What is it?!

10th Sunday after Pentecost

Sunday, August 5, 2012

Exodus 16:2-4, 9-15; John 6:24-35

Imagine yourself at the dinner table and seated across from you is a picky eater. Originally I thought I would suggest you imagine a child, but in my experience adults are at least as picky if not more so. And the vegetable dish comes around full of Brussels sprouts, that much maligned vegetable that for some reason seems to have more opponents than fans, and this picky eater makes a face. “What is it?” Or if the person has really bad table manners – and again here I include at least as many adults as children – maybe they even pick one up, holding it between two fingers an arm’s length away. “What is it?” Have you got that image in your mind now?

When the Israelites landed in the desert after their exodus from Egypt, they quickly began to whine about the food they had to eat. I can’t blame them so much really – to this day you can stand on a hill by the Nile river and see where the brilliant green fields grow out of fertile soil irrigated by life-giving water and then the line where it suddenly stops and the desert begins for as far as the eye can see. The Israelites have just experienced the life-transforming, power-crushing, overturning power of God’s liberation, but they have come to a dead end in the desert, and they’re right, there is nothing to eat. They began to think, that’s it – God’s power is used up and now we die.

But they are not without food for long – God hears their concern and rains down food from heaven. I can imagine these Israelites on that first morning that the bread from heaven appears, picking it up between two fingers, holding it out, and asking “What is it?” In fact according to the author of Exodus for the next forty years wandering out in the desert the Israelites will call this daily, heavenly bread “manna,” a version of the Hebrew man-hu “What is it?”

God’s gift to them of daily bread in the most literal sense, food to sustain them in a barren land, and they don’t even know what it is. And perhaps at first they hold it out eyeing it suspiciously, as if picky eaters approaching the ancient world’s equivalent of Brussels sprouts. It strikes me that of the many ways we can draw parallels between us and the Israelites of the Bible, this is one of them – we are a people who have God’s daily bread laid out for us and too often we either don’t understand or don’t want to have anything to do with it.

In what ways do we together as the people of God in this place overlook the gifts God has placed among us? Maybe some of us, like the Israelites want to look back to another time that may or may not have been as good as we remember it. There were certainly times when mainline protestant churches were, on the whole, more prominent and successful by the world’s standards. The church of today does not look as it did before and sometimes the way ahead looks bleak. And yet in the form of exciting moments in ministry, in the gifts of God shared among ourselves and in the community, like the Israelites, we are given daily bread – enough for today and the promise of enough tomorrow.

Or have you ever looked at someone else or yourself and wondered what that person has to offer? Dismissing someone with a metaphorical “What is it?” It’s sometimes easier to see faults than gifts or to wish that someone’s gifts were different and to dismiss that person because they don’t fit the preconceived notion of what kind of person we need to have to in order for things to work out. As a congregation sometimes we can get caught up on the groups of people we don’t have that we’d like to have. Our demographics aren’t what we sometimes imagine the church ought to look like. We look around and wonder, “What is it?” How are we supposed to make this manna into something edible? Maybe we wonder why this particular arrangement of people is here in this place now. But perhaps we can begin to see what a life-giving blessing it is from God that these people are the amazing gifts that God has provided for today. Tomorrow’s bread may be different, but today this is the bread sent down from heaven for us.

The Israelites are faced with a choice, go back into slavery in Egypt or go forth into the wilderness with God and with God’s sometimes unidentifiable blessings. It’s an easy choice for us who can read the story of the wilderness wandering in a few hours rather than actually facing it for forty years. But for the Israelites it isn’t so easy. As they look at the journey ahead and ask the question, “What is it?” with scrunched up noses and curled lips, they had a lot to learn.

And they did – they began to gather the mysterious substance. And some wanted to gather more than they needed while others didn’t feel motivated to pick up much at all, but in the end all had exactly what they needed and no more. When they put it in jars to keep for the next day it spoiled – so they learned to use what they had in front of them and to trust that tomorrow’s would be there.

Eating the bread they learned to see God’s provision for them. Like the followers in the Gospel lesson who came searching for Jesus – and he says to them that it is not because they saw the sign but because they ate the bread. They took in the abundance of God and learned to look for more. Within them grew a hunger to see – to see themselves, their neighbors, and their lives in terms of God’s daily bread – a gift to be enjoyed rather than held onto, a gift that is what God has intended it to be rather than a gift that we have defined.

What is it? What is this thing that God has given us to sustain us and feed us. What is this thing we do not yet fully understand. What is this bread from heaven that we are called to take into our very being and make our own.

So the invitation to eat – to eat the bread of life from heaven. To gather together with the people of God to hold out our hands and ask, “What is it?” And the answer will be, “The body of Christ given for you.” A piece of bread to train us to look for the presence of God in our world. A piece of bread to strengthen us for our journey. A piece of bread to send us out into the world to serve.

I did not eat Brussels sprouts growing up. I listened to the rumors that they were not worth eating. I let my “What is it?” mindset take over. But as an adult I discovered what I had been missing. I discovered another reminder to open my eyes to new possibilities. I turned my disgusted bewilderment into a question of excited curiosity, “What is it?!”

Sometimes I fail to see God’s gifts for what they are. I don’t recognize what is right in front of me. I miss out on the enjoyment that comes with the mystery of daily bread. But what a joy it is to come across those moments when it becomes clear and the mystery of God becomes clear to us. May we this week and beyond look with excited curiosity at the gifts of God, and nourished by the bread in this place, go looking for God at work in our world.

-Pastor Steven Wilco