Patrick O’Brian wrote his first novel when he was twelve years old and saw it published three years later, making him a bit of a literary wunderkind. Today, no one knows him for that novel, and few know of his many other works, for all other works have been dwarfed by the immensity of his Aubrey-Maturin series, the 21st volume unfinished at the time of his death in January 2000. That series was somewhat summarized in a single film that combined the titles of two of the books, “Master and Commander: Far Side of the World,” though few films can capture a single novel, much less twenty plus.
On one level, the novels are about espionage and naval warfare at the turn of the 19th century, mostly though not exclusively focused on the conflict between England and Napoleon. On another level, it is the tale of a remarkable friendship, Jack Aubrey, an officer in His Majesty’s Royal Navy, and his friend and “ship’s surgeon,” Stephen Maturin. The latter is a polymath, a naturalist forerunner to Darwin on the HMS Beagle.
Stephen Maturin is also a spy. He is particularly useful in this role because he is not British, but is instead the son of an Irish officer who served in the Spanish Army and a Catalan woman. This location, as a person at the margins of two marginalized peoples, sometimes creates tension with his friend Jack. In one scene, captured in the film, the captain has reluctantly ordered that a man be flogged, a man who had behaved courageously in a crisis, but who later became insubordinate while drunk. A heated exchange takes place in Jack’s cabin after the flogging, with Stephen arguing for mercy, and for tipping the ship’s grog over the side, while Jack insists that discipline and order are necessary on a ship, a “wooden world” in his words, that must be kept afloat. The conversation ends when Jack says to his friend of many years, “You’ve come to the wrong shop for anarchy, brother.”
Moses would nod his head, have great empathy. He knew a thing or two about how hard it is to lead. A fugitive murderer with a speech impediment, he would seem an unlikely choice when it came to leading a revolt. Yet there he was, holding a conversation with shrubbery, and soon standing before the court of the Pharaoh where he grew up, this time demanding freedom for the Hebrews, and unleashing frogs and boils and hailfire on the people of the Nile. When Pharaoh pushed back, not really shocking behavior for a despot, the Hebrews did not blame Pharaoh, were not convinced that this was one more reason they must escape. Instead, they complained to Moses that he had made their misery worse. They seemed to have thought that it was all going to be easy. And they had adapted to their misery, slowly, inch by inch, over the years. Maybe this vague tomorrow Moses was promising, this Promise Land, wasn’t really worth it.
There are those who argue the entire Exodus is fabrication, but then again, there are those who argued that David was a fabrication right up until archeologists dug up the Tel Dan stele that references the House of David. There are some who insist Jesus is a fabrication, though Occam’s Razor would suggest otherwise.
On balance, I tend to agree with those who see clear evidence of an escape by slaves of Semitic origin who ended up settling in Canaan. Even so, we might be skeptical of some elements of the story, especially as seen through the immense lens of Cecil B. DeMille. We know that the authors who eventually gave the ancient legends the form found in the Torah, the form we have received, had an agenda. The story is told in a way that reinforces a sense of identity and that lays the foundation for an entire culture. Yet they chose to include these moments when the people behave foolishly, rebel against the leader of their own rebellion. Including these moments was a decision. They decided to “keep it real,” giving us a story that mirrors our own lives, particular to a historic time and place and yet timeless and universal.
Take the leadership challenge in today’s reading.
In “The Sky Is Falling: Leaders Lost in Transition,” the Rev. Alan J. Roxburgh writes:
This is the paradox of their situation. It was both deeply painful and, at the same time, the only way of life they knew. […] As strange as it may seem, their stable, predictable, almost manageable word was Egypt, not the Promise Land. In spite of the suffering, this had been a world of regularity and normality for several generations.
He goes on to write that
The desert narratives present a confused, frightened assortment of people living in the midst of terrifying fear precisely because Egypt had been taken from them. Even though Egypt represented the very world that was destroying them, they wanted to return to its secure predictability.
Leadership wasn’t easy then, and it isn’t easy now. While many democracies have fallen under the thrall of corrupt despots and racists, others have proven simply ungovernable, election after election failing to produce a functional government.
We could focus on Moses striking the rock and producing water, the miracle, and I have no doubt a significant number of pastors preaching this text this morning are doing exactly that. But we aren’t exactly miracle-focused people. We are people-focused people.
Moses is trying to lead them somewhere. They liked the concept. Some are not so keen on the reality.
And the ancient authors choose to remind us that sometimes captain and crew are not on the same page. Meriba and Massah, Testing and Dispute, here in Exodus, there in the 95th psalm, always with us, a religion for real people with real lives.
The model for Christian leadership is servant leadership, Jesus washing the feet of the disciples before the last supper, the Suffering Servant who will deliver the people as foretold by Trito-Isaiah. Captain Jack Aubrey is right there with his crew, on deck and in the boarding party during every battle. Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth is just as muddy and bloody as anyone. Harriet Tubman wasn’t sitting behind a desk.
These leaders aren’t perfect. The final editors of the Torah didn’t give us a perfect Moses. The authors of the Hebrew Scriptures didn’t give us a perfect David. The authors of the gospels didn’t give us a perfect Jesus, despite the efforts of theologians and philosophers to try to fit Jesus into some abstract God-box into which he was never going to fit.
Scripture gives us humans, people who choose the misery they know over the risk of the new, the mysterious. Leaders who stumble, become frustrated, snap. Even Jesus. They would not do us a bit of good as role models, as guides in the messiness of daily life, if they felt like aliens. We weren’t saved by an angel. We were saved by a man, born just like every other wailing infant.
This wailing and messiness doesn’t mean we shouldn’t expect more from one another. We need the give and take of leaders and the communities they serve, those who are willing to be led, in order to reap the benefits of civilization. Things like public health.
During Lent, we have been studying the document “Reclaiming Jesus,” an attempt to re-center values, decency, and kindness in our civil discourse. It asks us to reject hatred and abuse. It asks that leaders be truthful. And boy, do we need that sort o leader right now. We need a Truman who will say “The Buck Stops Here.”
The plagues are upon us, and you will be glad to know that I have not been holding conversations with bushes. But we have a journey ahead of us, forty days and forty nights maybe, maybe more. We must work together, some leading, some following, all of us committed to the common good, and all nurturing the flame of faith that God is good, that creation and life are improbable miracles, and that together, we can make things better. All it takes is love. Amen.