Adolescence in the Wilderness: Exodus 15 - 17
Sermon from November 9, 2026
The Rev. Megan Collins
This morning and next Sunday we’ll be continuing in Exodus, but on November 22nd you’ll hear from the elders of our congregation here at Maitland Pres for Elder Sunday. They’ll share their reflections on faith in action for the message. The following week is the start of Advent, so we’ll spend the rest of the year in the gospel stories surrounding Jesus’ birth. Then in January, we’ll get back to Exodus, starting with the Ten Commandments, and we’ll look at what Jesus says about each one.
This week I was talking with one of the members here, and she mentioned she had come across some of the yearbooks from when Dave and I were teenagers. We went through school together so one yearbook covers both of us. That’s one of the challenges of living in your hometown as an adult - your adolescence can show back up, at any time, with photographic evidence from people who knew you when you were younger.
I know this is hard to believe, but Dave and I were not super cool as teenagers. In fact, here we are, in middle school, crushing it.
Just think . . . this guy in his beaded necklace, and this girl with her bangs, would one day fall in love and go to college and then seminary and then get married and then pastor a church together.
But of course we couldn’t possibly have imagined any of that then.
The only thing this girl knew was how hard it was to be a teenager.
It is so hard.
If there is a teenager in your life right now, please be kind to them.
They are balancing all of the changes they are going through physically with a world that is a constant emergency and the demands of 7 different classes in a school where they can’t even use the bathroom because they apparently aren’t clean.
So if they complain, or if they are a little cranky, they have EVERY REASON TO BE.
Because in the middle of doing all of this, their life just keeps going. They aren’t kids anymore, but they don’t have any of the rights of being an adult. There is this push and pull between needing to grow up and be independent, but not quite being out of childhood yet. There are a million huge questions to answer like “who am I? Where am I going in the future? Who are my friends?” Then they’re supposed to just keep functioning through all of this chaos like it’s fine.
Adolescence is so hard.
For the rest of us, even as adults, we can still find ourselves in seasons that feel a bit reminiscent of our adolescence. Whether you are five years out of adolescence or sixty, you have seasons when you are again in between who you’ve been and who you are becoming. You may find yourself asking the same kinds of questions you did then. We also have times like this as groups of people. It turns out not all adolescence is bad.
As a nation this week, we have found ourselves in a bit of a wonderful adolescent time. For most of us here, this was a week of really exciting progress, with the possibility of change on the horizon, if we can just be patient for January. It’s been a good week, as our nation seems to be starting a very new chapter. Now we’re in this in between, waiting between where we’ve been and where we can’t wait to go.
Whether it’s personal or with a whole country, adolescence is a lot of navigating change, of wanting to hurry up to the next chapter, but still not always sure who we are becoming.
We’ll see all of that today in our stories about the Israelites. They are newly freed from their slavery in Egypt. They are no longer who they were, but they are also not yet really formed as a people. They are asking the same questions we know from our own teenage years.
Who am I, outside of Egypt?
Where are we going next, and when will we get there?
Who is really in charge here?
Life keeps moving forward, but they are now in this strange wilderness that will define their next 40 years, and will shape their identity forever.
They’re in their adolescence, and the teenage years of the Israelites are difficult, and no less embarrassing than my own. For me, the record of my embarrassing transition to adulthood is limited to a few yearbook photos. But for the Israelites, it is well documented in these stories in the Bible.
There is one key requirement of moving from childhood to adulthood is pushing against your parents. This is how we find our way from being children to being independent adults. This pushing back is an important part of how we grow up. And the Israelites are pushing back. They rebel and complain and question.
Today we'll see just how God, as the parent, will respond to all of it. Will God ground them, take away their cell phone, hhide and hope they’ll go away? No.
When I had teenagers of my own, someone told me the job of a parent during adolescence is to hug the cactus. They said that teenagers can be prickly sometimes (because they are going through an awful lot, and it’s hard) and it’s easy to just get angry, or pull back if you get pricked by one of their thorns. But then they said the job of the parent is instead to hug the cactus, to love them, even if they are prickly, to give them a little room to figure things out, but to stay close enough that they can see you. It’s like a hug but with some space.
Hug the cactus. This is what God does over and over for the Israelites.
Last week, we read how God did this huge miracle and led them from slavery by parting the seas. Now they’re free, and they no longer have the oppressive rules and structure of their time in Egypt. It’s like that first time your parents dropped you off somewhere alone, with no chaperone. It’s exciting and a little scary and no one is really sure what they’re supposed to be doing. But they aren’t as alone as it might seem. The Lord hasn’t abandoned them.
God offers some specific guidance, to help them, and to see what they would do.
Exodus15:25b There the Lord made for them a statute and an ordinance, and there he put them to the test. 26 He said, “If you will listen carefully to the voice of the Lord your God, and do what is right in his sight, and give heed to his commandments and keep all his statutes, I will not bring upon you any of the diseases that I brought upon the Egyptians, for I am the Lord who heals you.”
God is setting them up with the information they need. Listen to me, God says. Listen to my voice, follow my commandments. This isn’t God saying “do what I told you because I said so.” The commandments we’ll study in January are there to protect their well being. It’s the very things that will help them become the people they are meant to be. God is not some uninvolved distant parent who suddenly shows up with a bunch of rules. This is the same God who personally brought them out of Egypt. They should have some reason to trust God cares about them.
They aren’t children in their faith anymore, but they also aren’t mature either. So God gives them the directions they need, and then steps back to see what they will do. And, as we’ll see in the rest of the Bible, they spend lots of time rebelling. There is this push and pull between God and the people as they listen to God at first, but then push back and choose their own way. It doesn’t work out. They come back again. Which is our story too, of course. God draws close to us even as we insist “I’ve got this on my own.” But God keeps gently offering guidance. We have all this teaching in the Bible that we can listen to, and God also gives us the freedom to try it our own way. Sometimes we’ll listen. Sometimes we won’t. Either way, God does not abandon us.
But we aren’t just spiritual, intellectual beings who need guidance and nothing else. We’re physical beings too. The Israelites, like teenagers, get hungry and thirsty, a lot. When they get into the wilderness, the water they find there is bitter.
Exodus 15:24
And the people complained
They complain. A lot. And they’re not just thirsty. They’re hungry too, so hungry they think they could die. I can remember when our kids were teenagers, about thirty minutes before dinner, they would come out and start circling around in the kitchen, like sharks. They weren't being difficult. They were just always hungry. It seems the Israelites are always hungry, and they don’t think the wilderness has what they need:
162 The whole congregation of the Israelites complained against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. 3 The Israelites said to them, “If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the pots of meat and ate our fill of bread, for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.”
Moses is reaching the end of his patience.
17:4 So Moses cried out to the Lord, “What shall I do for this people? They are almost ready to stone me.”
What should I do with them? Moses is all done with them. But the Lord keeps hugging the cactus of his fussy little people. Back when they said the water was bitter, Moses cried out to the Lord:
15:25 and the Lord showed him a piece of wood; he threw it into the water, and the water became sweet.
And then when they were hungry:
16:4 Then the Lord said to Moses, “I am going to rain bread from heaven for you, and each day the people shall go out and gather enough for that day.
35 The Israelites ate manna forty years, until they came to a habitable land; they ate manna, until they came to the border of the land of Canaan.
God chooses love again, this time by helping them meet their basic needs. They can’t be expected to think through the bigger questions of who they are as God’s people if they can’t see past lunch. So God meets them there. And we know that physical needs aren’t just physical needs.
When I was hungry as a teenager, of course it was physical. But when I complained I wasn’t just looking for food. I also needed to see if my parents cared about me. We need God to meet us in the basic everyday stuff we need - food, housing, clothing - not just because we need them but so that we can see that God cares about that stuff too, which means God cares about us. God does meet those kinds of needs, and Jesus keeps sending us out to feed and clothe each other too. The physical stuff matters.
But it doesn’t happen often in miracles. Usually God works through what (or who) is already around us. This is the part we miss when we read these stories. The water with wood in it, the manna that appears, it sounds like just another miracle. But look again. The water was made drinkable by God showing Moses a piece of wood that was already there to put into it. And manna was likely a kind of natural phenomenon. There are these insects in the area where the Israelites were that feed on the sap of the tamarisk trees. They take in more sugar than they can use, and what they leave behind dries into these white flakes on the ground. It melts in the heat, it spoils fast, and attracts bugs. Just like the manna described in Exodus. People who live in this area actually still gather these flakes in the morning, and they still call it manna.
It didn’t have to always be a huge miracle to show that God cares about your everyday stuff.
It could be God showing you what was already provided so that you can see it.
Also notice in the text, God provides one day at a time. The manna is for today, and then it spoils. You can’t hoard it, or stockpile it, or keep more than you need. Nobody gets to keep all the manna while someone else goes without. So growing up means noticing what God has already given, sharing so that everyrone has enough, because we can trust that God will provide again tomorrow.
But what about when what we need isn’t something inside of us, but dealing with someone else? When I went to middle school, I learned it was great to have a good lunch, and to have good advice as I got onto the bus, but then there was another bigger problem: the other kids. I got in a few skirmishes of my own in my three years at Milwee Middle School. And as the Israelites wander, a fight is coming for them. The Amalekites in their area were quite the bullies, and Deuteronomy tells us (Deut 25:18) they attacked when the Israelites were faint and weary. Classic bully behavior. So . . .
17: 9 Moses said to Joshua, “Choose some men for us and go out; fight with Amalek. Tomorrow I will stand on the top of the hill with the staff of God in my hand.” 10 So Joshua did as Moses told him and fought with Amalek, while Moses, Aaron, and Hur went up to the top of the hill. 11 Whenever Moses held up his hand, Israel prevailed, and whenever he lowered his hand, Amalek prevailed. 12 But Moses’s hands grew heavy, so they took a stone and put it under him, and he sat on it. Aaron and Hur held up his hands, one on either side, so his hands were steady until the sun set.
This is another one of those stories we read as a miracle, then we wonder where the miracle is in our own lives when we are up against our own bullies. But like the manna and the water, maybe it’s not really a miracle at all. Maybe it’s exactly the kind of way we experience God. It's not a miracle, but God showing them what they needed to see. It turns out, the most likely interpretation of this passage isn’t that Moses’ arms were somehow magically controlling the armies with some sort of God spell. It’s just the sight of Moses’ arms, raised in the air on that hilltop, that tipped the balance for them.
For the Israelites, Moses’ staff and hands were like seeing the hand of God. So as they fought their battle, every time they looked up and they saw Moses’ outstretched hand, they remembered that God was with them. It gave them what they needed to keep fighting. And in the same way, when their enemies saw Moses’ hand, they knew the people weren’t fighting alone.
When we have children, we stand in front of them, fight their battles for them. But in our adolescence, sometimes what we need when we are afraid or unsure, when we are fighting against something bigger than us, isn’t for someone to fight for us. We need to look up, and see that someone is there, at a distance, rooting for us, believing in us.
God doesn’t always pluck us out of the hard thing we are fighting against. But when you are in the thick of it, you can look up, and there’s God, up on the hill, arm outstretched, saying “I’m here. You don’t fight alone.”
Then God went on to answer for the Israelites what might be one of the biggest questions of adolescence: Where do I belong? Who are my people?
In Exodus 16, the people are called a congregation. By Exodus 19, they are a nation, a kingdom, and the story stops being just about each of them growing up. It becomes about them growing into a people.
Communities can have adolescence too.
Over the past two years we’ve been asking a lot of questions as a church.
Who are we? Where are we going? Who are our people? Like the Israelites, sometimes we complain, even rebel, from who God is calling us to be. But God has still been building something new here, in this church, and we’re not done yet. We’ve changed a lot from who we were, but we’re still a work in progress. We’re also in an adolescence.
But along the way we are finding the answers to those questions. We are starting to really know who we are, as we listen to God together. Like the Israelites in our story from Exodus,
God has given us guidance. Through the Scriptures, through prayer, through each other.
God has given us what we need, through what’s already here: this building, our resources, and through what you give financially to this church, our own manna for this season. We find we have enough for each day, but we are having to put our trust in God that the manna will be there again tomorrow.
And God has been with us in the fight. When we stand up against our own bullies in our community and country, when we fight for the equality of all people, because that’s what we believe God calls us to, we know we aren’t alone. That fight doesn’t stop just because we see the beginnings of change in our nation. There is still so much work to do.
Our community still needs us.
Back in our story, when they were fighting, Moses couldn’t keep his arms up all day alone. So Aaron and Hur found him a rock to sit on. They stood on either side of him. And then they stood, one on each side, and held up his arms until the sun went down.
That’s what we do, here, together. As a part of our adolescent little church, when you give money, or volunteer, or choose to be a part of what’s happening, you are helping hold up the arms. Those raised arms were how the people fighting down in the valley knew God was with them. So you are making it so that when someone in the middle of their own fight looks up, and sees this church, they know they aren’t fighting alone.
Adolescence isn’t easy.
We can complain. We can even rebel.
God’s not going anywhere.
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