Rev. Dr. Jim Harelson… Biblical Odyssey: An Epic of Biblical Proportions

Sunday Worship - FPC LaGrange - June 21st, 2026

Transcript

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As Jacob pointed out, and by the way, I uh just want to acknowledge Jacob for a moment. Um it's been uh great fun to uh come to know him and to work with him, and um in my opinion, it'd be hard hard to find a more gracious host this morning for me. So thank you, Jacob. I appreciate it so much. Um so as Jacob was pointing out, you don't have to be a guy to be a hero. Now, in the in the Odyssey, it's interesting because long before the principal hero, Odysseus, shows up, there's his wife, Penelope. And Penelope is in a terrible situation because her husband's been gone for low 20 years. And in the meantime, uh all of these nobles, uh minor nobles in the kingdom, um, have uh converged on her house and are eating her out of house and home and want to uh uh marry her, and they're vying for her hand. She, on the other hand, believes Odessius is uh still alive, that he's on his way home somehow, some way. And um, so in order to put off the the suitors, she has said, you know what, I need to make a burial shroud for my father-in-law, and this is going to take some time. And so she spends every day weaving this burial cloth, and then every night she undoes it all. So that for years this goes on. Well, finally, one of her handmaids rats her out, and uh they find out and they start pushing her again. And so uh finally she says, you know what? If there's somebody among you who's man enough to take this bow, uhsius was known as having this bow that only he could string, only he could shoot. I don't know, must have been a 150-pound draw. I don't know. But uh, she says, if any of you is man enough to do that, then I will take him. Well, so a couple of them try and unsuccessfully can't even string the thing. Um so it that that brings us up to the the point at which um the the really serious um denouement happens, and she doesn't realize it, but Odysseus is already at home in the palace, in disguise, just waiting to reveal himself and and to uh execute his revenge. Penelope is crucial to the storyline because she is essential to her husband's restoration. She gives both Odysseus and the story purpose. His whole purpose for struggling low 20 years trying to get home is Penelope. Now, by way of comparison and contrast, there's this other woman in Exodus that Jacob was talking about. She's unnamed. So is her daughter. Even the daughter of Pharaoh doesn't have a name. But it's her heroic efforts that make the story. Without that decision, which the book of Hebrews tells us is based in faith in God, trust that God is going to do something. Without that, there is no story. Because there is no Moses. Right? Without the decision that she makes, there's just no story. There's no Moses, there's there's no Israel. So you've got two different times, two different cultures, two different civilizations, and two different kinds of women. Penelope manages to uh outwit these suitors, and and it's her uh ability to think outside the box and her her uh uh ability to put together a scheme that works, and you know it's it's all internalized with her. And she is a is this really smart, sharp woman who's got um all of these intellectual skills that allow her to come up with these with these plans that put off the suitors. Meanwhile, the unnamed mother of Moses has faith. And in that lies the difference. When Moses comes to the point of confronting Pharaoh, he does so given a special staff, which he utilizes at God's behest, and as a consequence, a number of plagues break out, and that's because he has gone to Pharaoh and said, God says, Let my people go. And he says, Oh, I don't know this God you're talking about. Now, one of the more interesting things in in about Moses' uh call to this particular work was that God had said, you know what, these people are gonna learn something in all of this. Because Moses says, Who should I say sent me? Because they don't know you. And and God's essential answer is not yet they don't, but they're going to. And he's not just talking about Pharaoh and the Egyptians, he's talking about the Israelites. They don't really have a clue. And so in this confrontation between Pharaoh and Moses, you end up having this battle of the gods, if you will. Many of you know that there are some ten plagues that are part of the story, and that in itself uh raises all kinds of questions for us. But the conventional, the conventional explanation of this is that these plagues come as God trying to uh demonstrate his power to Pharaoh. In reality, each one of the plagues corresponds exactly to one of the Egyptian gods. So the gods that are supposed to protect the Egyptians, Pharaoh included, one by one fall as the power of God is demonstrated. In each case, God is invading their sphere of influence that they supposedly have, and overwhelming them and demonstrating that they are powerless in the face of this unknown God. This unknown God who picks this pathetic person, Moses, and identifies with a horde of worthless slaves. Underneath all the fireworks, there's this tension. And the way I saw it in my mind was imagine Pharaoh on one side and Moses on the other looking at each other in this sort of line of electricity going back and forth between their eyes, and it's sort of sizzling and zapping, you know. There's this going on. And the one says, My God says, let my people go, and the other one says, I will not. No, I will not let your people go. Now it's worth noting, and I've already kind of snuck this in, Moses is not like Odysseus. Excuse me, Odysseus. And the reason is because there's two different conceptions of what the ideal man is. In in Greek thinking, the the ideal man, the concept of the ideal man develops along the same timeline as the Odyssey itself. It takes about three or four hundred years to develop, but by the time you get there, the ideal man is physically strong, a born leader, resourceful, wise, good with the sword and with the spear and maybe the bow, long-suffering, patient, magnanimous. The Greeks have a word for this. It's it's arite. It means excellence, with special emphasis on manly qualities, things like valor and prowess. Only much later does the word come to mean virtue, which is where it ends up before the ancient Greeks are done with it. But in our story, Moses, whom God calls directly and specifically, says, No, I can't do this because I can't speak in front of people. I'm gonna ask you a question. Well, I'm not gonna ask you, I'm just gonna tell you a little anecdote. I can still remember a class I had in seminary where I was just asked to share just five minutes of something personal and I couldn't do it. I couldn't do it. Because I couldn't get up and speak in front of people. And now I can't shut up. So forgive me, please. Moses says, I can't go. I can't go. In fact, he's it is he ends up having Aaron have to speak for him. But also in the end, God gets sort of short with him and says, You're gonna go. So there. That's all there is to it. And when you get there, trust me, they will know, they will know before it's over who I am. So God chooses not the strong, not the wise, not the impressive to achieve his will in the world, but the seemingly weak and the foolish and the unimpressive. God chooses, and I want you to pay careful attention to this, because we're dealing now with a man who's not only got a poor self-image, he's a murderer. Yeah, we sometimes forget about that piece. The reason he's out there with the sheep in Midian for 40 years is because he killed an Egyptian who was mistreating a Hebrew. God uses broken people, unreliable people, people who have actually destroyed other people. And our question is, God, how could you use people like that? And God's answer is, watch me. Paul is one of those people. We call him Saint Paul, but Paul, the apostle, is a person like that. This doesn't give license for people to go out and be bad. That's not the point. But the point is, God takes people like that, and when he is finished molding them, they're different altogether. And there's something else here. God identifies not just with this horde of slaves, but he identifies with these kinds of people I've just been describing. Now I want you to consider a question. How much humility would it take on the part of God to become not just associated with, but identified with and identified by people like Moses, people like the Israelites, people like Paul. I think that says something about God that we rarely consider. So Moses goes in his homespun to the glorious imperial court, one of the most impressive empires of the day, not as anybody in himself, but as the mouthpiece of this strange new God that the Egyptians have never heard of. And it's not just Pharaoh he has to convince. He's got this group of slaves that he's going to try to convince to believe in the God that he represents, and that that God is the one who led their distant ancestors centuries ago to go to Egypt. And I can just hear them now. Oh, and just where did this God lead us? He led us here into slavery. Some God he turns out to be. So even as he tries to move Pharaoh to obey Yahweh, he has to try to get the people whom God has chosen to believe in God. Now he's leading you out. You must trust. But that's something they're not going to have. They're not going to demonstrate until they're finally leaving Egypt. Pharaoh relents. He releases the people of Yahweh, but only temporarily. Because now the slaves that Moses leads are standing on the shore, waves lapping at the rocky edge, and they can see the horde of Pharaoh's soldiers rapidly advancing from behind. What have you done to us, Moses? What have you done? We're going to perish. If we survive, our fate's going to be worse than it was before. What on earth have you done? And Moses' reply is stand firm and see the deliverance that Yahweh will bring. And it's in that moment that the epic is birthed. Because either God shows up, God does something, or we never hear of Israel. Ever. Moses waits for God to show up. And only then does God act. And he says, raise your staff, stretch out your hand, the water will divide, and you will go over on dry ground. So he did, and it did, and they did. And when the forces of Pharaoh follow, the sea overcomes them. They're overwhelmed, and it destroyed them. Meanwhile, the self-important man, the arrogant man, the unyielding, petulant man, stands on one shore, his power destroyed, defeated, humiliated, powerless to effect his own almighty will. Remember, he's Pharaoh, that means he's a god. And on the other shore stands the man whose only purpose, desire, and destiny is to give up his own will for that of God. And out of that a nation is born. Now, some people think this is all made up. Yet there's no reality behind it. It's all made up. Miracles, God engaging humans. What nonsense. Some of their own people don't believe it. And of course, you can see how the story can be misread, misused in ways that do not lead to peace, but to possessiveness, to anger, even to war. But a poor use of the story does not negate the story itself, nor does a poor understanding of it. To that skepticism, I might respond by saying: if there is no supernatural reality, if there's no intersection between that reality and our normal everyday reality, then what on earth are we doing here? This all presumes and presupposes that we believe that God is actively engaged with us, with our story, personally. We claim to believe in an engaged God. A disengaged God is not whom we claim to follow. So we must not miss the really important point here. This epic is about an engaged God using that which is not, Moses, Pilate's slaves. God uses that which is not to put to shame everything that claims to be something, one of the greatest empires of its time. God uses what is frail and small and powerless to accomplish his will. That which is immense, powerful, full of itself, arrogant, watches on helplessly as what is weak and small causes what is huge and powerful to crumble. In the Odyssey, the hero wins through to the end because he is the masterful ideal man. But in one of those modern epics, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien gets it right. Instead, he really understands and transposes the authentically biblical view into his storyline. It's Frodo, the little hobbit, not Sauron, the big evil power, who wins. Weak, small, helpless Frodo hobbit is the one who comes out winning at the end. Antagonists, that is, people like Pharaoh, the Hitlers, the Stalins, the Ayatollahs of our time, they're the ones who are inherently empty, grasping at straws, they believe are life-giving. It's the ones they belittle whom they attempt to use for their own ends and purposes, whom they oppose, whom they try to destroy, who turn out to be the ones who survive. In our story, and this is really important, the one giving life to the Israelite people, who is the power behind their survival, is Yahweh. Life itself, the reality to which all fictions bear witness. Now, the problem with putting out this series as a series of epics is that if you compare biblical epics with other epics, you run the risk of people thinking that the biblical ethics are the epics are the same thing and therefore not really real. C.S. Lois and J.R.R. Tolkien tried to tell us that epic stories that we tend to discount as myth as unconnected to real life are actually the carriers of the most important truths. It's not that the biblical epics are faint copies of earlier, more vital fictional stories. It's actually the other way around. Those stories are what's called proleptic. They look forward to the greater truth which is to come. That which is embodied not just in the story of Moses, but in that of Christ, in whom the promises made to Moses and the Israelites are fulfilled. God no longer stands among them as a pillar of fire and cloud over the tent of meeting, but God in Christ walks among his people, first in Galilee. And finally, as God fully revealed in the promised new creation of Revelation 21. God walking, living with and among God's people who come from every race and nation. Either we believe in a God who will set all things right, or we don't. No matter what we think we see in this present moment, no matter how things shake out in this time and place, the epics, and this one in particular, remind us that the ultimate end is better than we could imagine. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians, no eye has seen, no ear has heard, no human mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love Him. In the end, in the struggle between good and evil, it's just really not a fair fight. May God bless this effort. Amen.