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Moses - Exodus 16
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
It has been a busy day already today. We still do, however, want to turn our attention back to Moses and the people of Israel this weekend. Because Joel brought us through the Exodus experience last week, And we have spent four weeks so far in the series getting to know Moses a little bit, learning about who he is, where he comes from, in some sense, what makes him tick. And then last week, Joel swoops in and gets to talk about the parting in the Red Sea and the brig miraculous moments of God's intervention. And I don't know how that happened in the schedule, but it's okay.
Speaker 1:I'm not bitter about it. Let's just move on. Because Joel did a good job last week, and it's fine. So we saw Moses standing at the edge of the water, staking his staff in the ground, and watching the waters recede before him. And I don't know what that looked like to the Jews.
Speaker 1:Was it literally walls of water that stood straight up for the Israelites to pass through? Was it simply waters pulled back at the edges so that it created a seam of land to walk across? Like a huge gust of wind that beat back the waters just enough to walk through. Did it look miraculous? Did they know something special was happening or did it look innocuous?
Speaker 1:Now, the rabbis used to tell a story about two Israelite men who were lost in the crowd of people walking through the Red Sea. Now, Joel talked about how the crowd was so big, the people were so dense, the rush to leave Egypt was so intense. And so in this rabbinic story, these two older Jewish men got caught in the middle of the crowd, and they just kept talking to each other as everyone walked. And they complained to each other, and they fed off each other, and they started worrying about the mud that was getting in their feet. And now the Bible says, the Israelites walked across dry land, but I think we can go with the rabbis here, give them a little license, and dry land need not necessarily mean completely bone dry.
Speaker 1:And so in this story, the mud was getting in their sandals, it was squishing between their toes, tiny rocks were collecting under their heels. You know how awful that is when you're wearing sandals. Right? And so they walked, and they complained, and they grumbled their way through the Red Sea, and never looked up from their toes, and completely missed the entire moment. They got to the other side, the land dried out, they finally looked up, and they said to each other, thank God for dry sandals.
Speaker 1:Now, if that's not an exercise in missing the point, I don't know what is. I mean, it's good to thank God for small things. You should do that. If you have dry feet right now, you should say a little prayer of thanks. Go ahead.
Speaker 1:I'll wait for you. Do it. It's a cold Sunday. It's good. But if all that you can thank God for at the end of reading chapter four is dry sandals, I think it's fair to say you may have missed the point of the story.
Speaker 1:And yet, unfortunately, this is far from a rare experience in the human story. Because often, the miraculous is less a question of God's involvement in our lives, and it is more a product of our ability to notice when he shows up. And so as we move today, as we move to reading, actually, one of the major themes that we're gonna talk about is this idea of seeing God as we move from reading the Israelites on the run from Pharaoh to actually wandering in the desert towards the promised land. We have to ask this question, how is it that the miraculous of God becomes mundane to us? And what can we do to recapture a sense of God's glory and presence and gift with us today.
Speaker 1:So let's read from chapter 16, the book of Exodus, and then we'll pray. This is Exodus chapter 16 starting in verse one. It says this, the whole Israelite community set out from Elam and came to the Desert Of Sin. Now, that sounds pretty imposing. Right?
Speaker 1:Let's just note here, this is a proper Hebrew noun. Sin is short for Sinai. This is not the Hebrew word for sin in English. Okay? So it's not what we translate sin in English.
Speaker 1:Just make a note here. We are not reading about a mythical desert of sin where people do terrible things in the heat of the sun. That's not what's happening here. Okay? The Israelites do some terrible things out in the desert.
Speaker 1:That's not what's being foreshadowed here. It's just a happy coincidence. Anyway, they came to the Desert Of Sin, which is between Elam and Sinai, same root word there. And it was on the fifteenth day of the second month after they had come out of Egypt. And in the desert, the whole community grumbled against Moses and Aaron.
Speaker 1:The Israelites said to them, if only we had died by the Lord's hand in Egypt. There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food that we wanted. But you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death. And so the Lord said to Moses, I will rain down bread from heaven for you. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day.
Speaker 1:In this way, I will test them and see whether they will follow my instructions. On the sixth day, they are to prepare what they bring in, that it is to be twice as much as they gather on the other days. And so Moses and Aaron said to the Israelites, in the evening you will know that it was the Lord who brought you out of Egypt. And in the morning you will see the glory of the Lord because he has heard your grumbling against him. Who are we that you should grumble against us?
Speaker 1:Exodus 16 verses one to seven. Let's pray. God, we welcome you into this space this evening. Not because you are waiting or need our invitation to come, but because sometimes we need to remind ourselves of your presence here with us. We walk past so much of life that is full of your beauty and your grace, and we miss it.
Speaker 1:And so we ask for eyes to see you clearly. For the times that we have been too preoccupied, too frustrated, too petty, or too small to notice you, we ask your forgiveness. For the times that you have shown up in our lives, and we have walked by with our heads down, staring at our shoes, grumbling about the mud, we ask for your forgiveness. For the times we have seen your hand at work in the world, but we looked past it or through it or we wished for something else, something different. We ask for your grace.
Speaker 1:We do this because we trust that you are good, that you desire to be known by us, that you want us to come back and to return to you even after all the times we've walked past or away from your presence. And so today, we pause and we turn back to you. And we look again so that we could see as if for the very first time. And we focus our attention so that we don't miss what you're doing here in this space. We train our thoughts so that we don't miss what it is that you're saying in our hearts.
Speaker 1:And we believe that as we turn toward you, as we step toward you, as we move toward you, that you would meet us and heal us and invite us to see you even more clearly in the midst of our ordinary day. In the strong name of the risen Christ, pray. Amen. Okay. Now, couple things here as we get rolling.
Speaker 1:First, this word grumbling here in the passage that we read is the word Telenot in the Hebrew. And this word has been variously translated in different English translations. The NRSV goes with complaining, very legitimate. The King James goes with murmuring. I like that too, but I don't use murmuring very often in normal conversations.
Speaker 1:And so I think the NIV and the King James have the right idea here. Because while this definitely is a complaint, the Hebrew word Telenot also has a very passive connotation to it. So this is not just coming right out and complaining about something. This is not naming what is wrong and asking for help. This is sort of passive aggressive murmuring, rumbling under your breath that's going on.
Speaker 1:And sure, there's that quote in verse three. If only we had died by the Lord's hand in Egypt. I mean, that's a fairly straightforward complaint. But the reference here on the whole is about a more insidious sense of injustice that has pervaded the Israelite community. They feel like they've been hard done by.
Speaker 1:They grumbled, they murmured, they talked amongst themselves. And no doubt, you've probably experienced something like this at some point. The employees don't like the boss. So they talk about her, and they commiserate about him. They plot the downfall of management without ever actually bringing their complaints to bear in a staff meeting.
Speaker 1:And maybe that's because in the past, legitimate efforts at dialogue were ignored. That's fair. Maybe it's because we're just too afraid to be honest. It's uncomfortable sometimes. And maybe it's just because we're childish.
Speaker 1:I don't know. I still remember probably one of the most difficult and humbling lessons that I've had to learn in my professional career. I was working for another organization. It was not a church at the time, but someone more senior than I had made some decisions and some choices that I thought were unfair, ill advised, they they just weren't good. And other people who worked there were all kind of grumbling about this, and we're talking about it, they're like, listen, you need to do something about this.
Speaker 1:People listen to you. Go talk to the boss. Tell him what's going on. And so what I did was I sent my boss's boss an email and told them all the things that I was upset about. And I said, listen, decisions have been made and people are upset.
Speaker 1:You need to do something here or it's gonna be a disaster. I got a response. And my boss's boss said, okay, great. Let's sit down. Let's talk.
Speaker 1:And I was like, great. He's gonna listen to me. He takes me seriously. He wants to hear what I have to say. My voice is being taken seriously.
Speaker 1:So we arranged the meeting. We sat down. He asked me what was going on. He listened to my response. He nodded at my concerns.
Speaker 1:He listened to my opinions about the situation. And after I was done talking, he very calmly asked me, now what did this person say when you talked to them about it? To which I rather sheepishly said, well, I haven't talked to them because they won't listen to me anyway. I mean, this is that's the whole problem here. And so my boss's boss looked me in the eyes and said, then I guess we're done here because there's nothing left to talk about.
Speaker 1:And here's the thing, for years I thought about that moment. I was like 21 at the time. And I ran that scenario over my head over and over again. And the truth is, even now at 36, I still, when I'm being really honest with myself, believe that I was right. And I knew my complaints were valid and they needed to be voiced.
Speaker 1:The problem is, it didn't matter because I was talking to the wrong person about it. Now listen, it's important that we have people in our lives who can be open and honest with us. We need people where we can unload what it is that's bothering us in a safe environment. As someone who it's safe to grumble and complain to at times, but outside those very few people that you trust to play that role in your life. The person you should give me complaining to is the person you have a problem with.
Speaker 1:If Rachel is the last person to know that I'm annoyed with her, then something is seriously broken in our marriage, and it is not her. I just listened to what Moses and Aaron say at the end of verse seven here. Who are we that you should grumble against us? That's not a statement of their authority and their stature. That's not incredulity that Evan anyone would even dare to question their leadership.
Speaker 1:In the context of this passage, it's a statement about who is the real object of the complaint. They say this, in the evening, you will know that it was the Lord who brought you out of Egypt. And in the morning, you will see the glory of the Lord because he has heard your grumbling against him. That him there in English is actually the personal name for God in Hebrew, Yahweh. In the English translation, they've gone with hymns so it doesn't sound repetitive.
Speaker 1:But in Hebrew, it actually reads like this, you will see the glory of Yahweh because Yahweh has heard your grumbling against Yahweh. The writer of the story has gone out of his way to make sure we see just how personal this moment is for God. You are grumbling against Yahweh. Who are we that you should grumble against us, they say. Their point is this, if you have an issue with God, you should take it up with him.
Speaker 1:Now this is not a passage that should be used to say, you can't question leadership or you're questioning God. That's not what's happening here. There are far too many pastors, leaders, politicians, figureheads that have tried to play that card in the past. This is not a false humility being passed off by Moses and Aaron here in order to, you know, quiet the cries of their people. This is a legitimate appeal to the fact that it was not them who brought them out of Egypt, it was the Lord who brought them out of Egypt.
Speaker 1:It was Yahweh who heard their cries as they were oppressed. It was Yahweh who brought plagues on their oppressors, who parted the Red Sea, who brought them across on dry land, and who has chosen to listen to them even now when they have complained to the wrong person. And so part of what we see here is this incredible graciousness of God to actually respond, to care, to listen even when the complaints we bring are sideways and immature and shallow and pointed at the wrong people. One of the greatest gifts in the embarrassing story I just told you was my boss's boss's willingness to sit and listen to me complain. Even though he knew full well that I was acting in an immature way and I hadn't gone to the right person.
Speaker 1:And he let me play it out in front of him, and he didn't raise his voice, he didn't humiliate me, he didn't embarrass me or tear a strip off me. What he did was very gently, very humbly teach me by letting me put my own foot in my mouth, and humble me so that I could be pointed in a better direction. Here, the Israelites are hungry. Remember, it's the fifteenth day of the second month since they left Egypt. That means it's been forty five days since they've had a good solid meal.
Speaker 1:Their concern is very legit. But rather than turn to the God who just brought them safely out of Egypt by parting the Red Sea, what they do is grumble and complain at Moses. They murmur. They wish they were dead. And yet, rather than send them back, rather than say, fine, you're on your own then.
Speaker 1:Rather than throw up his hands and walk away, what God says is perhaps this too can actually be a learning moment. He lets them grumble. He lets them complain, and then he says, maybe I can test them. Verse four, I will rain down bread from heaven for you. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day.
Speaker 1:In this way, I will test and see whether they will follow my instructions. This word test here in Hebrew is the verb nasa, and it is just as equally test as it is teach or train. In this way, I will teach them to follow my ways, God said. So this is not the angry, petty, small God we sometimes imagine in the text of the Old Testament. The one who demands fealty and fear and perfection all the time.
Speaker 1:This is actually the profound image of a gracious, caring father who longs to see his people grow and mature and learn and become something better. This is the God who is not done with his people yet. This is the father who's not done with you yet. And maybe at times, you have been less than mature with your complaints against God. You have kept them.
Speaker 1:In the back of your mind, you've carried it with you. And maybe you let them slip in a conversation with someone when you are vulnerable, but the truth is you've never actually told God frustrated with him. You've never prayed your complaints clearly and honestly and articulately before God. You've murmured and you've grumbled. You've wished things were different.
Speaker 1:You lost something. You lost someone. You invested in something, and it made all the sense, but it didn't work out the way it was supposed to. You put everything into something. You did all the right things, but God didn't come through on his end.
Speaker 1:And you've taken that out on friends, on family, on pastors, and loved ones. And if that's the case, what I wanna say to you is that God is okay with that. He's not done with you. He's not given up on you. God's graciousness and grace is not too small to move past this and welcome you and invite you to actually speak with him.
Speaker 1:Because I also wanna say this, that God is not so small that he can't take your honest complaints. It's been forty five days since the Jews have had a good meal. That's a legitimate time to call out to God and say, we're hungry. So there is grumbling against God. There's murmuring under your breath against God, and then there is being honest and direct about your issues with God.
Speaker 1:And the Bible steers us away from the first, but part of the beauty of the scriptures is how openly they invite us to do the second. Psalm one forty two. With my voice, I cry out to the Lord. With my voice, I plead for mercy to the Lord. I pour out my complaints before him.
Speaker 1:I tell my trouble before him. As Kathleen O'Connor writes, simple lament names what is wrong. What is out of order in God's creation. What keeps human beings from thriving in their full creative potential. Simple acts of lament expose these conditions, name them, open them to grief and anger, and make them visible for remedy.
Speaker 1:In its complaint, anger and grief, lament protests conditions that prevent human thriving. And it's this resistance that may finally prepare the way for healing. And so even as we watch the Israelites grumble and murmur and complain in their own small and petty ways. The lesson here is not to stuff it down, to stop complaining, to keep a stiff upper lip and a smile on our faces and just keep going. The lesson here is to be honest with God.
Speaker 1:If you're hungry to meet with him, and it has been a long time, it is the fifteenth day of the second month, and you have not seen or heard anything from God, it's okay to call out and say, where are you? If life is hard and it's unfair right now, It's okay to express that to God. If there's pain and suffering in your life, in someone that you care about and they're near to you, then that needs to be spoken so that it can be healed because we know that God is listening to these complaints. Because part of what happens to us when we push our complaints down and we don't give voice to the sense of injustice that we feel at times, is that we begin to lose touch with the beauty that invariably does surround us at other times. See, grumbling is a bad thing, but complaint and lament are actually part of what helps us get in touch with beauty.
Speaker 1:Now here, the Israelites are hungry and they're scared. But instead of calling out to the God Egypt, who parted the sea for them, what they do is they grumble under their breath. Yet God in his graciousness doesn't give up on them, doesn't lose his cool, doesn't abandon them to find their own food in the desert. What he does is he actually brings a miraculous food to them in the form of manna. In the story, it's these strange flakes of bread that form on the ground overnight.
Speaker 1:And the Israelites are to go out and gather it in the morning. It smells like coriander and tastes like honey, we're told in verse 31. Sounds good. Right? And even though we call it manna in English, which is a transliteration of the Hebrew phrase man who, what that literally means is, what is this?
Speaker 1:So you could very honestly and legitimately translate manna, whatchamacallit, and Hebrew scholars would be like, yeah, that totally works. That's that's good. You get one gold star for Hebrew translation. There you go. I don't know if you get gold stars in Hebrew translation, but if you did, there you go.
Speaker 1:So whatchamacallit is on the ground, they go out, they gather it, they eat it, it's great. These are it's get this special bread and it's delicious. Coriander, more commonly known as cilantro here in Canada. Some of you hate cilantro. Now there's objective proof here that you're wrong.
Speaker 1:But what happens is this. Well, first, they start trying to collect more than they need. So if you read the story, they gather up more than the day, they put it in jars. By the morning, it's all rotten and gross, and they have to throw it out. God says, Just trust me.
Speaker 1:Get what you need. Then, they start going out trying to collect more on the Sabbath. God says on Friday, get twice as much because Saturday you rest, there's gonna be no man on the ground. Saturday morning, they go out and they're like, where's our bread? And God's like, come on guys.
Speaker 1:I told you this. Then what happens is this, they get sick of all this miracle bread that's forming on the ground. Even though God has been gracious enough to listen to their complaints when they were offside and to the wrong person, they now start demanding better food. Numbers chapter 11. We get a parallel account to Exodus 16, but it has more detail here.
Speaker 1:It says this in verse four. Again, the Israelites started wailing. I like that. And said, if only we had meat to eat. Remember the fish we ate in Egypt at no cost.
Speaker 1:Also, the cucumbers, melons, onions, and garlic. But now, we have lost our appetite. We never see anything but this manna. Now, first of all, at no cost, maybe a little nostalgic here. Sure.
Speaker 1:You didn't pay for food. You were slaves. No. You know, let's not let rose colored glasses get too carried away here. Here's what I would say.
Speaker 1:Be careful about going back to or wanting to go back to where you were without celebrating where you are right now. This is something all of us do from time to time. Second for me is this. It shows the correlation between honest complaint and healthy gratitude. Now, I know that might sound obscure, and the connection may not be obvious here, but think about it this way.
Speaker 1:The ability to honestly evaluate what is bothering us, who we should be talking to about it, and what we should be asking for is in many ways the exact same skill that helps us to become aware of all the ways that we are blessed and supported and encouraged in our lives as well. It's about thinking critically and being honest about our circumstances. And my guess is that if you don't know how to honestly talk about God to God about what is bothering you, then you probably don't know how to honestly thank him for what he's given you either. Because these are both two sides of the same coin. And that goes for any relationship that you're a part of.
Speaker 1:If you can't talk about what's hard in your relationships right now, then you're probably not doing a good job of talking about what's good either. And this is important because what God is looking for from us is not some unqualified gratitude that always looks on the bright side and ignores struggle. That slaps on a cheery face every morning regardless of what's going on in our world. God did not ask the Israelites to pretend that they were full when they were hungry. What he's looking for is open, honest, mature people who can be in healthy relationship with him.
Speaker 1:Where they name what is wrong and ask for help where they need it, where they notice what is good and celebrate his generosity where it is. The Jews are hungry in the desert, and they don't know how to turn to God for help. So they grumble and they complain. They're given miracle food in the night, and they don't know how to thank God for it, so they wish for something else. This is what we would call a dysfunctional relationship.
Speaker 1:People who don't know how to express their concerns, their struggles, and their needs, and they don't know how to say thank you when it should be said. And it's why the Jews felt the need to tell these stories over and over and over again until they sunk into their bones. Here they are getting miracle bread that tastes like coriander and honey appearing on the ground every morning, and they're like, meh, we had better when we were slaves in Egypt. Earlier, we talked about the rabbinic stories of Jews who walked through the middle of the sea staring at their fleet completely unaware of the moment and missing the miracle. Sometimes, the miraculous is less a question of God's involvement in our lives and more a product of our ability to see God clearly when he shows up.
Speaker 1:This morning, you likely got up on a very cold Sunday in a home that was heated through systems of natural gas distribution that would have been science fiction a hundred years ago. And you dressed yourself in clothing that was made half a world away on another continent, something that would have been unimaginable a thousand years ago. And then you drove yourself here in a car powered by tiny explosions of combustible liquid made from long dead dinosaurs, which turned pistons, that cranked gears, that spun wheels, something that would have been impossible without millions of years of history behind it, and you walked into a room where the god of the universe deigned to meet with the scraggly group of human beings that dragged themselves in here in order to reach out to the divine. You wanna talk about signs and wonders and where's the miraculous in this world? Everything is miraculous in this world.
Speaker 1:Because the God of the universe creates and sustains and upholds and maintains everything that we depend on for breath. If you're honest about it, the world is incredible and it is full of God's generosity. But if you don't have a context to say to God, this is what I'm legitimately struggling with, this is my pain, and this is what I'm going through, then it's very hard to say this is what I'm celebrating, this is where I understand your generosity, this is where I want to say thank you. If you don't have a context to say, this is what I struggle with and this is what I celebrate, then even miracle bread will eventually get stale. And so maybe this evening, you have something you need to thank God for.
Speaker 1:You have grumbled and complained and murmured and bleated, and it has sapped away your ability to notice all the ways God has blessed and supported and been generous to you. And in this moment, it becomes clear, and the only thing that needs to be said is a sincere and quiet thank you. But maybe this evening, you have brought legitimate frustration and anxiety into this room. There is concerns and baggage that you've been carrying for a long time, and everyone has heard about it except for God. You've told friends, you've told your family, you unloaded on the poor stranger who happened to sit next to you on the bus on the way to work last week, but you have never spoken clearly and honestly to God about what is bothering you.
Speaker 1:To say this is my pain, and I need you to be present to me here in this moment. I'm hungry. I'm lost. I'm frustrated. I'm I'm lonely, and I need to know that you're with me now.
Speaker 1:The lesson of the desert of sin is not to keep smiling and move forward. It is that being open and honest with God in our generosity, in his generosity and our thankfulness, and in our struggles and our need will actually give you something to smile about. Because being open about our struggle, being truthful in our thankfulness, these are two sides of the same coin, It is a mature, honest, open relationship to the divine. And this is what we're invited to have. Let's pray.
Speaker 1:God, help us in a world where your presence and your generosity is so overwhelming. Everything we see, everything we experience on a daily basis is so good that it resets, it recalibrates us to believe that it's just meh. And instead, what we should be is overwhelmed by your goodness and your grace. And so, God, we ask for eyes to see very clearly about where it is that we are experiencing real frustration, real pain, real concern, and real hurt. And then we would have the courage to invite you into those moments to be present with us, to heal us, to renew us, and remake us.
Speaker 1:So that we could then look back on the world to see your goodness and your generosity where it exists all around us. That we would see your divine presence sustaining and holding up everything that gives breath to this world, and that we could celebrate the goodness of who you are for what it is in our lives. God, we don't want a dysfunctional relationship with you where we murmur and complain and we don't have the guts to speak to you. We also don't wanna go blindly through life never celebrating your divine goodness. And so we ask that you would help us to see our world clearly and honestly, and to invite you into that with us.
Speaker 1:You're a great God. And in the strong name of the risen Christ, pray. Amen. Okay. We'll end here tonight, as we always do with this.
Speaker 1:Love God, love people, tell the story.
Speaker 2:This is a podcast of Kensington Commons Church. We believe that God is invested in the renewal of all things. Therefore, we wanna live the good news by being part of the rhythms of our city as good neighbors, good friends, and good citizens in our common life. Join us on Sunday or visit us online at commonschurch.org.