We will not see our enemy -- all our uncertainties -- swallowed up into the sea, but we will be delivered by our God. That is the promise of God to the Israelites, and that is the promise of God to us through the waters of our baptism.

Like the Israelites wandering through the desert who longed for a return to comfort and security of the old ways, there is something deep within us that also desires a return to our old ways.

And so it is for us, as that promise and covenant has been renewed in Jesus, where we walk the way of Christ hand in hand with God.

Pharaoh tries to make the Nile River, Egypt’s main source of water and life, into an instrument of death. Yet the three women allies succeed in making the river a place of rescue and life.

To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you. Holding a grudge imprisons you. Forgiveness sets you free.

When have you been like Joseph’s brothers and fallen to group think or turned a blind eye to protect your own privilege at the expense of another?

Through this process of transformation, we shed the distractions, the addictions, and all that seeks to separate us from God.

And if we do find ourselves, like Esau, in positions of privilege, in positions of power, benefitting from the entitlements of our society, which is not an inherently bad place to be, but if we do find ourselves like Esau, will you perhaps share from your abundance?

And when, with this community of faith surrounding us, we do finally recognize God’s leading, may we, like Rebekah, respond eagerly “we will go.”

Something changes between Abraham and God that day. Abraham learns to trust and fear God. And God proves that God can be trusted.

Reconciliation is the pathway towards restoration, and the restoration of creation is at the heart of the mission of God.

Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?

No way…we are proof. I am proof. This, right here, right now, is proof in the wondrous depths of God.

The choice that we have to make is this: when we feel God’s tug on our hearts will we let go and follow? What is God calling you to?

All of these experiences of God are summed up in the doctrine of God as a Trinity of Persons, which is the church’s trying to make sense of our ongoing experience of God with us, past and present and future.

“See what love the Father has given us,” exclaims the author of I John, “that we should be called the children of God. And that is what we are!”

Christ has no body but yours,

No hands, no feet on earth but yours,

Yours are the eyes with which he looks

Compassion on this world,

“There is nothing – in the heavens or on the earth or under the earth – no person, no organization, no circumstance – that can separate us from the love of God in Christ.”

So it is for us, when we find ourselves in the disciples shoes; when we find ourselves in a liminal space, an in-between period of our lives, take heart, though we may not see him, Jesus is with us.