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Exodus 5:1-9, 14, 22-23
BY IRA ZEPP

I didn?t know what to do after graduating from high school. Since I had a job with a business in Bel Air I thought I might as well go to the University of Baltimore Business School. I was working six days a week, traveling 60 miles round trip to downtown Baltimore three nights a week, and to top it off, was not doing well at all academically.

I was a virtual failure and after a year-and-a-half dropped out. Since I?d heard a lot about God, I wondered what God was doing in all this.

Twenty-five years later a therapist told me that I should let my preoccupation with inadequacy and failure become manure and fertilize my life.

She went on to say something I never forgot: 'Failure will teach you more than any of your successes. In fact, there are few successes without failure.'

I?d been around God and God?s people long enough by then to hear with a bit more clarity what God was doing through this counselor?s healing message.

Aaron and Moses were apparently dealt a failing hand when they pleaded, on behalf of God, for the release of their brothers and sisters from Egyptian slavery. 'Could we, at least, have a little spiritual R&R in the desert?' they asked Pharaoh.

The latter replied, 'I?m running things around here, not your God, and I?ll keep piling on work and making it more difficult for the Israelites.'

Moses naturally complained to God: 'Why the humiliation of your people?' 'Do you know what you?re asking of us?' 'We just don?t get it.'

There is something so utterly biblical about all this.

Scripture is replete with the rhythm of bondage/freedom, loss/gain, defeat/victory, death/life, and cross/resurrection. Classical Christian literature would call that 'holy history,' God?s comedy.

In 'comedy' the protagonist goes from misfortune to fortune. (A tragedy is when we move from fortune to misfortune.) This 'comedy' is not just a romantic Pollyanna story, it is the very activity of God here and now, the God who has the last laugh, the God who, in the words of Vladimir Nabokov can 'make ornaments out of accidents and possibilities.'

There would have been no land of milk and honey without the stubble of straw the Jews struggled to find to make bricks, for me no vocation to the ministry without failure at business school, no emotional health without the fertilization of failure.

Addicts know that it all begins with defeat. Their program requires an admission of powerlessness and reliance on a 'higher Power.' The model for this is in God?s response to Moses? anxiety: 'Please know I have heard your cry and will deliver your people;' in Job who found faith in doubt; in Paul who found God?s strength in weakness; in the Psalmist who in a moment of God-forsakenness found that God delivers all those who trust in him.

It is not an accident that Jesus quoted Psalm 22 on the cross. The dark night of the soul?s abandonment is just before the dawn of a new vision of divine support and God?s underlying promise: 'Nevertheless, I am still with you.'

The Rev. Ira Zepp is a teacher at heart and a retired pastor in the Baltimore-Washington Conference.