This week I spent three days with a very small group of Christians from around their state. This group is just forming, longing together for a deeper focus on God and prayer in their congregations and Church. They know each other but barely, mostly sharing an openness and willingness for whatever God may have for them.
Before I arrived, the initial 12 people became 8. Then, 8 became 5. One could be with us only in the evenings. Another was bearing the grief of two dear ones currently dying. But they all wanted to be as present as they were able. I had planned what I would do, but when I got there, the situation called for something different. In coming to talk to people about trusting God and responding to God’s leading, I was having to scrap my plans and pay attention in the moment to what God was doing and respond.
Could it be any other way?
Mostly, we prayed. We talked about praying, shared stories about prayer, read scripture about prayer, rested, played and prayed. Morning, midday, evening prayer and compline, prayer stations, and all the ways of prayer we practice on Saturdays I shared with them in our contemplative prayer guide. And for three days, that’s what we did.
I started the retreat saying we were going to pretend God is real and see what happens. And God kept meeting us. This is not an idea, it’s an experience. It can feel like a pressure in the chest, a ‘kathunk’ in the gut, tears, warmth, aha!, being drawn beyond yourself into something bigger, both deeply vulnerable and held safe. God met us in art and nature, in sharing and listening, and especially in two ways: the songs I brought from our congregation – every single one was new to them and they fell right into them and gratefully sang, even though we were just a handful of people. And then, especially, and completely unexpectedly, in these strange, unplanned pockets of sudden silence.
Every time something ended – a meal, a conversation, a liturgy—a heavy, holy silence seemed to descend, and we sat there. Silent. And weirdly, it was not forced or awkward. Nobody felt compelled to speak or hurry away. When I did say something that broke the silence, it would just resume afterwards as though my comment was fine, but an unnecessary interruption of what was really meant to be happening.
When I realized that something was happening around silence, instead of the hour-long midafternoon silence on the schedule, like we usually have on our own sabbath retreats, I asked if they would like to try a Benedictine ‘Great Silence’ that extends from the end of Compline until lunch the following day. Without hesitating, they said yes.
That night, they wanted to start compline early, so we prayed, and then departed the campfire at 7:45 pm into a silence that extended for the next 16 hours.
Who is this God? And what is God up to?
The scripture before us today is the theological beginning of our faith story. The part of the story we consider the beginning is told from the perspective of the relationship God forms with the people here, in the Exodus. It is here, 3500 years ago, that this question, Who is this God and what is God up to? begins being voiced and answered in our faith ancestors. Everything before and after flows from right here.
But in this moment, they don’t know what’s happening. They don’t really know who they are yet, and they’ve barely just met this God their people have been worshiping for some five hundred years. Belonging to God is an idea, not yet an experience. we are glimpsing in these verses the first moments of this relationship forming. It is here that this God they’ve only heard stories about begins engaging them directly. Here is where they begin being made into the people of this God.
The Hebrew people who find themselves starving together in the harsh wilderness are a smattering of twelve, small, loosely related but separate, nomadic, tribal clans with an oral history tradition, who have been enslaved by the Egyptians for centuries. When we meet them here, they don’t have the law, the Ten Commandments or the Torah. There is no Sabbath practice or temple worship, no formalized religion or scripture at all, not even a unified, written language. Everything that comes before this moment in our bible—Father Abraham and Mother Sarah, Isaac who was promised, Jacob who wrestles-with-God, and Joseph who saved the Egyptian empire from famine— it is all passed down, generation to generation, family to family. Nothing is written down yet. “The God of our Ancestors” is worshiped by each family and clan praying to this God, and telling their children the stories of God’s faithfulness to their forebears, while they themselves are slaves to the Pharaoh of Egypt.
Then one day, Moses, a nobody nomad, stuttering shepherd, is out in the wilderness with the sheep and sees a bush continuously on fire, and hears from it his own name being called. Take off your shoes. You are on holy ground. Moses, I AM this God of your ancestors, of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. My name is I AM, Yahweh. (God’s name is an always present, always past, always future, outside time and timeful, I am who I am, I am who I was, I will be who I am…)
Yahweh tells Moses, I have seen the people’s misery, heard their groans, and know their suffering. I am going to set them free and make their home in a land flowing with milk and honey. And you, Moses, are going to lead them out of Egypt.
Then God acts. When the Pharoah repeatedly refuses to listen, God visits plagues on the Egyptians. Through Moses God unites the people into one, and in early morning hours they flee. They’re chased by the world’s most formidable army, and God delivers them by parting the sea to lead them through on dry land. And day after day, God guides them onward by a cloud in the day and pillar of fire at night.
Who is this God and what is God up to?
So far, that is being answered this way: Yahweh listens to our cries. Yahweh is more powerful than the mighty Pharoah who does not listen and his booming empire built on the backs of the weak. Yahweh is greater than the greatest army that cannot stand against God’s power. Earth, water, wind and fire are at Yahweh’s beck and call.
That’s all a good start. Only now, the people have been out there in the wilderness for several grueling weeks, and the food has run out. They’re hungry and miserable, trudging through heat and barrenness, with no end in sight. Unsurprisingly, the complaining kicks up. “If only Yahweh had killed us back there when we were slaves, at least we had enough to eat!” The people yell at Moses and Aaron, his brother and spokesperson, “You brought us out here to kill the whole lot of us by starving us in the wilderness!”
But before Moses can respond, or bring their complaints to God, God is already responding. God says, “I am going to provide enough food for the people for each day, and that is all they are to gather. I will test the people to see if they will obey.”
Think of this like a pre-test. Where are we at, people? Do you trust me? How much teaching will I have to do? Yahweh is out to form them into God’s people, to shape them into this personal, covenant relationship of belonging to God they’ve heard about from the stories of their ancestors, but do not yet know themselves. And this shaping is not first through instructions and words. God didn’t line them up before they left Egypt and give them the Ten Commandments like reading them the rules before they get on the field trip bus.
Trust is felt. They need to know what it is to be taken care of by God in their bodies and spirits. They are not going to be told how God operates until after their hunger is fed, their needs are provided for, and the rhythm of obeying, trusting and resting begins to be lived out in their daily actions and their conscious surrender into this way of God.
The people keep complaining to Moses and Aaron, but they keep pointing back to God – you think we’re leading you? God is leading. God is listening. God is providing.
Who is this God?
The answer now expands. Yahweh is the God who provides, who listens to our complaining and responds to our need.
Our lectionary text stops the story with God providing: Quail and manna, all they need, for today and only today. But if we were to read on, we would see that this lesson is reinforced miraculously and insistently with the manna itself. God tells them a per person amount they should collect. But some of them gather scads of it, and some just a little, only when they go to measure, it is all exactly the amount God commanded them to pick up, enough for each person in their tent to eat and be filled. But then, some don’t eat their whole portion, they stay a bit hungry to squirrel way part of it for the next day just in case. And when they do, it becomes wormy and rotten, and Moses gets angry with them. “Morning by morning” the scripture says, “they gathered it, as much as each needed, but when the sun grew hot, it melted.” The provision of God can’t be saved up, and it also can’t be postponed.
What you need today. All you need today. Enough for all. No one with more. No one with less. No rationing and saving up for tomorrow. No delaying receiving the gift. Participating in this new way of being. Morning by morning, new mercies. God will take care of you. Now. And again tomorrow, now, I AM is your God.
After five days of slowly learning, they’re told to gather twice as much on the sixth day, because God is going to give them this new thing: a holy day of rest. They will have enough food for the seventh day and will not need to gather. But when the seventh day comes, some of them try to collect again and find nothing there. And poor Moses and Aaron have to keep verbally reiterating these lessons Yahweh is teaching them. You can’t hack the system and save yourself. Trust. Obey. Receive. Rest. Live into these rhythms and rituals that hold you in this relationship with the God to whom you belong.
Who is this God and what is God up to?
Now it’s deeper: Yahweh is trustworthy. This God knows and provides exactly what we need. Yahweh thwarts our attempts to live apart from God for ourselves. Yahweh expects us to participate in God’s way of life. God will continue to take care of us. Bit by bit, God is freeing them from slavery’s patterns and self-protections, freeing them for belonging to God and each other.
Teach us to pray, the disciples will ask Jesus, 1500 years later. And now the God who encountered the Israelites in the wilderness and taught them to trust through daily bread is standing right in front of them in the person of Jesus Christ, who says I AM the ‘the bread of life.’ A new kind of relationship is forming, and they don’t know what is happening yet, or how it all fits together, and they certainly don’t know what is to come. They only know that they want to learn something Jesus seems to know. So they do like we all do and ask a “How?” question, and like their ancestors, they get a “Who?” answer. How do we live? How do we help? How do we know what to do? How do we pray?
Jesus answers them, and we have named his answer a “How” answer by calling it ‘The Lord’s prayer,’ but it is really a Who, answer, drawing them toward I AM.
Loving parent, not bound by time and space,
draw us into your life, your way of seeing and being in this world.
Feed us today what we need for today. Teach us to trust.
Form us into people turned toward you, ready to receive.
Release us from what separates us from you, and help us release others from what divides us from them. Don’t test us to see where we stand; instead deliver us from evil (and this word deliver means literally, save us to and for yourself).
“Jesus, teach us to pray.” is what this group I was with said this week, 2000 years after the first disciples. And we kept being fed with silence. Over and over. Delicious, rich, strangely satisfying silence that we had clearly been starving for. The I AM, just hanging out with us right there. I don’t yet know what God was doing in that, or will do their congregations, or their diocese, or what is to come for them. But whatever it will be, something was beginning.
God is always forming us into a people to and for Godself. Whatever we think we are asking for, what we receive is God, I AM, who pulls us into Christ’s life and through his death to the vulnerable and safe space on the other side, where we embody for the world the shared human reality of our belonging to God and all others. We are learning to obey, trust, receive and rest. We begin by being as present as we are able. Then we watch for what God is doing and respond.
Amen.
