In the name of God ☩ Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Today’s collect is a beautiful prayer, asking that God enable us not to be anxious about earthly things but to hold fast to that which shall endure. It’s something that we all struggle with – not sweating the small stuff and focusing on what truly matters. But as we know from psychology, this is easier said than done. Someone tells you all the great things that you’ve done, and then they offer a bit of constructive criticism by saying “but,” and it’s as if everything said before “but” was just a lie to soften the blow.
All of us can sit down a make a list of our priorities, of whose opinions we truly value, of what things we really care about. But that list goes out the window when a stranger calls us a name, or when something we really don’t care about doesn’t go our way. Putting our emphasis and energy in the right place is not only necessary for balanced mental health, but it’s also a part of our spiritual journey – to put God at the center of our lives.
Repentance is at the core of what it means to be a Christian, and as I’ve said before, in the language of the Bible “to repent” does not mean “to apologize or be sorry.” When John the Baptist, or Jesus, or Paul tells us that we need to repent, it’s not them saying “You’re guilty and you need to admit it,” rather the word they use means “to change your mind.” In other words, repentance is about changing our focus, it’s about giving our attention to God instead of so many other distractions.
In our reading from Exodus, we see the perils of what happens when we focus on the distractions instead of God’s goodness. You’ll remember that last Sunday, we heard about God’s mighty and saving act of leading the Hebrew people safely across the Red Sea, giving them their promised freedom from slavery in Egypt. And here we are, just about one month later in the story of Exodus and the people are already regretting that God saved them. They say “If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.” God hears this complaint and rains bread from heaven down on them to take care of their needs.
It’s a wonderful story that illustrates that God provides. And it’s also a reminder that it’s okay to complain to God. While I love the regal nature of the prayers in our Book of Common Prayer, our prayer book also contain the entire book of Psalms. Our tradition understands the power of the psalms to be honest, and even blunt, with God. It’s okay to shake your fist at God. It’s okay to be angry at God. It’s okay to say to God “You’re not holding up your end of the bargain.” One of the things that complaining to God does is to change our focus. It’s not so much that God says “Oh, sorry, I sort of forgot that you were in the desert and needed food,” but rather that we acknowledge our complete and utter dependence on God and look for signs of divine providence.
If you read a lot about this passage from Exodus, you’ll eventually find some scholars to try to explain where this food came from in naturalistic terms. And that’s fine if people want to do that. What matters though is not the mechanisms by which God provides, but rather the fact that God does indeed provide. We proclaim this truth most weeks in our liturgy – “All things come of thee, O Lord” or “Praise God from whom all blessings flow.” God heals, and that healing often comes through the skill and training of doctors and medical researchers. God loves, and that love often comes through our acts of compassion. God provides, and that providence comes through generosity. God speaks, and that speech comes through our voice boxes and is enabled by the Spirit. What matters is not where the quails and bread came from, but what matters is that God provides. Trying to figure out where exactly the blessings come from is a distraction from the fact that God provides us with life. And when we are honest enough to admit that we need God to provide and bold enough to petition God, our focus is shifted from the distraction of narcissistic self-reliance to a generous and grateful sense of reliance on God.
The bread that sustains the people is called manna, and knowing what that means in the Hebrew of the Old Testament is really helpful. Manna doesn’t mean “bread” or anything like that, but manna is a question that means “What is it?” Sometimes God’s providence doesn’t come in forms that we’d expect. Certainly, sometimes God does provide for something extraordinary, but more often than not, God provides through the ordinary. Our expectations can be a distraction. Perhaps you’ve heard the joke about the man who is trapped on his roof after a great flood. He prays for God to save him. Along comes a boat offering him an escape, but he says “No, God will provide.” Then a helicopter comes and he refuses the rope saying “God will save me.” Well, the waters eventually rise further and he drowns. When he meets God face to face, he asks “Why didn’t you save me God?” God replies “I sent you a boat and a helicopter, what more did you want?”
So often we think we know what we need, when in reality we don’t have a clue. The people in the desert were complaining about a lack of food. They remembered the fleshpots of Egypt, those abundant pots of meat. Conveniently, they forgot about the oppression and the slavery, but they remembered the food. So, reasonably, they were probably hoping that God would provide something at least as good as what they had back in Egypt. But that’s not what they got. Rather, they got a fine flaky substance. The initial reaction wasn’t “Thanks be to God,” but “What is this stuff?”
God provides daily bread for us all, and it comes in many forms. But we’re often so busy and so distracted that we miss it. A great practice is to take five minutes each evening and reflect on the day that has passed. Think about the ways in which you were blessed and taken care of, and thank God for it.
That distracting question of “What is this?” is one that we see in the parable that Jesus offers in Matthew as well. A landowner needs some day laborers to work the vineyard, so throughout the day he picks up more workers, and the last laborers are picked up in the last hour of the workday. So when the time comes to get paid and those who only worked an hour got paid for a full day’s labor, those who had been there since the morning assumed they’d be paid a handsome wage. And they were paid a handsome wage; they were paid the market rate for a day of work. But it’s not what they were expecting, so when they opened their palm and received one coin instead of a handful, they grumbled, saying “What is this?”
Fairness, or at least our distorted view of what is fair, is one of the greatest distractions there is in seeing God’s love and justice in this world. Now, I’ll admit that this is a hard parable to hear. It’s parables like this that got Jesus killed. We’re just as uncomfortable with this parable as those who first heard it. It doesn’t fit with our sense of what is fair. It doesn’t fit with our Protestant work-ethic. It doesn’t fit with our ethic of “hard work pays off.”
And we see this all over the place – think about how many times we either literally or metaphorically look over people’s shoulders to see what’s going on. Think about the debate around tax reform – doesn’t it boil down to a fight about “Why do they get more than me?” Think about immigration – “Why should they get what I’ve worked for?” But these questions of comparison are a distraction from seeing God’s providence and mercy.
And I’ll be honest with you, I sometimes feel this way about other clergy. There are churches in Salisbury that have pastors that haven’t been ordained in any regular sense of the word and don’t have any formal degrees in theology or religion. I went through a long and thorough ordination process that involved vulnerability, anxiety, psychological evaluations, physical examinations, and intense interviews. I have a bachelor’s degree in religion, a Master’s of Divinity degree, and am over halfway through a Doctor of Ministry degree – that’s 10 years of college and graduate studies in the field. But then some person comes along, maybe they’ve taken a few online courses from a non-accredited school and all of a sudden they get to be a pastor with their own church? It’s enough to make me ask in disgust, “What is this?”
My self-righteous though is a distraction. It blinds me from seeing the grace of God that is operating differently from how I think it should work. Everything about our society is competitive and commodified. Big data is everywhere, you can find statistics on nearly anything you want, and transactions on the New York Stock Exchange happen in milliseconds in response to minute market fluctuations. We are a numbers driven people, and while knowledge is power, we all know that power can be misused and abused.
It’s been said that “It matters what you count, and what you count matters.” Though it goes against everything about our culture of counting and comparing, there are some things that simply should not be quantified. God’s love is one of those things. God doesn’t love anyone any more or less than anyone else. Forgiveness is another – there’s no such thing as forgiving someone 71%. Another is dignity – either we respect the dignity of other people or we don’t, it’s not about giving one child of God more dignity than another. And God’s grace is not something to be quantified, because what we can put a number on is something that we can seek to limit and control. Trying to count to infinity is a distraction from the wonder of being infinitely loved.
The laborers missed this point. They, like we sometimes do, convinced themselves that they deserved more than they were promised and more than they actually earned. Just like the manna in Exodus, God provides us with our daily bread, but God doesn’t provide us with weekly bread. The way we get weekly bread is by taking the daily bread from others. God lavishes us with mercy, God blesses us with abundance, God generously provides for us all. But we get distracted from seeing this abundance when we try to count it or when we try to compare how much God gave to that other person.
Don’t count your blessings, that’s bad advice. Rather, thank God for your blessings, and share them so that God might make you a blessing to others. Instead of focusing our attention on being thankful for God’s blessings and making sure that everyone receives these blessings, we focus on earthly things – like fairness, like having more than we really need, like being self-sufficient instead of relying on the generosity of God and the community.
Today’s collect is a true treasure in prayer. As it concludes, we pray that God grants us to hold fast to those things which shall endure. We all know what is going to matter in 50 years and what isn’t going to matter next week. But so often our priorities are misaligned to dwell on things that will pass away while neglecting things that will endure. We all know what doesn’t really matter – awards, prestige, money, grudges, being first, being right – these things are here today and gone tomorrow. But love matters. Peace matters. Generosity matters. Justice matters. Mercy matters.
There are distractions all around us that prevent us from seeing God’s grace, so grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly; and even now, while we are placed among things that are passing away, to hold fast to those that shall endure. Amen.
