If Only!

If Only!

Exodus 16:1-3

October 27, 2019 • Mount Pleasant UMC

So, I have noticed that once I turned fifty, I started having all these different sorts of meetings. My investment guy called me and asked if I wanted to have a meeting to discuss retirement strategies. My insurance agent called me and wanted to have a meeting to discuss retirement income and whether or not there was enough life insurance “for when you leave your family behind.” Wait, does she know something I don’t? And then, this week at our covenant group meeting, we were discussing what book we were going to read together next, and one of the suggestions had a subtitle that went something like, “Spirituality for the Second Half of Life.” What? I’m in the second half? When did that happen?

Well, at 52 I guess I am in the second half of life unless I’m going to live past 104, and when you finally admit that, it causes you to begin to look back and maybe even rethink some of your past choices. Sometimes you don’t even have to get to a certain age to rethink things. In a few weeks, we will be celebrating Thanksgiving, and most if not all of us will indulge in a pretty big meal, after which I will lay down on the couch and say, “Why did I eat so much? If only I had stuck to my diet!” When the bills come in January, we’ll rethink our choices and some of our purchases at Christmas. “Why did we spend so much? If only we had stuck to our budget!” Some of us may even have to rethink this evening after Trunk or Treat when we let our kids eat too much candy! If only…two of the saddest words in the human vocabulary when put together. If only I had done this instead of that, turned left instead of right, chosen this career instead of that one. If only I hadn’t done this, if only I had done that. If only…two words that we find in the mouths of the Israelites one month out on their Exodus journey.

We’re studying the life of Moses this fall, seeing what we can learn from the story of this reluctant prophet, this somewhat unwilling leader of God’s people. Moses, at age 80, answered God’s call to help set the Hebrew people free from slavery in Egypt. If you did the readings this week, you experienced a dramatic moment with the people’s escape as they crossed what is traditionally called the Red Sea, but probably more accurately called the Reed Sea. God rescued the people and punished the Egyptians in one powerful night. Now, they are really free, no longer slaves; they’re on their own as a people for the first time in over four hundred years. Chapter 15 is a long song that Moses and his sister Miriam sing to give God praise for the rescue. And after this huge celebration, after this extended time of worship because they’ve seen the power of God, what do the people do? Having experienced God fulfilling his promises, surrounded by fresh evidence of God’s faithfulness, what do they do? They grumble.

Do you ever grumble? Maybe I should ask your family members if you ever grumble! Before you answer, we should probably find out what the Bible means by “grumbling.” The word used here is also used elsewhere to describe the prowling and scavenging of wild dogs, but primarily it refers to murmuring or whispering. It describes the kind of conversation that doesn’t exactly happen out in the open; it’s more the kind of talk that happens about someone but not to someone. “Behind the back,” we most often say (cf. Hawkins, “Grumbling,” NIDOTB, Vol. 2, pg. 699; Durham, Word Biblical Commentary: Exodus, pg. 211). But it’s more than just talk; the sense of this word is that there is a rebellious spirit behind it. In other words, the talker is wanting to do more than talk. There is a hope or a plan to rebel, to fight back, to resist what the object of the grumbling is doing or trying to do (cf. Enns, NIV Application Commentary: Exodus, pg. 330). So this is not the people coming to Moses and Aaron to work out an issue, at least not initially. Before they do that, they go around and drum up support for their ideas by talking about Moses and Aaron but not to them. They’ve just done something similar in chapter 15; when they were out of water, they grumbled against Moses (15:24). Now, not too much later, they are grumbling against Moses and Aaron because of a lack of food. I know at 14th and Chestnut, they call the cafe “Grumbling Tummies.” There are grumbling tummies here in the desert, but it’s very different! I think even if they were handed a steak dinner, they would still be unhappy because what they really lack, as one commentator points out, is faith. They’re a month into their journey (Enns 324, 330). They’re only a month out from Egypt. They’ve witnessed miracle after miracle, including the sea opening up for them. But it’s not enough. They have no faith, so they grumble. So let me ask again: do you ever grumble?

If we’re honest, we all grumble about something from time to time. We’re in the middle of a local election cycle and next year’s national election cycle seems to have started a long time ago. Stop at the coffee shop and you’ll hear plenty of grumbling—talking about people and issues but not talking to people. Politics, while essential and important in our nation, does not bring out the best in us these days—in person or online! Or we grumble about our neighbors. They don’t keep their lawn the way they should, their house is not kept up, they are affecting our property values! Many of us don’t know our neighbors, but that doesn’t keep us from grumbling about them. And this is as much “true confessions” for me as it is anything else. At least we don’t find grumbling in the church, right? Of course we do, and the grumbling that happens here seems more intense at times because we mix our preferences with our deeply-held faith convictions, and sometimes we get the two confused. When things change to something that is not our preference, it’s easy to get that mixed up with the faith that will never change, as if our preference is obviously Jesus’ preference. And we start to grumble.

Tod Bolsinger, who was here a week ago talking about his book Canoeing the Mountains, reminds us that most people don’t actually resist change; we resist loss (pg. 106). It’s what we feel we have lost as a result of the change that causes us to grumble. That’s true in the story of Moses, as we’ll see in a moment, and it’s true in church life today. Dr. Bolsinger told about a man who spent weeks arguing with him over the font they were using on their screen at their church. The man even brought in research articles to show how one particular font was better than the one they were using, and Dr. Bolsinger said he couldn’t figure out why this gentleman was getting so worked up over a font. But in the course of one particular…we’ll call it a discussion…it suddenly came out. The man was upset because he couldn’t see that particular font. If they were asking him to sing off the screen, he at least wanted to read the words. It wasn’t really about the screen or the songs. It was about his own loss and the struggle with his eyesight. But instead of doing what Jesus said to do and talking it out honestly, one to one, he grumbled for a long time. Yes, we grumble—in these areas of life and in others as well.

The loss the Hebrews are dealing with in the desert is not just food. It’s the loss of a way of life. Sure, it was slavery, but it was known. They could count on having food; now, they really weren’t sure where their next meal was coming from. This grumbling comes not only out of frustration and anger but out of desperation and despair. Listen to how they express it (eventually; this sounds the consensus of lots of those parking-lot committee meetings and probably starts with the word “People are saying…”): “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” (16:3). Oh, Egypt, it was great. Remember all the food? Remember the pots of meat? Remember the desserts? Sure, we were slaves, but we had food! Now you’ve just brought us out here to starve us! Now, had they stopped to think about it, that whole statement makes no sense. Of course Moses and Aaron did not bring them this far just to starve them. For one thing, if the people starve, so do Moses and Aaron! Did they really think that these two brothers were suicidal? But we say all sorts of things when we are desperate.

I remember my “if only” moment. It was about two weeks after my first heart surgery in 1999, about a week after I had come home. I became very ill, very nauseous, and dealing with that plus the pain of the incision and the struggle of the recovery became overwhelming for me. I very clearly remember being in our family room, laying on the couch, miserable, and telling God it would have been better if he had just let me die. I’d had enough and if life was going to be like this going forward, I’d just as soon not go forward. I didn’t want to live like this. At that moment I was ready to give up, and I couldn’t see all the good things that were coming down the road. If God had answered my prayer the way I demanded that afternoon, Rachel would never have been born, I would have missed out on a lot of opportunities and blessings, including moving to Terre Haute to serve here at Mount Pleasant. The Hebrews are at the same point, and maybe you have been there or maybe you’re even there today. The present is so difficult you can’t see beyond this very moment. The Hebrews in the desert can’t imagine a time when they aren’t hungry, when they don’t feel lost, when they are not angry, frustrated and tired. They can’t imagine a better future. They are living with a mindset of scarcity instead of abundance, and we are very often just like them. I know I am. So we yell at God and we complain and we kick and scream and say, “If only you would do it my way!”

But here’s the thing: God can handle it. God can handle our outcries. God can handle our anger and our frustration. God can handle our doubts and he does not chastise us for them (cf. Enns 330). The great hymnbook of the Hebrew people that has been passed down to us as the book of Psalms shows that to be true. Read the psalms and you run up against complaints over and over again. In fact, scholars say that about seventy percent of the psalms are laments, people complaining about the things that have happened to them or the way people are treating them or even the way they feel they have been treated by God. It often goes something like this: “Save me, O God, by your name; vindicate me by your might…Arrogant foes are attacking me; ruthless people are trying to kill me—people without regard for God…Let evil recoil on those who slander me; in your faithfulness destroy them” (Psalm 54:1, 3, 5). Some folks have a hard time with language like that being in the Bible, but it’s just honest. Like any collection of songs, the psalms reflect the heart—the human heart—of those who first wrote them. And seventy percent of the time, they are complaining.

Interestingly, we don’t get God’s responses in the midst of those psalms, though often we do hear in the voice of the singer how they have been changed by their interaction with God. Isn’t it interesting, though, to compare our faith ancestors’ worship with our own? Seventy percent of their songbook is lament; zero percent of popular American worship is lament. We want worship to be upbeat, positive. I’ve been told by people that they get enough bad news on the other six days of the week, they want only positive messages on Sundays. And one Christmas season, when I preached about Herod and how he killed all the babies in Bethlehem, I was caught by someone at the door who told me she did not want to hear such things at Christmas. It’s supposed to be happiness. But, friends, that’s not life and that’s not the story of the Bible because the Bible stories happen in real life. Sometimes there is not enough food. Sometimes there is death. Sometimes there is a reason to complain to God! But the Bible reminds us over and over again that God can take it. He is big enough to handle it and he will even use it. Think about the story of Job. Job lost everything: his family, his crops, his livelihood and then his health. And in the book that bears his name, he spends something like thirty-six chapters complaining to God. His wife has told him to curse God and die. His friends tell him he must have sinned and he’s being punished. Job himself says he would love the chance to make the case to God himself for why he is so undeserving of suffering. And then God shows up. And God speaks. And God asks questions that Job has no answer for because God sees more than we do. God has a different perspective, and so when we come to him with honest doubts and genuine questions, he can handle it. You can come to him just as you are, bad days and all (cf. Goldingay, Exodus & Leviticus for Everyone, pg. 69).

So how does God respond to Moses’ situation? If you follow the weekly readings, you’ll read the rest of the story this week, where God “rains down” bread on the people. They are told the bread will appear six days a week, but that they should only get what they need for their family each day because it will spoil if it’s kept overnight. On Friday, however, they are to gather enough for two days because it will not appear on Saturday, the Sabbath, the day they are not supposed to do any work. When the bread appears the first day, they call it “manna,” which basically means, “What is it?” Now, you might read this story and think that God gave in to their demands. You might read this in this way: “These are spoiled brats and God gave into their whining.” Every parenting book will tell you that’s a bad idea. But that’s not what is going on here. The people think they are complaining about Moses and Aaron, but as Moses points out (16:8), they’re actually grumbling against God. They are failing to trust his protection and his provision. They are choosing to believe that God has brought them this far and will just leave them alone now. They lack faith; they lack trust. And so God provides bread (and quail as well) so that—here’s the key verse—so that “you will know that I am the Lord your God” (16:12). The whole point of God’s response to the people’s grumbling is to teach them that it’s okay to bring your complaints to God and that God is big enough not only to listen to the grumbles but to provide for his people’s need.

Can we believe that? Can we really get ahold of that truth, deep down in our souls? It’s so easy to forget, even in a short time, the ways God has provided for us. Many of you remember how, a few years ago, this church faced a crisis. Some of you were here then, some of us have come after, but the worship center was in danger of collapsing and we found ourselves in a place where we had to rebuild. The best estimate was it was going to cost around 1.5 million dollars (it actually ended up costing a little more than that), and people said we couldn’t do it. There was no way we could raise that kind of money. But you all came together as a congregation, as the body of Christ, and you pledged about 1.2 million dollars. Now, things shifted and changed somewhat as we went through the process, but God has continued to provide; our current debt is somewhere around $825,000. We’re paying that down as faithful folks continue to give toward that debt. About a month ago, we heard a report, however, that we have struggled financially this year as a church. That’s true. Things have been tight. And it’s easy to focus on what we don’t have. It’s easy to fear and begin to question God’s call. I’ve done plenty of that in the last few months. We can do that, or we can focus on and remember the times when God has provided. We can trust that if he still has ministry for us to do in this place, he will provide what we need to do what we’re called to do. Now, it’s probably not going to drop out of the sky like manna. It’s going to come through God’s people, through you and me.

We grumble and God provides. Is there any clearer picture of grace than that? Think about the ways God has provided for you in the past. it might even be good to write down the account of God providing for you so that you have it to go back to in those times when you are tempted to grumble or when you begin to complain. Call it your provision narrative or your gratitude journal. That’s a big part of why these stories were written down in the Scriptures: to remind God’s people that he has provided in the past and he will provide in the future. He has been there and he will be there again.

So let me ask you this morning: what’s your manna? How do you need God to provide for you? Now, let me ask the meddling question: have you asked him? Or have you just grumbled about the ways he’s not come through? There is a New Testament principle here: “You do not have because you do not ask God” (James 4:2). Now, that is not a principle that automatically guarantees we can get whatever we want. Remember, God’s provision is for what we need, not for what we think we need (cf. Matthew 6:8, 25-34). He knows better, which is why James, in that passage, goes on to say, “When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures” (4:3). He goes on from there to remind us that our first calling is to submit to God (4:7), to allow God’s spirit to transform our desires, our hearts, our plans, our lives. Sometimes, like in the Exodus story, God gives in spite of our grumbling spirit; he’s that kind of God. But he also longs for us to be conformed to his image, to be made more like his son Jesus Christ. We say things like, “If only God would do this or that,” and God is saying, “If only you could see my heart. If only you could know how much I love you and want the best for you. If only you could be more and more my child.” If only…if only we would come to him and ask and trust him for the provision that will come.

When I was miserable and laying on the couch after my first heart surgery, God’s provision came through a conversation Cathy had with a doctor friend in another state. When Cathy mentioned to our friend how nauseous I was, this friend asked if I had ever been tested for an allergy to codeine. No, I had not, and lo and behold, once my local doctor removed the medicine that contained codeine, I felt better within a day. Now I only had the pain to deal with, but that I can handle. God’s provision didn’t come in a blinding light and it certainly didn’t come in the way I thought I wanted it to come in that moment. It came through a fellow believer in Jesus who was tuned in to the situation and cared enough to ask the right question. We may not always recognize God’s provision right away; we might ask, “What is that?” It might look like “thin flakes like frost on the ground” that tastes like “wafers made with honey” (16:14, 31). It might look like an email that arrives just at the right time or a gift that comes in the mail. It might come as an encouraging word at a critical moment or a hug when you’re feeling most alone. I can’t tell you how God will provide; I just know he will because he’s that kind of God, the kind of God who does not leave us in the midst of our “if onlies.” Let’s pray.