Sermon – Between a Rock and a Hard Place

(I preached this sermon at Christ Lutheran Church in Harrisburg, PA on Sunday, October 11, 2026. It is based on Exodus 14:5-7, 10-14, 21-29. You can listen to the audio at this link.)

Picture the scene. A huge crowd of people is camped by the water. Families. Old folks. Kids. Animals. Everything they own is tied up in bundles. A few days ago they were slaves. Now they are free, and they are tired, and they are scared.

In front of them is the sea. Behind them, they hear something. It starts low, like thunder far away. Then they see the dust. Then they see the chariots. Pharaoh has changed his mind. He wants his slaves back. In his mind, he owns these people.

The people do what any of us would do. They panic. They cry out to God. And then they turn on Moses. “Weren’t there enough graves in Egypt? Why did you bring us out here to die?” They would rather be slaves than be dead. That is how bad it looks.

Most of us know this feeling. We call it being stuck between a rock and a hard place. The eviction notice is on the door and the landlord won’t call back. The doctor says the word you were afraid of. The bills are stacked higher than the paycheck. You look forward and there is water. You look back and there is an army. There is no road. There is no way out.

Moses says something strange in that moment. “Do not be afraid. Stand firm, and see what the Lord will do for you today. The Lord will fight for you. You only have to keep still.”

That is where the good news starts in this story. Israel doesn’t save itself. God shows up. God makes a way where there was no way. Let’s look at how.

Pharaoh brings 600 of his best chariots, and then every other chariot in Egypt, with officers over all of them. The Jewish historian Josephus guessed there were 50,000 horsemen and 200,000 foot soldiers. We don’t know the real number. We do know this was the strongest army in the world.

On the other side is a crowd of runaway slaves with no weapons and no training. They have bread on their backs and children on their hips.

If you were placing a bet, you know how this ends. Everybody in Egypt knew how this ends. There is going to be a slaughter at the edge of the sea.

This week the Pentagon announced that the firing squad execution of the Fort Hood shooter will be livestreamed in December. That man murdered 13 people, and the grief of those families is real. Grieving them is right. Turning a man’s death into a show is what empires do. I have no doubt that if Pharaoh had the technology, he would have streamed what he planned to do at the Red Sea. Cruelty works best with an audience. It teaches everyone watching who is in charge and what happens to people who cross him.

And there is a slaughter. Just not the one anybody expected. God flips the script.

Egypt ran on a set of beliefs. Every empire since then has run on the same ones. Might makes right. The strong survive. The ends justify the means. Those beliefs built the pyramids on the backs of slaves. They let Pharaoh drown Hebrew baby boys in the Nile. They still run a lot of our world today.

At the Red Sea, God puts those beliefs on trial. The strong do not survive. The finest army on earth ends up at the bottom of the sea. Might does not make right. God takes the side of the weak and the beaten down, and justice wins the day. And the ends do not justify the means. That way of thinking makes everybody disposable. Sooner or later it eats the people who live by it. Pharaoh threw Hebrew babies into the water. In the end, the water took his army.

This is the last scene of a long fight. The plagues were God’s judgment on the gods of Egypt, one by one. The god of the Nile, the frog goddess, the cattle goddess, and finally the sun god himself. Now God judges the last god left standing, the one who wore a crown and thought he could not lose. Pharaoh.

There is a hard part of this story, and I don’t want to skip it. What about the Egyptian soldiers?

Dr. Song-Mi Suzie Park, who wrote this week’s Working Preacher commentary, asks that question. Most of those soldiers didn’t choose this fight. They were following orders. Some were probably drafted. They had families back home. The plagues hit regular Egyptian families too. Their firstborn children died because they lived under a terrible ruler. Dr. Park asks us who those people are in our world today. Who are the people we are told to see as the enemy, who are really just folks like us, caught up in disasters they didn’t make?

There is something else in this story that bothers me, and maybe it bothers you too. The Bible says God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. That hardening is what sends Pharaoh chasing after Israel, and it ends with an army at the bottom of the sea. We don’t like picturing God that way. I don’t think we should rush past it.

We don’t know the mind of God. But we do know how empires work. An empire never gives up power because someone asks nicely. It doesn’t hand out rights to the people it is crushing or share its wealth. It always wants more. There is never enough. An empire has no room for repentance or mercy. It can’t see the image of God in its enemies, or even in its own people. So it will not listen and it will not change. The only language it knows is violence.

That is why every empire in history ends the same way, in death. The only questions are how long it lasts and how many people it takes down with it. At the Red Sea, God judges Egypt the way God judges every empire. God puts Pharaoh’s empire right where it was already headed.

History is full of empires. And they are still with us.

In a way, this story is a fight between God and a narcissist who thinks he is God. In Egypt, the king was treated as a god. Pharaoh believed it. A leader like that cannot admit he is wrong. He cannot back down. Ten plagues and a dead son were not enough to turn him around. He would rather lose everything than lose face. Leaders like that all act the same way, and they leave the same mess behind them. Everything they touch gets broken. People die.

Here is something interesting. The Bible never tells us this Pharaoh’s name. Maybe that is a gift. It lets us see that Pharaoh is a pattern more than a person.

You can spot that pattern all through history, on every side of the political fence. A leader like that needs to be praised all the time. Every problem is somebody else’s fault. People who tell him the truth get pushed out, and people who flatter him get promoted. He picks a group of people to blame and keeps everyone angry at them, so nobody looks too closely at him. He talks a lot about the poor while he makes deals for the rich. And when it all falls apart, the ones who pay are never the ones at the top. It’s the soldier at the bottom of the sea. It’s the family that can’t make rent.

That is what tyranny looks like. Real leadership is something else. Pharaoh thought leading meant crushing people until they gave in. We sometimes picture God that way too, as a bigger and meaner Pharaoh. That is a human picture of power. God’s power looks like setting slaves free.

I think about Israel and Palestine. It is so easy to pick a side. People on both sides have good reasons. They can name the attacks, the bombings, the rockets, the hostages, the airstrikes, the children killed.

Here is a question I keep asking. Which side is God on?

I wonder if God is on the side of the ordinary Palestinian and the ordinary Israeli who are just trying to stay alive. The mother looking for bread for her kids. The family that never got a real say in who leads them.

Palestinians have not voted for their national government in twenty years. The last legislative election was in 2006. Another one is scheduled for next month. We will see if it happens. Israelis do vote. But in a survey last year by the Israel Democracy Institute, only about one in four Israelis said any party really speaks for them. Their system forces leaders to build coalitions with small, extreme parties. So the government often does things most people don’t want.

So many people on both sides of that wall are like those Egyptian foot soldiers. They are paying the price for choices made far above their heads. God sees them, and God’s heart breaks for every one of them.

Pharaoh was one false god. There are plenty more.

Dr. Park asks some good questions here. Who or what do we treat as more important than God? What quietly eats up our time and our worry? What are the vultures and the vampires in our lives?

We could make a long list. Money. Political power. Our favorite politicians. Our party and our ideology. Christian nationalism, which wraps the flag around the cross until you can’t see the cross anymore. Work. Even good things like exercise can become a god. Our phones and our shows. Drugs and alcohol. Sex. Any of these can sit on the throne that belongs to God. And every one of them, like Pharaoh, promises life and delivers slavery.

There is another enemy in this story. The sea.

In the ancient world, people thought of the sea as a god too. It was wild, and nobody could control it. It stood for chaos.

I’ve heard it said that there are two kinds of evil in the world. One kind is the evil people do on purpose. Cruelty and abuse of power. That is Pharaoh. That is empire. The other kind is the evil of chaos. Floods and hurricanes. The accident nobody saw coming. That is the sea.

At the Red Sea, God takes on both. God beats the empire and God beats the chaos, in the same night.

We live with both kinds of evil today, and here on Allison Hill the picture is complicated. Some of the harm comes from choices people make. Gun violence on our streets. Drugs and trafficking. Those choices are real, and they hurt real people. But a lot of the evil on this hill was pushed onto people from outside. Decades ago, banks drew red lines around neighborhoods like this one and refused to lend here, and we still live with what that did. Immigration agents pull parents away from their children. Rents climb while wages stay put, and people end up sleeping in their cars. Our LGBTQ+ neighbors are targeted. Refugees who escaped war get treated like criminals. 

People get blamed for being poor inside a system that was built to keep them poor. And then there is the chaos. The cancer. The stroke. The flood in the basement. The mind that turns against itself.

Empire always thinks it has the upper hand. Chaos always thinks it is in charge, because we keep having to react to it. But when God shows up, empires fall, and chaos gets pushed aside.

Human history is full of crossings like this one.

About 50 miles up the Ohio River from the Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, there is a little town called Ripley, Ohio. On top of the hill above the river stood the house of a Presbyterian pastor named John Rankin. Every night, the Rankin family put a lantern in the window. Enslaved people in Kentucky could see that light from across the river. It meant: cross here, you are safe here. People crossed that river in rowboats. Some crossed on foot over winter ice that could break at any step. Slave catchers were right behind them. The water was in front of them. And there was a light on the hill.

Today people are still crossing. Families walk across deserts and jungles. They pile into rubber boats on the Mediterranean Sea. Many of them drown. They are running from war and hunger, just like Israel ran from Pharaoh. Some of them now live right here on Allison Hill.

And each of us has our own crossings. Getting clean. Leaving a relationship that was hurting you. Burying someone you love. Starting over after prison or after an eviction. You know your own story. You know what it is like to stand at the edge of the water with nowhere to go.

Here is the good news. God has been making paths through water for a long time. The prophet Isaiah calls God the one who makes a way in the sea, a path through the mighty waters. Then God says, “I am about to do a new thing. Now it springs forth. Do you not see it?”

We see that new thing in Jesus.

Jesus keeps showing up at the water. He goes down into the Jordan River to be baptized, right into the waters of chaos. He crosses the sea to the land of the Gerasenes, where a man lived chained among the tombs, and he sets that man free.

We can’t make that path. We don’t have to. God makes it. Our part is to get up and walk.

People like to say that God turns the world upside down. I’ve come to see it another way. The world is what’s upside down. A world where the strong crush the weak, and a few people have more than they could ever spend while children go hungry. That world is upside down. When God acts, God is setting it right side up again. God is putting it back the way God meant it to be from the start.

And what did God mean it to be? The prophets called it shalom, which means peace and right relationship. Micah put it this way: do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God. We see it in Jesus, bringing good news to the poor and healing to the sick. We see it at the very end of the Bible, where a river of life flows through the city of God, and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.

The Bible is one long story of God setting things right. And God hasn’t stopped.

God set Israel free from Egypt. God set enslaved people free in this country, through people who rowed across rivers and lit lanterns in windows. In 1968, poor people of every race came together in the Poor People’s Campaign and camped on the National Mall to demand a fair share. Isaiah dreamed of a day when people would beat their swords into plows. Today there are groups that take donated guns and hammer them into garden tools. Something that took life gets turned into something that grows food. That is God setting the world right side up.

God still goes ahead of us and calls us to follow. That’s what we try to do at Christ Lutheran. We are following God into the fight against sickness and suffering on this hill. That is what our healing wheel is about. Healing for bodies in the medical clinic and healing for teeth in the dental clinic. Healing for this neighborhood, for our spirits, and healing that comes from justice. We didn’t think this up on our own. God was already at work here. We are following where God is leading.

So where is the good news in all of this? The good news has a name. Jesus.

Go back to the very first page of the Bible. Darkness covers the deep waters, and the Spirit of God moves over the face of the water. Then God speaks. “Let there be light.” And the chaos has to make room for life.

The Gospel of John tells us who that Word is. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Then John says the most amazing thing of all. “The Word became flesh and lived among us.” The Word that spoke over the waters at creation has a face and a name. Jesus.

That same Word was at the Red Sea. When the people cried out, God spoke. “Tell the Israelites to go forward.” The waters stood up like walls, and a people who had been owned by Pharaoh walked out on dry ground. Pharaoh’s army found out who the real God was.

That same Word got into a fishing boat with his friends on the Sea of Galilee. The storm hit. The disciples were sure they were going to drown. Jesus stood up and spoke to the wind and the waves. “Peace! Be still!” And the sea went calm.

And Jesus is still speaking.

He is still speaking over the waters of chaos. Over the hospital bed and the eviction notice. Over the overdose and the 2 a.m. phone call. The chaos does not get the last word.

He is still speaking against every Pharaoh who thinks he owns people. We may not know the names of all the false gods of this world. Jesus knows every one of them, and he isn’t afraid of any of them. Pharaohs come and go, and they all end up at the bottom of the sea. Rome thought it had the last word when it nailed Jesus to a cross. On Easter morning, Jesus walked up out of the deepest water there is, death itself, and he came out alive. Empire does not get the last word either.

And Jesus is still speaking to you.

Maybe you are standing at the edge of your own sea this morning. You can hear the chariots coming. You can’t see any way forward. Listen. Jesus is saying the same thing God said at the Red Sea. Do not be afraid. I will fight for you. Go forward. I have already made the way.

So get up and follow him. The way is open.

Thanks be to God.