Exodus 17:1-7

17 From the wilderness of Sin the whole congregation of the Israelites journeyed by stages, as the Lord commanded. They camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. 2 The people quarreled with Moses and said, “Give us water to drink.” Moses said to them, “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the Lord?” 3 But the people thirsted there for water, and the people complained against Moses and said, “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?” 4 So Moses cried out to the Lord, “What shall I do for this people? They are almost ready to stone me.” 5 The Lord said to Moses, “Go on ahead of the people and take some of the elders of Israel with you; take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile and go. 6 I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink.” Moses did so, in the sight of the elders of Israel. 7 He called the place Massah[a] and Meribah,[b] because the Israelites quarreled and tested the Lord, saying, “Is the Lord among us or not?”

In The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck showed scarcity's effect on the human soul. People grew desperate as the ground dried up. There's a scene early in the book where a tenant farmer, about to be evicted, asks the man sent to do it: 'Who do we shoot?' And the man says, nobody. It's the bank. It's the drought. It's the market. There's no one villain, just a slow tightening no one controls.

When scarcity has no face, people find one anyway. By the time the Joads and thousands fleeing the dust bowl of Oklahoma reach California, they are hungry, asking only for work. But the local growers, afraid of losing what little they had, organized to keep them out. 'Okies' became a dehumanizing slur.

So, here's what I want to sit with from this scripture: scarcity doesn't just take the land, or the crop, or the water. It takes something else first, the capacity to recognize someone else's hunger as kin to your own. Some people, watching the dust rise, closed ranks around their own. Some turned suspicious of strangers who looked like competition instead of neighbors. And I think that's the oldest religious question there is, older than Steinbeck by three thousand years: what does scarcity reveal in us that abundance lets us hide?

In Exodus, Moses and the Hebrew people have already come through great adversity. After fleeing slavery, they narrowly escaped Pharaoh’s army as they crossed the Red Sea. They may have been slaves in Egypt, but they were close to the fertile Nile, and even slaves get bread and water. People learned to live off the land, to hunt quail and harvest manna, but now they camped in a place without water.

Panic can set in quickly, and they say to Moses, “Give us water to drink.” This request sounds realistic. They are not asking for more hamburgers, they will die without getting water soon. Moses replied, “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you put the Lord to the test?” That was not Moses’ finest moment. Instead of reassuring people he reacts, questions, blames. To get the blame off himself, he tells them they are really quarreling with God. Imagine asking a leader an important question, and they dismiss your concern as arguing with God. Moses basically told them to suck it up and stop complaining.

Moses has misread the moment. The concern is real. Survival is at stake. The complaining doesn’t stop, it escalates to “Why did you bring us up out of Egypt to make us and our children and livestock die of thirst?” They have reached their “who do we shoot?” moment.

Now Moses does what he should have done in the first place. He takes stock of the situation and goes to God, asking what he should do before they stone him to death. God’s response is often interpreted as a miracle story, but I think it offers us something more than that. Listen to the Divine response in verse 5,

Go out in front of the people. Take with you some of the elders of Israel and take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go.

The first word of the verse is go, and the last word is also go. God is advising Moses to act. He can’t stay and quarrel with people, he must get everyone out of there before they die of dehydration. You can sort out whose fault it is later. Now just go! These words are reminding Moses that he must lead, not fall into the blame and arguing trap. By telling him to gather the elders and take his staff, God reminds him he isn't alone, and that he still has a role to play. The staff says he is the leader who brought people out of Egypt. He once told Pharoah to “let my people go.” Now he must tell the people to keep going. Leaders don’t rest on their past accomplishments; they only stay leaders if they take on the next real challenge.

Where God tells Moses to go is also important. Mt. Horeb is the place where Moses saw the burning bush and first encountered God. Horeb is the place where it all began, where the desire for freedom was launched. A return to Horeb is a return to the original vision and purpose of Moses’ life. In a crisis, he must remember his why. When the people accuse Moses of leading them out to die, they have lost sight of that purpose entirely. Anxiety and fear do that to people. Moses must hold purpose out front again. So, they head to Horeb.

When they reach the destination, Moses strikes a rock, people have water again, and the day is saved. Here is where we need some care in reading the text. he Exodus narrative moves through one miracle after another: plagues, a staff turned serpent, a parted sea, and now water from a rock. So, as we face our contemporary challenges like climate change, do we simply wait for God to enact a miracle? Should we be praying harder, trusting God, not letting our fears get to us because God will work it out?

I trust deeply that God makes a way where there was no way. But the way usually calls us to act, to live with courage, to bring justice, to love people who may be hard to love. In our text, God doesn’t deliver water on demand. First, people must stop quarreling and move. Take the next right step. Honestly, if people could stop quarreling, that might be the greater miracle. Parting the Red Sea was easy. Getting people to stop trolling each other online is much harder.

The story ends with Moses naming the places of conflict Massah and Meribah, which literally mean testing and quarreling. He could have named the places “Flowing Water” or “God provides,” but chose to remember the danger of quarreling instead of God’s faithfulness.

This text speaks to me as we face our own global Grapes of Wrath moment. In the face of fear over scarcity and the dwindling capacity of our planet to sustain human life, will we dwell in Massah and Meribah, or will we move to Horeb?

We don't have to look very far to see what Massah and Meribah look like today. We are living in a time of deep division, even contempt for one another. Many of us have former friends or family members with whom we can no longer speak, or whom we must carefully tiptoe around certain subjects. Fear narrows our vision until we see only what threatens us.

That is the deeper danger of scarcity: not simply that there may not be enough water, food, land, or security, but that it makes us forget the hungry person is kin to us. It make us see strangers as competition instead of neighbors.

We see this in the refugee crisis already unfolding around us. More than 21 million people are displaced each year by weather-related disasters. Behind that number are families whose homes and communities have become difficult or impossible to sustain. And when people are forced to move, our instinct can be to protect what we have, to build the walls higher, to see those who are arriving as a threat.

But their lives are bound up with ours. We share one planet, one atmosphere, one web of life. There is no “somewhere else” to send the problem.

The question before us is not simply, “Who is to blame?” Perhaps it is, “Who are we going to be?” I believe we already have many of the solutions we need. We know how to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, conserve water, restore forests and wetlands, build resilient communities, and welcome people whose homes have become unsafe. The harder problem isn’t knowing what to do. It is finding the will to do it: the courage, compassion, and imagination to see beyond our own immediate fear. That is what makes Massah and Meribah so difficult to leave.

Moses had to leave the quarrel behind and go to Horeb. Horeb was where his journey began, where he first heard God's call, where he remembered who he was and why he had been sent.

We need this return as well. Not an escape from the hard realities of our time, but a return to the deepest purpose of our lives. I don't put my faith in a wave election. I put my faith in people willing to leave behind the bickering, blaming, and bombast of Massah and Meribah. People who can act with imagination, courage, and compassion. People who can see another person's need and recognize them as kin.

Because God does not tell Moses to stay there and figure out who is to blame. God says, “Go.” Go to Horeb. Take the elders. Take your staff. Take the next step. The solutions are many. Leaving Massah is hard. But Moses went.

That is where faith begins again: not with knowing exactly how everything will turn out, but with remembering who we are, remembering why we are here, and taking the next faithful step.