Dancing In The Desert
Then Miriam the prophet, Aaron's sister, took a timbrel in her hand, and all the women followed her, with timbrels and dancing. Miriam sang to them: "Sing to the Lord, for he is highly exalted. Both horse and driver he has hurled into the sea." -Exodus 15:20-21
Well, picture with me for a moment that the Israelites have just left Egypt, they've just done the traumatic crossing of the Red Sea, and they've just gone through that incredible experience, and it's their first night in the desert. So picture with me, Moses gathering together his executive team, if you will, and he wants to take stock of where they're at, what exactly... What exactly did they bring to sustain them in the desert? And so Moses gathers together his executive team and he looks at Mariam and in my imagination, you're welcome to imagine the story however you want it, but in my imagination, Mariam, the quartermaster or the logistics readiness officers, we'd say in the Air Force, she's in charge of all this stuff, right? And so Moses looks to her and says, Okay, Mariam is the first night of a 40-year camp out... What did we bring to help us survive this 40-year camp out? Tell me, tell me, Mariam. Tell me... We brought tents for everybody, right.Tell me, I wanna know that we brought tense for everyone, and
Mariam says “Tents?”. No
Tense. Now, we brought a couple of tent pegs, they'll probably be used later. You can read about JL later when you get home, but... Yeah, no tense. Okay, Moses says No, no test. Tell me, tell me you at least brought some turkey jerky, tell me we were gonna feast on some turkey turkey... No, not really, Moses. We got some real thin bread, some of it kind of do 'cause we were in a hurry. You remember you were there, right, Moses Mariam says, we were in a hurry to get out of Dodge, right. So we got some thin bread, but no turkey jerk. Well, at least tell me you. We brought some frog-leg jerky. Alright, plenty of frogs. You made some frog-leg jerky right now.
No, no shelter. Moses says very little food, Mariana, in the world did you bring? To help sustain us in our desert life. That's easy, Moses says. But I brought the most important thing I could think of, I brought the one thing that will sustain us through this incredible journey, I brought a tambourine. You heard Jimmy, Jimmy. Can you picture Moses? Look on his face. You brought what... You didn't bring shelter, we really don't have much to... And you brought a tambourine.. Why in the world? Moses says, Why in the world would you bring a tambourine... No, no, no, no, I didn't bring just a single tambourine, I brought a tambourine choir. That all of the women had tambourine. According to our passage this morning, all of the tambourine. So Mariam says, Yeah, I've been having choir practice... It's Thursday, right? Thursday is the Holy Holy Night of choir practice. Even for these relates, when they were in captivity, Marian had called together all of her sisters in faith and had timbering choir practice on Thursday night while they were yet slaves in Egypt, they had to... Right, at least in my imagination, they had to...
They had to be practicing for this moment, so Moses says... So not only did you bring a tambourine for yourself, you brought a whole tambourine choir... Yes, I did. Why?Well, I just knew that we would need some encouragement in the desert, I knew there would be times of disappointment, of struggle, of wanting to go back to known misery rather than to face unknown freedom. And Mariam says, You know, I thought of the power of music and of dancing, and I couldn't help but think of the power of this one instrument in a choir together to be able to encourage us to move forward, 'cause Mariam, I imagine says... Would say to Moses, I guess I had that capacity to imagine our desert life and to plan ahead, because Pharaoh may have had my body, but he didn't have my mind, freedom is of the mind that the only way P