died in Egypt without rescue are not narrated. - **Just-world hypothesis:** Assuming the drowned deserved it individually and the rescued earned it. - **In-group bias:** Reading oneself as Israel by default. Matthew 2 and Warrior's essay both disrupt this. - **Hindsight bias:** vv. 1-4 tell the ending first; real fear in the moment didn't have that information. - **Confirmation bias:** Using physical models or archaeology only when they support a prior commitment. ##### 🔄 Referent Inversion Watch | Text | Original addressee | Inverted use | Effect | |---|---|---|---| | v. 14 "keep still" | Terrified escapees, as comfort | Congregants who question leaders | Silencing dissent | | v. 31 "believed… in his servant Moses" | People who just saw God act | Members asked to trust an apostle or pastor | Leader loyalty fused with faith | | vv. 11-12 complaint | Fleeing slaves | Anyone who leaves or questions a church | Leaving framed as wanting Egypt | | "Pharaoh" | An empire enslaving a people | Political or personal enemies | Weaponized typology | ##### 💸 How These Fallacies Distort Interpretation - **Theological costs:** A God who either does everything (passivity) or nothing (pure activism); a God who rejoices in death; faith fused with obedience to leaders. - **Communal costs:** Complaint treated as rebellion; trauma responses shamed; outsiders cast as Egypt. - **Safeguards:** - Read the full chapter, then the lectionary cut. - Keep v. 14 and v. 15 together. - Keep v. 30 with Sanhedrin 39b. - Read with Williams and Warrior, not only Cone and Gutiérrez. - Ask of every application: who is being told to be still, and by whom? #### 🔭 Implications and Future Research - **Balanced hermeneutics commitments:** - Hold divine and human agency together. - Read the exodus with the conquest that follows. - Treat the Jewish reading tradition as primary for a Torah text, not supplementary. - **Interdisciplinary approaches:** - Egyptology on frontier fortifications (Migdol sites in the eastern Delta). - Trauma studies on the complaint motif. - Hydrology (Drews & Han) as context, not proof. - **Reception history to trace:** - Black spirituals that sing of Pharaoh's army drowned (trace in Raboteau). - Harriet Tubman as "Moses." - MLK's "Death of Evil upon the Seashore." - Puritan "New Israel" rhetoric and Native dispossession. - Amistad and the American Missionary Association. - **Non-Western voices to add:** African biblical scholarship on Egypt as African (e.g., Cain Hope Felder, *Stony the Road We Trod*, 1991 – 🔍 verify Exodus content); Asian readings of exodus and minjung theology (🔍 identify specific Exodus treatments). #### 🧩 Areas for Further Expansion - **Philosophy and ethics:** Compatibilism and the hardening of Pharaoh; collective responsibility for conscripted soldiers. - **Historical-cultural archaeology:** Eastern Delta fortifications; New Kingdom chariot corps. - **Liturgical applications:** Easter Vigil; Shvi'i shel Pesach; Shabbat Shirah; Orthodox canon ode 1. - **Contemporary ethical issues:** Migration (Sunday's confession named Pharaoh's decree against the foreigner); reentry; refugees who "must walk to safety" (CROP flyer). - **Gender and intersectionality:** Women's absence in ch. 14 and presence in chs. 1-2 and 15. - **Spiritual formation and leadership:** Moses corrected by God (v. 15) – leaders who need redirection. - **Formation pipeline:** If the Oct. 4 children's message used "God will fight for you, just be still," check whether the adult sermon supplied v. 15. - **Global receptions:** Palestinian, South African, Latin American, and Indigenous readings side by side. #### 📚 References and Recommended Reading ##### 🖇️ Translations - [NRSVue](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus+14&version=NRSVUE), [AMPC](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus+14&version=AMPC), [CJB](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus+14&version=CJB), [MSG](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus+14&version=MSG), [NASB](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus+14&version=NASB), [NLT](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus+14&version=NLT), [TLV](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus+14&version=TLV), [OJB](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus+14&version=OJB), [CEV](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus+14&version=CEV), NMV (Bible Gateway) ##### 🧰 Study Helps - [Sefaria – Exodus 14 with commentaries](https://www.sefaria.org/Exodus.14) - [Blue Letter Bible](https://www.blueletterbible.org/) - [Bible Odyssey](https://www.bibleodyssey.org/) ##### 📖 Commentaries - Brevard Childs, *The Book of Exodus* (OTL, 1974) - Terence Fretheim, *Exodus* (Interpretation, 1991) - Nahum Sarna, *Exploring Exodus* (1986); *JPS Torah Commentary: Exodus* (1991) - Carol Meyers, *Exodus* (New Cambridge Bible Commentary, 2005) - Umberto Cassuto, *A Commentary on the Book of Exodus* (1967) - Everett Fox, *The Five Books of Moses* (1995) - Robert Alter, *The Five Books of Moses* (2004) - Peter Enns, *Exodus* (NIV Application Commentary, 2000) - Walter Brueggemann, "Exodus," *The New Interpreter's Bible*, vol. 1 (1994) ##### 📚 Thematic Works - Jon Levenson, *Creation and the Persistence of Evil* (1988); *The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism* (1993) - Michael Walzer, *Exodus and Revolution* (1985) - Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, *The Particulars of Rapture* (2001) - Millard Lind, *Yahweh Is a Warrior* (1980) - Gustavo Gutiérrez, *A Theology of Liberation* (1971) - J. Severino Croatto, *Exodus: A Hermeneutics of Freedom* (1981) - James Cone, *God of the Oppressed* (1975) - Delores Williams, *Sisters in the Wilderness* (1993) - Albert Raboteau, *Slave Religion* (1978) - Eddie Glaude Jr., *Exodus!* (2000) - Robert Allen Warrior, "Canaanites, Cowboys, and Indians" (1989) - Naim Ateek, *Justice and Only Justice* (1989) - Martin Luther King Jr., *Strength to Love* (1963) - James Barr, *The Semantics of Biblical Language* (1961) - Gregory of Nyssa, *The Life of Moses* ##### 🏛️ Historicity - Israel Finkelstein & Neil Asher Silberman, *The Bible Unearthed* (2001) - William Dever, *Who Were the Early Israelites?* (2003) - James Hoffmeier, *Israel in Egypt* (1997) - Richard Elliott Friedman, *The Exodus* (2017) - Carl Drews & Weiqing Han, "Dynamics of Wind Setdown at Suez and the Eastern Nile Delta," *PLoS ONE* (2010) ### Additional Scripture #### Accompanying Reading – Matthew 2:13-15 ![[Matthew 2#13]] ![[Matthew 2#14]] ![[Matthew 2#15]] ### Responsive Reading #### Psalm 114 *Bulletin text (The Inclusive Bible) is in the [[#Responsive Reading – Psalm 114 (*The Inclusive Bible*)|Order of Worship]].* ![[Psalm 114#1]] ![[Psalm 114#2]] ![[Psalm 114#3]] ![[Psalm 114#4]] ![[Psalm 114#5]] ![[Psalm 114#6]] ![[Psalm 114#7]] ![[Psalm 114#8]] ### Sermon *Rev. Caroline E. Saxton* #### 📝 Sermon Notes > [!info] Source > Auto-transcript clip (reading → sermon → closing). Timestamps are clip-relative (00:00 = start of the Exodus reading), not livestream time. ##### 🎬 Introduction - **Reading:** Exodus 14:5-7, 10-14, 21-29, read in what appears to be the **Common English Bible** (v. 13 "Stand your ground"; v. 14 "You just keep still"). The reading matched the Narrative Lectionary cut. - **Framing tag after the reading (03:27):** The pastor said, roughly, "I don't know if the story happened this way, but I know that story…" That set up a non-historicist reading frame before the sermon began. - **Prayer for illumination (03:35):** An invocation drawn from the chorus "Spirit of the Living God," followed by Psalm 19:14 ("my rock and my redeemer"). - **Opening thesis (04:00):** One of the most enduring names for God is **liberator**. God frees us "from slavery, from sin, and from all that will hold us hostage and harden our hearts." - **Spiritual quoted:** "Go Down, Moses." - **Framing for the day (04:38):** The story is a precipice between past and future, slavery and freedom. On World Communion Sunday, we ask what it means to be rescued and to live together as liberated people. - **The refrain is introduced:** "The struggle for freedom continues… Yet God is a liberator. The question is: As Christ's followers, who are we?" ##### 🧱 Main Points ###### Point 1: The backstory – how Israel got to the sea (05:27–07:30) - Recap of last week's Joseph text (Gen 39). Joseph rises in Pharaoh's household, reunites with his family, and they settle in Egypt (Gen 50). - Exodus 1:8: a new king "who didn't know Joseph" treats the Israelites as a problem and lands on enslavement as the solution. - God hears the people's cries and remembers the covenant with "Abraham and Sarah and their descendants." This adapts Exod 2:24, which names Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. - God sends Moses and Aaron. Pharaoh resists because "people in power want to remain in power," then finally relents. - Chapter 14 is "one final confrontation": the chase, the rescue at the sea, the defeat of the oppressor's army. ###### Point 2: The rescue – from fear into trust (07:33–08:42) - The odds: Israel left with what it could carry; Pharaoh's army was well-equipped. - The wheels stick; Moses stretches out his hand; the water returns, "drowning Pharaoh's horses." - The people had questioned Moses, but God protects and guides them, "leading them from death into life, from fear into trust, into a life of freedom." - The journey continues: forty years in the wilderness. - Refrain: **"God is a liberator."** ###### Point 3: History versus meaning – what the story is for (08:46–11:34) - Cecil B. DeMille's *The Ten Commandments* is the image most people carry: thunder, wind, crashing waves. - Recent scholarship questions the account's historicity. No obvious body of water fits; "Reed Sea" may be more accurate than "Red Sea." - She admits preferring the dramatic version, then asks whether that desire obscures the point. The point: God rescues us from all that holds us hostage, from forces of evil that want our bondage, and "will break every chain." - The people's doubts came because the unknown is scary: better bondage in Egypt than the risk of the wilderness. - "So they needed a dramatic story of danger and rescue." It shows God is more powerful than Pharaoh, and our doubts are no match for God's "liberating love." - **Call:** "So step out in faith. Walk out on dry ground." - "Does it matter if it was the red sea or the green sea? Probably not." What matters is God's character: **"God is on the side of the oppressed, not the oppressor. God loves. God leads. God liberates."** ###### Point 4: Who are we? – partners in liberation (11:34–15:05) - **Harriet Tubman:** Cynthia Erivo in *Harriet* (2019). Tubman was called "Moses." The pastor first heard the film's song "Stand Up" at the 2023 MLK Day service, performed by a Disciples of Christ ministry. Tubman heard "the same call that Moses heard – the call to liberation." - **Human partnership:** "God also invites our help in the struggle for freedom, justice, and peace." We can hinder or help, wait or work. The people needed God *and* Moses. "Liberation doesn't just happen." - **Her star word:** For this year's star words, she chose **"protect."** She feels compelled to protect the vulnerable and to "stand in between those who are being hurt" and whatever harms them. - **Matthew 2:13-15 (stated as 13-16):** Another Joseph takes his family to Egypt. "Once the site of oppression, once the site of slavery, becomes a place of refuge." - **Closing:** "We know who God is. God is a liberator. Who are we? May we wrestle with this question honestly and faithfully." We walk together hand in hand; "they'll know we are Christians by our love." This leads into the song of the same name. ##### 🎞️ Illustrations/Stories - Cecil B. DeMille, *The Ten Commandments* (spectacle vs. scholarship) - Harriet Tubman as "Moses"; Cynthia Erivo in *Harriet* (2019); the song "Stand Up" - 2023 MLK Day service: a ministry team performing to "Stand Up" - Personal: the pastor's star word, "protect" - Spiritual: "Go Down, Moses" - Closing song: "They'll Know We Are Christians by Our Love" ##### 🔗 Scripture Connections - Exodus 14:5-7, 10-14, 21-29 (read) - Genesis 39 (last week); Genesis 50 (Joseph's family settled in Egypt) - Exodus 1:8 (the new king) - Exodus 2:23-24 (God hears and remembers the covenant), adapted to "Abraham and Sarah" - Exodus 5-12 (Moses and Aaron before Pharaoh; Pharaoh relents), summarized - Numbers 14:33-34 (forty years), alluded - Matthew 2:13-15 (stated as 13-16) - Matthew 2:1-12 (the magi and the star), alluded via star words - Psalm 19:14 (prayer for illumination) ##### 💬 Key Quotes > "One of the most enduring images and names for God is that of liberator." (04:00) > "People in power want to remain in power." (06:53) > "Leading them from death into life, from fear into trust, into a life of freedom." (08:15) > "What if that desire obscures the point that the text is actually trying to make?" (09:46) > "God is on the side of the oppressed, not the oppressor. God loves. God leads. God liberates." (11:19) > "Liberation doesn't just happen." (13:23) > "Egypt, once the site of oppression, once the site of slavery, becomes a place of refuge." (14:27) > "We know who God is. God is a liberator. Who are we?" (14:51) #### 📊 Sermon Analysis – 13-Category Rubric (65-Point Scale) ##### 1. 🎯 Sermon Summary - **Central Message:** God is a liberator who sides with the oppressed. Knowing who God is, Christ's followers must decide who *they* will be: partners in liberation or obstacles to it. The message is both personal (fear into trust) and communal (walking together; protecting the vulnerable). - **Liturgical/Thematic Focus:** - Strong fit with the Narrative Lectionary arc. It explicitly continues last week's Joseph sermon and sets up the wilderness. - Matthew 2 was integrated well; it was the sermon's best structural move. - World Communion Sunday was named once (04:56) and never developed. The table, the global church, and the bulletin's "Pharaoh decrees death to the foreigner" confession were not connected to the sermon. - **Score: 4/5** ##### 2. 🎙️ Preaching Style Assessment - **Primary:** Narrative (retelling Exodus 1-14) with a **Topical** spine (God as liberator). - **Secondary:** **Inductive** – the recurring question "Who are we?" holds tension open and closes on an invitation rather than a resolution. **Prophetic** notes appear ("people in power want to remain in power"; "on the side of the oppressed"). - **Blend assessment:** Suited to the congregation and the text. The refrain carries a short sermon well. The prophetic register stays general rather than naming present-day Pharaohs. - **Score: 4/5** ##### 3. 🎞️ Storytelling and Illustration - **Used:** DeMille film, Harriet Tubman and *Harriet*, the MLK Day performance, the pastor's star word, "Go Down, Moses." - **Inclusivity:** Strong. The two central illustrations come from Black freedom history and Black sacred music. Tubman puts a woman's leadership into a chapter with no named women. - **Balance:** Stories support rather than replace the text. - **Weakness:** The DeMille reference is factually off as transcribed (see tape verification). The illustrations sit in sequence without much connective tissue between them. - **Score: 4/5** ##### 4. 🗣️ Intonation and Delivery - **Limited assessment.** Only a transcript was available, not audio or video. - **Observable:** Short declarative sentences, a repeated refrain, and rhetorical questions suit oral delivery. Speaker-2 segments ("God is a liberator," "Who are we?") may be congregational call-and-response, which would raise this score. Verify on tape. - **Score: 3/5 (provisional)** ##### 5. 🧱 Content Structure - **Strengths:** Clear thesis at 04:00; a refrain ("God is a liberator… Who are we?") that recurs at about 04:56, 08:42, 11:34, 12:53, and 14:51; a closing that returns to the opening question. - **Weaknesses:** Transitions are abrupt between DeMille → Tubman → star word → Matthew 2. The "Who are we?" question gets several partial answers (help, don't hinder; protect; walk together), but they aren't gathered into a single landing. - **Score: 4/5** ##### 6. 🤝 Engagement and Application - **Engagement:** The question refrain invites self-examination; possible call-and-response. - **Inclusion:** The oppressed are centered in principle. No present-day group is named, though the bulletin offered several: the reentry coalition, the Pride festival, immigrants (via the confession), and CROP walkers. - **Application:** "Step out in faith," "help or hinder," "protect the vulnerable" – right direction, but low specificity. - **Score: 3/5** ##### 7. 📖 Scripture Handling - **Scriptures:** See Scripture Connections above. - **Exegetical depth:** - **Positives:** Narrative context from Genesis 39 through Exodus 14; the Reed Sea vs. Red Sea point; a careful Matthew 2 inversion; "Abraham and Sarah" as an inclusive adaptation of Exodus 2:24. - **Gaps:** No Hebrew; no engagement with the hardening of Pharaoh (the opening line reassigns hardening to "all that will… harden our hearts," quietly moving the agent away from God). The tension between "keep still" (v. 14) and "go forward" (v. 15) wasn't named, though the sermon effectively preached v. 15. - **Foundation or launchpad:** Mixed. The text supplies the narrative and the liberator image, but the sermon's emphasis is thematic. - **Justice use:** Appropriate and aimed in the right direction – at the powerful. - **Score: 3/5** ##### 8. 🧠 Logical Reasoning - **Strong reasoning:** - **Category distinction (09:23–11:19):** The sermon separates historical questions from theological claims and argues that meaning doesn't depend on settling the site. This is a sound move and models honest scholarship for a congregation. - **Cross-textual inversion (14:08–14:38):** Egypt as oppressor (Exodus) vs. Egypt as refuge (Matthew) is a genuine textual observation that complicates simple us/them readings. - **Cooperation logic (12:59–13:23):** "The people needed God and Moses" correctly reflects the chapter's divine-human pattern. - **Fallacies and lapses:** - **Proof by assertion / overclaim (10:38):** "It shows us without question that God is more powerful than Pharaoh," moments after conceding the account may not be historical. - *Impact:* Undercuts the honest framing just established. - *Improvement:* "The story testifies that…" keeps the claim theological rather than evidentiary. - **Equivocation on "they" (10:33):** "So they needed a dramatic story of danger and rescue." The *Israelites in the story* had doubts; the *community that told the story* needed it. The sentence slides between the two groups. - *Impact:* Turns a historical-critical insight (the story served later communities) into an unclear claim about the characters. - *Improvement:* Name the tellers: "Generations who remembered this story needed it…" - **False dilemma (13:09):** "We can wait. Or we can work." The read text itself commands waiting (v. 14, "You just keep still") before working (v. 15). - *Impact:* Implicitly devalues the stillness the congregation just heard as comfort. - *Improvement:* "There's a time to keep still and a time to go forward – and liberation needs both." - **Hasty generalization / overstatement (09:23):** "There doesn't seem to be a body of water that would make sense." Scholars propose several candidates; the accurate claim is "there's no consensus." - **Minimization (11:03):** "Does it matter if it was the red sea or the green sea?" The joke flattens the Reed Sea point she had just made; it is rhetorically light, not a serious fallacy. - **Composition risk (11:19):** "God is on the side of the oppressed" is faithful to this chapter. Stated without qualification, it invites the inference that God always rescues. Delores Williams' Hagar critique is the corrective. - **Score: 3/5** ##### 9. 📚 References - **Theologians or scholars named:** None. "More recent scholarship" is unattributed. - **Implicit lineage:** "On the side of the oppressed" is the language of James Cone and Latin American liberation theology (preferential option for the poor), uncredited. - **Marginalized voices:** Black freedom history (Tubman, spirituals, MLK Day) – strong. No feminist, womanist, Indigenous, Jewish, or LGBTQ+ interpretive voices. - **Score: 3/5** ##### 10. 💬 Quotes and Illustrative Stories - **Most memorable:** "God is a liberator. Who are we?" and the Egypt-as-refuge line. - **Tubman as Moses** ties the biblical figure to the congregation's own national history and makes the call to liberation concrete. - **The star word "protect"** – standing between those being hurt and what hurts them – is the sermon's most personal moment. It also unknowingly echoes the cloud moving *between* the two camps (vv. 19-20), one of the verses the lectionary cut. - **Score: 4/5** ##### 11. 📣 Calls to Action - **Invited steps:** Step out in faith; walk on dry ground; help rather than hinder; protect the vulnerable; wrestle honestly with "Who are we?"; walk together in love. - **Justice connection:** Present but general. - **Modalities:** Spoken, plus music (closing song). No visual or experiential action – a missed chance on a communion Sunday, when the table itself could have been the enacted answer to "Who are we?" - **Score: 3/5** ##### 12. 🎨 Style Effectiveness Analysis - **Did it work?** Yes, for a short liberation sermon. The refrain gave structure and memorability. - **How it would shift:** - **Fully expository:** Would confront divine hardening, the stand-still/go-forward pair, and v. 30's bodies on the shore. - **Prophetic:** Would name today's Pharaohs and chariots specifically (detention, incarceration, poverty). - **Inductive-contemplative:** Would dwell on fear at the shoreline and the cloud between the camps. - **First-person narrative:** An Israelite parent at the water's edge, or an Egyptian soldier's widow. - **Learning styles served:** Auditory and interpersonal (refrain, questions, song). Visual and kinesthetic were underused. - **Recommended blend:** Keep the narrative-inductive frame. Add one expository beat on vv. 14-15 and one concrete local application. - **Score: 4/5** ##### 13. ✝️ Theological Depth & Coherence (added from March rubric variant) - **Coherent:** God as liberator; liberation from both sin and systems; divine initiative plus human partnership; Christ connected through Matthew 2's Holy Family. - **Thin:** Christology limited to the Matthew 2 parallel; no engagement with how liberation relates to the cross or resurrection, or to the table on World Communion Sunday. God's violence against the Egyptians (horses and riders) passed without theological comment. - **Score: 4/5** ##### 🧮 Scoring Summary | # | Category | Score | |---|---|---| | 1 | Sermon Summary | 4 | | 2 | Preaching Style | 4 | | 3 | Storytelling and Illustration | 4 | | 4 | Intonation and Delivery (provisional) | 3 | | 5 | Content Structure | 4 | | 6 | Engagement and Application | 3 | | 7 | Scripture Handling | 3 | | 8 | Logical Reasoning | 3 | | 9 | References | 3 | | 10 | Quotes and Illustrative Stories | 4 | | 11 | Calls to Action | 3 | | 12 | Style Effectiveness | 4 | | 13 | Theological Depth & Coherence | 4 | | | **Total** | **46/65 (71%)** | ##### ⚖️ Side-by-Side: Narrative-Topical vs. Fully Exegetical | Aspect | This Sermon | Fully Exegetical Version | |---|---|---| | Primary style | Narrative-topical with an inductive refrain | Expository through vv. 1-31, including the omitted verses | | Stories | DeMille, Tubman, star word | Fewer; the Nachshon midrash; MLK's "Death of Evil upon the Seashore" | | Scripture depth | Narrative recap; Reed Sea; Matthew 2 inversion | Hebrew *tacharishun* / *veyissaʿu*; hardening; "serve" chain; Baal-zephon | | Hard texts | Hardening reassigned; v. 30 not read | Hardening faced; v. 30 with the Talmud's rebuke of the angels | | Application | Help, don't hinder; protect | Still *then* walk; name local Pharaohs; table as answer to "Who are we?" | #### 🎧 Listening-Prompt Check (from the Exodus 14 study) - **Divine hardening (vv. 4, 8, 17):** Not mentioned. The opening line moves hardening from God to "all that will… harden our hearts." The lectionary's omission was continued, and the agent was reassigned. - **"Go forward" (v. 15):** **Restored in substance, not by citation.** "Step out in faith. Walk out on dry ground." "Liberation doesn't just happen." "The people needed God and Moses." This is the sermon's most important correction to the reading cut. - **"Keep still" (v. 14):** Read, then implicitly downgraded ("We can wait. Or we can work"). No referent inversion – it was never aimed at dissenters – but the comfort reading was lost. - **Cloud and angel (vv. 19-20):** Not mentioned. The star word "protect / stand in between" is a direct parallel that went unused. - **Seeing and believing (vv. 30-31):** v. 30 wasn't read. v. 31's movement was preached anyway: "from fear into trust." The deaths were softened to "drowning Pharaoh's horses." #### 🧬 Hermeneutical Genealogy (non-scored) - **"God is a liberator… on the side of the oppressed":** - Spirituals and the enslaved church reading Exodus against America-as-Egypt (Raboteau, *Slave Religion*, 1978). - Black theology (Cone, 1970, 1975). - Latin American liberation theology – the preferential option for the poor (Medellín, 1968; Gutiérrez, 1971). - Mainline progressive adoption, 1980s onward. - **Presented as:** a timeless name for God. **Actually:** a specific, hard-won 20th-century reading built on 19th-century Black Christianity. That lineage is honorable – but it was unnamed. - **"I don't know if the story happened this way, but I know…" (03:27):** - A narrative-theology posture (cf. Hans Frei, *The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative*, 1974): meaning located in the story, not the event. - 🔍 The exact phrasing resembles a widely circulated storyteller's opening often attributed to Indigenous oral tradition. Verify the source before citing. - **Reassigning hardening away from God:** Follows the post-Enlightenment liberal Protestant tendency to remove morally troubling divine agency. Contrast with Luther and Calvin (who embraced it) and the rabbis (who explained it). - **Blind spots in this lineage:** The critiques of Delores Williams (survival without rescue) and Robert Allen Warrior (liberation leading to conquest) are absent. Tubman, a woman, appears only through a male template ("Moses"). #### 🔁 Lateral Transfer Risk Audit (non-scored) - **Referent direction:** **Correct.** Power critique is aimed at the powerful ("people in power want to remain in power"; "not the oppressor"). No referent inversion found. - **Leader authority:** Moses appears as a partner with God; v. 31's "his servant Moses" was not read or used. No apostolic-authority framing. - **Lexical overlap (low risk):** - "God will break every chain" (10:00) is phrasing shared with a widely sung contemporary worship song popularized through charismatic networks (including Jesus Culture). It is equally old abolitionist imagery. **Assessment:** vocabulary overlap, not framework transfer. - The "Spirit of the Living God" invocation is a 1920s chorus long standard in mainline hymnals. No concern. - **Epistemology:** The sermon openly admits historical uncertainty and separates meaning from literalism – the opposite of high-control certainty patterns. **Overall risk: low.** #### 🧒 Children's Message Analysis (non-scored companion) > [!warning] Load-bearing verification – 04:53 > The transcript reads "He **forbids** us from complaining, even when things are going against us." It may be "He **forgives** us for complaining." The two readings produce different findings below. Confirm on tape before circulating. ##### 🎯 Central Message - **As transcribed:** The Israelites were complainers who grumbled right after receiving freedom. We complain too. God provides and takes care of us anyway, "no matter how much we complain." - **Thematic link to the adult sermon:** Shared text, opposite emphasis. The adult sermon is about God the liberator and human partnership. The children's message is about complaining as a fault that God tolerates. ##### 🗂️ Rubric Notes (same 13 categories, not scored) - **Summary / Liturgical focus:** Places the story in the Genesis → Exodus arc, which is good. World Communion Sunday is not mentioned (unless "our writings from around our world" at 04:53 is a garbled World Communion reference – verify). - **Style:** Dramatized object lesson (acting out a complainer) → narrative retelling → moral application. Classic and age-appropriate in form. - **Storytelling:** The opening bit is strong; the laughter shows the children were engaged. The retelling blends Exodus 14 with Exodus 16: "we have no food… we're going to starve" is the manna complaint, not the sea. In chapter 14 the people fear being killed. - **Delivery:** Can't be assessed from this transcript. Laughter suggests warmth and good rapport. - **Structure:** Hook → story → application is clear. The closing is unintelligible in the transcript. - **Engagement:** High in the opening; "Have you ever met anybody who complains?" invites recognition. "God, breathe in" may be an embodied prayer – a strong practice if confirmed. - **Scripture handling:** Narrative summary only. Exodus 14:10 says the Israelites "cried out to the LORD" before they spoke to Moses; the message presents only the complaint, not the cry to God. Rashi reads that cry as prayer. - **Logical reasoning:** See the fallacy notes below. - **References:** None, as expected for the format. - **Quotes/stories:** "God is going to take care of us, no matter how much we complain" – the strongest grace statement. - **Calls to action:** Implicit – complain less, trust God. If "forbids" is confirmed, the takeaway becomes "don't complain even when things go wrong." - **Style effectiveness:** The form works. The content choice – centering the Israelites' complaint rather than God's rescue or Pharaoh's power – is where the concern lies. - **Theological depth:** God as provider and patient caretaker is sound. God as liberator from an oppressor is largely absent. ##### 🧠 Fallacy and Framing Notes - **Mischaracterization (category shift):** Terrified people fleeing an army are described as ungrateful grumblers ("They've just been given freedom… and they're complaining already"). The text frames their fear as the ordinary reaction of people being chased by chariots, and God answers it with rescue, not rebuke. - **Conflation:** Food complaints (Exodus 16) and law complaints (later Exodus and Numbers) are pulled into the sea story, making complaint the dominant theme of a chapter that is about rescue. - **Fallacy of composition (if "forbids"):** Complaint against hardship → all complaint is forbidden, "even when things are going against us." This would erase the biblical tradition of lament (Psalms 13, 22, 88; Job; Lamentations). - **Grace statement (if "forgives"):** Much softer – complaint is still framed as a fault, but one God forgives. The lament concern remains, but it is no longer a prohibition. ##### 🔄 Referent Inversion Check | Element | Exodus 14 | Adult sermon | Children's message | |---|---|---|---| | Who is the problem? | Pharaoh and his army | "People in power want to remain in power" | The Israelites' complaining | | Israel's fear (vv. 10-12) | Fear at real danger; cry to God | "The unknown is scary" – sympathetic | Ingratitude – "complaining already" | | Pharaoh | Pursuer; the oppressor | Oppressor | Regrets letting them go; little critique | | Human role | Keep still (v. 14), then go forward (v. 15) | "Liberation doesn't just happen" – help, don't hinder | God takes care of us; complain less | | God's character | Rescuer and warrior against oppression | Liberator on the side of the oppressed | Provider who puts up with complaining | - **Finding:** The critique the text aims at the powerful (Pharaoh) is redirected onto the least powerful people in the story (frightened escapees) and then applied to the least powerful people in the room (children). This is the inverted referent vector pattern seen in the Ten Commandments series. - **Severity depends on 04:53:** - **"Forbids":** High. Children are taught that voicing distress when things go wrong is something God prohibits. - **"Forgives":** Moderate. Complaint is still the sin of the story, but grace is the frame. ##### 🧬 Formation Pipeline - **Structural issue:** Children go to Children's Corner after the children's message, so they never hear the adult corrective – the sympathy for Israel's fear, the critique of power, "liberation doesn't just happen." - **What each audience left with:** - **Adults:** God is a liberator; fear is understandable; join God's liberating work. - **Children:** The Israelites complained too much; God takes care of us anyway; complain less. - **Consistency with prior findings:** This matches the pattern you documented in the Ten Commandments series – the adult sermon and the children's message point in different directions, and only the adults get both. ##### 🛠️ Constructive Alternatives (same object-lesson format) - **Keep the opening bit, change the turn:** "Is there a difference between complaining about coffee and crying out when you're scared?" Then show that the Israelites cried out to God (v. 10) – and God heard them. - **Teach lament as faithful:** "It's okay to tell God when you're scared. Moses said, 'Don't be afraid' – and then God said, 'Now let's go!'" This brings in vv. 14-15 together. - **Use the embodied moment:** If "God, breathe in" was a breath prayer, pair the inhale with "keep still" and the exhale with "go forward." - **Connect to the table:** On World Communion Sunday – God feeds hungry people everywhere, and we help (CROP Walk, Oct. 18). #### 🎥 Tape Verification > [!warning] Sermon – verify before circulating > - **08:53 – DeMille film:** Transcribed as "1926 classic… starring Charlton Heston." DeMille's *The Ten Commandments* with Heston is **1956**; his silent version is **1923**. Possibly a transcription error ("fifty-six" → "twenty-six"). > - **08:37 – "And the oppression they experience is over":** Likely "isn't over," given "The struggle for freedom continues. It's not over" (05:10). > - **02:29 – v. 25 reading:** Cut off at "because the Lord is…" – verify whether the lector finished "fighting for them against Egypt." > - **03:31 – Framing tag:** Ends mid-sentence ("But I know that story"). Confirm the full phrasing. > - **12:00 – "disciples of Christ Minor Ministry":** Likely "Mime Ministry" or "Dance Ministry." Confirm the group name. > - **Speaker 2 segments** ("Let us work for the Egyptians," "You just keep still," "God is a liberator," "Who are we?"): Determine whether these are a second reader, congregational call-and-response, or diarization errors. This affects the Delivery and Engagement scores. > - **14:08 – "Matthew two thirteen to sixteen":** The bulletin lists 2:13-15. Confirm what was intended. > [!warning] Children's message – verify before circulating > - **04:53 – "forbids" vs. "forgives":** Load-bearing; see above. > - **00:29–02:00:** Confirm who is speaking (Roxanne Davenport vs. Chani Wolfe) and whether "Sweet Sally" is a puppet or prop. > - **03:08 – "notice the Towers":** Possibly "notice the soldiers" or a reference to Migdol ("tower," v. 2). Confirm. > - **04:53 – "our writings from around our world":** Possibly a World Communion reference. > - **05:06–05:44:** "God is on the other side" and "Don't argue with it. It's not real" are too garbled to analyze. Confirm what was said. > - **06:00:** The non-English characters are transcription noise. #### Personal Reflections ##### What spoke to me:   ##### Questions raised:   ##### Challenges/Convictions:   ##### Liturgical Context Reflections:   #### Applications ##### This week I will:   ##### People to pray for:   ##### Follow-up study:   #### Connections     ## Worship Leadership | Role | Name | | --- | --- | | Pastor | Rev. Caroline E. Saxton | | Organist | Barbara Motichka | | Choir Director | Gary Crum | | Worship Team | Roxanne Davenport, Barbara Motichka, Courtney Robertson, Chris Willman-Bunge | | Deacon in Charge | Pete A'Zary | | Lector | Chani Wolfe | | Children's Corner | Chani Wolfe | | Media Coordinators | Calvin Frantz and Neath Ham | | Bulletin Cover | "Moses" © Estate of John August Swanson, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt University Divinity Library | ### Worship Resources - Call to Worship written by Thom Shuman and posted on Lectionary Liturgies (adapted) - Responsive Prayer of Confession written by Katherine Hawker - Assurance of Grace written by Thom Shuman and posted on Lectionary Liturgies - *The Inclusive Bible: The First Egalitarian Translation* - Prayer of Dedication written by Thom Shuman and posted on Lectionary Liturgies ## Church News & Announcements *Join us for a time of fellowship following the service!* ### Communion Attendance All are welcome at Christ's table. To let the church office know that you communed today, please sign the black attendance pad found in each row. If you are communing from home, please contact the church office to let us know. ### Birthdays This Week - 10/05 – Katrina Dietrich - 10/07 – Ken Dilling - 10/08 – Camden Wadel - 10/10 – Judy Cook and Sandra Lewis - 10/11 – Logan Parson ### Flowers at the Foot of the Cross Given as a special thank you to everyone who helped make the Fall Tea such a success, from Renee Byers, Connie Strunk, and Sue McMurtray. ### Staff & Contacts - **The Rev. Caroline E. Saxton**, Pastor – [email protected] – (641) 260-1868 (cell) - **Tonya Schwartz**, Office Administrator – [email protected] – (717) 263-8593 (office) - **Gary Crum**, Music Director - **Barbara Motichka**, Organist - **Roxanne Davenport**, Director of Children & Youth - **The Rev. Stephen W. Hoffman**, Pastor Emeritus ### Announcements #### Quick Intro to Spanish Join us after worship today for a "quick intro" to Spanish in Room 116. We'll learn some greetings/introductions, a few useful everyday phrases, and practice together. #### Bible and a Beer An opportunity to talk about our faith in public. Meets the 3rd Monday of the month at the Trojan Diner at 6:30 pm. Next gathering: **October 19**. #### Fall Quarter First Fruits August, September, and October giving supports Franklin Together–Franklin County Reentry Coalition, Homeless Matters of Franklin County, and the Fayetteville Fire Department. More information about each organization is in the *Spirit*. #### Sunday Night Bible Study Join Pastor Caroline on Sunday, October 4 at 8 pm via Zoom for a Bible study on Ecclesiastes 11. - **Zoom Meeting ID:** 836 0593 5961 - **Passcode:** 277938 - A hyperlink is included in the weekly e-blast. > [!warning] Discrepancy > The "Today" calendar lists Ecclesiastes **chapters 11 & 12**; this announcement lists **chapter 11** only. #### Monday Afternoon Book Study Chapter 8 of Barbara Brown Taylor's *Learning to Walk in the Dark* – Monday, October 5, 1:30 pm, Conference Room 111. #### An Evening of Fellowship Saturday, October 10, 5 pm in Fellowship Hall – music, food, and community with our other two congregations. Bring a dish to share; sign up at the Welcome Center in the Lobby. "Potluck dinner church!" #### Franklin County Pride Festival Sunday, October 11 at Wilson College. Contact Pastor Caroline if you can represent St. John's. #### Immunization Clinic Sunday, October 18 after worship in the Parlor. Chambers Apothecary will host a flu shot clinic. Sign up by October 16 (sheet at the Lobby Welcome Center). Questions: Harold Collier, [email protected]. #### CROP Hunger Walk Sunday, October 18, starting at Falling Spring Presbyterian Church (221 N. Main Street). Registration opens at 1:30 pm; the walk begins at 2. Monetary donations and non-perishable food items welcome. ##### Bulletin Insert – 2026 Chambersburg CROP Hunger Walk - **Team:** St. John's UCC Youth - **Theme:** "Building Global Resilience" / "Ending Hunger One Step at a Time" - **Summary:** The flyer frames the walk as a way to rebuild connection and stand in solidarity with neighbors who walk for water, food, medical care, or safety. It cites the Jewish teaching that saving one life saves the whole world. - **Example impact:** - $21 – five chickens for a family in Tanzania - $25 – a month of groceries for a refugee in Egypt - $40 – a year of school supplies for a Roma child in Eastern Europe - $43 – a biosand water filter for a family in Myanmar - **Contact:** 888-CWS-CROP • crophungerwalk.org #### No Tricks, Just Treats Saturday, October 31, 6–8 pm. Candy donations can be dropped off at the church office. #### St. John's Pumpkin Patch Tea – Thank You Thanks to all who advertised, invited friends, and attended, plus the set-up team, prep workers, kitchen help, waiters, dishwashers, clean-up/tear-down volunteers, and tablecloth-washing ladies. Thanks to Pastor Caroline for her support and to Tonya, who handled ticket sales and the table chart. Spring "Vintage Tea": **Saturday, April 24, 2027**. #### October Is Pastor Appreciation Month Write notes of encouragement for Pastor Caroline and pin them to the Tree of Appreciation at the Welcome Center (pre-cut leaves provided). Private cards and gifts may be mailed or dropped at the church office. They will be presented during Pastor Appreciation Sunday worship on **October 18, 2026**. ## Vision & Mission ### St. John's Vision We are called to love, to learn, to worship and to witness in Christ as a congregation that welcomes everyone, and seeks service that will advance God's realm on earth. ### St. John's Mission To grow in love of God and neighbor ## Calendar & Upcoming Events ### Today – Sunday, October 4 - 11:15 am – Quick Intro to Spanish – Room 116 - 8:00 pm – Bible Study on Ecclesiastes 11 & 12 – Zoom (link in Friday e-blast) ### Monday, October 5 - 1:30 pm – Book Study (*Learning to Walk in the Dark*, Chapter 8) – Conference Room 111 - 5:30 pm – Kinusaiga Craft Night – Room 116 - 7:00 pm – Boy Scouts – Fellowship Hall ### Tuesday, October 6 - 5:30 pm – Yoga – Room 202 - 6:00 pm – Ladies Bible Study – Zoom - 6:30 pm – Cub Scouts – Fellowship Hall, then smaller groups ### Thursday, October 8 - 6:00 pm – Bell Choir Practice – Room 117 - 7:15 pm – Choir Practice – Room 103 ### Friday, October 9 - 6:00 pm – Dance Class – Fellowship Hall ### Saturday, October 10 - 5:00 pm – Potluck Food, Fun, and Fellowship (Sharing with our Congregations) – Fellowship Hall ### Sunday, October 11 - 8:45 am – Godly Play Church School (Ages 3–K) – Room 119 - 8:45 am – SPARK! Church School (Grades 1–5) – Room 115 - 8:45 am – Scripture/Contemporary Issues (Grades 6–12) – Library Room 106 - 8:45 am – Wired Word Adult Church School – Room 116 - 8:45 am – Upper Room Adult Church School – Conference Room 111 - 10:00 am – Sunday Worship – Sanctuary - Franklin County Pride Festival – Wilson College - **No Bible Study** – resumes 10/18/2026 ### Looking Ahead - **Oct. 16** – Flu shot clinic sign-up deadline - **Oct. 18** – Pastor Appreciation Sunday; Flu Shot Clinic (Parlor, after worship); CROP Hunger Walk (registration 1:30 pm, walk 2 pm); Sunday Night Bible Study resumes - **Oct. 19** – Bible and a Beer, Trojan Diner, 6:30 pm - **Oct. 31** – No Tricks, Just Treats, 6–8 pm - **Apr. 24, 2027** – Spring "Vintage Tea"