A Sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
Sunday 4 October 2026
Exodus 14.5–7, 10–14, 21–29
Matthew 2.13–15
There's a particular kind of fear
that belongs to shorelines.
It's the fear of running out of ground.
We've been moving,
we've been getting away,
and then the land simply stops.
In front of us there's water,
grey and deep and indifferent.
Behind us, getting louder,
is whatever we were running from.
That's where Israel finds itself this morning.
They've left Egypt,
and for a few days it must have felt like freedom.
Then they reach the sea,
turn round, and see dust on the horizon.
It's the chariots.
The story is careful to tell us what's coming.
Six hundred picked chariots,
and then all the other chariots of Egypt,
with officers over all of them (14.7).
This is the finest military technology of the ancient world,
the tanks and drones of its day,
and it's all been sent after a column of brickmakers
with their children and their bread dough.
It's worth asking why Pharaoh bothers.
The text gives us the answer,
and it isn't what we might expect.
It isn't wounded pride,
or at least not only that.
Pharaoh and his officials look at each other and say,
"What have we done,
letting Israel leave our service?" (14.5).
The whole weight of the empire turns round
because the workforce has walked out.
The pyramids won't build themselves,
and the store-cities need bricks.
An economy built on unpaid labour
can't cope when the labourers leave.
So the chariots are, in the end,
an economic policy.
That's usually how empire works.
It rarely presents itself as cruelty.
It presents itself as necessity,
as the natural order of things,
as the way the world has to be run.
And when people try to leave that order,
it sends the chariots.
Then comes one of the most painfully honest moments
in the whole of scripture.
Israel sees the army and cries out,
not in faith
but in terror.
And then they turn on Moses:
"Was it because there were no graves in Egypt
that you've taken us away to die in the wilderness?" (14.11).
There's a black joke hiding in that line.
Egypt was the land of graves.
It was famous for them,
the grandest tombs in the world.
"Couldn't you at least have let us die
somewhere with decent burial facilities?"
Then they say the thing that really breaks the heart:
"Didn't we tell you in Egypt to leave us alone
and let us serve the Egyptians?
It would have been better for us to serve Egypt
than to die in the wilderness" (14.12).
It would be easy to preach against Israel here,
to scold them for their lack of faith.
But I don't think that's what the story wants.
It's showing us something truer
and sadder.
Empire doesn't only take our labour.
It takes our imagination.
After four hundred years,
Israel literally can't picture a life
that isn't organised around Pharaoh.
Slavery at least was familiar,
and freedom is a wilderness with no map.
That's not a personal failing.
It's what systems of domination do to people.
They teach us that there's no alternative,
and they teach it so well
that when the door opens
we're frightened to walk through it.
Many of us know something of that,
in the jobs we can't leave,
in the debts that shape our choices,
and in the stories we've been told
about what's realistic.
So Moses answers the panic,
and what he says matters:
"Don't be afraid.
Stand firm,
and see the deliverance the Lord will accomplish for you today.
The Lord will fight for you,
and you have only to keep still" (14.13–14).
Notice what isn't asked of Israel.
They aren't told to arm themselves
or to form ranks.
Nobody suggests they meet chariots with chariots.
The logic of empire says
that power can only be answered with power
and force with a bigger force.
The God of the exodus
simply refuses to play that game.
Israel's rescue won't come
from learning to be a smaller Egypt.
That's the thread that runs all the way to Jesus,
who tells Peter to put away his sword in Gethsemane.
The way out of Pharaoh's world
isn't to become Pharaoh.
And "keep still" doesn't mean do nothing.
In the verses just after our reading, God says,
"Tell the people to go forward" (14.15).
So the stillness is the stillness of trust,
and it turns out to be the only thing
that can hold our feet steady enough
to walk into the sea.
Then the wind comes.
A strong east wind
that blows all night (14.21).
The pillar of cloud moves behind Israel
and stands between the two camps,
darkness on one side
and light on the other.
The sea is driven back,
and the people go through on dry ground,
with the waters a wall on their right hand
and on their left.
If we listen,
we'll hear an echo of the beginning of the Bible.
In Genesis, the wind of God moves over the face of the waters,
and God separates the waters
and says, "Let dry land appear."
The exodus is creation all over again.
God is making a people
the way God made a world,
by pushing back the chaos
and giving it a shore.
And for those of us who are Baptists,
it's hard not to hear something else as well.
Paul says our ancestors were "baptised into Moses
in the cloud and in the sea" (1 Corinthians 10.2).
Every time someone goes down into the water in this sanctuary,
they're walking the bed of the Red Sea.
They go down into what feels like death,
the place where the ground runs out,
and they come up on the other side
as part of a people who've been brought through.
We don't go through deep water because we're brave.
We go through because someone has gone before us
and held the waters back.
But we can't leave the story on the far shore quite so quickly,
because there's a part of it that should trouble us.
The Egyptians follow Israel into the sea.
The wheels of their chariots clog in the mud,
the waters return,
and "not one of them remained" (14.28).
Our instinct, perhaps, is to cheer.
And the next chapter does sing.
Miriam takes up her tambourine,
and we should never begrudge the song
of people who've just escaped slavery.
But there's an old Jewish tradition,
found in the rabbinic writings,
that tells a further story.
When the Egyptians were drowning,
the angels in heaven wanted to join the song.
And God stopped them.
"The work of my hands is drowning in the sea,"
God said,
"and you want to sing?"
I love that story,
because it's truer to the God we meet in Jesus
than any cheering would be.
The soldiers in those chariots
weren't the architects of empire.
Most of them were sent.
They were ordered into the sea
by a king who'd already shown
he'd sacrifice anyone to keep his system running.
In the end,
Pharaoh drowns his own people.
That's what the machinery of domination always does.
It devours the enemy,
and then it devours its own.
God is with the victim,
and here that means both the slaves who reach the shore
and the conscripts who don't.
The sea isn't God's revenge.
It's the place where empire's violence
collapses in on itself,
and even there God grieves.
Now we turn to our second reading,
and something extraordinary happens.
The road runs the other way.
Joseph has a dream.
An angel tells him to get up,
take the child and his mother,
and flee to Egypt,
because Herod is about to search for the child to destroy him (Matthew 2.13).
So in the night they go,
as refugees,
carrying what they can.
Matthew is doing something deliberate here.
Herod is playing Pharaoh.
Just after our reading
he'll order the killing of the little boys of Bethlehem,
just as Pharaoh ordered the Hebrew boys thrown into the Nile.
The empire has changed its name
but not its methods.
Kings who are afraid of losing power
still reach for the children.
And the land of slavery
has become the land of refuge.
Egypt, the house of bondage,
is where the holy family finds safety.
There's no parting of the waters this time
and no pillar of cloud.
There's only a dream,
a night journey along an ordinary road,
and a border that lets them in.
That matters.
Sometimes rescue looks like the sea standing up in walls.
And sometimes rescue looks like a neighbouring country
letting frightened strangers in.
Then Matthew quotes the prophet Hosea:
"Out of Egypt I have called my son"
(Matthew 2.15; Hosea 11.1).
When Hosea wrote those words,
he was talking about Israel,
about the exodus,
about God's tender love for a people brought out of slavery.
Matthew takes that verse and says it's about Jesus.
He isn't twisting it.
He's saying that Jesus carries Israel's whole story
in his own small body.
He goes down into Egypt,
and he'll come up out of it.
He'll pass through water at his baptism in the Jordan.
He'll go through the wilderness.
And at last he'll go down into the deepest water of all,
into death itself,
and God will call him out.
Before Jesus was a preacher,
before he was a healer,
he was a refugee.
That's not a footnote to the gospel.
It's part of the gospel.
William Brock, our first minister here,
told this church to hold the Bible in one hand
and the newspaper in the other.
So let's do that.
A little over twenty miles from the white cliffs,
there's a shoreline where people stand
with the sea in front of them
and something terrible behind them.
Since 2018,
more than two hundred thousand people
have crossed the Channel in small boats.
Of those whose asylum claims have been decided so far,
the majority have been granted protection,
and that's before anyone counts the appeals.
These are people fleeing their own Herods,
their own Pharaohs,
their own massacres of the innocents.
The numbers this year are the lowest since 2021,
and that's being presented as a success.
Some of that is because more boats are being stopped,
now and then even in the water itself.
Whatever we think about how borders should be managed,
and there are serious questions there,
the exodus story asks us something uncomfortable.
When we look at that shoreline,
whose side of the story are we being invited to stand on?
Are we with the people at the water's edge,
or are we the chariots?
In this story God's action at the sea
is rescue,
not deterrence.
The pillar of cloud stands
between the refugees and the army.
When lifeboat crews have been accused
of running a "taxi service"
for going out to people in trouble at sea,
they've been doing something very close to what God does in Exodus 14.
They've been getting between the drowning
and the deep.
This isn't a call to feel guilty.
It's an invitation to see clearly.
The powers want us to see a threat.
Scripture wants us to see Mary and Joseph,
travelling at night with a baby,
hoping a border will open.
There's one more thing to say about that night at the sea,
and it's this.
Before the waters part,
there's a long darkness.
The wind blows all night.
Israel has to wait on the shore,
with the cloud between them and the army,
not yet through,
not yet safe.
Many of us live in that night.
We know what it is
when the way ahead seems blocked.
It might be a diagnosis,
a debt,
or a grief.
It might be a relationship that's ended,
or a fear for the world that we can't shake.
We stand on the shore
and the water doesn't move.
The Christian story knows about that kind of waiting.
It's Holy Saturday,
the day between the cross and the resurrection,
when Jesus lies in the tomb
and nothing seems to be happening.
But the wind is blowing all night.
God is at work in the dark
long before the morning shows it.
And on the third day
the waters of death are driven back,
and Christ comes up out of the deep
onto the far shore.
The resurrection is the exodus completed.
It's the sea parted for good.
So we come to the table.
The first Passover was eaten in haste,
by people with their sandals on
and their bags packed,
waiting for the night of their deliverance.
When Jesus sat with his friends in the upper room,
it was that meal he was sharing.
The bread and the cup belong to a people on the move,
a people who've been brought through.
We don't come to this table
because we've got it all worked out,
or because our faith never wavers at the shoreline.
Israel complained all the way to the water's edge,
and God brought them through anyway.
We come as we are,
with our fears and our doubts.
We come as people
whose rescue has already begun.
The sea has parted.
The one who was called out of Egypt
has gone before us through the deepest water of all,
and he has come up on the other side.
The chariots don't get the last word,
and neither do the graves of Egypt.
We're a people brought through deep waters.
The way has been made where there was no way.
And the table is set
on the farther shore.
