Sermon: Greed and Grace
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Sermon: Greed and Grace Text: Exodus 16:2-21 Date: September 21, 2008 Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, Eagle Harbor Congregational Church If you have any kids in the Bainbridge School District I bet you know when the school administration starts paying attention to the provision of snacks during school hours. During this season, notes get sent home urging parents to make sure there are snacks, and volunteers even provide extra snacks to cover for the deadbeat moms and dads who forgot to send granola bars and apple slices. Which season is it? WASL season, of course. The days our young people are taking their standardized achievement tests, upon which depend the graduation of the students, the approval of the federal government, the reputation of the teachers, and the bragging rights of the community (if Bainbridge scores top those of the Mercer Island Schools). Why the fuss over snacks? Because we want our bright youngsters to be able to concentrate, and not be distracted by the sound or sensation of grumbling tummies. It’s hard to think about anything else if you’re hungry, right? Grumbling tummies led directly to grumbling Israelites, according to today’s scripture story. The people had barely escaped their slavery in Egypt through the mighty hand of God and had begun their journey to the land of milk and honey. But they didn’t pass “Go” and proceed directly to the Promised Land; they had some time to spend in the wilderness first. They had been on the journey for about two and a half months. I suppose that means they had pretty much run out of whatever food they had been able to carry with them. They were hungry. And like hungry children everywhere, the Children of Israel started to complain: “If only we had died by the hand of the Lord (i.e. died of old age) 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 this whole assembly with hunger.” I don’t blame them a bit for complaining. I have barely ever skipped a meal in my 49 years, and I get cranky if I have to eat lunch an hour late. I can only imagine the desperation of the truly hungry. Of course they complained; wouldn’t you? Interesting, isn’t it, how they suddenly grew nostalgic for the good old days of slavery? Looking back, the cruelties of seven-day-a-week forced labor fade in memory as they reminisce about the savory taste of stew and hot bread; maybe building Pharaoh’s palaces and banks wasn’t so bad after all. Oh, sure, there were the whips, the probability that the young women would be abused by the foremen, the endless hours under the scorching sun, the bone-weariness, home to hovels with roofs that leaked…but the lamb stew, with just a hint of rosemary, man, that was delicious. It’s hard to concentrate on the journey to freedom over the growling, grumbling tummies. Just like last week’s Exodus story, when they were in a frenzy of fear, when trouble arose the people of Israel turned on the leadership. Moses and Aaron sounded a little defensive, crabbily reminding the cranky people that a complaint against them is really a complaint against God, who is in charge of this journey. But in spite of all the grumbling going around, God is gracious. God responded to the needs of the people, and taught them a lesson about abundant grace at the same time. Kate Huey opens her commentary on i.ucc.org this week with some reflections about God’s name. “When God met Moses up on that mountain and gave him his assignment to bring the people of Israel out of slavery in Egypt, Moses (perhaps gingerly) asked for God's name: who might he say sent him on such a bold mission? While God's response is translated in various and interesting ways, most often as "I Am Who Am," another version is particularly fitting for our story today: "I will be who I will be." Someone has rendered this as "I will be what is needed at the time." The wilderness in today's passage provides a perfect setting for God to be exactly that: just what the people need at that moment in time.” [1] Notice: not what the people want. What they need. How does that song go—“You don’t always get what you want…you get what you need.” It sounded like they might have wanted to go back to the fleshpots and filling bread of Egypt. Their life as slaves may have had its miseries, but they were miseries they to which they were accustomed, predictable miseries. The patterns of the past often seem to offer more security than an unknown future, and keep in mind that their basic need for food was being met back there. Can’t blame them for wanting to throw this trip in reverse. However, God doesn’t, in this instance, give them what they want. God gives them what they need. Food. But a new kind of food, and a new way of obtaining it, and a new way of thinking about it. They wanted the fleshpots of Egypt, and God sent flocks of quail; not such a strange substitute for people out camping. They wanted the lovely oven-baked loaves of their old home, and God sent WHAT? What is translated as “manna” has as its literal root in Hebrew the question, “What is it?” That kind of cracks me up—God provides “What is it?” It was so unfamiliar a form of bread that Moses had to instruct the people, “It is the bread that the Lord has given you to eat.” Given that scholars suggest that manna most likely was the excrement of a certain type of scale insect that infested a certain type of tree, it’s no wonder the people were puzzled. They may well have been dubious about its edibility, as I would be had I been advised to partake of the excrement of insects. However, they were hungry, and it was plentiful, and apparently it tasted pretty good. So now their hunger was satisfied, and they could get back to concentrating on what it meant to be God’s people on a journey of liberation. God set about teaching them some things they needed to know about God’s character, the nature of the world through which they travelled, the type of community God wanted them to form, and an essential spiritual practice that would remind them of all these things. And God taught this whole complex lesson with bug poop. Cracks me up. Let’s review. Manna teaches something about God’s character: God is gracious. God provides what we need. God’s grace is abundant. God is creative. God supplies what we need through the natural order. Maybe, also, God has a sense of humor. Manna teaches something about the nature of the world through which the people of God travel: Life here isn’t always a cake walk, but there is enough for everyone to be sustained. Nature—God’s good creation—provides enough for all the people who are prepared to harvest nature’s abundance. You will have to work in order to enjoy the harvest. Manna teaches something about the community God wants the people to enjoy. This is a community in which there is enough to go around, so everybody gets what they need, and no one gets too little. And the corollary is, nobody gets too much. This is a community in which there is essential equality, so there doesn’t have to be a lot of striving and competition. Greed is actively discouraged; if anyone gathers up too much manna, it very quickly spoils, breeding worms and smelling foul. Manna reinforces one of the core values of the people of God: the practice of the Sabbath. Remember, you couldn’t get more than one day’s worth of the daily bread, except for the day before the Sabbath. Then you could gather up two days’ worth, so that everyone gets a day off from the harvest on the Sabbath, and still the Sabbath supply would not spoil. And the Sabbath practice underlined all the previously mentioned lessons—the graciousness of God, God’s abundant provision for our needs, the natural rhythm of the planet which has periods of activity and periods of rest that nurture abundance, and the community of equals in which every person deserves rest, from the chief to the lowliest grunt worker. Sabbath—a day of rest to enjoy God and enjoy what God has made—has from the very beginning been a counter-cultural spiritual practice. Among its many dimensions is a reminder that God provides for human needs so abundantly that everyone can afford to take a day off. It therefore introduces a reminder of abundance into the hard-scrabble daily work of getting enough food, shelter, clothing and so forth to survive. Keeping the Sabbath is a way of keeping God’s story of abundant grace in the foreground, at least every seventh day. There’s no doubt that the story of God’s abundant grace is not the only one being told in human culture. Biblical scholar Walter Brueggeman suggests that there are really two major stories about what the world is like continuously playing against each other in human culture. There is a narrative of Scarcity, and a narrative of Abundance. Brueggeman points out that in the first 47 chapters of the Bible, the emphasis is very much on abundance, a celebration of what God has made. Then the Egyptian Pharaoh had a dream that there would be a famine, and he was frightened, and he got organized to administer, control, and monopolize the food supply. In terms of the biblical narrative, it was Pharaoh who introduced the principle of scarcity into the world economy. In general terms, it was during that time period that the Israelites became slaves, trading their land, their cattle, and finally themselves—what they had for collateral—for food security. Ever since that time there is a contest in the human story between the liturgy of abundance and the myth of scarcity. The myth of scarcity strongly shapes the way we see the world. Brueggeman writes, “We who are now the richest nation are today’s main coveters. We never feel that we have enough; we have to have more and more, and this insatiable desire destroys us. Whether we are liberal or conservative Christians, we must confess that the central problem of our lives is that we are torn apart by the conflict between our attraction to the good news of God's abundance and the power of our belief in scarcity—a belief that makes us greedy, mean and un-neighborly. We spend our lives trying to sort out that ambiguity.” [2] It’s tough to stay tuned into God’s story of abundance when the story of scarcity exercises such influence over the way we do things in our time and place. I remember once being at the Folklife festival in Seattle listening to some sort of quiet music on an outdoor stage—a singer with a guitar, I think. There arose a racket coming from the street behind the lawn where the audience was seated. It was a parade of drummers—Brazilian drummers, if I remember correctly, with lots of people marching along keeping time with their own drums. It was exciting, and very loud. As you might imagine, it was tricky to stay tuned to the beautiful music on the stage in front of me with all the noise and agitation going on around the edges. I believe that is the situation in which we find ourselves today with the competing narratives of scarcity and abundance going on around us. We would like to stay tuned to the magnificent, gracious, generous love of God and God’s will for communities of equal sharing, but it’s tricky in the atmosphere of frantic acquisitiveness, greed, and fear in which we live. As Brueggeman writes, “We can live according to an ethic whereby we are not driven, controlled, anxious, frantic or greedy, precisely because we are sufficiently at home and at peace to care about others as we have been cared for. But if you are like me, while you read the Bible you keep looking over at the screen to see how the market is doing. If you are like me, you read the Bible on a good day, but you watch Nike ads every day. And the Nike story says that our beginnings are in our achievements, and that we must create ourselves… According to the Nike story, whoever has the most shoes when he dies wins. The Nike story says there are no gifts to be given because there's no giver. We end up only with whatever we manage to get for ourselves. This story ends in despair. It gives us a present tense of anxiety, fear, greed and brutality.” [3] Jim Wallis, blogging on the current financial disaster in American society, headlined his comments with a paraphrase of a famous quip made by James Carville during the Clinton campaign: “It’s the economy, stupid.” Do you remember that? Carville was trying to summarize what was most important in that election season. Jim Wallis’ revision for diagnosing the heart of the matter in the current financial earthquake: “It’s the greed, sinner.” Greed is at the rotten core of shaky financial institutions in which leaders went for short-term gains, many making fortunes ($33 billion handed out in bonuses on Wall Street last year), without regard for long-range fiduciary responsibility. I know that is a broad generalization, but I agree with Wallis’ analysis of the sin of greed. And the driving force behind greed is the noisy myth of scarcity—we better hurry up and get ours now, and more and more. Suddenly the product of this pattern of behavior, like the manna which was gathered to excess, is a foul smell and a rotten mess. I don’t want to indulge in too much blame-throwing; it’s cathartic but not very productive. We may, like the people of Israel, find ourselves moaning and complaining and nostalgically longing for the “good old days”; go ahead, but don’t get stuck there. Complaining is allowed, but it’s not all that constructive. It is more productive for people of faith to purposefully tune into that story of abundance amidst the din of panic about a new era of scarcity. If we trust that God will provide what we need, and trust that although life may be different, there will still be abundant grace, it is incumbent upon us now to start looking for the new “manna” that God will provide. In the Exodus story, we are not told if manna was a new thing that God dreamed up to respond to the people’s needs, or whether the manna was there all along and people just needed to be educated in how to recognize and use it. It’s quite possible that God is going to be providing graciously for us now in forms we will not immediately recognize as a sign of grace. God will provide for us in creative new ways, and also by calling our attention to forms of grace already in the world that we have neglected. If truth be told, we may find God’s provision for our needs about as appetizing as bug poop, leading us to ask “What is that? What kind of help is that?” I don’t know what might happen to the economic systems in our country, and I in no way would want to belittle the suffering of those who will feel an economic pinch. But I keep thinking about something I heard at a conference last spring, when one of the speakers asked where the source of real security lies. It’s not in banks, bank accounts, financial instruments mislabeled as “Securities.” Real security, she said, lies in community. People who look out for each other. That has a real ring of truth to me. If you start asking people about their memories about the Great Depression, you almost always hear a story or two about the neighborliness that sprouted up in hard times. For instance, in Bible Study this week, John Chamberlain told us about how his family took in a refugee from New York City, a young stranger who had ridden hundreds of miles on his bicycle seeking work and food. He stayed with John’s farm family for months, sharing their chores, the harvest of their garden, and the fellowship of the family. John remembers that episode in their family life with pleasure. One of the things we need as human beings is the warmth of being in community with other human beings. Maybe that’s what God will provide us—neighbors who need help, neighbors who can offer help. Our manna may be a new period of cooperation, an easing of the terrible loneliness and isolation that so many people suffer from now in “good” times. Our manna may be tuning in afresh to the rhythms of nature as we are obliged by the high cost of shipping to eat more local and seasonal food. Our manna may be spending less on high-cost travel and entertainment, spending more time instead chatting on porches with friends. Our manna may come in the form of a reminder of God’s steadfast trustworthiness amidst the crumbling of institutions we had come to trust. Use your sacred imagination as you look for signs of God’s abundant grace. Ask yourself, “What is it?” Talk with your companions on the faith journey as you compare notes on the sustenance God provides as we travel in what begins to look like a wilderness, a wild time. Don’t neglect the time-honored practice of Sabbath as a means of tuning into the liturgy of abundance. If you find yourself working 7 days a week, take a day off, for God’s sake! It’s the slavery of Pharaoh, the myth of scarcity that inspires constant work. The Sabbath is meant to meet our physical need for rest and our spiritual need for re-focusing on gratitude—celebrating what we have rather than frantically chasing after what we do not have. Sabbath interrupts the drum-beat of greed that pulses through our society, allowing us to listen to the music of “Amazing Grace” which resonates through the universe. Let me share a few more wise words from Walter Brueggeman:
[1] Huey, Kate http://i.ucc.org/StretchYourMind/OpeningtheBible/WeeklySeeds/tabid/81/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/99/Bread-from-Heaven-Sept-1521.aspx [2] Brueggeman, Walter copyright 1999 Christian Century, from the March 24-31 issue of Christian Century |
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