Trusting that the Bread Will Be There

Exodus 16:2-15
The whole people of Israel grumbled against Moses and against Aaron in the wilderness. The children of Israel said to them, "If only we had died at the hand of YHWH in the land of Egypt! There we sat by the pots of meat and ate bread to our fill. But you led us out to the wilderness in order to kill our whole people with hunger."

YHWH said to Moses, "Look, I am going to rain bread from heaven for you. The people shall go out and gather each day enough for the day. In this way I will test them, whether they will follow my instruction or not. On the sixth day when they prepare what they will bring in there will be double what they glean day to day."

Moses and Aaron said to all the children of Israel, "This night you shall know that it was YHWH who brought you out from the land of Egypt. And at daybreak you will see the abundance of YHWH because [YHWH] has heard your murmuring against YHWH. For what are we that you complain against us?"

Moses said, "When YHWH gives you meat in the evening to eat and bread at daybreak to sate you, you will understand that YHWH hears your murmuring that you utter against him. What are we? Your murmuring is not against us but against YHWH."

Then Moses said to Aaron, "Say to all the congregation of the children of Israel, 'Draw near before YHWH because he has heard your murmuring.'"

And it happened as Aaron spoke to the whole congregation of the children of Israel that they turned to the wilderness and, look, the abundance of YHWH appeared.

YHWH spoke to Moses saying, "I have heard the murmuring of the children of Israel. Say to them, 'In the evening you shall eat meat and at daybreak you shall be sated with bread. And you shall know that I am YHWH, your God.'"

So in the evening quail came up and covered the camp and at daybreak a layer of dew was upon the whole camp. And when the layer of dew went up, look, on the face of the wilderness there was a thin peel, like a thin frost on the earth. The children of Israel saw it and they said one to another, "What is it?" because they did not know what it was. Moses told them that it was bread that YHWH gave to them to eat.

Sometimes it’s hard to see what’s good about the place you’re in. Have you ever felt like that? Say you’re 12 years old and your parents send you off to summer camp. It’s an exciting thing at first. You’re looking forward to the canoeing and the swimming and the silly campfire skits. But then you get there and you’re in a cabin with a bunch of people you don’t know and you’re folks aren’t around and even though you thought that was a good thing, now you’re not so sure. And it’s a whole week before you get to go home again to your cat and your video games and even your little sister. Yeah, at times like that it’s hard to see what’s good about the place you’re in and it takes a while - maybe a day or two -- until you’re reminded what a cool place camp really is.

Or maybe you’re off on to college and you get a roommate who is nothing like the one you would have ordered. And the hallway of the dorm is total chaos twenty-four hours a day. The classes are harder than you expected. Dealing with the university bureaucracy is a pain. And the cafeteria serves eggplant tacos as the healthy alternative to greasy pizza. Yeah, at times like that it’s hard to see what’s good about the place you’re in.

I remember when Suzanne and I moved to Dallas from Virginia as I began seminary there. The first night we moved into this old cinderblock dorm building that was built in the 1940s. Sounds echoed so much that you could flush a toilet anywhere in the three-story building and you could hear it like it was next door. We lived in one-room efficiency apartment with a bed you pulled down out of the wall and which you could sit on the end of and be in the kitchen. You could make breakfast in bed…in bed. It was so small that I had to go out into the hallway to change my mind. Yeah, at times like that it’s hard to see what’s good about the place you’re in.

But you don’t have to leave and go off somewhere new in order to experience this. Maybe you’re in the same space and you lose your job and the whole world suddenly seems to change for you. You don’t know what’s going to happen or how you’ll pay for it. Or your spouse goes through a serious illness. Or your child develops a drug dependency. Or a senseless moment of violence ends the life of someone you love. Yeah, at times like these it’s hard to see what’s good about the place you’re in. At times like these it’s sometimes hard to see what God is up to.

Well, we’re not alone you know. Oh, no. It may feel like you’re the first person to have ever experienced the wilderness, but you most certainly are not. The wilderness has been there from the beginning and God’s people are always going out into it to discover what it is they really believe and whom it is that they can really trust. Abraham and Sarah? They had to pack up and leave when God called. They followed to the Promised Land and what did they find? A famine and a desert. It took some time for them to see what God was up to with them. Joseph? We talked about him a few weeks ago. The dreamer who always imagined he would be someone important and great -- he spent time in the wilderness, first in a pit and then as a slave in Egypt. Moses? When he fled for his life after striking down an Egyptian he ended up tending sheep in the desert until he encountered God in a burning bush.

And then there are the Hebrew people. We talked about them several weeks ago as the conflict was growing between them and the Egyptians among whom they lived. They were prospering in Egypt. You remember the refrain, “Multiply, multiply, multiply!” They were multiplying. In response the Egyptians made them slaves and made their lives unbearable.

So God delivered them from slavery. God sent Moses and his brother Aaron to tell Pharaoh to let the people go. It took some time. It took ten plagues of biblical proportions. It took an exodus through the waters of the Red Sea. It took a wall of fire and a great wind. But God delivered the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt. They walked up on the far shores of the Red Sea into the Sinai wilderness and they were a new people in a new place.

They sang a song of victory. The women danced with tambourines and singing. They looked around at this new land they were in and said, “Wait a minute. There’s nothing to drink here!” Four verses. It takes four verses to get from “Sing to the Lord for he has triumphed gloriously!” to “Are we there yet?”

Then it only takes another five verses (during which God provides them with sweet water to drink) --it only takes another five verses to get to this lament: “Oh, if only we had died at the hands of God in Egypt! If only God had just gone ahead and killed us there! In Egypt there was bread and we could eat as much as we wanted. In Egypt there were fleshpots.” I always wondered what fleshpots were and why people would be nostalgic about them. It seems like a strange thing to want -- fleshpots. But it really just means - pots of meat. It was an all-you-can-eat buffet. “Oh in Egypt it was so great. There were Golden Corral Steakhouses and Old Country Buffet. There were Starbucks. Do you know how hard it is to get a latte in the wilderness? And forget about good shopping. It’s like the Eastern Shore out here!” I might not be getting the translation exactly right, but it went something like that. The people had a very selective memory of what it was like in the place where they had come from - out of slavery - across the bay.

The result is that Moses and Aaron have a mutiny on their hands. The people accuse them of plotting the whole “liberation from Egypt” thing as an elaborate ploy to kill them from hunger. Isn’t it amazing how quickly their perspective changes? The wilderness is one of those places -- one of those places where it is difficult to see what’s good about the place -- and the people of Israel have just wandered into it.

God sees what is at stake right away. Before Moses and Aaron can do anything God calls Moses aside and says, “Look, I know what’s happening here and this is a test. The wilderness is a test for my people to see if they can see something besides desert here. To see if they can see something besides scarcity and desolation and no water to drink and no food to eat. Can my people see something else here? Can they trust me? Can they know that I am their God?”

So God provides bread and instructions on how to gather it. Obviously God is going to have to go right back to the beginning when in six days God provided all that was necessary for life to flourish on the earth. This time, its bread that will rain down from heaven and provide food for the people for six days and on the sixth day they will have to collect double portions because there won’t be anything on the seventh day. That day is the Sabbath day and on that day they have something more important to do than collect bread. On that day they are supposed to worship God.

So Moses and Aaron are supposed to go out to the people and pass along the news. They are a little annoyed with the people. They don’t like the murmuring. God doesn’t talk about the murmuring much but Moses and Aaron do. A couple of times they say, “What are we that you should complain against us?” They keep trying to help the people see that underneath all the bellyaching and the aching of their empty bellies is a theological problem. The people have not yet learned to live in the wilderness and to trust in the Lord.

Moses and Aaron are interpreters in this story. They have to keep telling the people what is really going on because the people can’t see it. They have to keep pointing towards God and retelling the story and leading the people because, left to their own resources, the people will forget. They will be so distracted by the lack of food and the horrible living conditions that they will forget what God has done…what God is doing…what God has promised to do with them and for them. God hasn’t forgotten the command to be fruitful and multiply, multiply, multiply; the people have and they need interpreters.

So Moses tells Aaron to call all the people together and to tell them they will have bread in the morning and quails in the evening -- food to sustain them because God has heard their murmuring. And something mysterious and miraculous happens as Aaron is addressing the people. We don’t know exactly what it is because the text is a little mysterious here. It only says that as Aaron was speaking the people turned to the wilderness, where they had only seen barrenness and death before and the abundance of God appeared. It was probably the bread. God had told Moses that the people would see the abundance of God each morning. Now the wilderness was changing before their eyes.

Before the people can speak God speaks one more time to Moses and says, “This is the way the people will know that I am the Lord, their God.” This is the test God offers. Can the people see God’s grace invading the emptiness of their lives to bring what they needed, not only to survive, but also to flourish and thrive?

I have to say, the initial results were not too promising. The people woke up that first morning and saw this layer of material like a frost covering everything. They peeled it away and looked at it very suspiciously. They said, “This is it? What is it?” They didn’t know what to expect. They certainly don’t seem to have been expecting bread. They need an interpreter to tell them what they are seeing.

So Moses said to them, “It’s the bread God is giving you to eat.” And they called the bread “What is it?” which in Hebrew is manna. And from then on they had bread, though they weren’t done complaining. They had a long journey to go on before they learned to trust in God.

Sometimes it’s hard to see what’s good about the place you’re in. Sometimes we need interpreters to remind us that the wildernesses we find ourselves in are not devoid of God’s presence. Sometimes we need interpreters who will remind us that in those very wildernesses of our lives God is waiting to give us our daily bread…God is waiting to give us the things we need to survive…God is waiting to give us the things we need to thrive.

Oh, I know the desert can be a scary place. I’ve been there. You’ve been there. In the deserts of the southwest there are creosote bushes that will burn your skin, spiny cacti that will pierce your flesh, and snakes with vicious looking fangs. The deserts we walk through in our lives can look even worse. But in that landscape there are also flowers waiting to burst forth with just the smallest amount of rain. There are creek beds ready to gush with living water. There is life everywhere ready to blossom out. And it is the same in the deserts of our lives.

One of the great movies of the last decade is an Italian film called Life is Beautiful. This is one of those movies you need to see if you haven’t. In this film a Jewish man in Italy during the Second World War is sent to the concentrations camps along with his young son who is about five. Guido is separated from his wife but his son stays with him.

Guido is a clown. He has made a wonderful father because he is always finding humor in every situation. His son thinks that he can do magic.

But now they are in the death camps of Germany, the blackest places we can imagine. How can Guido find humor and hope here? But Guido is determined to do so. And by the sheer force of will and imagination he refuses to accept the dark consequences of the hatred that has placed him and his family in this place. He convinces his son that they are only away for a time and that they should make the best of their situation, even to celebrate its craziness. He mimics the goose-stepping soldiers and continues to play the clown and the son comes to see that even in the midst of what could have been the most God-forsaken place imaginable, life and hope could survive.

Guido, like Moses, was an interpreter of a larger reality. When all of the traditional indicators pointed toward death and despair, he pointed to the manna in the wilderness. When the people of Israel forgot who they were and where they had come from…when they forgot that God was on their side and not against them…when their memories failed them and they began to believe that slavery was better than freedom…when they could not see…they needed an interpreter who could make it absolutely obvious that we have no cause to doubt God’s acceptance of us and no cause to doubt God’s provision for us and for our flourishing.

Jesus knew something about the wilderness. Jesus knew something about providing bread in the desert to a hungry people. Jesus knew something about pointing beyond death and despair to what God was really doing in the world.

Because, you see, the truth of the matter is that the devil is a hapless fool. The forces of despair and darkness are not equal to the task of enslaving us again. What God needs are interpreters and here’s where the story turns to you. What God needs is you, not to recognize yourself in the people of Israel. God knows we’ve been there and asked that “What is it?” question way too often. What God needs are more Moses and Aarons and Miriams -- prophets who can describe the world in such a way that what God is doing is absolutely obvious.

Because you’re going to walk out of those doors in a little bit and it will be tempting to think that the world is the same as when you left it this morning. But it’s not the same. The world is full of the abundance of God. There is manna everywhere. And people are starving because they cannot see it.

Who are you going to tell this week? Who are you going to tell about this amazing God who doesn’t accept the way things are but turns the world upside down? Who are you going to tell about where to find life and hope? Because people are starving. They’re hurting. They’re murmuring. And they don’t know where to take their pain. They need to know where they can find the holy manna. They need to know whom they can trust. Are you going to tell them?

Thanks be to God.