The Sea at the End of the World

Stand still, and see the Salvation of our God.

That is what Moses told the people of Israel when they were standing at the edge of the yom soph — the sea at the end of the world, traditionally identified with the Red Sea, but in the mythology of Egypt much more like the realm of chaos and destruction; the place later peoples would call Tartarus or Hades — and were looking back at the dust clouds raised by Pharoah's armies, charging towards them, hell bent on destruction.

The people of Israel had seen the power of God displayed mightily in the contest of plagues, but here they were, only days later, in despair. They were, so far as they could see, totally beyond hope; trapped at the edge of the sea at the end of the world, with no way forward or bacj but into death. Perhaps it is only when we stand on the very brink of the end of the world that we are really in a place to understand the great salvation of our God.

Later, Moses would command the people to tell this story again and again — to their children, to their grandchildren, to themselves — so that they would never forget the great salvation of our God.

On Thursday evening, Carrie did just as Moses had commanded, as she told us the story of her own journey to the sea at the end of the world, and standing there in despair, as the Egyptians were racing in to sweep up everything that was left of her world. But really, her story was the invitation again to stand still and see the salvation of our God — a salvation that, like for the people of Israel, led not away from the sea at the end of the world, but through it.

Tomorrow, Holy Week begins. A week when we are invited once again to enter into the story of the great salvation of our God — when we are invited to walk with Jesus as he makes his journey to the sea at the end of the world. We are invited to walk with Jesus right up to the very pit of hell, and watch as he plumbs its depths.

The thing that draws us to this story, the thing that made Mel Gibson's cinematic retelling of it such a box office event, is not the gore and the violence and the destruction. It is instead that here, in this story, we finally see the ultimate salvation of our God, as God once again parts the waters of the sea at the end of the world — Hell itself — and makes a path not just through the valley of the shadow of death, but through death itself.

This story is the real story — the reality that the Exodus story foreshadows, and that Carrie's story echoes. The story of how in dying we are born into eternal life — the story of the great salvation of our God.