Sermon 3/4/18
Exodus 16:1-30
Israel
in the Wilderness
We’ve talked about how Jesus’ time in the wilderness,
where he confronts temptations that would take him away from God’s vision for
the redemption of the world, where he goes having just been reminded of his
identity as God beloved’s child, Jesus’s time in the wilderness is our model
for wilderness time, and a major model for the season of Lent. We seek to go to
the wilderness because Jesus does. But the other primary wilderness story in
the scriptures is the story of Israel in the wilderness. God’s whole people,
the Israelites, spent forty years in
the wilderness as they journeyed between Egypt and the Promised Land. Through a
strange series of events, the Israelites had become slaves of the Pharaoh in
Egypt. They were the workforce in Egypt, and the Pharaoh was cruel to them –
demanding more and more work, and eventually instructing that male Israelite
babies should be killed at birth, because he was frightened they would take
over and rebel against the Egyptians. God called Moses, and his brother Aaron,
to lead the Israelites to freedom, to a Promised Land, a place the Israelites
could make their home. Moses manages to lead the Israelites out of Egypt, out
of a life of slavery and oppression. And you’d think from there it would be:
“And they all lived happily ever after.” But no. Again, for a variety of
reasons, the Israelites don’t march straight from Egypt to the Promised Land.
Instead, they spend 40 years in the wilderness, learning from God, becoming a
people, preparing for their new life. This is the other primary story that
grounds our Lenten season. In Judaism, the Exodus, Moses leading the people to
freedom at God’s direction, is one of the main stories that shapes Jewish
identity. This week and next, we’ll spend some time with this story, today
looking at a text near the beginning of their journey through the wilderness,
and next week hearing more about Moses toward the later part of the journey.
Some
important things happen before we arrive at our text today. Back while they’re
still in Egypt, God gives the Israelites instructions on how to leave, and not
only that, but while they are still in
Egypt, God already gives them instructions for how every year going forward
they are to have a Passover celebration to remember how God led them to
freedom. Before they even leave, God is helping them to make plans to remember
what they’re about to do. That should
tell us something: God knows they are going to need to be reminded. They’re going to forget, something that
probably seems impossible in the moment when they can almost taste their
freedom. They’re going to forget how much they longed to be free. And so before
they even leave, God prepares a ritual that will help them remember who they
are, where they came from, and how God has been with them.
In fact, they
forget almost immediately. The Israelites prepare to cross the Red Sea,
escaping Egypt, with the Pharaoh and his armies chasing after them. The threat
of being caught is imminent, and the Israelites are in a panic. They’re still
mid-escape. They complain bitterly to Moses, saying, “Was it because there were
no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness? What
have you done to us, bringing us out of Egypt? Is this not the very thing we
told you in Egypt, ‘Let us alone and let us serve the Egyptians’? For it would
have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness.” But
then God led the way and Moses brought the people through the parted waters of
the Red Sea, and Pharaoh and his armies were defeated, and they were free.
Fast-forward
two chapters to our text for today. The Israelites are now in month 2 of what we know will be a 40 year period in the
wilderness. That’s .4% of the total time they will be spending in the
wilderness. The Israelites were slaves in Egypt for a long time – hundreds of
years, in fact, according to the scriptures. And after just about 45 days of
freedom and this new life, after hundreds
of years as slaves, the people are complaining again. The people apparently
are ready to go back and be slaves, now remembering their life in Egypt as “not
so bad” after all. The Israelites complain to Moses and Aaron, “If only we had
died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots
and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to
kill this whole assembly with hunger.” Fleshpots, by the way, are places of
luxury and unrestrained living. This is how they now describe their lives as
slaves, 45 days later. It would be laughable if it weren’t so very sad.
As
a reader, I can’t help but think, “You have got to be kidding me! You
ungrateful, complaining, miserable people! How can you have forgotten that you
were slaves? How can you have forgotten that your children were being
slaughtered? How can you have forgotten the relentless work that kept
increasing and increasing? And how can you not believe that the God who brought
you safely from Egypt will also be faithful to the rest of the promises made to
you?” Perhaps you, like me, want to give the readers a bit of a good shake.
But
I wonder. I wonder if we are so different than the Israelites. I think, like
them, we often think that the misery we know is better than the unknown future.
Our fear and anxiety about what is yet to come, or our knowledge about the hard
work that waits ahead of us can even cause us to reflect on our past with
distorted vision, forgetting about the painful situations that we were trying
to escape, forgetting about the injustice and hurt we suffered, remembering
only the good moments. This kind of thinking – fear of the unknown future, and
trying to forget what we’re escaping in the past – is part of the thinking that
keeps people trapped in abusive relationships, or caught up in cycles of
addiction. The road of healing, the road of recovery can seem like an endless
wilderness, and maybe things weren’t really so bad before.
But thinking
this way, acting this way, like we’d rather face the misery than the unknown
isn’t limited to more extreme situations. I think about a friend in ministry
who’d been serving a church for several years, and things were deteriorating.
She loved her congregation, they loved her. But they had reached a point where
she couldn’t lead them to the next step as a congregation. And people were starting
to resist her leadership, resist her pushing them. She felt strongly it was
time for a change – for her, and for them, so they could both thrive. She asked
for a new appointment, and received one, a church that seemed like it would be
a great fit, a congregation that was seeking just the leadership gifts she
could bring. But the new appointment meant a big move for her, and a lot of
changes for her family, and suddenly, she was heartbroken that she would be
leaving her congregation. Suddenly, she felt like she was being torn away from
the place she loved. And she did love
her congregation. But I had to remind her that she had known for some time now
that a move was right for them and her. I had to remind her that this was what
she wanted, and that God was at work in her life and was bringing her to a new
part of her ministry. It was a painful time of transition. And I can tell you,
when she left her own church and started her new appointment, it was not
immediate by any means that she started to feel like God had brought her to the
right place, that she wasn’t looking back over her shoulder at the congregation
and community she’d left. It was a lot of hard work, the transition. But
eventually, eventually, she put down roots in her new home, and grew in her new
ministry setting, and found a place where she could envision her life as a
disciple unfolding for a long time to come.
This
week I was texting with Danielle Atria. I’m pretty sure the praise will
embarrass her, but I have to tell you that Danielle takes her faith seriously,
and she reads the Bible regularly, and often texts with questions about what
she’s reading. I love her dedication to learning and growing in faith. After a
chat this week, she sent me a little saying from an app she has that has inspiring
quotes which said, “You dishonor your future when you build an altar to your
past.” We often don’t know where God is leading us when we commit to being
disciples of Jesus Christ. But our future with God is always better than an altar that ties us to anything else: painful
pasts, or beloved pasts. What past are you trying to hold onto? What is it that
you fear about the future toward which God is leading you?
God
answers even the unwarranted complaints of the Israelites. God rains bread from
heaven, a substance the Israelites call “manna,” which means, appropriately,
“What is it?” What it is is a gift from God in the wilderness, reminding them
that even though they’re not sure what is going to happen next, their journey
with God is where they belong, not back
as slaves in Egypt. The people immediately try to store it up, still anxious,
still planning for a future where they are alone and abandoned, but it won’t
keep. It spoils if they try to store it up. It’s just for the day. The must
learn to depend on God, and the daily manna is a sign that God plans to be with
them today and every day. They can trust in God. And so can we.
A
dozen years ago, retired Bishop Judy Craig was our guest preacher at Annual
Conference. It was the year I was ordained – a special year for me. She is a
dynamic preacher, a prophet, and I was blessed that she, along with our Bishop
Violet Fisher laid hands on me at my ordination. Bishop Craig preached on this
text that year. She said “God who led them also fed them.” But, she said, being
fed by God is something we need daily. Being fed by God isn’t something that
“keeps.” Being fed by God isn’t something you can put into canning jars and
store up for later. “What we need today is not for tomorrow,” she said. That’s
one of the reasons we’ve focused so much on the disciplines of prayer, fasting,
and giving this Lent. They’re practices for each day, opportunities for God to
be our daily bread. In the midst of this unmapped wilderness, this place where
God is leading us, where so much is unknown, and where our fear can lead us to
long for the past, or to store up whatever we have in front of us, this is known: God is with us in the
wilderness. Our future belongs to God. And God will feed our spirit day by day
if we keep coming back, ready to receive what God wants to give. The God who
leads us also feeds us. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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