Sermon for September 21, 2008 

                                            Exodus 16:2-15

                                   Rev. Sharon James Fazel

Fascinating story, isn’t it? If you were here last week, you’ll know that this moment in the life of Israel happens after the parting of the Red Sea to allow Moses to lead the Israelites across to dry land, after which the waters closed around their pursuers, the Egyptian army. Yet, in today’s part of the story, there they were on the other side, only to find themselves starving in the desert. In last week’s reading, God was described as a warrior. And indeed, drowning an entire army might be considered an act of war.

However, in today’s part of the story, God becomes something else. The people are hungry, wandering in desolate terrain with the hot desert sun beating down on them. We often forget those conditions when we read this story, and focus purely on the fact that they complain about their living conditions. But honestly, wouldn’t you? They are in need! What is it that they need? They need food! They need the barest of essentials -- nutrition, to sustain their very lives.

So what do they get? They get the best of the natural world in that place – quail swoop down out of the sky (out of nowhere, it seems) and become the protein they need. But they also need carbs! And that comes in the form of “manna.” We don’t really know exactly what this “manna” substance was, but speculation says it might have been a sweet substance which is the crystallised honeydew of certain scale insects, “which is a delicacy in the middle east, and is a good source of carbohydrate,” or so says Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manna). So who is God now, to these same Israelites, in this step of their journey? God was a warrior, when they needed a warrior/deliverer; now God is a provider/sustainer. In two weeks’ worth of storytelling, God has gone from warrior/deliverer to provider/sustainer.

But let’s go back to a part of the story that happened even earlier than the parting of the Red Sea, back to when Moses first learned that God wanted him to lead Israel out of Egypt. That’s the story of the burning bush! Remember that story? We won’t go into the whole thing, but what’s important to us now is that Moses asked God “Whom shall I say is calling my people out of slavery in Egypt?” God says, “What?” And Moses says, “Who are you? What is your name?” God answers, “tell them… I am who I am.”

In reviewing the UCC website’s “Sermon Seeds” to prepare for this morning, I came across this, about those words: “While God’s response is translated in various and interesting ways, most often as “I Am Who Am,” another version is particularly fitting for our story today: ‘I will be who I will be.’  Someone has rendered this as ‘I will be what is needed at the time.’ The wilderness in today’s passage provides a perfect setting for God to be exactly that – just what the people need at that moment in time.” (www.ucc.org, S.A.M.U.E.L.)

“Just what the people need at that moment in time.” This then, is a sign that God takes on a variety of different roles in relation to human experience. Later on in the story of Israel, God is first a judge, then a deliverer, then a disciplinarian, then a comforter. Indeed, God plays so many roles in the Hebrew Bible that I want you to know that the next time anyone makes some glib reference to “the God of the Old Testament,” you have every right to seriously ask them, “Which God are you talking about?”

But you see, if all that is true, then what might we say about the nature of God, not just for the Hebrews, but for ourselves today? What might we say about how God “answers” us, if God is indeed “what we need at the time”? There’s an old country western tune that I’m sure has a lot more words to it, but the only ones I know are a part of the chorus, which goes something like this: (singing) “Lord, won’tcha buy me a Mer-say-deez Benz?” Now, the singer may conclude that such a fine car is what he “needs” at the moment, but is that what it means to you when we say “God is what is needed at the time”…a high-end car dealership?

Moreover, is there a difference between the “needs” we perceive for ourselves and God’s actual role in our lives at the time of that perceived need? The people in the desert with Moses thought they needed more quail and more manna so they could stockpile it, and yet that didn’t happen. Each day they got only as much as they needed for that day. But basically, this story seems to have God answering the people’s needs according to what is just. Could it be that basic needs are an issue of justice; whereas, desires for more of something are nice for those who can manage it, but have little to do with simple basic needs, the “stuff of life”?

So, this way of thinking about a God of justice who assumes different roles according to the needs of God’s people, also begs the question, “what’s the difference between what we need and what we desire?” You’ll be glad to know that even in our Bible, this question doesn’t end with the Israelites, it continues right through the stories of Jesus.

A parallel New Testament scripture for today that we didn’t read this morning, is Jesus’ parable from the Gospel of Matthew. It’s about a wealthy landowner who hires people to work in his vineyard by offering a full day’s wage for everyone who works for him that day, even though some of them get hired for a full day, some for a half day, and others for only a couple of hours. At the end of the story, when everyone is paid, the workers hired first are upset that workers hired at the end of the day get the very same money. But the landowner claims a right to give more to some if he wishes, since everyone agreed to the same terms upfront. Obviously, the difference in wages has nothing to do with the workers’ work ethic, but more to do with the landowner’s generosity. We might say that the characters in Jesus’ parable who complained later received the justice of a full day’s pay for a full day’s work – no more, no less than they needed. But the characters who worked shorter hours yet were paid a full day’s wage experienced the grace of receiving more than they expected.

So who is God now, in this piece of the Christian story, where Jesus is assumed to be the one in whom God’s love is personified as human experience? The “giver of both justice and grace, according to the real needs of the people”? Yet each and every one of us could come up with an example from our own lives of a time when we thought God was unjust to us; or when we thought we should indeed have been granted a little, or a little more, grace, right?

Perhaps ultimately, who God is at any given moment can only be defined by, as it was by the Israelites, according to our experience, not only individual but collective, as “God’s people” in this sweeping saga of life in the earth. The Christian story claims the experience of both justice and grace, offered by a loving God, to us. And in Jesus, the Man of Nazareth, we see that offer extend to individual human beings, as well as to the collective. Whether we deem God’s action in the world in terms of justice or grace is perhaps only to be determined in hindsight, as is true in our study of the Bible. Until then, and especially in these volatile times when so many want for the very “stuff of life,” it seems that the Serenity Prayer, authored by one of our UCC forebears Reinhold Niebuhr in the 1930’s, is supremely appropriate: God grant [us] the serenity to accept the things [we] cannot change; courage to change the things [we] can; and wisdom to know the difference.” Amen.

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