I have to admit that I have enjoyed
being a grandparent since the arrival of the granddaughters into my life. Grandchildren make life so much richer . . .
so much more fun . . . and, I get to send them home at the end of the day when
I am done corrupting them. Grandchildren
are a joy . . . most of the time. There
are times when they remind me that children can be a real hassle and not a
whole lot of fun to be dealing with . . . just like most of us in the human
race. From time to time though, they remind
me of something I had forgotten . . . hungry kids are grumpy kids . . . whiny
kids . . .complaining kids . . . or what the writers of the Bible like to refer
to as lamenting sorts of kids. In fact,
I think most people are pretty much that way when they are hungry.
At least that seems to be the case in
our scripture reading for this morning . . . the Israelites are hungry. As the story from last week continues, the
Israelites have quickly packed up and hightailed it out of Egypt when given the
chance. They have survived the frantic
attempt of Pharaoh to recapture them or to wipe them out at the Red Sea when
Moses, through God, split the sea for the people to escape. Thus far it has been a pretty hectic and wild
adventure with very little planning on the part of Moses . . . the goal is just
to escape toward freedom.
Having packed up and left in a hurry
the Israelites did not plan on what they were going to do for nourishment . . .
did not think about how they were going to feed themselves. After a while what little food they had ran
out . . . people started to get hungry.
Hungry people get grumpy. Hungry
people complain. The Israelites were
hungry and so they began to whine.
“If only we had died by the Lord’s hand in
Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat
and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to
starve this entire assembly to death.”
Let’s see . . . Moses, through God,
has secured the people’s freedom from a cruel oppressor. The people now are a free people. Moses, through God, got the people out of the
sticky situation at the Red Sea when it looked like certain doom would
happen. And, now this is the “thanks” that
Moses gets in return . . . a bunch of complaining? I am surprised that Moses didn’t just ask the
people if they would like a little cheese with that whine.
Poor Moses . . . he is just the
scapegoat in all of this. He’s taking
the heat for all of this as we all know that it is actually God running the
show. Moses knows it. God knows it.
Moses tells the people: “. . . he has heard your grumbling. Who are we?
You are not grumbling against us, but against the Lord.” But, what do the people care . . . they are
hungry. At this point they would take
cheese with their whine.
Something is not right in this age
that we are living in. In the world
around us we see great discontent . . . people are not happy . . . people are
oppressed . . . people are whining as represented by the great upheaval we are
witnessing across the globe. There is a
great hungry that is sweeping across the world today and it is getting nasty in
its violence against one another.
We see it in our own nation as our
leaders in government cannot seem to tolerate one another . . . cannot even
seem to stand in the same room with one another without pointing fingers and
complaining . . . there is lots of division and animosity in our nation . . .
lots of whining from everyone. There is
a hunger that is sweeping across our nation . . . our communities . . . our
lives.
We see it in the “church”—the body of
Christ—as the “old” complains about the “new” and the “new” complains about the
“old”. We see it as the mainline and
established denominations—both liberal and conservative—struggle to exist. We see it in the division of the body of
Christ where the faithful point fingers at one another and complain about
things that they don’t like the other representing. There is a lot of whining going on that
represents a hunger within the “church”.
Across the holy domain of God’s
creation there is a hunger . . . a cry to be feed. All of God’s creation whines. All of God’s children want to be fed . . .
bring on the cheese!
And, that is what God does. God feeds the people. God provides the meat. God provides the manna. God has come into their midst once again . .
. made God’s presence known to the people . . . and fed them. For the people this is to be a sign—once
again, that God is with them. For the
time being, the whining stops as the people are fed through the presence of
God.
Though the world’s hunger is not a
physical hunger it is still a cry out to be fed . . . it is a deeper hunger
that the world and its people are crying about . . . a spiritual hunger. A hunger for acknowledgement. A hunger for purpose and meaning. A hunger for relationship . . . a hunger for
relationship for it is truly relationships that bring life to all of us. It is a hunger to be loved and to love. Looking at the world today in its disastrous
condition I think that the world does not love itself much . . . after all we
love the way we love ourselves.
The hunger that the world . . . and
humanity . . . whines about can only be eliminated through what our Lord and
Savior told us to be about—relationships.
Remember how he affirmed the lawyer’s answer that the purpose of life
was to love the Lord wholly and completely . . . to love one’s neighbor as
one’s self? Remember how Jesus said that
these two commandments fulfilled all the law and words of the prophets? Remember how he told the lawyer—and
ultimately, all of us, to go out and do likewise? It comes down to relationships between us and
God, us and others . . . it comes down to radical accepting love. That is the manna that feds us . . . that is
the cheese that takes away the whining.
That is what we all want . . . to be
full of the life that God offers to each us of through an intimate and holy
relationship with God. We want to be
loved . . . we want to be acknowledged . . . we want to have a purpose and
meaning . . . we want to be.
In this time of respite in our lives this morning from the crazy
busyness of the lives we live . . . let us consider the whining we do in our
lives . . . let us acknowledge our hunger . . . let us ask what it is that we
truly need and want that will satisfy this hunger that is trashing our souls .
. . killing our hearts. In this time of
pausing for worship and fellowship, let us lift up our deepest hope that our
hunger will be feed . . . that our lives will receive the manna—the bread of
life. In this time of quiet reflection
let us step into the presence of God . . . let us embrace the love and grace of
God . . . and, let us enter into the intimacy of our relationship with God and
others. It is here that we will find
what we need. It is here that we will be
fed.
God said to the people: “Then
you will know that I am the Lord your God.” So it will be for us. Amen.
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