sermons
Air - Lent: A Spring Season
Knowing God, But Not All by Ourselves
Steve Watson
Mar 30, 2025
Friends, if you’re willing, close your eyes for just a moment, and hear the words of God that anchor us this week.
Be still and know that I am.
Be still and know that I am.
Be still and know that I am.
Last weekend in our Saturday morning community group, we were talking about our spiritual lives.
- Like what does it mean to be close to God?
- To keep the faith?
- To be grounded in inner strength and love no matter what happens?
And that got me thinking about singing.
Singing is important to me. It was how I found my confidence, my voice as a teenager. And ever since then, it’s been one of my favorite things. And I’m alright at it. I know what I’m doing.
But there are very few people on this earth who would want to listen to just me sing for an hour. Probably my mom, my dog, maybe a couple other people. And I don’t blame them. I don’t think I’d listen to myself sing for an hour either.
But I’m in this chorus where we practice singing together for a couple hours every week. There are only 14 of us. Small chorus. And by ourselves, we’re each all right. We all have some skills, we all have a lot of musical experience. But together, we sound beautiful. I mean, it’s Renaissance choral music, very niche, so it’s not like all that many people come to our concerts, they don’t. But together, we sound really good. I would absolutely listen to us for an hour.
And in our group, I wondered: what if this is what a life of faith looks like?
By ourselves, we are meant to know that God is with us. That God has room for us, smiles for us, as God’s beloved children. And it is meaningful and good to have a relationship with our Creator.
But it was never meant to be complete or sufficient. We may sing “me” and “I” in our songs, and that’s all good. We may have been taught how to pray by ourselves, and that’s good too. This church has actually spent a lot of energy over the years helping us develop personal relationships with God. And we’ll keep doing that.
But maybe that’s never been the main point.
Just like singing with other people is better than singing alone, things happen in a life of faith when it’s shared with others that could never happen by ourselves.
That’s why our community group was talking about our church’s Lent guide yesterday and the Saturday before that, and that’s why we were reading the scriptures in it and talking about how it is that we notice the presence and the activity of God’s Spirit, and how it’s easier, and richer, and better when we do that together.
This year, friends, in our six-week season of Lent, which we are right in the middle of, we are asking God to renew our faith, and restore our hope, and revitalize our love, to make us resilient people. And we have this guide here in my hand and online at reservoirchurch.org that we know people will mostly read for 10 or 15 minutes a day or maybe an hour a week, if at all. But we gather here on Sunday and we meet in groups and talk about these things together in friendships because we were never meant to have strong faith and deep hope and resilience by ourselves.
We were meant to do it together.
And so today, I want to give you a preview of what’s in this week’s guide, Week 4, where we look at two great moments of spiritual revelation and closeness to God in the life of Moses, and how it is that we can stop for a moment, be still, and know that God is.
(And while I do encourage you to read the guide this week – you don’t have to go back and catch up on the first three weeks if you missed them. Skip it. Jump in on Week 4.)
But I want to be clear today that we don’t live the words of this guide by ourselves. Moses who we’ll meet again this week is one of the great spiritual leaders, the great prophets in all of human history. The gospel of Matthew, as a compliment to Jesus, speaks of him as a new kind of Moses figure.
And just like I’m not going to be one of the world’s great singers, drawing crowds just to listen to me sing, you and I are not going to be Jesus or Moses, the mystic who all by ourselves achieves total unity with God in this life.
But just like we can make stunning music in my little choir together, so we can think about how in connection to other people, we can experience the same things in God that Moses did.
And so that’s today’s message. Three of the truest things about God that Moses discovers and we also can know very deeply when we don’t do it by ourselves.
There are two big stories from the life of Moses in the guide this week. I’m going to read just a short excerpt from each of them and share about these three ways we can deepen our faith and our resilience together.
Exodus 34:5-7 (Common English Bible)
5 The Lord came down in the cloud and stood there with him, and proclaimed the name, “The Lord.”
6 The Lord passed in front of him and proclaimed:
“The Lord! The Lord!
a God who is compassionate and merciful,
very patient,
full of great loyalty and faithfulness,
7 showing great loyalty to a thousand generations,
forgiving every kind of sin and rebellion,
yet by no means clearing the guilty,
punishing for their parents’ sins
their children and their grandchildren,
as well as the third and the fourth generation.”Exodus 3:7-10 (Common English Bible)
7 Then the Lord said, “I’ve clearly seen my people oppressed in Egypt. I’ve heard their cry of injustice because of their slave masters. I know about their pain.
8 I’ve come down to rescue them from the Egyptians in order to take them out of that land and bring them to a good and broad land, a land that’s full of milk and honey, a place where the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites all live.
9 Now the Israelites’ cries of injustice have reached me. I’ve seen just how much the Egyptians have oppressed them.
10 So get going. I’m sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.”
- The first thing we can know about God is God’s compassion and mercy.
I wrote most of the words in this Lenten guide in a lakeside house in rural Pennsylvania that one of you let me use for a week. Thank you so very much for that. I was visiting my daughter who’s finishing up college not too far from there and taking a mini-writing retreat to turn my notes into paragraphs.
And the first night I got to this little town, it was a cold and dark Tuesday evening in February, back when it got cold and dark really early still. I stopped in the town to buy a few groceries to last me for three or four days. But I was tired and hungry and didn’t want to cook anything that evening, so I stopped in a little pizza shop to buy a couple of slices as well, to tide me over for the evening.
And after the owner of the shop put the slices in the oven to warm them up, he turned to the register and said: that’ll be $7. And I pulled out my wallet, grabbed my charge card, and while I looked for the card reader, he pointed to a sign I hadn’t seen that said: cash only.
I looked in my wallet and only had a $5 bill and I thought: shoot and told him, I guess I’ll just take one slice. And he said: how much do you have? And I said: just $5. And he took the five, passed me my two slices, and said don’t worry about it. Here you go. Pay it forward if you want.
I said thank you, but the words came a little slow because I was really surprised, a little choked up, to be honest.
Because well, I guess it was just an extra slice of pizza, it was a difference of $2. But I feel like not many people do stuff like this for strangers. And as I went back to the car, and drove to the lake house, and as I got out and ate my two slices, I thought – that man’s words and hands, and these slices going into my belly – this is the goodness of God.
Because when Moses said:
God, show me what you’re really like,
God started singing:
the compassionate, the merciful.
And so every time we experience or even witness compassion and mercy, we experience and witness God. And every time we ourselves embody compassion and mercy, we give flesh to the goodness of God.
We are not living in compassionate and merciful times. We live in times when a pastor asks the president of our country to be merciful, he can’t decide if it’s a joke to insult or an affront to him to complain about. There are churches and Christian leaders in this country trying to convince people that empathy is a sin because they view the life of faith as some kind of war against their enemies.
But Moses learned that the one of the truest things about God, maybe the truest thing about God is God’s compassion and mercy.
And this doesn’t just need to be an abstract belief or hope. No, every time we witness compassion and kindness and mercy, we can remember that ultimately, this comes from God. And that in that moment, God is here.
One of the beginnings of my own more personal relationship with God was the forgiveness offered to me so gently by someone I’d hurt very much when I was young. It was one of my early windows into the truth of God’s goodness. And everytime someone puts forgiveness, compassion, mercy, kindness into the world – even through a slice of pizza to a weary soul who’s out of cash – the glory of God is there if we’ll see it.
We know God through every act of compassion.
2. II) The second thing that is most true about God is God’s loyalty and faithfulness across the generations.
I’ve got a couple friends who are having a baby soon and we were talking the other day about how some friends or family have looked at her very pregnant belly and said to this couple –
hey, look at what you made.
And this couple, they look at the ultrasound pictures of the child about to be born, they feel it moving, and they’re like:
I don’t feel like we exactly made this. I mean we did something, but we couldn’t make anything like this. That doesn’t make sense.
It’s too complex, too miraculous, they’re like:
sure, I guess it was us. But God too, right?
I get it.
Most of life’s best gifts are not made by us or any one we know. We didn’t build our roads or buildings or any of the other infrastructure we depend upon. Others who came before us did. And we didn’t have the sun that warms our bodies and grows our plants that make our oxygen any more than we could claim credit for inventing the genes or the science and all the miracles that make our babies.
All the biggest and best gifts of life come to us across the generations through long stories of loyalty, love, and faithfulness.
God tells Moses that one of the truths of the God is that when people screw up, it tends to do harm across three or four generations. That’s real, right? Our lives, our nation, our planet is haunted by choices made by the generations above us. It’s our responsibility, but it’s not our fault. And our kids and grandkids and their kids might say the same about us. This is real, that actions have consequences.
But God says it’s even truer that love and faithfulness create blessings for a thousand generations.
A thousand generations is a long time ago. Even Moses is recent history compared to that, some 200 generations before us. And we’re still grateful for his vision of the truth of God’s nature.
What were humans up to, what was God up to 20,000 years ago that blesses us still? I looked it up.
The first humans to come to this continent may have come around 20,000 years ago. Thank you, ancestors, and the God who inspired them, because I love living in this part of the earth. Gift that keeps on giving.
You all like fishing, or just eating fish?
A thousand generations ago, humans were learning to make fish hooks.
Thank you, God, and thank you ancestors for that.
How about art, religion? Humans were making art and exploring the meaning of life and who and what were behind it all 20,000 years ago, so if you treasure singing or the drawings your kid made in preschool, or this church – hey, thank God and thank you to the ancestors.
You don’t need to be so literal about the 1,000 generations to play this game.
The point is that our lives are full of gifts, just overflowingly chock full of them, that are the result of the love and faithfulness of God a long time ago, that if you’re a person of faith, you believe helped inspire our ancestors to think and do marvelous new things.
Fire, coffee, chocolate ice cream, the notion of a day off of work, the words “I love you,” schools for learning and play being more common that child labor, modern medicine – all the gifts of our ancestors to us, and all reflective of the loving faithfulness of God behind showing up in the abundance of creation, and the inspiration and creativity of God’s children.
Friends, no matter how tired or angry or sad we are, we get hard and die inside and curse ourselves and our children and our societies if we give up on gratitude. Because God has been loving and faithful across the generations, and when we remember to say thank you together, we know the goodness of God.
Lastly, the third thing that Moses finds is the truest truth about God is God’s attention to pain, and God’s passion for justice.
Moses first learns about God when he realizes that he may have run away from Egypt and its violent oppression of Moses’s people, the Hebrews. But God had not run away. God was listening still to every cry of pain. Every prayer of “Help” and “How long?” And God was determined to do something about it.
But as we heard, God could not do that by Godself. God could get Moses’ attention, and God could inspire Moses to realize he needed to work with some folks to help.
Friends, we know God in the compassion we witness, in the gratitude we cultivate together, and we know God in our struggle for Liberation.
There’s a great deal that is wrong in the world right now. A great, great deal. Enough to overwhelm and drive you to despair.
None of us can fix it all. We can’t even hold it all. So here’s an invitation for us together. An invitation to human-sized liberation and human sized-faith in a God who sees.
When you hear pain, say to yourself: I believe that God hears. I believe that God is there, at the site of that pain. And I believe God wants to inspire somebody to help.
So when my doctor friend tells me that he and some colleagues are searching for HIV medicine that they can get to an organization in East Africa that lost their US AID funding, so that patients are about to start getting AIDS and dying, my first thought is to again be so pissed off at my government’s short-sighted stupid cuts, to try to save billions by cutting all that health aid at the same time they announced a program to spend billions of dollars on a new bomber plane that can reach the other side of the world. And all this is true, but my anger doesn’t change this, and right now, there doesn’t seem like there’s anything more I can do about this besides another call to my congresspeople that I already made.
So I can also say, the fear of those HIV patients, the desperation of those clinic workers – God hears, and God is there, and thank God that God is inspiring my friend and others to do what they can to help. God, strengthen them.
And then I watch the video this week showing Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts grad student on a Fulbright, being scooped up in Somerville this week by masked ICE agents with no explanation, sent down to a cell in Louisiana against direct orders from a judge, and held presumably because she spoke up about the Palestine on campus last year. I can be angry and sad and afraid and appalled, and I am , as is most of our broader community. And I can also say:
God is with her. And ask God to raise up a helper for her deliverance.
It doesn’t save the world. None of us can do that. But this belief that our cries of injustice and the pain of the world are holy sites of God’s presence, and this request that God raise up a helper, these are alternatives to apathy or despair. They keep us connected, and once in a while, when we pray: raise up a helper, we find that we are that helper and there is something we can do.
And that too is the gift of God. It happened to me last week, maybe a small thing, but it gave me life and encouragement. I know it will for you too.
Friends, none of us can have robust faith all by ourselves. We weren’t made for that. But when we encounter compassion in our human relationships, we can know the compassion of God. When we remember to say thank you to God and to the people who came before us in our social and public dealings, we can remember that God has been faithful and is still here. And when we don’t turn away or despair of all the suffering of this moment, but say to God: I believe you are there, and I pray you’ll raise up a helper, we sew into a spiritual imagination of hope and love and sometimes, once in a while, of action. And this too is the glory of God among us.
Let’s pray.