September 21, 2008 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Bread for the Journey

Alice M. Trowbridge
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 105:1–6, 27–45
Exodus 16:2–15

“When the Israelites saw it, they said to one another,
‘What is it?’ For they did not know what it was.”

Exodus 16:15 (NRSV)

What makes something bread from heaven? Is it the thing itself or the one who sends it? How you answer those questions has a lot to do with how you sense God’s presence in your life. . . . If you are willing to look at everything that comes to you as coming to you from God, then there will be no end to the manna in your life. Nothing will be too ordinary or too transitory to remind you of God. The miracle is that God is always sending us something to eat. . . . God gives the true bread from heaven, the bread that gives life to the world.

Barbara Brown Taylor,
Bread of Angels

This summer my family and I traveled to Wyoming. If you’ve been there, then you can see the landscape vividly in your mind’s eye—broad expanses and sweeping plains between majestic mountain views. Sage bushes cast their fresh aroma through the dusty dry air; the sounds of rushing clear rivers offering refreshment and relief during the heat of the day. There were high altitudes and thin air and brilliant sun and a true blue sky by day and, come nightfall, a sky so marvelously packed with every celestial being that words cannot tell the whole story. With no competition from city light, just that natural cathedral of brilliant mystery—the Milky Way and the shooting stars and the moon in its course. All of us were mesmerized each night.

We got to know the owners of a cattle ranch while we were there. For several generations they have maintained the demanding enterprise of running a cattle ranch. There were several nights when we sat around a campfire, and they told us some of their stories—stories about their long-ago pilgrimage to the west, stories about the ranching life, stories about the animals that have been placed in their care, how much they love those animals. They said how much their hearts hurt when they lose a beloved creature to a virus or an injury or to the cruelty of Mother Nature. They shared stories about the daily grind of ranch life, where all animals great and small require daily attention—from the wee hours of the morning to the end of the day, throughout all the extreme seasonal changes. Work on a ranch is not for the faint of heart. This life requires daily commitment and discipline, an abiding love for the land and the animals, a strong measure of humility, and a profound trust in God, that God will protect them and their animals and that God will provide for their daily needs.

Mother Nature can be relentless: surprising late spring blizzards can damage the crops and put young calves at risk, and they told us that occasionally, when a calf comes in winter, there is only a window of about one hour to birth that calf and get her warm, otherwise the frigid temperatures will take her. Cattle ranchers are dependent upon the established cycles of nature. There is only so much the rancher can control; the rest they entrust to the hands of God.

Stories are powerful, and these stories capture some of the defining moments for this Wyoming ranching family, reminding them of who they are, what they are about, and in whom they place their trust. Many of us have sacred family stories, and similar stories can be found in scripture, among the family of faith.

We encounter one such foundational story today: the story of the Israelites in the wilderness receiving the manna from heaven. We know the Israelites have been liberated from captivity in Egypt, by God’s own love and faithfulness, and now they find themselves in the wilderness, headed toward the promised land. While they have their freedom and while they are told to believe in the future with hope, these are little more than faraway concepts, intangibles that have no relevance to the here and now. For they are hungry, and there is no food in sight. And as can happen when daily needs go unmet, they complain. Things escalate; accusations are made; and a food crisis becomes a faith crisis. The new identity of these people as God’s own has not yet sunk in, and they begin to long for the days in Egypt when, though they were captives, their bellies were full.

We witness in this story something of the character of God. In the Israelites doubt and fear, in their murmurings and complaining, where is God? Do they think God has forgotten them? Often when God seems farthest away, that’s when God is closest. And God is close to them. God is hearing. God is listening. God is actively engaged, and God addresses their needs with the provision of manna and quail. And God tests them, instructing them to take only what they need for their daily nourishment.

This is difficult. These people are hungry; it runs against their instinct to take only what is needed for the day and to resist the temptation to store up. The Israelites are in the process of growing in their trust. God is helping them to grow in faith. God’s work of redemption has already happened, apart from any demonstration of obedience or trust or loyalty on the part of Israel. The law has not even been delivered at Sinai yet. And yet God is asking these people to examine their behavior and to curb the temptation to covet or steal and to put their trust in the Lord.

No hording, no building larger barns, no anxieties about what to eat or what to drink or what to wear. We are constantly challenged throughout scripture to trust more—to learn to rely on God not only for the macro vision of hope for our lives, but equally as much in the micro scale, to learn to rely on God for our daily needs and to look for God in everything.

Walter Brueggmann, in a theological handbook on Old Testament themes, describes the faith we observe in this text not as an “assent to God” but rather as a “trust in God.” “Trust,” Brueggmann says, “is not to be understood primarily in emotive terms. Trust is a practice that entails obedience” (Brueggemann, Reverberations of Faith, p. 78). And action, and repetition. When we think of the Israelites in this story, we hear the word chosen—chosen not as in who’s in and who’s out, for that is not Christ’s way. And chosen not as in—being more desirable or in a place of greater privilege or ease—for that is not Christ’s way either. The chosen ones of Israel are those who, throughout history, have entrusted their lives to God’s care, those who have taken the harrowing journeys and contended with the hard questions, and performed the duties and responsibilities of life together, all because they know to whom they belong. The priesthood of all believers, in which any willing soul is welcome to share and participate, is the dynamic whereby God is in charge and each of us brings certain gifts to use for the work of the kingdom. As author Kathleen Norris says, “That’s a tall order, to literally be a sacrament, and it helps to remember Jesus’ statement in John’s gospel: You did not choose me; I chose you.”

Kathleen Norris tells about a new member Sunday at her church in the bitter cold of January. Elders gathered with the new members, and one of them, Norris says, was an elder named Ed, whom she hadn’t ever liked much, someone who seemed ill-tempered most of the time. The minister asked this elder to formally greet the group, and so he did. Standing there somewhat awkwardly, this man cleared his throat, paused, and found these words: “I’d like to welcome you to the body of Christ.” Norris said her mouth dropped open, for she had never heard words remotely like this come from this fellow’s mouth. “Like distant thunder,” she writes, “the words made me more alert. I was astonished to realize that while I may never have liked Ed very much, I had just been commanded to love him.” And so chosen does not exclude others; chosen means entrusting our lives to God and to one another—the body of Christ—and recognizing the good and the holy wherever we encounter it. (Amazing Grace, pp. 142–143).

In these times of uncertainty, with doubts and fears prevalent in many realms of life, our own complaining is not unfamiliar to us. Just as the Israelites were tested then, we are tested now. But just as God was watching over the Israelites, God is watching over us now—watching and listening, preparing to give us what we need.

John Wesley, in times not unlike our own and on behalf of those who shouldered doubt and fear, was asked the question, “But what can I do for the kingdom today?” to which he replied, “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.”

Our trust is in the one who created us, redeemed us, and calls us into a new freedom. Our doubts are not obstacles to our faith but the seeds that will eventually strengthen our faith. Today is all we know and all we have, and the time for our faithfulness is right now.

Stories are powerful. And every so often there is a story right in our own backyard that illuminates what daily devotion to God is all about.

Many of us heard the story this past week about the family in Chesterton, Indiana, whose ten-year-old son, Doug, had survived a near drowning in the swollen creek near his home last Sunday morning. The story is referenced again in this morning’s Chicago Tribune, in a front-page article on heroes, highlighting people who acted without any hesitation or doubt, people whose actions took great courage.

Doug and a couple of his friends were dipping their feet into the creek after the torrential rains that hit the Midwest, and Doug slipped and went into the rushing river. Doug’s neighbors next door were home. Mark Thanos, a high school English teacher and coach, heard his wife scream, sped out of the house, and jumped into the rolling creek to save the boy. When Thanos struggled, his seventy-four-year-old father, John, followed him into the water. Neither man survived.

Later that day, these words came from the boy: “I wish he knew I could swim through that tube,” little Doug said, with a cracking voice, as he clung to his mother’s side. “I wish he didn’t love me that much.” Two men whose love for neighbor, for child, for son, was so ingrained in them that in the critical moment, when there was no time to deliberate, instinct led them to jump in that water, to chase after the boy, neighbor after neighbor, father after son.

This is a tragic story, but I tell it this morning because tragedy does not have the last word. (The following elements of the story are taken from articles in the Chicago Tribune by Stacy St. Clair on 16 September and John Kass on 17 September.)

The following day, young Doug and his family visited the newly widowed Victoria Thanos and her sons. There would be nothing they could do to lessen the horrific events of the previous day, but they tried. Doug brought Victoria and her sons a homemade cake. Victoria embraced the boy. She told him she was glad he was feeling better and that she thought his cake looked delicious. She then invited the family to stay for something to eat. And she told them stories, stories about her family.

That cake, that meal, the bread they broke together—that was bread for the journey, a symbol of God’s daily provision. And the graciousness and the love with which the grieving family received this gesture affirms that God is present—with both families, in the courage and grace both for the boy’s family to bake the cake and for the grieving family to receive it that way. That’s not our human weakness; that’s God providing. As Doug left the Thanos’s house, Victoria thanked him and his whole family for their concern and hugged the boy once more. She tells her friends, if you pray for anyone, pray for that little boy.

The Thanos sons have a gift that their father and grandfather left to the world: One person summed it up this way: “Those boys know that actions are important, not just words. That’s always what their dad and grandpa wanted to teach them—to be good to your neighbors, to live that, to understand it’s what you do, not just what you say.” That’s what they taught us all in those heroic, selfless, instantaneous actions of two men trying to save a child’s life and the compassion of the mother to the survivor.

Theirs was a love that offers us a glimpse into the way God loves us. God loves us with the kind of love that is first, foremost, and forever for us, seeking us, providing for us. A love that is with us in the day’s challenges and through the toils of the night. A love that jumps in, stands firm, holds on, and is always faithful. A love that puts our stories in the context of God’s story for human history, the story that anchors us and roots us in the community of the faithful, the body of Christ, those here on earth and those in heaven. A love that calls us into the world to action, not just words; that reminds always that we are chosen, claimed, loved by a love that no hunger, no thirst, no wilderness or circumstance can ever defeat. A love that conquers even death. A love that will never let us go.

Our greatest joy and confidence is that the one who upholds our life and the life of the world is completely trustworthy, and therefore we can propose to live a trusting life in response. The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning; great is thy faithfulness. Amen.