We’ve been following the Israelites as they go from slavery in Egypt to freedom. Freedom, it turns out, is in many ways harder than slavery.

You might recall that when we last discussed this two weeks ago, the children of Israel were passing through the Red Sea, which swallowed up Pharaoh and his army. So now, by God’s power, this ragged band of slaves, with their old people and women and children and flocks and herds, have made a clean get away.

In the movies, that would probably be the end of the story. We’ve been treated to a series of dramatic confrontations with a despotic dictator. He has repeatedly promised freedom; we packed up and got ready to go; then, at the last second, it was withdrawn. It’s like a spy movie in which our hero overcomes great peril, only to be turned away at the border. Good drama. Then, after all these episodes of anticipation and disappointment, the Israelites finally get out, finally defeat the dictator and achieve their freedom. In Hollywood, we’ve have seen them leaving, kicking up a great cloud of dust, and a narrator would have said [deep voice], “And so the children of Israel were free at last, free to . . . blah, blah, blah.” And the movie would be over.

But in the Bible, achieving freedom, as hard and as improbable as it was, is the easy part. Notice that this story is from Exodus; we are only in the second book of the Bible! This is just the beginning. My Bible devotes less than twenty pages to the task of achieving freedom from Pharaoh. The harder part, which the next thirteen hundred and thirty-six pages will be devoted to, is the saga of this not-a-people becoming the “People of God.” That’s one way of looking at the Bible; it is the story of becoming the People of God.

What we have escaping from Egypt is a ragged band of slaves who’ve been in captivity for over four hundred years and who know, vaguely, that they have a common ancestor. For over four centuries, they’ve been told exactly what to do and exactly when to do it. If you stopped one and asked, “Who are you?” he would answer, “I am an Egyptian slave. That is my identity. Slave.”

As we are learning so painfully in Iraq, overturning the dictator is the easier task. Becoming a free people is much harder and much more complicated.

The task for our ragged band of Egyptian slaves is to become the People of God. And the first things needed are commitment to that process and trust that God will provide for them. Commitment and trust.

We do not get off to a good start. As this cloud of dust heads into the desert, it’s not long before a very powerful and predictable human behavior kicks in — whining. Right off the bat, the Israelites begin complaining against Moses and Aaron and saying, “We don’t have enough to eat!” Now, they don’t pray for food; they say, “You should have left us in Egypt where we had bread; now you’ve brought us out here to die of hunger.” How are they doing on the commitment part? “Send us back,” they say. How are they doing on the trust part? “We’ll die out here,” they say.

God sends them manna in the morning and quails in the evening, so they’ll have bread and protein. Now this manna is interesting stuff. It’s sort of a flaky substance that shows up in the morning like dew, and it is nourishing and tastes sweet. Interesting thing about manna; you can only collect one day’s worth at a time. If you try to hoard it and collect several days’ worth, it goes bad — maggots. And another interesting thing about manna; no matter how much you gather for that day, whether too much or too little, when you get back to camp and measure it out, you have just enough — for that day. You don’t suppose God might be making a point? “And give us this day our daily bread.”

Then, as we hear in our reading this morning, they camp at a place that doesn’t have water. So, how does this band of slaves, who are just beginning the journey toward becoming the People of God, react? Well, they don’t pray for water. They whine. They complain to Moses, saying, “Why did you bring us out here to kill us with thirst?” And they are ready to stone him. How are we doing on the commitment front? How about the trust? Not so well. Lots of whining and complaining.

But God doesn’t give up on them. God tells Moses to strike the rock with his staff, and life-giving water flows out. And despite frequent and well-founded exasperation, God will not give up on them for the next thirteen hundred and thirty-six pages, as we journey on the path of becoming the People of God, a people who don’t whine and complain but commit and trust. A people who, when asked who they are, would not say, “We are slaves,” but, “We are children of God.”

I do my share of whining and complaining, although I’ve learned that St. John’s is a pretty dangerous place to try it. You may recall that in 2000 I was co-chair of the Bishop Nominating Committee. That took at least twenty hours a week, in addition to my day job as rector of St. John’s. For about nine months, I very rarely had any time off. Toward the end of that time, a parishioner asked me how I was doing. I don’t know what happened to me; I was tired— temporary insanity — but I told them. “I’m exhausted,” I said. “All this work for the Nominating Committee is killing me. I haven’t had a day off in a month.”

The parishioner did not hesitate with a pastoral response: “You volunteered for this, didn’t you?” “Yes,” I said. “Well, then, you shouldn’t complain about having to do it.” End of conversation. (And don’t even ask me who it was!)

You know, sometimes there’s a fine line between tough love and — insensitivity and meanness. But that response was exactly what I needed to hear at that time. Not what I wanted to hear, mind you, but I had volunteered. I wasn’t praying for more help or that I might delegate better or bear the load better. I wasn’t thanking God for the opportunity to use my gifts. I had been feeling sorry for myself; I was whining and complaining about how hard it was to do God’s work. I was losing my commitment and my trust, and I needed to be called on it.

You see, this business of becoming the committed, trusting People of God, I want you to know that it didn’t end when the Bible ended. It is our great challenge today, every one of us. Can we, as individuals and as a body, leave slavery and become the committed, trusting People of God?

Oh, really? Look, we all have restraints and duties in our lives. When we view them as children of God, we might rejoice in them or need to change them, but we don’t whine about them. If we whine about them, that’s a sure sign that they have spiritual power over us. Are you with me on that?

I want you to think about this: what we whine about is what enslaves us. The Israelites weren’t just enslaved by the Egyptians; they were enslaved by being taken care of by the Egyptians. So when they won their freedom, they whined about not having the things the Egyptians had given them — the easy food, the easy water, ironically enough, the comforts of life as a slave in Egypt. And they didn’t trust that God would provide. So they lost their commitment to the journey, and they wanted to go back into slavery.

In our development as People of God, we are in a time that will test us. More is going to be asked of you and me than has been asked in the past. Our nation has been hammered by two hurricanes that have devastated hundreds of thousands of lives. You are going to be asked to give and give again. Of time, of money, of possessions.

And at St. John’s, we will have a stewardship drive in a month or so, and we’ll ask you to give yet again to support the work of Christ in this place. We’re going to have increased overhead next year that we can’t do a thing about. We’ve been running deficit budgets, which we can’t continue to do. We will ask you not only to help, but — and here’s a politically unpopular word — to sacrifice.

And all this at a time of great concern for many of you as Delta is in bankruptcy.

I can tell you that I am going to want to whine, and I am going to want to complain. But I’ll also tell you that my trips to Haiti, where so many have so little, and what I’ve seen on TV from Katrina and Rita, as people start over with only the clothes on their backs, those experiences have reminded me that I have, and most of us have, so very, very much.

We tend to think of our lives in terms of scarcity, what we don’t have. That is slave talk. When we speak our of our commitment and trust as People of God, we sing of our blessings, of our rich abundance, of how much we have to share.

So, when I want to whine and complain, I’m going to stop and ask, “How is what I’m trying to protect (because when we whine, we’re always trying to protect something)— how is what I’m trying to protect — enslaving me?”

I hope you’ll ask that too. It’s an important step in our journey toward becoming, more and more, the committed, trusting People of God.