Pentecost 15
Exodus 16:2-18
September 21, 2014
There was once an Anglican church in Denmark where a dispute arose
within a congregation in regards to the color of the new carpet that was going
to go into the sanctuary. The
congregation was split into two camps, the blue camp and the red camp. Things got so bad that the pastor called the
Bishop in to settle the dispute so that he wouldn’t be accused of taking
sides. The Sunday that the Bishop
visited with the congregation, they all sat down after worship and each side
argued their case for the color of the carpet that they wanted. An hour later, after both sides had rested
their case, the Bishop took some time to think.
Finally, he stood up and said to the entire congregation, “I fear that
your mission as a congregation has become lost.
I charge you with the task of raising $100,000 with which you will feed
the poor. If you are not able to do this
by the end of the year, I will close the doors to this congregation.”
The second time that the congregation of the Israelites began
complaining against Moses and Aaron was three days after they crossed the Red
Sea. They had witnessed Moses raising
his arms and God sending a breath of air to part the sea. They had witnessed the drowning of the
Egyptian army who had pursued them into the sea. They had sang of the deliverance that God had
provided for them. Three days later,
they were complaining. How long our
memories last, right? They were complaining because they were thirsty. God, through Moses, fixed that problem by
turning bitter water into sweet water.
A month and a half later they are at it again. This time it isn’t thirst, it is hunger…a
hunger so extreme that they had forgotten the conditions they were living under
in Egypt. “If only we were back in Egypt
where we ate our fill of bread,”(which was about as far from the truth as you could
get), “but you have brought us out here to die of hunger. It would have been better if we had died in
Egypt.”
They sound like a bunch of whiny teenagers who haven’t eaten in all
of, say, two hours. There is, however, some legitimacy to what they are saying
in their complaints to Moses. The
complaint itself is not well placed.
Moses and Aaron are not the ones they should be complaining about. Rather, it is the content of their complaint
that you cannot blame them for. They
have just come out of Egypt, just been made into a new people, “the
congregation” of the Israelites, and are learning how to trust and follow this
God that brought them out of Egypt and into this new life in the desert. Likewise, God is learning this new group of
people that he created so that he is better able to nurture them so that they
can thrive. Not once in these complaints
in the wilderness, not when they were at the other side of the Red Sea, even,
does God begrudge them for their complaints.
Rather, God hears what they have to say and provides for what they
need. And right now they need some
food.
God generously and abundantly provides for their needs, providing
manna in the morning and quail in the evening.
There will be enough for everyone to get their fill of the bread and of
the poultry. With the generosity comes a
test, though, to see if the Israelites are listening to God or just following
their stomachs. Each day, the Israelites
are to collect one omer per person, which is approximately 3.5 liters of manna
each morning. No more. On the sixth day, they are collect two days
worth of Manna so they have enough to eat on the Sabbath. Those were God’s instructions. And we learn, finally, in verse 18 that when
the Israelites went out to gather and what they gathered was measured, what was
gathered by those who took too much turned out to weigh in at exactly that
omer. And what was gathered by those to
look too little turned out to weigh in at exactly that omer. Everyone had just enough. God’s generosity provided for all of the
members of the congregation of Israel to have enough.
What does this have to do with an Anglican congregation in
Europe? We’ll get there. We
need to talk about crises of faith first.
Because that is exactly what is going on here. The food crisis that the Israelites faced in
the desert turned into a crisis of faith.
Who was this God that had led them out of Egypt and into the wilderness
but didn’t pack a cooler full of water bottles and lamb on pita
sandwiches? But they soon learned that
God would provide for their needs and do so with great generosity.
Which sounds well and good and all…but how does this “God is going
to provide for all your needs with great generosity” thing sound when you’re
sitting in the chemo chair? Or when you
go in for that first ultrasound only to hear the words from the doctor “I’m
sorry, there is no heartbeat”? how does
it sound when you have spent months going back and forth to the unemployment
office because you keep hearing the word “no” when you go to apply for a
job? Or when, in order to pay the bills
to keep the roof over your head, all you’ve eaten this month is pasta and
eggs?
Here’s the thing, when we talk about God’s generosity and God’s
abundance, we are not talking about it in the same way the Joel Osteen or
Creflo Dollar or Kenneth Copeland do. We
are not talking prosperity gospel, where they preach that if you believe hard
enough and do all the right things and give enough to the church God will bless
you with health and wealth beyond your imagination because God wants you to be
happy. You’ve heard that, right?
When we talk about God’s generosity and God’s abundance here in
this place, that is not what we are talking about. Because the reality is stuff happens, life
happens. The reality is that bad things
happen to good people, try as we might to prevent it. God didn’t even spare his own son from being
crucified, but through the death and resurrection of Jesus, God’s ultimate act
of generosity was shown to us in the promise that we will have life forever in
his presence. As Christians, we trust
that God does hear us when we cry out to him and God’s generosity still shines
through the bad things that we face in life, in the merciful smile and warm
hand of the nurse, in the shared tears of folks who have been through the same
hell you have and lived to tell the tale, in the friend who buys your dinner
over and over again without asking anything in return, in the faces of the
folks at the food bank.
In the midst of the wildernesses that we find ourselves in
throughout our lives, that is our manna, we are each other’s manna.
The test we face now, though, is will we pay it forward? Will we have the eyes to see the manna
waiting for us in the morning and the quail in the evening and trust in God
that the omer we have gathered will be enough for the day?
The congregation of Anglicans was faced with a test. To give $100,000 to feed the poor in their
community. Not only did they meet that
challenge, but they exceeded it and their mission and ministry, and their joy
is now in not only feeding the poor in their community but to combating
poverty. Their benevolence is now the largest in the diocese for they realized
that when they opened their eyes and their hearts to see just how generous God
had been with them over the many years of their ministry, they gave them the
freedom to respond by being generous with each other and their community. And it all started over some complaining over
a carpet.
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