A Sermon by Sydney V. (Skip) Jackson — September 21, 2008
Indianola Presbyterian Church, Columbus, Ohio
Texts:  Psalm 105:1-6, 37-45;  Exodus 16: 2-18, 31, 35

When the Israelites saw it, they said to one another, “What is it?”
For they did not know what it was.  Moses said to them, “It is the
bread that the Lord has given you to eat.” — Exodus 16:15

I’ve always loved family reunions.  I haven’t been to one in seven years, but I well remember them from when I was a kid—hordes of kids (there were about 28 of us cousins in my generation), lots of good food, and a whole lot of folks who seemed really old.  Most were probably younger than I am now, but there were a couple of great aunts who seemed to me, then, to be older than God.  So I can imagine that a family reunion story I heard recently is true.  Apparently something like eighty family members spanning five generations had gathered together for the first time in years.  Since they’d come from all over the country, they spent a lot of time getting reacquainted—or getting acquainted for the first time, since some of the youngest and oldest knew each other mainly from e-mailed photos.  One of younger kids, a four- or five-year-old girl, was particularly fascinated by the family matriarch.  Great-great-grandma was nearly 100, and the little girl just could not stop staring at her.  Finally she marched up to her great-great-grandmother and loudly demanded, “If you’re so old, why aren’t you dead?”  There was utter silence, and then the matriarch replied, “Well honey, every time I get settled and ready to go, somebody needs me to make a sandwich.”

It’s the little things—common everyday happenings, things like sandwiches—that keep us in touch with life.  Yes, there are times we want final answers—want some transforming experience that will give permanent shape and meaning to everything.  But life is not a problem to be solved once and for all.  Life is a process, challenging us to live moment by moment, day by day—one day at a time.  And most often, it is through the day-to-day happenings in our lives—things that may not seem all that important in and of themselves—that God touches us and sustains us.

The Jews view the Exodus as one of the foundational events in their history as a people.  It gives meaning.  The story of the journey from bondage in Egypt to freedom in the Land of Promise has served and continues to serve them as a pattern for understanding themselves as well as their relationship with the God.  The Lord is the one who frees people from bondage.  They are slaves who have been freed.  Yet this morning’s story also demonstrates a profound awareness of the significance of mundane daily experience.  Think of it this way.

As the children of Israel are fleeing from Egypt, it’s as if God seeks to impress them once and for all with a miraculous demonstration of power and grace—a miracle so spectacular that no one witnessing it will ever again doubt God’s power or providence.  God parts the sea so that the Israelites can pass safely, and then God releases the waters to drown all of the Egyptian pursuers.  (Do you remember how impressive it all looked in the Cecil B. DeMille version, with Charlton Heston as Moses holding his staff out and the towering walls of water on both sides of the fleeing people?)  Certainly, the people of Israel are suitably impressed, and they believe in the Lord.  On the far side of the sea, Miriam and all the women dance.  Moses and all the people praise God and pledge their undying faith and loyalty.  They proclaim, “Who is like thee, O Lord… The Lord will reign forever and ever.”  Forever and ever!

So God’s plan works—but not forever… just for a few days.  By the third day after the parting of the sea, the people are in the wilderness.  They are hot, tired, thirsty, and hungry; and they wonder why they ever got into this mess in the first place.  Complain, complain, complain.  The text says they murmured against Moses and Aaron.  They don’t remember that it was the Lord who brought them out of bondage in Egypt.  They’ve already forgotten the once-and-for-all miracle at the sea.  As Rabbi Harold Kushner has said, the word “forever” is actually just a technical, theological term that means “forty-eight hours.”  No miracle, no matter how impressive, will solve the problem of faith or prove God’s grace for more than a day or two—anymore than the finest meal will solve the problem of being hungry for very long.  (We all need someone like great-great-grandma to keep making sandwiches.)  So God changes strategy.  Instead of an occasional, spectacular miracle—perhaps every generation or so—God regularly provides the Israelites with water to drink and manna to eat.  And in these less spectacular “everyday” miracles of food and drink—these things that make their lives possible—the Hebrew people experience God’s grace and the fullness of life.  They learn that God is not at their destination waiting for them to get there, but is present with them on every step of their journey.  The people awake each day for forty years to the gift of food; and it is as Moses and Aaron promised—“In the morning, you shall see the glory of the Lord.”

Every one of us has the freedom and the capacity to decide to pause in life’s journey—to pause and experience the wonder of God’s presence in everyday life, to pause and see the glory of God each morning in the gift of a new day.  To pause… why, that is the primary reason for the Sabbath.  Yet all too often we rush through life, skimming the surface with only a limited awareness of what is going on.  We feel driven to discover meaning in our lives, but we are like speed-readers.  Woody Allen once commented, “I took a course in speed reading and was able to read all of War and Peace in twenty minutes.  It’s about Russia.”

 

Consider a breakfast, a lunch, a dinner, any meal.  We can take it for granted and treat it as a hurried refueling, a pit stop in life’s rat race.  We can choose to eat “fast food.”  Or we can see each meal as an opportunity to pause and to savor all the miracles of dirt, rain, seeds, sunshine, and human imagination that have come together to “give us this day our daily bread.”  We have the capacity to recognize and enjoy the little miracles of life—the freedom to pause and rejoice in wonder at God’s grace instead of rushing about searching for “something really important.”

We can pause and look around to discern God’s hand in all that happens, but we do have to look closely sometimes.  This is because of something we do—usually unconsciously—that can take away from a sense of wonder about the world.  It has to do with how we crave answers and explanations and how focusing on these can block out any sense of mystery and wonder.

Consider again the highlight of this morning’s story, the manna.  I wonder if it might not have happened something like this…  The Hebrew people had gone hungry for many days in the desert.  After murmuring among themselves most of the night, they finally get nerve enough to take their complaints directly to Moses and Aaron sometime just after noon.  (Nothing for lunch was the last straw!)  They confront Moses and Aaron, accusing them of incompetence.  “Fine leaders you two turned out to be!  You’ve led us out into the wilderness to starve to death!”

Moses and Aaron respond, “Don’t go complaining to us?  This is all God’s idea.  You do remember God, don’t you?”  The people keep muttering, and Moses goes on, “This very evening you shall eat flesh and know it was the Lord who brought you out of Egypt.  In the morning, you shall be filled with bread and see the glory of God.”  Such fine promises, and sure enough, in the evening the people feast on quail.  Then in the morning, when the dew dries, the ground is covered with a fine, flake-like stuff.  And the people?  They mill around asking each other, “What is it?  Tell us.”  They need to know what it is… like little kids confronted with a new food.  What is it?  Even after last night’s quail, they don’t even look to see if it’s something to eat.  “What is it?” they have to know.

So, suppose that in response Moses goes off to his tent and returns a little later with his Bible Dictionary.  He reads to the people, “F. S. Bodenheimer suggests that these are the honeydew secretions of two types of scale insect that feed on the sap of the tamarisk tree.  The sap is rich in carbohydrates but poor in nitrogen.  So, in order to get enough nitrogen, the insects eat large amounts of the plant sap and excrete the excess carbohydrates as a honeydew that is rich in three basic sugars and pectin.  In the dry desert air, most of the moisture quickly evaporates, leaving sticky droplets on the plants and ground.  The sap also drips from the punctures the insects make in the tamarisk branches, and the droplets dry to a yellow-white color.”

 

Well… that’s not really what happens.  But if it did, then someone else (maybe Aaron?) might have gone off to his tent to get his Bible Dictionary… another publisher, a different theology.  Aaron could have read, “There’s no known substance that satisfies all the requirements of the Old Testament references to this material.”  So maybe the stuff isn’t bug poop after all.  But what is it?  So then everyone could have spent all morning debating different theories and explanations, arguing about who is right and who is wrong instead of eating breakfast.  But no… rather than explanations, Moses gets right to the point—“It is the bread which the Lord has given you to eat.  Gather as much as each of you can.”  You see… the need for explanations and the explanations themselves can get in the way of the blessings of life, can keep us from seeing God’s hand in the unfolding of each day.  To drive this lesson home, the text contains a joke—actually a pun.  It’s hidden away in the Hebrew, in the name given to this stuff.  The people ask, “What is it?”  And that’s what they end up calling the stuff—“manna,” which in Hebrew means “What is it?”  This stuff—the bread that the Lord gives—might as well be called whatchamacallit.  What is it?  Yes, sure enough, that’s what-is-it.  What is it?  You got it, what-is-it.  That’s what I asked you in the first place!!!! (It’s almost like Abbott and Costello doing “Who’s on first?”)

Now I have nothing against answers and explanations.  I was trained as a scientist, and the scientific quest for answers can lead to a profound sense of wonder.  Each answer can lead to new questions and deeper into mystery—even to an increasing awareness of the Creator of all there is.  But too often we mistake scientific explanation for full understanding, and skim across the surface of life.  We may learn all there is to know about bees, but forget the sweetness of the honey.  We may expound about seeds germinating in the fertile earth, yet not wonder at the source of the life within them.  We may fail to see miracles because they are products of our own technology.  Yet are antibiotics, open-heart surgery, modern psychology, or organ transplants any less miraculous than the healing miracles of Jesus?  What is the source of human ingenuity, of human creativity, if not the Creator in whose image we are made?

 Scientific answers are not the only ways we can miss experiencing God in the day-to-day world.  The longer I’m a pastor, the more I realize that theology can also be used to avoid encountering God.  Our desire for theological answers can cut us off from experiencing God with us.  Perhaps nowhere is this more the case than with prayer.  What is prayer?  What good does it do?  How do prayers work?  People argue about and debate answers to questions.  And in the debate or in the lack of any answers, we might well forget to pray.  I can’t cover all aspects of prayer now, but I’m often asked about intercessory prayer, about praying for other people.   Mostly I have to answer, “I don’t know.”  I simply do not know if our prayers ever convince God to change the way things are or will be.  I suspect that God already knows what is best in any situation, and I don’t know whether our prayers, which can seem like such little things, can really make an objective difference.  I’m tempted to go consult some of the many books I have on prayer, looking for the answers.

But then… I remember a moment when I was in treatment for alcoholism 25 years ago.  I didn’t want anyone to know I was there.  I did have to notify my boss and my father.  But I was so ashamed of so much and quite convinced that I deserved only judgment and condemnation from God.  Surely no one cared that I was there.  I was on my own.  Then on my fourth day there, I received a postcard from my Grandma Jackson.  She was 92 or 93 then.  She had difficulty writing, so her message was brief.  She simply wrote that she was praying for me.  In that moment, I didn’t need answers.  Looking back, I see that her prayers didn’t change God, but they made a difference in me.  In that surprising moment, reading a postcard, my eyes were opened to God’s loving presence. And nothing else, not answers, not explanations, mattered at all.

We live our lives moment by moment, day by day.  According to the Exodus story, for forty years in the wilderness, the Lord provided the people with manna to eat—manna… “what is it?”—not an answer, but a question.  A question… not an answer, but a question… that’s what sustained the people on their journey and let them see the glory of God anew every morning.  May our eyes be opened to the wondrous mystery of God’s presence with us moment by moment, day by day, sandwich