Sermons
“Hungry for the Kindom” based on Exodus 16:2-4, 9-15 and…
The central question of faith is: What is the nature of your God? The Bible’s most repeated answer to the question is “God’s steadfast love endures forever.”
The narrative from Exodus seems to be slightly expansive essay on the theme “God’s steadfast love endures forever” that helps people understand what that means and how it functions. In the book of Exodus, we encounter God who liberates the oppressed. In particular, we encounter the Divine hearing the cries of the people, and feeling compassion for them. The Holy One then works through some of the least likely individuals possible to bring the people to freedom, and then guides them along their way.
Here, in chapter 16, the people are in the midst of the wilderness. By some estimates it has been about 6 weeks since they became free, and that appears to be long enough for the excitement to have worn off and new anxieties to have settled in. One commentator puts it, “The narrative of Exodus 16 can be read as representative of the type of crisis that faith faces whenever God’s people move from bondage to well-being. … The wandering in the wilderness is for Israel the place to knock down the mental frame of being oppressed and to pick up the life of liberty.”1 Part of the framework of oppression is constant anxiety.
The newly freed former slaves are getting nervous about their situation. Now, when the Bible says “desert” or “wilderness” what it is trying to say is “a place so forsaken that human life cannot be maintained without Divine intervention.” The desert near Sinai was such a place, and I think most pictures of Egyptian desert do a good job of communicating just how scary it could be to suddenly find yourself in that place without sufficient provisions. I think the anxiety was founded, but I also think it was rooted in their oppression.
While other parts of Exodus indicate that the people were supposed to “have faith” and “trust in God to provide,” in this Priestly version of the manna in the desert narrative, the people grumble and God simply has compassion on them. After all, God’s steadfast love endures forever, and steadfast love looks A LOT like compassion. Another commentator said, “What is important here is that God – once again – heard the people’s cries and responded to their need, whether it was real or whether it was a misperception caused by panic.”2 They are hungry and scared, so God offers them consolation and food.
There is one way in which I often struggle with Bible stories that speak of God feeding hungry people. I love the stories, but I also know that in real life people starve to death, and there are even more who are malnourished to the point that their health is compromised. It can almost sound like God picks favorites and feeds those while ignoring others, when we hear the stories of God feeding the people, and I don’t think God works that way.
It is helpful to think about who wrote the story. This story is told up by the Judean priests, it is designed to teach of God’s trustworthiness. The Judean priests, in their regular work, oversaw food redistribution programs, and called on the leaders of the people to make sure that systems were in place to make sure that food was accessible to those who need it. The story didn’t come out of vacuum. It is in the midst of the Torah, which as a whole, OBSESSES over taking care of the poor and vulnerable. We have a story that suggests that God took care of the poor and vulnerable in the desert AND SO the people should take care of the poor and vulnerable in the Promised Land.
Thanks be to God, on this planet we have enough! We have more than enough food to feed all the people. We have enough clean water (for the time being). We are even getting to the point where we have enough renewable energy sources to feed our energy needs! (How cool is that?) The reason people struggle with malnourishment and starvation is a HUMAN DISTRUBTION problem, not a lack of Divine gifts of abundance. Creation is sufficient to our needs. However, people have decided to use the resources in ways that prevent others from accessing them.
In the Bible, food is not just food. The people are told, “’At twilight you shall eat meat, and in the morning you shall have your fill of bread; then you shall know that I am the LORD your God.’“ (12b, NRSV) A scholar explains, “In the Old Testament context, knowledge is not essentially or even primarily rooted in the intellectual activities of a human being. Rather, it is more experiential and embedded in the emotions. It therefore encompasses qualities such as intimacy, concern, communication, mutuality, and contact.”3 So the gift of the food was a way of “knowing” that God’s steadfast love endures forever. The food in the desert guided the people to trust in God, and God’s compassion for them. The food was food, and that was good. But the food was also a means of knowing that God is good.
James Fowler’s book “Stages of Faith Development” discusses faith development through the human life span. He says that if babies have human caregivers who notice and attend to their needs, they will later find it credible that God is benevolent. However, for babies whose needs are not met, it will be far harder in life to believe that there is any being with power who seeks goodness for them (or anyone.) We “know” God in part by having our needs met.
This has gotten me thinking about what our needs are. Maslov famously created a hierarchy of human needs, but further studies have indicated that they aren’t as hierarchial as he thought, nor as universal. Nonviolent Communication Theory has a list of universal human needs without any hierarchy. They fall into categories like: connection, honesty, play, peace, physical well-being, meaning, and autonomy. Nonviolent Communication teaches that all of us have all of the needs, and that most of what we do and say comes out of an attempt to meet those needs. Even more so, most of what we FEEL is a reflection of how our needs are met or unmet. Nonviolent Communication encourages us to notice what we feel, as a means of figuring out what we are needing. The needs are the key to it all.
The priests taught that God gave the people food so that they would KNOW (experience, live) God’s steadfast love. Having needs met makes so much else possible! When a need is flaring to be fulfilled, it is very hard to focus on anything else!!
In the end of our Gospel reading today, Jesus said to them, "I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” (35, NRSV) Based on the context, it is clear we’re not just talking about food here either. Earlier in the chapter, in the part we read last week, Jesus fed the masses. The verbs in that passage speak of not only being full, but being satiated. The people seemed to KNOW God and God’s love once again, through the bread. In today’s passage, they seem to be seeking those things again.
So bread IS bread, sometimes, because humans NEED food. But bread is also a metaphor for our other needs. So too with thirst. What hungers and thirsts is Jesus talking about? Knowing Jesus and his context, I suspect he was talking about bread and wine in physical senses AND at the same time in spiritual senses. Jesus never seems to focus apart from people’s physical needs, nor does he think satiating only the physical is enough. He fed people bread and hope. He offered people living water and compassion.
I suspect the bread of life and living water Jesus offers in John are intentionally vague, so that those of us who hear of them can attend to the needs flaring up in us. Then we can hear as we need to hear. Jesus offers food to the hungry, healing to the sick, liberation to the oppressed, release to the captives, good news to the hopeless, a welcome to the homeless, rest to the weary, comfort to the grieving, movement to the stuck, purpose to the lost, intimacy to the lonely, inspiration to the resigned, joy to the downtrodden, and inclusion to those who have been left out. 😉 To name a few.
The Gospel of John says the people had been satiated by Jesus, and they wanted to be again. The book of Exodus says the people’s needs were met so they would know their God to be the one whose steadfast love endures forever.
The Bible thinks about the needs of “the people” more often than it thinks about the needs of any individual person. It feeds the masses, because the conditions that make one hungry often make others hungry as well.
That leads me to wonder what the Body of Christ is hungry for today, the people together. I suspect we might hunger for justice and thirst for compassion, and I think that is what God hungers and thirsts for as well. God is the God of all the people, so whoever is hurting the most is creating aches within God. When the world becomes more just, God aches less. When the people receive compassion, God finds relief. When fewer people are hungry, there are fewer hunger pains within the Divine. Hunger for justice and thirst for compassion is a way of saying that those of us who have enough bread, hunger for a world where all people do too. It is also to say that we hunger for the kindom when all have enough to survive AND thrive.
May our needs be met – the ones we each came with today, and the ones we share as the Body of Christ. May we trust in God who seeks for us to know Holiness by meeting our needs. When human beings get in the way of God’s people getting what they need, may we be courageous enough to get in the way of those systems. And may we notice, when our needs are met, that the Holy One whose steadfast love endures forever is with us, ready to be KNOWN once again. May our hunger for the kindom help kindom come. Amen
1 Rein Bos, “Exegetical Perspective on Exodus 16:2-4, 9-15” in Feasting on the World Year B, Volume 3; David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, editors (Louisville, KT: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009)293.
2 Dean McDonald, “Homiletical Perspective on Exodus 16:2-4, 9-15” in Feasting on the World Year B, Volume 3; David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, editors (Louisville, KT: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009) 291.
3Bos, 295.
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Rev. Sara E. Baron
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305
Pronouns: she/her/hers
https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady
August 5, 2018