Exodus
16:2-21
The
United States has a history of odd people wandering around from one end to the
other. Some of them are legendary, like
Johnny Appleseed. Some of them turned
their wanderings into literature, like Jack Kerouac writing On the Road. Our music is full of songs by people like
Woody Guthrie:
“I roamed and rambled,
and followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of
her diamond deserts,
And all around me, a
voice kept sounding,
‘This land was made for
you and me.’ …”
Some of those roamers and ramblers have traveled
because they felt they had a message to spread, and one of those was a woman
who called herself Peace Pilgrim. She
set out in 1953 because she was concerned about what would happen if nuclear
weapons were allowed to proliferate, thinking that she would simply talk to
people everywhere she went and try to awaken their consciences on that
issue. Before her death in 1981, she had
been in all fifty states and crossed the continent seven times on foot. She traveled light, by necessity. After her death, one of her friends wrote:
“She walked ‘as a prayer’ and as a chance to inspire
others to work and pray for peace. She
wore navy blue shirt and slacks, and a short tunic with pockets all around the
bottom in which she carried her only worldly possessions: a comb, a folding
toothbrush, a ballpoint pen, copies of her message and her current
correspondence.”[1]
Of herself, she said:
“To the world I may seem very poor, walking penniless
and wearing or carrying in my pockets my only material possessions, but I am
really very rich in blessings which no amount of money could buy – health and
happiness and inner peace.
The
simplified life is a sanctified life. …”[2]
It
seems to me that Peace Pilgrim had a very specific vocation, a very individual
calling that is not a common one. In
fact, people who live a simple life of the kind that really is sanctified by
God are often set free to do that because of the support of others who do not
share that same calling. Henry David
Thoreau built his cabin out on the shores of Walden Pond and became famous for
writing about it. “Simplify, simplify,
simplify!” he wrote. Of course, other
records show that during the time he was living in simplicity, he spent a lot
of evenings having dinner at the house of his friends Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Waldo
Emerson.
The
Israelites would learn a lot during their years roaming and rambling in the
desert, and one of those things was how to depend on God that way, coming to
know that God would provide for them, that God’s provision is of the sort that
rises to the need, but at the same time is there to carry forward God’s plans,
not necessarily our own.
That
part of their story begins just after they had crossed the Red Sea, no small
exercise in faith itself. They found
themselves in the desert without adequate supplies.
“The
whole congregation of the Israelites complained against Moses and Aaron in the
wilderness. The Israelites said to them,
‘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; for you have .brought us out into
this wilderness to kill the whole assembly with hunger.’”
[Exodus 16:2-3]
It’s an old story: everything was so good in the old
country. It takes a lot of forms. An army officer I knew used to say that
someone’s best posting was always the last one or the next one. In this case, in their hunger (which was
real, and a valid concern) the people could only remember having enough food
and forgot that they were fed because they were slaves. They had bread and meat because someone was
protecting an investment. Maybe they ate
enough, but how much does that mean when it is beaten out of you an hour later?
You
could say that God’s investment in them was greater than the pharaoh’s,
though. The Lord did not bring them into
the wilderness to kill them off or to let them starve. He would provide food, and in so doing, he
told them,
“You
shall know that it was the Lord who brought you out of the land of Egypt.”
[Exodus 16:6]
Quail flew over each evening and landed on their camp,
and they had meat. As for bread,
“In
the morning there was a layer of dew around the camp. When the layer of dew lifted, there on the
surface of the wilderness was a fine flaky substance, as flaky as frost on the
ground. When the Israelites saw it, they
said to one another, ‘What is it?’ For
they did not know what it was. Moses
said to them, ‘It is the bread that the Lord has given you to eat.’”
[Exodus 16:13-15]
As it turned out, there was always enough for everyone
– just enough, never too little and never too much. Every morning there was a day’s supply. Moses warned people about that part, telling
them not to bother hoarding any of it, because whatever they kept into the next
morning went wormy. [Exodus 16:20] This
continued for the next forty years, until the next generation of people arrived
safely in the Promised Land.
More
than a thousand years later one of their descendants would teach his friends
about prayer and told them to pray, “Give
us this day our daily bread.” It is
a deep and lasting part of our faith stretching back and back and back to
recognize that God gives us what we need when we need it, morning by morning,
day by day. It is part of who we are to
entrust the future, including its needs, to him. It doesn’t mean that we don’t save or
plan. That would be to go to the
opposite extreme, like the servant in Jesus’ parable of the talents who takes
what he is given and just buries it for safekeeping and finds himself in
trouble when the owner returns and asks how his investments have done. What is not used, and used wisely, goes bad.
I am
sure that I am not the only person here who has ever opened up the refrigerator
and said, “What’s that smell?” If that
has never happened to you, let me tell you what happens next. You pretend that you didn’t notice anything,
take out what you were looking for, and close the door. Then a few hours later you go back and there’s
that smell again, a little bit stronger, and you start taking out containers
and looking into them. You ask yourself,
“What is this?” and thinking, “I meant to have that for lunch last Tuesday.” You see something else and realize it’s about
a month old. And then there are the
containers you decide not to open at all.
To
keep some things awhile is prudent, when you know they will be needed and used. To keep some things too long is mistaken, if
you don’t use them when they are needed. To keep some too long is toxic, when they become
an end in themselves. In all of it, the
point is to ask what God wants, and then to do it – and God finds ways to let
us know. The Bible is full of accounts
of how that happens. Just ask Paul or
Jonah or Esther or pretty much any of the prophets.
The book of Deuteronomy
pictures Moses’ successor, Joshua, addressing the people at the end of their
forty years of wandering in the desert. Soon
they will ether the Promised Land and the manna will no longer be on the ground
every morning, because they will be able once more to plant and to harvest on
their own. New lessons will need to be
learned and shared. At that key moment he
takes time to summarize what they have learned and how the soul of the nation
has deepened through their experiences. He sees both their hunger and their fullness
as God’s work, and tells them,
“He
humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna, with which
neither you nor your ancestors were acquainted, in order to make you understand
that one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the
mouth of the Lord.” [Deuteronomy 8:3]
With
that reliance on God, I invite you to join with me in a prayer written by Rubem
Alves, found in The Hymnal at #639
that speaks both of God’s simple blessings and of our need for guidance in
using them.
O
God, just as the disciples heard Christ’s words of promise and began to eat the
bread and drink the wine in the suffering of a long remembrance and in the joy
of a hope, grant that we may hear your words, spoken in each thing of everyday
affairs:
Coffee,
on our table in the morning;
the
simple gesture of opening a door to go out, free;
the
shouts of children in the parks;
a
familiar song, sung by an unfamiliar face;
a
friendly tree that has not yet been cut down.
May
simple things speak to us of your mercy, and tell us that life can be
good.
And
may theses sacramental gifts make us remember those who do not receive them:
who
have their lives cut every day, in the bread absent from the table; in the door
of the hospital, the prison, the welfare home that does not open;
in
sad children, feet without shoes, eyes without hope;
in
war hymns that glorify death;
in
deserts where once there was life.
Christ
was also sacrificed; and may we learn that we participate in the saving
sacrifice of Christ when we participate in the suffering of his little
ones.
Amen.
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