September 17, 2005  David Martin

SERMON: "What's This?”

Once I visited a friend who was earning his Master’s degree in geology in Oregon .
In the back of his old rusty van was a cardboard box containing a box of spaghetti,
cream of mushroom soup,
canned tuna, canned black olives,
and a few other dusty cans of vegetables.
It didn’t strike me
as a particularly appetizing combination.
“What’s this?”
I asked him.

He said it was the ingredients for “Tuna Schmegma.” Sounds delicious, doesn’t it?
He left it in the back of his van in case he made an unplanned trip into the backwoods
and forgot to bring other food,
or his van broke down on a mining road far from help,
a very real possibility.

Most of us would probably go to great lengths to avoid eating anything like “Tuna Schmegma”
on our travels.
We might plan to eat at restaurants,
or if we were going camping,
we might plan a menu for a few days
or a week or more,
perhaps taking advantage of foods
that require little refrigeration,
and carefully packing these foods
so that they are ready for each meal
as we need them.
We want our meals to be convenient,
and ourselves to be self-sufficient.

On our family’s trips,
we’ve even turned around after leaving home a few times
to retrieve items deemed necessary
for our self-sufficiency,
whether a camera or sleeping bag or a pair of boots.
Five, ten, or even 20 miles down the road,
a forgotten item of significance is remembered, and with sighs and grumbles,
we turned around to get it.

Imagine then yourselves among the throng of Israelites getting ready to leave Egypt .
A throng perhaps the size of New Orleans ,
or perhaps on tenth of that, 60,000,
or perhaps only 6,000.
In any case, a very large number
given the desolate region of Sinai
you are about to enter.

You eagerly anticipate freedom from slavery,
and yet are anxious about how
you and your family will survive
without the sources of food and income
that you have always counted on.
You don’t have a car or gas or much of anything except a few household goods
and perhaps some cattle.
You pack up all this
plus as much food and water
as you and your animals can carry,
and you leave under the leadership of Moses
and by the blessings of a mysterious God
who claims you as his people.

Our passage from Exodus picks up the story
six weeks later.
With the help of this mysterious God,
you have evaded the Egyptian army
at the Red Sea ,
and after running out of water,
discovered and camped at an oasis
with many springs.
And then you and the rest of the Israelites
set out again
into another desert region,
a stony wilderness
with little grass or trees.

We may think we are living in the wilderness
when we can’t have a warm shower,
flush toilets, or running water,
or when we are without refrigeration or fast food or a comfortable bed
or a quiet place to call our own.
Not having just one of these things
even for a day
can make us feel acutely deprived.
I remember the reception I received
from a group of friends on a car camping trip with me
when they learned I forgot to bring the coffee.…

Certainly, the ancient Israelites had none of these things,
but the wilderness that they really faced
was the uncertainty of their own survival.
The wilderness is a place
where the means to survival
seem insufficient or totally lacking.
This year, perhaps some of the most dramatic images of wilderness
are the tidal-wave-smashed shores of Indonesia ,
the burned-out villages of the Sudan ,
and the flood ravaged streets of New Orleans and Biloxi .

But wilderness places and wilderness journeys
are common even here,
even if they do not appear on TV.
I speak not only of those destitute families
in this area
who are wondering right now if they will be without a home, or heat, or food, or medicine, because the money has run out,
but those who have suddenly lost a loved one,
or a marriage
or a job,
or are dealing with a chronic situation of debilitating pain or weakness,
or memory loss,
or recurring hospitalizations,
or mental illness,
or a child whose misbehavior
seems beyond control.

I speak also of this church
as it enters an interim period
between senior pastors.

In the wilderness,
we are uncertain and frightened and stressed and exhausted.
In the wilderness,
we are worried for our survival
and for the survival of those we love.
In the wilderness,
we imagine that God is absent,
or only concerned with our spiritual
and not our material well-being.
In the wilderness,
we may even apply a tourniquet
between our spiritual and material well-being,
and wonder why we hurt so much.
In the wilderness,
we tend to see only scarcity.
In the wilderness,
we have a tendency to grumble and complain,
to gossip and pot-stir.

As the fearful and hungry Israelites
complained to Moses
and his brother Aaron:
“We wish that the Lord had killed us in Egypt . There we could at least sit down
and eat meat and as much other food
as we wanted.
But you have brought us out into this desert,
this wilderness,
to starve us all to death.”

What a complaint!
Were the Israelites really fat, dumb, and happy
in Egypt ?
No, they were overworked and beaten
and minimally, if regularly, fed.
Their real problem was that in this wilderness
they were free and fearful and lacking in faith—like adopted children
who have not been fully convinced
of their new parent’s love for them.

Praise God that God’s shoulders
were big enough for the complaints and fears of God’s adopted children in the wilderness,
and that God’s shoulders
are big enough for our complaints and fears.
For God heard the complaints of the Israelites,
and did not punish them,
but promised meat in the evenings,
and bread in the mornings.

In the evening, a large flock of quails flew in,
enough to cover the camp,
and in the morning there was dew
all around the camp.
When the dew evaporated,
there was something thin and flaky
on the surface of the desert.
It was delicate as frost.
When the Israelites saw it,
they didn’t know what it was and asked each other, “What’s this?”

I believe that God provided this food
out of the goodness of God’s creation.
God did not wind up the clock
and walk away after the beginning,
but has always cared for his children
through the goodness of God’s creation,
even when God’s children are in the wilderness.
God’s provision of food in the wilderness
was neither natural or supernatural,
but an action arising from the goodness
of God’s character and God’s creation.

Thus,
the quail probably settled in the Israelite’s camp
exhausted from their migration
from Africa to Europe or vice versa.
The exact nature of the flaky food
that fell like dew,
and could be make into wafers or cakes,
remains a mystery,
although later in Exodus
it is compared to a small white seed.
Some scholars think it may have been a substance secreted by plant parasites
as they feed on tamarisk trees in the wilderness.

I believe that probably this flaky food was evident elsewhere in the wilderness,
but overlooked by the Israelites.
It was only when they heard God’s promise
that they saw it.
For here was bread
not from the bureaucracy of Egypt ,
or bread meant to require the loyalty of slaves
for their oppressive masters,
but the bread of newness, of freedom,
of possibility, and of hope.
We too need to believe before we can see, especially in our wildernesses.

Yet if we stubbornly insist on seeing God-given resources and possibilities
before we believe,
it is likely that we will remain blinded
to the goodness of God’s creation
by our own limited sense of possibilities,
blinded, for example, by thoughts such as
”only I can fix this situation,”
or “only my eldest child can help me,”
or “only this pastor can care for me,”
or “I refuse to see this hurtful person
as someone like me,”
or “only if things are done the old way
will they get better,”
or “only if we find food that we are used to
will we eat.”

To find God’s provision in a barren land
of our fear or hurt or loss or grief,
we need to open the window shades
 to the possibility
that God will provide what we need,
even if we do not see it yet.
For God’s wilderness provision
may come in a new or unexpected form,
causing us to ask, “What’s this?”

At our church’s recent Illinois South Conference Annual Meeting,
a pastor shared a story about her college-aged daughter
who after some travel found herself in London
with little money and no place to stay.
She was considering sleeping on a park bench, when an older woman struck up a conversation with her.
The young woman admitted
she had no place to stay,
and the woman invited her to her home.
With some doubt and hesitancy,
the girl said yes.
In this older woman’s apartment,
there was a beautiful piano,
and the young woman asked if she could play it, since she was a music major.
And while she played,
her hostess bustled about  in the kitchen
preparing an elaborate meal.
And as they ate late that evening,
the young woman learned that the older woman was a retired pastor
and that her husband had died not to long before. The girl’s company and piano playing
was the much needed bread of companionship
for this retired pastor,
while the retired pastor’s unconventional act of hospitality
was literally bread and shelter
for the young woman.

And not only that,
in the presence of this retired pastor
this young woman
first sensed her own call to ordained ministry.
For it is in the sharing of bread
in a wilderness of loss and hopelessness
that we know the healing and reconciling power of our risen Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

Trust, that you may see the bread of life
in the wilderness
even if you need to ask, “What’s this?”
For the promise is that our surprising, self-giving, and loving God will provide. Amen.

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