This sermon was delivered in the out-of-doors at a member's home. Their name and the name of the town where they live has been changed for their privacy.
Exodus 16:2-15 & Matthew 20:1-16
It’s my difficult job, in the wooded, sylvan beauty in which we find ourselves today, to remind you about the desert. Yes, here in the lush loveliness of the Johnson's pleasant Hillside home where we get to escape to for our worship at their invitation annually, I find myself in the unfortunate position of needing to draw your attention away from all this: away from the trees with their green leaves providing a dabbled shade for us; away from the plants, the flowers that surround us; away from the wee birdies chirping overhead and flying about as they go about their necessary chores.
Instead, I need you to think about the desert. Yes, the desert; that barren, arid, difficult place where existence is far from assured; the place where people seem to be driven to, rather than drawn into; the place where creatures and plants that do survive there have adapted to live a life that is harsh and demanding.
It seems a shame, doesn’t it? “Can’t we just revel in the greenery that surrounds us and pretend that deserts don’t exist?” I can hear many of you saying right now. Ah, how I wish we could do just that: just relax in the comfort of this inviting place and soak in the comeliness of trees and flowers and those wee birdies.
But somehow God has seen fit that we should deal with the contrasts between our setting today and the setting in which the Israelites found themselves in today’s Exodus passage. So, I ask you, put all this [indicating all that is around us] out of your heads and put yourself in a desert; a hot, sun-baked, food-free, waterless desert.
Why would we want to do that? Well, that’s almost exactly what that wandering bunch of Israelites was thinking all those thousands of years ago. “Why again, would you tell us,” they queried, “did we leave the comforts of Egypt for this? We’d truly rather die well-fed, contented and, okay, oppressed in Egypt than meet our ends hungry and thirsty out here in the middle of abso-freakin-lutely nowhere!”
Now Moses and Aaron, not to mention God, had a whining gang on their hands, for certain. I’m sure that Moses thought many times that he wished he had left that burning bush alone all those years earlier. Life would have been much easier. And, undoubtedly, this was one of those times for him.
The people didn’t even know what they were saying, if you think about it. They had yearned for freedom from the oppression of their Egyptian rulers. Pharaoh was the pinnacle of evil as far as they were concerned; the very embodiment of all that was wrong with their world. They labored and toiled under terrible working situations and all sorts of harsh requirements were heaped upon them time after time.
And now they had that precious freedom. They had escaped from the cold tyranny of their Egyptian overseers and at this point were early on in the journey to the promised land; that land pledged to their ancestors all those years ago, the stories of whom had been passed down generation to generation. They had had to work together for their liberation; they had to unite under a leader who seemed to come out of nowhere and they had traveled out of Egypt with one purpose in mind.
Except…well, except that now they wanted to go back. Maybe that liberation thing was overrated; maybe the Egyptian bosses weren’t all that bad, after all, they were human too. They missed the lamb stews and the homemade breads not to mention the roofs over their heads and the bed to sleep on at night. They hadn’t planned on this desert experience in their escape to freedom; they didn’t expect that things would go from bad to worse and then even worse before they’d get better.
Hunger is very real. Hunger is a major driving force in the history of humankind. Hunger changes perspectives and makes priorities get reevaluated. And that’s just where this ragtag Hebrew group was when we drop in on their story today. Hungry. And scared. And really wondering if all this was actually worth it. Reevaluating priorities.
And so they longed for the good old/bad old days in Egypt. They looked back instead of forward. They griped and complained about very real issues and very real problems. Their bellies rumbled in the scorching hot midday sun.
And God did what God does; God took care of their needs. There were quail and there was manna. They ate their fill and learned to share and found out that God would even take care of them on the sabbath day.
But still there was that embarrassing, ungrateful moment in which they turned their backs on the future that had been laid out for them and to which they were called and they longed for the past, however bad it was.
How like them we are. In spite of thousands and thousands of years of change in civilization; in spite of the differences in the way we do something as fundamental as communicate; in spite of the fact that the nomadic culture of these early Israelites is as different from ours as possibly can be, how like them we are.
For here we are: God’s people in this day and this age; so often looking back and remembering; remembering the glory days of American Protestantism in the mid-20th century; looking back and remembering the ways we used to do things and adhering to them even though they are outmoded and no longer working; looking back and remembering when we were a defiant band leaving behind the oppression of dysfunction; looking back and remembering how good it was “then.” Looking back and remembering and glorying and reveling and celebrating and…well, forgetting, actually, that we can’t look back and look forward at the same time; forgetting that the good old days weren’t really all that good for some of us; forgetting that God is always, always ahead of us coaxing us onward.
God provides. God does indeed give us what we need, we learn from these verses from Exodus. And, if we are to believe the parable Jesus told in Matthew from today’s gospel reading, God is foolish to the point of excess in this providing. God doesn’t even know how to manage money and accounts; God just gives and gives and doesn’t really check your timecard or credentials when God is doling out the pay.
The people in the desert saw this stuff on the ground and said “manna.” Unfortunately, we’ve come to associate that word with the stuff that they found there that first morning and which nourished the whole congregation of Hebrew people in their desert. But actually, the word “manna” means “what is it?” “What the heck is this!?” they were saying either out of incredulity or astonishment or disbelief or just plain ignorance. They had no idea of the gift they had just been given. All they could say was “manna?”
We may neither recognize nor appreciate the gifts we have been given in our own desert experiences. Curses may be blessings; disappointments may be opportunities; setbacks may in fact be unsure steps inching ever forward. We may be saying “manna?” and all the time not know that we are being nurtured and fed on our desert journeys.
Manna? Why, it’s the One who calls us and prods us and goads us into ministry and mission feeding us and seeing to our needs.
7 September 2008
Exodus 12:1-14
My friend Marilyn often asks me, usually on Friday or Saturday, what the scripture is that I’m preaching on this week. Our conversation typically goes on to how I am going to treat the passage in my sermon. We sometimes have discussions about the passage that typically help me to clarify what I’m trying to get across. Time and again, naturally, this all occurs before I have actually plied pen to paper or, truthfully, pressed fingers to keyboard.
This week was no different. We had that conversation late in the week. But actually there was a difference this time. She couldn’t quite understand why I would want to preach from the Exodus passage for this morning from the lectionary; especially as I summed it up to her as being about the last of the plagues to be sent on Egypt, the one that killed all the first-born among the Egyptians, leaving out the majority of the passage which described the instructions about eating a lamb and having unleavened bread.
For some reason, this passage grabbed me though. And I wasn’t sure why; I couldn’t quite articulate it. Yes, it is the first celebration and instructions for that great Jewish festival of Passover which is celebrated every year with seders to this very day. And yes, it is the very edge of liberation and exodus for the Hebrew people, who had been enslaved in Egypt for decades and decades. But there was something more in those verses that was vying for my attention.
And then I realized that that something was possibly a something from my past; my distant past. I ruminated and figured out that I was remembering the scene from the 1956 movie, “The Ten Commandments” that recounts this very event that we just heard. The whole thing has been stuck in my head for all these years, ever since I saw it, undoubtedly on our black and white tv when the silver screen made it to the little screen and ended up in the Brague living room in the 60s.
Now of course, Cecil B. DeMille really drove home a point in this scene. If you remember, it was dramatically set. (Well, duh! DeMille and ‘dramatically set’ go together like horse & carriage, love & marriage, etc.) I recall especially the eerie mood with which he set up the scene. The Hebrew people had all received their instructions to put the lamb’s blood on their doorposts so the Angel of Death would avoid their homes.
Unless my memory is faulty, which we all know is an ever-growing possibility, there were shots of empty, shadowed streets with a mist or fog roaming ominously about, implying that this Angel of Death was on its route to do its job. The Hebrews were all in their homes, anxious but, finally, safe because they had done what they were told to do.
But, and this is the big but, in the background you could hear cries and shrieks in an ever-growing chorus; cries and shrieks of shocked and grieving Egyptian parents. Eventually, we saw Pharaoh, who had to this point been hard-hearted and immovable in the pleas of Moses to set the people free. But now we saw Pharaoh in pain, bent over the lifeless body of his eldest son, a young boy.
The formidable Yul Brenner (who was the Pharaoh to end all Pharaohs) gave way at this last plague and allowed Charlton Heston and the NRA, I mean, the Hebrew people, to go; which they did, but that is another reading from Exodus and another several scenes in the movie.
But those cries and shrieks; they live with me to this day. The cries of those broken-hearted Egyptian parents still ring in my ears. And, as a young boy, I undoubtedly found myself in Pharaoh’s son’s place: blameless except for the place of birth. (Of course, I was neither the oldest nor even the oldest son in my family, but that doesn’t stop me from empathizing.) But the pain portrayed in that eerie scene lives on. Why should these Egyptians suffer the most difficult thing that there is to suffer, the death of their child? In those days, of course, first-born sons were held in even higher esteem than they are today. So the grief would have been that much greater, though not for reasons we might want to acknowledge today.
And the worst of it is that God caused this to happen. God didn’t let this happen. God didn’t watch this happen. God, we’re told, made this happen. And yes, the liberation of God’s chosen people was at stake and this very event was the initial incident that, in succession, brought the people to the land that was promised to them and their ancestors.
But I’m stuck on that disturbing fact that God God’s-very-self came and caused the deaths of all those people, many of them innocent and likewise blameless and caused the grief that would have to be born. And frankly, I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t actually know where to go from here.
There are many lectionary preachers today who just ignored this passage, I’m sure. If it was even read, they just let it pass by, uncommented on. But for some reason, God help us, I can’t.
And God does indeed need to help us, because you’re along for the ride too, as it were. If you’re expecting me to tie this narrative up and explain it away in a satisfying and neat conclusion, you don’t know me as well as you thought. Because I can’t do that. And I can’t ignore it. And I can’t make it all better and soothe the pain of those guiltless Egyptian parents millennia ago. And another thing: don’t we believe that they are God’s people too? (Well, that’s actually a modern-day concept that really shouldn’t be applied in this situation, but I’m a modern-day preacher with all my concepts nicely intact and in place, right or wrong.)
So I struggle; right here, right now, right in front of you. What am I to do? Do I reject God because of this incident of which I disapprove? Do I try to convince myself that the God of the Israelites is different from the God of my faith? Do I focus on the liberation aspects of this tale, knowing that God’s ends finally did come about because of this, knowing how important liberation is to my theology? Do I wiggle out and put the blame on Pharaoh? He could have averted this tragedy which struck his people and his own family had he not been so hard-hearted and stubborn, you know.
Maybe, I’m not giving God enough credit though. Through the tears and cries and shrieks of those grieving parents, right up to and including the unsettled feelings and thoughts experienced by a young boy on the floor of the living room watching actors play their parts on the television and who grows up to be someone who, from time to time at the least, wrestles with this God; maybe, just maybe, through all of that pain and time, God was grieving and crying and wondering “why, oh why?” too. Perhaps God wanted to find a way around the stubbornness of humanity as brought to fruition in a ruler whose name is forgotten by most if not all of us and God truly desired to avoid all this. Perhaps God, having given God’s creation free will, recognized that things would go badly at times and wept at the very thought.
Because a small band of oppressed people received their freedom after years of toil remembered to tell their children and grandchildren about how God saved them; and because those children and grandchildren kept telling that story, over and over and over, year after year after year, generation to generation to generation; and because someone, somewhere along the span of history, had actually learned to write and decided that this story was vital enough to be painstakingly captured word by word; because of all of that and more, we today ponder the workings of God not only in history but also in our midst.
Because God still weeps, I think. God weeps at the hard-heartedness of our leaders and wonders what next to do. God, from an incomprehensible vantage point of eternity, looks at us and remembers ancient, oppressive Egyptians and wonders if anything has really changed. But I believe, if I may be so presumptuous as to try to fathom God’s mind, that God still remembers those cries and shrieks of grief-torn families. God remembers, I pray, and says “no more; I can’t do that again.”
My friend Marilyn often asks me, usually on Friday or Saturday, what the scripture is that I’m preaching on this week. Our conversation typically goes on to how I am going to treat the passage in my sermon. We sometimes have discussions about the passage that typically help me to clarify what I’m trying to get across. Time and again, naturally, this all occurs before I have actually plied pen to paper or, truthfully, pressed fingers to keyboard.
This week was no different. We had that conversation late in the week. But actually there was a difference this time. She couldn’t quite understand why I would want to preach from the Exodus passage for this morning from the lectionary; especially as I summed it up to her as being about the last of the plagues to be sent on Egypt, the one that killed all the first-born among the Egyptians, leaving out the majority of the passage which described the instructions about eating a lamb and having unleavened bread.
For some reason, this passage grabbed me though. And I wasn’t sure why; I couldn’t quite articulate it. Yes, it is the first celebration and instructions for that great Jewish festival of Passover which is celebrated every year with seders to this very day. And yes, it is the very edge of liberation and exodus for the Hebrew people, who had been enslaved in Egypt for decades and decades. But there was something more in those verses that was vying for my attention.
And then I realized that that something was possibly a something from my past; my distant past. I ruminated and figured out that I was remembering the scene from the 1956 movie, “The Ten Commandments” that recounts this very event that we just heard. The whole thing has been stuck in my head for all these years, ever since I saw it, undoubtedly on our black and white tv when the silver screen made it to the little screen and ended up in the Brague living room in the 60s.
Now of course, Cecil B. DeMille really drove home a point in this scene. If you remember, it was dramatically set. (Well, duh! DeMille and ‘dramatically set’ go together like horse & carriage, love & marriage, etc.) I recall especially the eerie mood with which he set up the scene. The Hebrew people had all received their instructions to put the lamb’s blood on their doorposts so the Angel of Death would avoid their homes.
Unless my memory is faulty, which we all know is an ever-growing possibility, there were shots of empty, shadowed streets with a mist or fog roaming ominously about, implying that this Angel of Death was on its route to do its job. The Hebrews were all in their homes, anxious but, finally, safe because they had done what they were told to do.
But, and this is the big but, in the background you could hear cries and shrieks in an ever-growing chorus; cries and shrieks of shocked and grieving Egyptian parents. Eventually, we saw Pharaoh, who had to this point been hard-hearted and immovable in the pleas of Moses to set the people free. But now we saw Pharaoh in pain, bent over the lifeless body of his eldest son, a young boy.
The formidable Yul Brenner (who was the Pharaoh to end all Pharaohs) gave way at this last plague and allowed Charlton Heston and the NRA, I mean, the Hebrew people, to go; which they did, but that is another reading from Exodus and another several scenes in the movie.
But those cries and shrieks; they live with me to this day. The cries of those broken-hearted Egyptian parents still ring in my ears. And, as a young boy, I undoubtedly found myself in Pharaoh’s son’s place: blameless except for the place of birth. (Of course, I was neither the oldest nor even the oldest son in my family, but that doesn’t stop me from empathizing.) But the pain portrayed in that eerie scene lives on. Why should these Egyptians suffer the most difficult thing that there is to suffer, the death of their child? In those days, of course, first-born sons were held in even higher esteem than they are today. So the grief would have been that much greater, though not for reasons we might want to acknowledge today.
And the worst of it is that God caused this to happen. God didn’t let this happen. God didn’t watch this happen. God, we’re told, made this happen. And yes, the liberation of God’s chosen people was at stake and this very event was the initial incident that, in succession, brought the people to the land that was promised to them and their ancestors.
But I’m stuck on that disturbing fact that God God’s-very-self came and caused the deaths of all those people, many of them innocent and likewise blameless and caused the grief that would have to be born. And frankly, I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t actually know where to go from here.
There are many lectionary preachers today who just ignored this passage, I’m sure. If it was even read, they just let it pass by, uncommented on. But for some reason, God help us, I can’t.
And God does indeed need to help us, because you’re along for the ride too, as it were. If you’re expecting me to tie this narrative up and explain it away in a satisfying and neat conclusion, you don’t know me as well as you thought. Because I can’t do that. And I can’t ignore it. And I can’t make it all better and soothe the pain of those guiltless Egyptian parents millennia ago. And another thing: don’t we believe that they are God’s people too? (Well, that’s actually a modern-day concept that really shouldn’t be applied in this situation, but I’m a modern-day preacher with all my concepts nicely intact and in place, right or wrong.)
So I struggle; right here, right now, right in front of you. What am I to do? Do I reject God because of this incident of which I disapprove? Do I try to convince myself that the God of the Israelites is different from the God of my faith? Do I focus on the liberation aspects of this tale, knowing that God’s ends finally did come about because of this, knowing how important liberation is to my theology? Do I wiggle out and put the blame on Pharaoh? He could have averted this tragedy which struck his people and his own family had he not been so hard-hearted and stubborn, you know.
Maybe, I’m not giving God enough credit though. Through the tears and cries and shrieks of those grieving parents, right up to and including the unsettled feelings and thoughts experienced by a young boy on the floor of the living room watching actors play their parts on the television and who grows up to be someone who, from time to time at the least, wrestles with this God; maybe, just maybe, through all of that pain and time, God was grieving and crying and wondering “why, oh why?” too. Perhaps God wanted to find a way around the stubbornness of humanity as brought to fruition in a ruler whose name is forgotten by most if not all of us and God truly desired to avoid all this. Perhaps God, having given God’s creation free will, recognized that things would go badly at times and wept at the very thought.
Because a small band of oppressed people received their freedom after years of toil remembered to tell their children and grandchildren about how God saved them; and because those children and grandchildren kept telling that story, over and over and over, year after year after year, generation to generation to generation; and because someone, somewhere along the span of history, had actually learned to write and decided that this story was vital enough to be painstakingly captured word by word; because of all of that and more, we today ponder the workings of God not only in history but also in our midst.
Because God still weeps, I think. God weeps at the hard-heartedness of our leaders and wonders what next to do. God, from an incomprehensible vantage point of eternity, looks at us and remembers ancient, oppressive Egyptians and wonders if anything has really changed. But I believe, if I may be so presumptuous as to try to fathom God’s mind, that God still remembers those cries and shrieks of grief-torn families. God remembers, I pray, and says “no more; I can’t do that again.”
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