September 23, 2012 | 4:00 p.m.

Bread from Heaven: When You Need It, When You Get It

Judith L. Watt
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Exodus 16:2–15
Matthew 20:1–16

Whether you’ve ever read the book of Exodus or not, if you’ve spent any time in the church, you most likely know that the Israelites did an awful lot of grumbling when they were on their way from Egypt to the Promised Land. The Bible says it was forty years they wandered. It was a heck of a long trip.

I like to imagine Moses and Aaron in the front seat of the car, with all of the Israelites in the back seat, chiming in together, “When will we get there? How much longer?” I don’t envy Moses and Aaron. They had taken on a big job for God, and the charges under their care and the conditions they faced weren’t making it one bit easy to deal with the people who were following them.

There’s been an awful lot of complaining going on in our lives for awhile now—if not aloud, then silently in the pits of our stomachs. Complaining and worrying. September of 2008 the stock market sank. Housing prices in some areas have been cut in half. The level of civility in political campaigns and jargon keeps declining. Killing of young people in our city has escalated. Back in 2008, after the bailout of the huge international insurance company, AIG, the Chicago Tribune had an insert with an article about AIG’s bailout. The article was titled “United States of Anxiety.” Here’s what it said: “America, sharply divided this decade by politics, is now united in worry. Our economy is faltering. Our health-care and energy costs are soaring. We’re fighting wars of security abroad and a battle over identity at home. Our problems run deep and wide.”

Back then, and now, we are facing the anxiety of looking directly into the wilderness ahead of us and not knowing what we’ll find.

The Israelites were worried about their survival in the wilderness. Their complaining is not a complaining that comes from only a lack of faith. They are complaining not because they are whiney people, but because they have real physical hunger. The rations are absent. They are like the people anywhere whose food supplies are decreased significantly because of natural disaster. They are like the people who complained in the Dome in New Orleans during Katrina. They are like people today who complain because their health care benefits have been diminished or their income has not caught up with costs or their ability to find work has been nil. These people traveling with Moses aren’t whiners. They have real need. They are worried about their ability to survive. And they are smack dab in the middle of a journey that had become very arduous. And there was no food.

Our worries are concrete also. There are jobs at stake, maybe some of yours. You’ve worried and wondered about retirement savings. The value of your home. Or having enough to send your kid to college. Maybe some of you are worried about this month’s food on the table. These are concrete worries. They are worries that affect us, whether we are steeped in faith or whether we aren’t. We aren’t sure we can trust the leaders in charge. We are nervous. So were they. And we would like to turn around and go back—push the rewind button. That’s what the Israelites wanted to do. Because here they are, out in the wilderness, on their way to this supposed Promised Land, and all of a sudden the excitement of the trip and the miracles of God were over. No food. No water. Exhaustion. Anxiety.

How do we live as a faithful people in times of economic hardship or physical distress? How do we live when real concrete worry about present survival or future survival plagues us?

Today’s section of scripture gives us some ideas.

Look the wilderness straight in the eye. The Israelites had begun dreaming about the past. Emotionally they were focused on the past, because at least in Egypt they’d had food, even if it was just a bowl of porridge set before them, even if they were only slaves. At least there was food of some sort, if not freedom. They complained to Moses and Aaron. But it was God who answered the complaint. It was as if God stood before them and put both hands squarely on their shoulders and turned them again to face right into the wilderness, to look again toward the future and God said, “I will and I will and I will.”

The Lord focused them on the future and reminded them that the promises of Yahweh would be in the future just as the promises had always been in the past. If they were so focused on the past, the Israelites wouldn’t be able to see the miracles and God’s provision to come. God turned them around to look the wilderness squarely in the eye.

What happened—the raining down from heaven of manna in the morning and the appearance of quails in the evening—those were natural phenomena. Natural phenomena of God have created order. In the Sinai Peninsula, a type of plant lice would puncture the fruit of the tamarisk tree and a substance would be excreted, a yellowish, white flake that would congeal. It was all over the ground that morning in the dew. It was manna, and God’s creation produced it. And it could be collected and baked into a kind of bread.

The quails were known as migratory birds that would fly from Africa and be blown about by the Mediterranean winds and find themselves so exhausted that at times in their journey they could be caught by hand. That’s what could have happened that evening, in the miracle of God’s grace. The quails could have found themselves exhausted right in front of these starving pilgrims. And if the Israelites had been turned toward the past, only looking backwards, they may not have seen this miracle that came in the future of their wilderness.

Face the wilderness and know that God is in it. Look for God there. As a church in transition, looking for a new pastor, we look to the future too, but it’s awfully tempting to get hung up on the past. What will God do when we can’t possibly imagine any solution? How will God rain down manna from heaven? When the questions overwhelm us and we don’t have the answers, we are to turn toward the future again, look the wilderness straight in the eye, and know that God and God’s promises are in that wilderness too. Look the wilderness straight in the eye.

Moses and Aaron also told the people this: “Draw near to the Lord, for he has heard your complaining.”

Draw near to the Lord.That instruction is an anchor for us. It is an anchor in times of hardship and worry. There are concrete ways to do it. Find time to read scripture at some point in every day. If not every day, commit yourself to certain days that are your scripture days. And if you have no time for that because of long commutes, find something on some discs or download something to your iPod that you can take with you. If you can’t do that, start coming to our ongoing Bible class as we read through the Bible in one year. You need not to have started at the beginning. If scripture isn’t the answer for you, take the hymnal and use a hymn per day or a hymn per week for devotion and reflection. Draw near to the Lord at least on certain days. If you can’t concentrate when you sit down to pray, forget it and instead take a piece of paper or a journal and start to just write a letter to God, a short note.

Every time I have gotten away from a practice such as this I have eventually found myself in my own kind of wilderness, and every time God has turned me around again and I have drawn near to the Lord. The practice I may have engaged in early in the morning changed my day for the whole day. These are spiritual disciplines, and they are like any discipline—like exercise: they get hard and sometimes you just want to forget it. But exercise trainers tell us that the body, the muscles have memory. From day to day, they have memory as to how many pounds you’ve lifted. Our spirits have memory, too. We develop spiritual muscle when we engage in these disciplines. Draw near to God. Draw near to your worshiping community. Offer your worries aloud to someone else or some group here within the church who will pray with you. Ask for prayer. When you do, it is like streams of living water in the middle of dry land.

The third instruction has to do with greed and gluttony. God’s instruction to the Israelites in this story is that they should gather as much as each of them needs, being sure to provide for those in their tents. In other words, take what you need, provide for your family, and there’s no need to hoard.

I like the story of these grumblers in the wilderness. They are real human people with real human needs. And God takes them by the shoulders and turns them around, so that they can look at the future, knowing that it is the God we know in Jesus Christ who keeps beckoning them forward, who stands behind them, and who walks beside them. May it be so for us.