A Grateful Life (Part 2)
A Grateful Life (Part 2)
Exodus 16:1-5
The story of our earliest ancestors in faith is a story of liberation. They had been slaves for generations. Across generations, they had become very good at one thing: making bricks, the basic building blocks that the Egyptians needed. It wasn’t that other people couldn’t have made them, too. Bricks are not fine art. However, these people had made them for so long and their bricks were so reliable. Why change a good thing?
In return for making great bricks, those ancestors had their basic needs met. They had homes in which they could live. They could squeeze in a family life and time with friends. It wasn’t that they were kept in chains. It was just that their lives were very regimented and were organized around work. They knew what to expect and what was expected of them. Basically, they knew that they were going to be making bricks until the day they died.
Over time, across generations, these people did what people do. If a human being does something enough times, what we are doing becomes the new normal. We adjust. We adapt to our conditions. After a while, we forget that there are even alternatives to the life which consumes us.
Need an example of this? Try this one. How many of you were alive before cell phones? Do you remember when you went places and you were unreachable? Do you remember when, if you wanted to call someone, you had to either be at home or had to find a payphone? Do you remember walking past a payphone and checking the change return to see if someone forgot their dime?
At first, cell phones crept into our lives. I remember when Tracy got me a “bag phone” for the car which came in it’s own leather attache case. The phone looked just like a land line phone. I thought it was the craziest contraption, a huge luxury. Later, I had flip phones and popup phones. Over time, they got bigger and smaller and thinner until one day, they got smart. No longer would we have to fight the alphabet to type a text! No longer would we have to have a computer to search a topic or check our email. No longer would we have to be smart enough to remember things because our phones would remember everything (our schedules, our grocery lists, our favorite quotations) for us.
How many people here this morning have a smart phone? Do you ever leave home without it? Could you go a whole day without checking it? How much money would I have to pay you to never use a smart phone again?
My point here is this. If you told me in 1990 that one day, not just a lot of people but almost everyone, would not only have a cell phone but they would check that cell phone constantly, I would have thought that was crazy. If you had shown me people in crowds walking and holding slabs in their hands and checking their slabs or, even weirder, talking to their slabs in public, I would have said, “No way!” And yet, we are totally used to it, not just the young people who have never known a world without them, but us “old coots,” too, who lived a previous lifetime without them at all. Now, this is totally normal though…
Our ancestors had been living the brick-making life for so long that no one would have been able to remember any other life. Then, one day, Moses wanders into Pharaoh’s court and announces that he is there on God’s behalf to get Pharaoh to set the slaves free. There were only a couple of problems. First, this brick making arrangement was quite lucrative for Pharaoh and quite central to the Egyptian economy. Second, the people never asked to be set free. Again, the thought never would have occurred to them. Moses had a whole lot of persuading to do—to get the most powerful man in the world to do something that wasn’t in his interest and to get the slaves to take the risk to leave behind the only life they knew for a life they couldn’t even imagine.
With God’s help, and some frogs and locusts and a few other plagues, Moses gets the job done. Pharaoh relents. The people flee. The Red Sea parts. You know the story. Here’s the thing, though. Almost immediately, our ancestors in faith want to go back. They can’t handle all the unknowns, all the discomfort, all the hardship that comes with being free. They want to go back to the land where their needs are taken care of. They want to return to Egypt, be slaves again.
Why do they want to do this? They want to do this because they are terrified that their needs won’t be met. They are sitting and thinking about the good old days in Egypt when they had delicious lamb stew in the evenings and as much bread as they could eat all day. “Do you remember how tasty that stew was?”
We have to pause here and acknowledge that everyone who has ever gone camping for any length of time has done the same thing. You’ve anticipated going on this trip for a long time. You make plans and gather your gear. You plan out your menus and think to yourself, “This food actually sounds pretty good!” The big day comes and you are so excited to go. The first evening, you’re proud that you have a fire, that your tent is up and that dinner is ready. You think to yourself, “I could do this for a long time!”
It’s day three or so when you realize that your food pack is limited. You start to have a “hankering” for that one taste that isn’t in that pack. Your body is telling you that you have, in fact, been sleeping on the ground, that you have been working harder physically that you’ve worked in a while. The novelty of being in the wild begins to wear off. You begin to think of the food and all the other things that you are missing (your bed, the people you love, a comfortable chair.) You are totally free. You are where you worked hard to be. And yet, what you want is to go back home.
It is a totally human thing to not want to be where we are, to not be thankful for what we have, to think about how good things used to be. It is totally human but also a big problem. It is entirely possible to spend so much time wanting to be somewhere else that we completely miss the gifts waiting to be discovered and appreciated all around us in the present moment.
Our ancestors wanted to go back to “good, old Egypt”—home sweet home! They are blind to the fact that in the wilderness they have a direct relationship with a God who cares about them. After they have complained with one another about how much they miss the Egyptian stew and bread, God hears their complaints. God talks to Moses and basically says, “It’s going to start “raining” meat and bread on these guys.” However, there is a catch. (As we all know, there is always a catch, right?). Everyone will have enough food for today. However, no one gets to hoard the food. If you make a point of trying to stock up on manna, the manna that you don’t actually need today will rot and be full of worms by tomorrow. Your need for food today will be met but your need for total security so that you don’t have to rely on God will not be met.
What’s going on here? God hears the people’s complaints about having something to eat. God, (and Moses, no doubt) are tired of all the whining. The whole point of God caring enough to send Moses to bring the people out of slavery is that God cares. God wants to be in relationship with them. God wants the people to know that God is reliable and trustworthy. To put the matter differently, “Do you think I brought you here to starve? Do you think the point of life is to worry about food? Do you really think you can’t depend on me?”
Now, it’s easy to step back and question this. We’ve all met the person who won’t lift a finger to take care of themselves and says, “God will provide?” Is this text telling us that we don’t have to work, that we don’t have to take responsibility for ourselves? No…the people have to gather what has been provided. They will have to do things every day in order to be fed.
More importantly, the people have to do the hard work of not making the sole focus of their lives be manna. Yes, they will be fed. They are not going to starve. However, they will get tired of manna. They will be tempted to hoard it and feel more secure and less dependent on God. They will have to learn to set limits and allow enough to be enough. They will have to figure out what it really means to be God’s people.
“So,” you ask, “What about all the hungry people in our world? Is God just slacking on the job?” No…world hunger is real in our world but it is not a question of whether God provides enough food. Rather it is a distribution question. We all know that there is more than enough food but only if the food is shared. The problem is that there will be always be leaders who use food distribution as a way to have power over others. And, when we have enough for today, it is awfully easy to start compaining about what we have and lose sight, altogether of those who have nothing.
It is so hard to tell the difference between our needs and our wants. Some people believe that if you are a faithful person then all your wishes will be fulfilled. You will prosper in every way. You will be rich beyond your wildest dreams (hashtag: “blessed.”) Just know…this is not the story that Scripture tells. In the wilderness, our ancestors were ready to trade away their relationship with God for some stew. Later, when they had their own land and life felt more secure, they focused not on their needs but their wants: they want a king; they want a temple: they want to be special; they want to be like everyone else. Even if God is connected to us and our basic needs are met, the human thing to do is to turn to God and say, “Okay, God…what have you done for me lately?”
The foundation of our faith rests in a caring God who provides daily bread—manna from heaven. If you think about it, it should not suprise us that when Jesus taught his disciples to pray, he taught them to say, “Give us this day our daily bread.” “Every time we pray, God, remind us that your caring presence is woven into our daily lives. Remind us that we can trust you. Remind us that life has to be about more than bread, alone. Jesus, as “the bread of life” becomes our manna which sustains us in a world that can feel so insecure.
Think about how insecure there disciples must have felt as they followed Jesus. “Where will we stay tomorrow? What will we eat? Will there be enough? Will we be okay?” I never get the sense that Jesus shared “the plan” with them. The disciples didn’t get to see the map. Instead, from the beginning to the end, the message was simple “Follow me!” The hard truth was, “You’re going to have to trust me.” And yet, no one starved. They found places to stay. It wasn’t like the disciples’ every wish was fulfilled. However, their needs were accounted for in a way that made it possible to recognize and respond to the needs of others.
That’s the bottom line—that we are meant to care about more than what we want or need, that we are meant to look around us and see those who are in need, that we are meant to care for those people by sharing what we’ve been given with them. When we live gratefully, we, like our ancestors in faith, are liberated and set free.