The Tenth Sunday After Pentecost
Exodus 16:2-4; 9-16
Psalm 78:23-29
Ephesians 4:1-16
John 6:24-35
Let your continual mercy, O Lord, cleanse and defend your Church; and, because it cannot continue in safety without your help, protect and govern it always by your goodness; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
I can picture the people of Israel
out there in the desert, after their dramatic escape from Pharaoh. They are
tired and out of sorts. Their feet hurt from walking in the hot sand, and their
eyes and lips are scratchy and dry from sun and wind.
They haven’t had a good meal or a
peaceful night’s sleep since they left Egypt, always on the move, packing and
unpacking their meager possessions over and over again. Their babies cry a lot,
and parents are walking with weak, whiny toddlers in their arms. Every day is
like the last one: full of monotony, suffering, hunger, and dwindling hope.
This Moses who looked like such a promising leader back in Egypt now seems kind
of bossy. Maybe he can’t be trusted? Maybe he’s got ulterior motives? The known
routine of their lives in Egypt, while ruled by oppression and injustice, was
at least familiar. They had a stable roof over their heads, water to drink, and
food to eat, at least. When you and your babies are hungry and thirsty, it’s
kind of hard to care much about abstract things like freedom.
I don’t blame the people of Israel
for grumbling to God, not one bit. And this food that God conjures up for them?
Couldn’t God at least make it something familiar like bread or goat meat? Why
this white, flakey stuff that rots when it sits too long in the sun? And it
comes with rules, too!? You have to gather it at the right time and remember to
gather extra before the Sabbath?! Seriously? As if the people don’t have enough
to worry about already.
I was interested to learn that “manna”
sounds like the Hebrew for “What is this?” I’m pretty sure that when the people
first look at God’s miracle of manna, the “what’s this?” that they utter is one
tinged with doubt and disappointment.
I imagine that they look at it with
the same wrinkled noses and worried tone that my little kids used when
confronted for the first time with a
blob of corn pudding on their plates, or that my European relatives used when
first served bright red, wiggly Jello salad: “What is this ….?!?”
Unfortunately,
we human beings don’t have to be stumbling around in the desert in order to
utter a disgruntled, “What’s this?” in response to God’s generous ways. In his
recent column in the New York Times, David Brooks admits that it is his high
expectations for his life that often deprive him of the gift of gratitude for
what he is given. He explains that staying in a fancy hotel makes him grumpier
than when he is staying at a budget motel. At the fancy hotel, he has higher
expectations, uttering an unhappy, “What’s this?!” when he can’t figure out the
shower controls or when there’s no coffee machine in the room. At the budget
motel, he’s not expecting much, so he takes the shortcomings of these
establishments more in stride. As Brooks points out, our American culture teaches
us that we are masters of our own fate. Our desert is a consumer, capitalist wilderness.
We feel that we earn what we deserve. When we work hard and graduate from good
schools, we think that we are supposed to be rewarded. We expect life, God, and
other people, to give us the benefits that we earn by our good works. When that
doesn’t happen, disappointment leads to dissatisfaction and resentment.
Instead of being grateful each day
for the small joys of motherhood, for example, I remember spending way too much
time counting up all of my parenting hours—expecting my children’s behavior to
reflect the effort and expertise that I put into it. When their behavior didn’t
match up, I would feel sorry for myself. When I work hard, I expect a reward: a
vacation, a nice dinner out, a new dress. I tend to see these things as
something due to me, rather than as a blessing bestowed on me by my loving God.
For gratitude to happen, writes
Brooks, a gift—a kindness—must exceed our expectations. We have to put less
stock in our own ability to control our lives and celebrate rather our
dependence upon God’s grace and the mercy of our fellow human beings. We need
to live in a world “in which gifts surpass expectations, in which insufficiency
is acknowledged and dependence celebrated.”[1]
In other words, if we are encouraged to expect a 5-course dinner from our
five-star lives, then we’re going to utter an exasperated “what’s this?” when
we are served some sticky white manna flakes. If we see ourselves as the frail
creatures that we are, however, dependent upon daily bread from our Creator,
then we will see each small blessing as an occasion for gratitude. As a
parishioner pointed out last night at Dinner Church: If we are caught up in the
injustice of our own suffering during an illness, then we wallow in misery. But
if we acknowledge our weakness, accepting the help of our caregivers, then we
soon find ourselves overflowing with gratitude for a host of small blessings
lavished upon us through the strangers, doctors, and nurses who care for us.
It’s easy for us to miss God’s totally
loving and self-giving response to the plight of the grouchy Israelites in our
story. We can easily picture their grumbling and their suffering state. But did
you even catch the loving response of God to their ungrateful and anxious
words? “Draw near to the Lord,” offers Moses. “He has heard your complaining.”
He will act. He will provide what you need. He will feed you with meat and
manna, so that you may know that he is your loving God--your God who will
always provide for you, who will always care for you, no matter how much you
rebel and complain, no matter how little you notice.
My adult daughter came home from a
dinner with her old high school friends the other night and confided that they
were all talking about how they now view their parents in a new light. All of
the parental hypocrisy, strictness, and mistakes that so annoyed these women
when they were teenagers have suddenly faded into an understanding of their
parents’ wisdom. They realized that the pierced-ears and pairs of shoes of
their expectations—the things for which they pined and whined as teens--were
not the measure of the abundant love out of which their parents’ actions always
arose. In the same way, isn’t it always in looking back into the past that we
are able to see the loving hand of God in our lives, even when the present is
too tumultuous for us to grasp it?
In his teaching, Jesus is always
trying to get us away from our economy of fear and scarcity, reward and
punishment, tit for tat, debt and debtor. Jesus shows us the opposite of our
American “merit economy,” based on an abundance of possessions. He offers us
life abundant, rather than an abundance of things; he puts the first at the end
of the line; he puts forgiveness above rule-following; he tells stories in
which all of the workers receive the same wage, no matter how long they work.
He tells us that the prayers of the tax collector are valued over the prayers
of the religious leader. Jesus spends his time surprising us, reversing the
order that we build around our lives. Finally, he does more than just give us
bread, he becomes bread: the bread of life. As David Lose puts it, in Jesus’
life and death, “God does the unexpected … instead of coming in power, God came
in weakness; and instead of giving us a miracle, God gives us God’s own self.”[2]
Like the Israelites in the
wilderness, we go forward into the unknown with the expectation that we are
being guided by a God whose love never fails: trust in this abundant and
eternal love is what Jesus is asking us when he tells us in today’s Gospel that
we must “believe” in the Bread of Life that God gives us in his Son Jesus. This
is also how to enjoy the blessings of gratitude. G.K. Chesterton defines
gratitude as “happiness doubled by wonder.” Wonder grows out of relationship
with our God. How can we but wonder at God’s deep, abiding love for us, God’s
wayward children? Our exclamation of “What is this?” in the face of God’s
strange and constant blessings must be filled with wonder, rather than scorn.
Not “what IS this?” but “what is THIS?” must be our daily prayer.
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