The 9^th Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 13B)

August 6, 2006

Text: Exodus 16

Pastor Harold Nilsson

Tucked in the news last week alongside stories of the continuing chaos in the Middle East and sports doping scandals and $3 gas was the report on school performance.  New Mexico schools have done only so-so in meeting the criteria of the No Child Left Behind initiative.  The pressure is on teachers and administrators to improve math and reading scores.  That news story with all its detail got me to thinking about evaluating churches and followers of Jesus.  What if we had a “No Church Left Behind” or “No Christian Left Behind” initiative?  What would it look like?  Who would write the questions, and who would score them?  Would we become so preoccupied teaching to the questions that we would neglect other important things?  And maybe, most importantly, what would happen if we didn’t measure up?  Well, I reined in my imagination before I went much further with this line of thinking.

But you see, what sparked my imagination to begin with was this reading we have this morning from Exodus.  It’s a kind of schoolroom experience, an educational report.  The episode has in fact been called “The Wilderness School.”¹  While it is based in antiquity, you decide when we’re done if this tale is still educationally apropos for us. 

As you no doubt know, this episode is part of the central story of the Old Testament, the exodus of the Hebrew slaves from Egypt.  When the story begins, the people of Israel are only 45 days into the journey.   Fortunately they don’t know how long they’ll have to endure.  They have 40 years to go before they get out of the wilderness.  By the mercy of God they’ve escaped through the water from Pharaoh’s wrath and are adjusting to the new reality of dry country where little grows.  And they complain.  They’re hungry.  “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.”  Their whining is even more plaintive in a parallel passage in Numbers: “If only we had meat to eat!  We remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions and the garlic…”  (Shirley and I went on a cruise last month.  We fondly remember the five course meals served with white linen every evening.)  What the Hebrew refugees have conveniently forgotten in their nostalgia for the good food of Egypt is that they were slaves.  They ate well, but they were not free.

God responded to their complaining by providing manna for each day.  The text describes it as being “like coriander seed” and having the taste of “wafers made with honey.”  Some think that it was the resin produced by flowering trees.  Whatever it was, it nourished them, as did the quails that appeared in the evening.  Whatever it was, God provided it.  They could trust God they would be fed. 

What do we learn already from the wilderness school?  Can’t we say, must we not say, food belongs to God; in fact, everything belongs to God.  Maybe you first learned the psalm as I did: “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof”; in a newer translation it reads “God owns this planet and all its riches.  The earth and every creature belong to God.”  If this is true, what does this say to our views of ownership and sovereignty?  Having, possessing, seems an unchallenged right with us—having property, houses, cars, and every imaginable appliance, as well as less tangible things—health, power, comfort.  At the state and national levels the right to ownership has been extended to possessing forests, oil reserves, lakes and aquifers. 

Douglas John Hall, a Canadian and one of my favorite theological writers, has observed that if we are true to our roots as a Christian community (and this story is one of those roots), we “will increasingly have to be found on the side of those who argue that the basic resources of the earth belong neither to individuals, nor corporations, nor nations, but are global treasures, given perpetually by a gracious God for the use of all the families of the earth—including those not yet born.”²  Think of the economic, political, ecological and spiritual implications if we truly adopted this stance! 

The story in Exodus continues beyond the verses printed on your bulletin.  The exiles were instructed to gather as much manna as they needed for each person in their family or clan.  They did.  And as they brought it in and measured it, they found (as the text reads) “those who gathered much had nothing over, and those who gathered little had no shortage; they gathered as much as each of them needed.”  They learned that all of them could live in sufficiency, with neither too much nor too little.  And they learned that hoarding smells.  Moses was clear that they were only to gather enough food for one day (with one exception that I’ll get to in a moment).  They didn’t need to worry about tomorrow’s food.  But some did, of course, and kept some back for the next day.  As the text delicately puts it, by the next morning the leftovers “bred worms and became foul.”

This learning—that hoarding brings decay—is so immense one hardly knows where to begin.  To avoid the Lutheran guilt that kicks in the minute you mention greed, we should note that God didn’t deprive the people in the wilderness.  They did not forgo the basic necessities of life; they lived and worked and loved in their families and wider circles of friendship; they lived in harmony with the earth.  God didn’t impose suffering or demand unreasonable sacrifice.  They had enough to live as God’s complete, special people.  (And don’t we, too?)  Yet they wanted more.  What they had was not enough. 

A few years ago the cognitive therapist Timothy Miller wrote a provocative little book, How to Want What You Have.  At one point he ticks off horrors that fill the world: Disappearance of species and nonrenewable resources, ethnic and religious hatred, warfare, crime, boredom, personal exploitation, child abuse, depression—the usual list.   

“Trace those horrors back to their roots,” said Miller, “and you’ll find that every one of them has been caused by someone’s desire for More.  The ultimate source of poverty, environmental destruction, war, crime, and all the rest is not stupidity but greed.  Greed does not exist in a culture, an economic system, or an era in history any more than a fish exists in an encyclopedia.  Greed lives in the hearts of individual human beings.”³ 

Note that this didn’t come from a preacher but from a therapist, based mostly on what he observed in his own practice. 

As they moved through the wilderness to the new land, God encouraged and forgave and shaped this people.  God sought to transform the greed in their hearts and teach them that happiness and fulfillment can be had right where they were.  They underwent a salvation experience, if you will.  This is no different than what God seeks to do with us.

Hannah Coulter is Wendell Berry’s newest novel.  If you are familiar with Berry’s work, you know that he writes marvelous stories about a fictional Port William, Kentucky.  Hannah Coulter is twice-widowed, alone, and in her late seventies.  In the novel she reviews her life.  She recalls her first husband, killed in WWII, and Nathan, her second, a veteran whom she married after the war.  In that context she reflects on the human propensity to want more: 

“Most people now are looking for a ‘better place,’ which means that a lot of them will end up in a worse one.  I think this is what Nathan learned from his time in the army and the war.  He saw a lot of places, and he came home.  I think he gave up the idea that there is a better place somewhere else.  There is no ‘better’ place than this, not in this world.  And it is by the place we’ve got, and our love for it and our keeping of it, that this world is joined to Heaven.”⁴

That’s the lesson about greed God taught the refugees in the wilderness.

As I mentioned, there was an exception to the rule of gathering enough manna for only one day.  This is what the Lord has commanded, said Moses: On the sixth day collect twice as much so you will have enough for the seventh day, because the seventh day is to be a day of rest.  No manna fell on the seventh day, but the extra food collected on the sixth day did not rot. 

What lesson was there in this detail?  People don’t have to work every day to receive and distribute God’s manna.  The extra time is a gift of God which makes it possible for humans and animals and the earth itself to rest.  Sabbath allows people to experience full time the wonder of friendship with God and others and all creation. 

The theme of the newest issue of The Lutheran is busyness as a spiritual issue.  The frenetic pace that some of us keep, even in retirement, coupled with omnipresent communication devices work against taking the time to discern God in our lives.  The issue appropriately points out that Jesus modeled balance and common sense in his understanding of sabbath.  It should not pass us by that he took time for rest and prayer, alone, without an Ipod, cell phone or laptop.  I commend the issue to you.  In his beautiful essay on Sabbath, Rabbi Abraham Heschel said the “meaning of the Sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space.  Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space [meaning work and all the material goods that go with it]; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to holiness in time.”⁵  “Time is the presence of God in the world of space.”⁶

In the wilderness school the refugees learned that God gives manna for all, that hoarding is unnecessary and even destructive, and that sabbath is a gift.  To help them remember these lessons, Moses told his brother Aaron to fill a jar with manna and keep it with them in their place of worship for all time.  And that’s how the 16^th chapter of Exodus ends. 

But there is an addendum to the wilderness school.  Jesus said, “I am the bread of life.”  He is our manna that feeds us for life.  To be sure, he feeds us in his meal at this altar.  But John’s gospel is clear that he feeds us as well in his teaching, a teaching that is deeply rooted in his Bible which we now call the Old Testament.  So in good faith we can affirm that the lessons the exiles learned in the wilderness school are at least a slice of the bread of life.  And, might we say, a piece of a “No Church Left Behind” initiative. 

¹  Daniel Erlander, Manna and Mercy (Mercer Island, Washington: The Order of Sants Martin and Teresa, 1992), 7.  I am indebted to Pastor Erlander for the primary ideas in this sermon. 

²  Douglas John Hall, The Steward: A Biblical Symbol Come of Age (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, rev. ed. 1990), 178.

³  Timothy Miller, How To Want What You Have (New York: Avon Books, 1995), 36.

⁴  Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004), 83.

⁵  Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1951), 10.

⁶  ibid., 100.