August 6, 2006
TEXT: Exodus
16:2-4, 9-15
The Quail Were Thrilled
This sermon has been an arm-wrestling match, and
after five days of pushing and pulling, I finally lost. The sermon I wanted to preach went something
like this: the Israelites get a bad rap
for their wilderness complaints. I
wanted to point out that complaining is a necessary – even holy –
undertaking. It is, I would have
cleverly observed, the provoking work of prophets. Not to be confused with petulant whining,
complaining is pure and simply the fact of something wrong given voice. It is, I wanted to argue, the essential
precursor to any move toward justice and mercy and redemption.
No positive change, after all, can begin until honest
recognition is given that something about the status quo needs changing. The very fact of the Exodus from Egypt was
the product of just such a complaint. In
the New Testament book of Acts, it was the complaints by some of the Greek
Christians about what they perceived to be an unjust and neglectful
distribution of goods that led the apostles to appoint deacons whose job it was
to take care that justice was served.
And in our own experience, wasn’t it the ministry of complaint that
eventually changed laws in the 1960’s to more fairly distribute civil rights?
That’s the sermon I wanted to preach – the importance
of complaining – and I still think it an important sermon to offer. But the story wouldn’t let me, and the story finally
prevailed. Biblical scholar and Disciple
hero Fred Craddock once pointed out that if you set out to preach on a passage
of scripture, it is generally important to start by reading that passage. The tendency, he knew, is to take a homiletical
shortcut routed by what you think the
passage is about, rather than letting it speak for itself. What Craddock is getting at, of course, is
the distinction our teachers in seminary use to make between eisegesis – the act of telling a passage
of scripture what it means – and exegesis
– drawing out of a text what it is trying to say. Literally, the distinction is between reading
“into” a text, and reading “out” of it.
And alas, I was speaking too loudly to hear. Like trying to harvest a zucchini from a
cherry tree, I was not only doing violence to the story, I was overlooking the
authentic fruit that was hanging there, ripe for the picking. The positive virtues of complaining will have
to wait for another day. This passage, I
finally conceded, has different matters in mind.
It might be useful to back up a verse and learn that
the Israelites, since their successful crossing of the Red Sea and escape from
the Egyptian military who had been chasing after them, have been camped at an
oasis called “Elim.” Animated by twelve
springs of water and seventy palm trees, it must have been like checking into a
Hilton after a week of sleeping in the back of a station wagon. It had been a perfect setting for singing and
dancing in celebration of God’s marvelous liberation. There had presumably been food to eat at Elim
and water to drink, and blessedly habitable, comfortable conditions in which to
absorb their new found freedom.
But Elim wasn’t to be their home. They had only begun their journey, and so
Moses moves the people on, into the Wilderness of Sin – which sounds like a
geological first cousin to the Badlands.
The wilderness, as you might anticipate, didn’t
compare favorably to the oasis. There
was a conspicuous lack of shade, and sand kept working its way into their
sandals. The simple fact that they were
moving couldn’t have helped matters, either – schlepping along whatever they
had managed to salvage from Egypt in bundles, on carts, or dragged behind them
on skids. Who can be surprised that
their tambourines of joy quickly turned to the violins of lament?
“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 this whole assembly with hunger.”
There is the complaint, the virtues of which I was so
anxious to extol. But reading the complaint leaves a decidedly
different taste. You might have noticed
that the complaint seems to arise out of nowhere. There is no mention made that the people have
actually begun to starve. The sense is
that any real hunger may be more a function of anticipation and fear, than
actual present experience. The problem,
in other words, seems to be more in their heads than in their stomachs, and
even then, I’m not sure the concern is really over food.
The problem seems to have more to do with nostalgia
than nutrition. “Fleshpots” is an
evocative word, calling to mind the large cooking vessels in which meat was
boiled. And though the impression the
memory leaves is of a time when food was plentiful and rich enough to include even
the luxury of meat – no offense intended to the vegetarians among us – such
abundance seems hardly likely in the context of slavery. You’ll note that the people remember “sitting
by” the fleshpots, not necessarily eating “from” them – as if the mere aroma of
cooking meat connoted wealth and plenty.
According to their memory, what they actually ate was bread.
But even assuming the friendliest interpretation, looking
backward never provides the surest footing for walking forward. The present doesn’t exist to nourish the
past. The Israelites, though, wouldn’t
be the last to overlook the promises in front of them and the blessings around
them by longing for the memories behind them.
Americans are tempted to glorify the fleshpots of the
1950’s when everybody went to church, grandfatherly Eisenhower was in the White
House, school days started with prayer, nativity scenes graced the courthouse
lawn, politicians were statesmen, gas was cheap and all was moral and
good. Never minding the fact that women
were typecast, African-Americans were disenfranchised, McCarthy was slandering
anyone he didn’t like while J. Edgar Hoover was wire-tapping everyone else,
non-Christians had no voice, Japan was buried in rubble, and television wasn’t
the only thing black and white, there was, indeed, much wonderful about the
‘50’s. And while there is much to lament
about our present day, there is also much to marvel at and celebrate as
well.
Churches inevitably become enslaved to the
idealization of some past life. Maybe it
was back when the Sunday School rooms were bursting at their seams, or when new
members were crowding the aisles during the Invitational hymn; maybe it was
when a certain level of agreement minimized distracting dissent and unified
missional direction, or when the neighborhood was new and growing instead of
decaying and forgotten.
I’m not for a second suggesting that such memories
are false or seditious or wastefully misspent.
After all, we take pictures precisely so we can look at them later and
enjoy, again, the experience. It is to
say, however, that memory has the power to become as intoxicating and addictive
as narcotic, leaving us not simply numb, but blind. It is possible to remember fondly past joys –
when I was thinner or lither – while remaining attentive to the present graces of
being alive in this very moment; vitality that makes us a breathing church and
not an airless museum…
Ø
like the
greeting of a child as you enter the church building on Sunday morning,
Ø
or the
determined grasp at English Monday through Thursday by immigrants for whom
English is not their first language;
Ø
like the safe
and happy and helpful gift of hospitality that is the farmer’s market on
Wednesday evenings,
Ø
or the
fingerprints on the communion table, both literal and symbolic, left by various
kinds of people who gather around it;
Ø
like the
trustworthy and anchoring contributor to the neighborhood around us we are now
viewed to be;
Ø
like the curious
and embracing community of faith and witness this city has experienced us to be.
In the story, God cuts the Israelites some
slack. Maybe it’s because God knows they
haven’t had much practice in the art of possibility, or the craft of panning
the present moment in search of golden nuggets.
They are, after all, just out of prison.
They can be forgiven, I suppose, for being amateurs at freedom. But ultimately I think God recognizes that
what the people perceive to be a “food” crisis is, in reality, a “faith” crisis
– faith not simply in God’s ability to sustain them through a desert, but
finally in God’s ability to make of the present and future at least as much as
– if not more than – they experienced in the past. It is the age old question: are our best days behind us or ahead?
And so God sends them bread to eat – manna from
heaven – and meat, to encourage their appreciation of the present. I’m sure the quail must have been thrilled to
serve as instruments of placation.
There is an old joke you’ve no doubt heard involving
a hog and a hen who shared the same barnyard. They heard about a church’s program to feed
the hungry, and discussed how they could help. The hen said, “I’ve got it!
We’ll provide bacon and eggs for a grand and filling breakfast.” The hog
thought about the suggestion and said, “There’s only one thing wrong with your
bacon and eggs idea. For you, it only requires a contribution, but from me, it
will mean total commitment!”
Similarly for the quail, whose contribution
to this chosen people would require total commitment. It makes me wonder how many quail are being
sacrificed today in service to some lamented past. How many present lives, wonders and songs are
being consumed while God indulgently tries to pry our attention from the
loveliness of what was to the gracious miracle of what is?
I say let the quail fly on. These may not be the fleshpots we remember,
nor the palm trees and ponds of the oasis we’ve moved beyond. But we are not in danger of starving. God is in this place as fully and generously
as in those places before, albeit in different ways. We don’t have to have it fluttering at our
feet to know it. We just have to look
with the eyes of faith, and trust, and see, and save our complaining for nobler
work. The quails will appreciate a price they don’t
have to pay, the tambourines will relish a fresh occasion to ring, and God will
surely bless this present chance to be seen, and followed, and known.