Israel saw the great work that the Lord did against the Egyptians. So the people feared the Lord and believed in the Lord and in his servant Moses. . .  

Then Moses and the Israelites sang this song to the Lord: . . .This is my God, and I will praise him, my father’s God, and I will exalt him.

Many of us came to faith in the Living God through personal crisis, a time when God had our full attention and we experienced some sort of divine intervention, when we said “This is my God and I will praise him—I recognize this chain of circumstances, this realization or intervention in crisis, as the work of God.”

In this conclusion to the Passover story— our people Israel have also come through a crisis and experienced the dramatic intervention of God. Now they too claim him as their own. But this is but one of three aspects of spiritual experience illustrated by our passage.

In the words “they feared the Lord and believed in his servant Moses” we see that peak experiences, those crises or times of apparent divine intervention, link us not only to God but to others whose experience shapes or resembles our own. Thus, the people not only encountered God in a new way, they also encountered Moses in a new way. We might term this second dimension of spirituality the communal dimension.