Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
24^th of September 2023

Exodus 16:2-15
Matthew 20:1-16

Poor Moses. Last week’s reading from the Book of Exodus ended, ‘Israel saw the great work that the LORD did against the Egyptians. So the people feared the LORD and believed in the LORD and in his servant Moses.’ (Exodus 14:31) This week’s reading begins, ‘The whole congregation of the Israelites complained against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness’. It is the ‘fifteenth day of the second month after they had departed from the land of Egypt’ (Exodus 16:1), very soon after the Israelites saw the waters of the sea retreat and return as Moses gestured, and yet already the Israelites are complaining that there is not enough food in the desert and they want to go home. Moses would have had every right to say, ‘Okay then,’ and turn the metaphorical car around. Instead, he continued to lead the Israelites for decades.

The Israelites spend forty years in the wilderness between Egypt and the Promised Land, a distance you can apparently now do by bus in 13 hours and 27 minutes. (I checked.) Those forty years were not wasted, nor were they simply a punishment for the many times the Israelites tested the Lord. (Numbers 14:20-23) It took all those decades for the people who had been slaves in Egypt to learn how to live as the people of God, as a ‘whole congregation’. The story of the Exodus tells us how difficult it is for people to accept freedom after enslavement. In a discussion of the Exodus story Archbishop Rowan Williams reminds his readers that ‘the best tool of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed. If you can convince someone that their subjection is not only normal but in everyone’s real interests, you are likely to be very safe’.[1] The Israelites have been convinced that slavery in Egypt is better than freedom in the wilderness: ‘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.’ No matter that Pharoah had tried to exterminate them (Exodus 1); that they were forced to make bricks without straw and were unable to take time from their work to worship the Lord (Exodus 5). Slavery was familiar; liberation was frightening.

So the Lord begins to teach the Israelites what it means to live in freedom. It means living in community in such a way ‘that God’s passionate care for and involvement in each person’s welfare becomes visible,’ to again quote Archbishop Williams.[2] It begins with trust that God will provide all that is needed for life out of the abundance of God’s good creation, but only what is needed. When the Israelites gather the manna in the morning, we are told that some gathered more, some less. ‘But when they measured it with an omer, those who gathered much had nothing over, and those who gathered little had no shortage; they gathered as much as each of them needed.’ (Exodus 16:17-18) Nothing we receive from God’s good creation is to be hoarded; when some of the Israelites tried to do so with the daily manna ‘it bred worms and became foul’. (Exodus 16:20) God provides enough if everyone shares and takes only what they need, but not if some take too much and hoard what they do not need.

The Israelites Gathering Manna in the Desert tapestry, James Bridges, (1685-1699).

Through this giving of the manna the Israelites also learn that in God’s economy, unlike in Pharaoh’s, there is time for rest. This story is the very first time in the Hebrew Scriptures that we hear the word ‘sabbath’:

On the sixth day they gathered twice as much food, two omers apiece. When all the leaders of the congregation came and told Moses, he said to them, ‘This is what the Lord has commanded: “Tomorrow is a day of solemn rest, a holy sabbath to the Lord; bake what you want to bake and boil what you want to boil, and all that is left over put aside to be kept until morning.”’ So they put it aside until morning, as Moses commanded them; and it did not become foul, and there were no worms in it. Moses said, ‘Eat it today, for today is a sabbath to the Lord; today you will not find it in the field. For six days you shall gather it; but on the seventh day, which is a sabbath, there will be none.’ (Exodus 16:22-26)

Even then there were people worried that the Lord would not provide; they went out to gather on the seventh and found nothing. (Exodus 16:27) Those people were still living as slaves in Egypt, worried about where their next meal would come from.

The command to keep the Sabbath holy is given in both versions of the Ten Commandments, in Exodus and in Deuteronomy, and in both the extent of the sabbath rest is astounding; it includes sons and daughters, male and female slaves, livestock, and resident aliens. (Exodus 20:10) When Moses gives the command the second time in Deuteronomy he reminds the people: ‘your male and female slave may rest as well as you’. (Deuteronomy 5:14) While Pharoah made the people work without rest, in the wilderness the whole congregation of the Israelites learn that rest is essential not just for them but for their slaves. It is another way in which the people of God are to live differently, without exploitation.

Pharoah’s world was one of scarcity, in which the people of Israel had to work without ceasing and make bricks without straw. The Lord’s world is one of abundance, in which everyone has enough, and rest is an essential part of life. During their forty years of wandering in the wilderness the whole congregation of the Israelites learned to trust the providence of God who fed them each evening and morning. As they stood at the threshold of the Promised Land Moses warned them not to forget the Lord, nor to imagine that their wealth was self-made: ‘Do not say to yourself, “My power and the might of my own hand have gained me this wealth.”’ (Deuteronomy 8:17) They were always to remember the manna, and that ‘one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord’. (Deuteronomy 8:3)

We live in a world much more like Pharoah’s than the wilderness; we sit around fleshpots rather than gathering manna from heaven. Can we possibly trust God’s providence in the way that the Israelites did on their journey? Walter Bruggemann writes of Americans, ‘We who are now the richest nation are today’s main coveters. We never feel that we have enough: we have to have more and more, and this insatiable desire destroys us.’[3] In this as in many other things, Australians copy Americans. We are one of the richest nations in the world and yet we are invested in the myth of scarcity, that there is not enough to go around and so we must hoard what we have.

I once had six months in which I truly experienced God’s abundance. I was a final year theological student, a candidate for the ministry, and the theological college had told me that I had to move out of Janet Clarke Hall, where I was on a scholarship that paid for my accommodation, and into what were then the Otira flats in Kew. I was doing a placement at Brunswick Uniting Church on top of my studies, so I had no time for paid work, and the candidate’s allowance barely paid for rent and transport. Three times in those six months I had to make a choice between buying food and paying utilities bills. And each time, just as I decided that I needed to pay for heating or light rather than for groceries, money appeared, and I was able to eat. Once I was notified that I had won three academic prizes and each of them came with a cheque for $100. Once the bond that I had paid when I entered Janet Clarke Hall was reimbursed and my bank account, which had been in the red, suddenly had $400 in it. On the third occasion, the Commonwealth government decided that it had charged me too much for the new passport I needed because the church was sending me to Switzerland, and refunded me about $183. I never actually went hungry, and while the obvious response would be that these were all lucky coincidences, to me they felt like something more.

The sudden appearance of money when I needed it most left me theologically deeply confused. I do not believe in the sort of interventionist God who puts money in people’s bank accounts. I definitely do not believe in a God who would make sure that I could eat in Kew, but not provide food for starving children in the Congo. During that year’s Synod meeting I told John Bodycomb that I was having these strange ‘providential’ experiences, and he said that believing in Providence was fine until one had to ask why Providence had not intervened in the Nazi death camps. And, of course, he was right. Yet I cannot forget these moments that I experienced as occasions of God’s abundance reaching me.

I do not believe in an interventionist God who puts money in bank accounts, even though I experienced Her. I do believe in the God whose good creation provides everything that every human being needs to live a life of abundance. People are not going hungry in Australia or in the wider world because there is a lack of food. People are going hungry because some people have too much and others too little. We cannot blame God for hunger caused by human actions. God intends a world in which ‘The one who had much did not have too much, and the one who had little did not have too little,’ as the Apostle Paul told the church in Corinth, quoting the story of the manna. (2 Corinthians 8:15) It is us, not God, who have accepted a world that contains food insecurity, because we are so invested in that myth of scarcity.

Churches would be visibly different if we lived out of faith in God’s abundance, rather than hoarding what we have in fear. God will always give us what we need. I cannot remember who said it to me, but someone once told me that the problem for the Catholic Church in Australia was not a lack of vocations to the priesthood. It was that the Catholic Church did not recognise the people that God was calling to be priests. Rather than importing priests from other countries, this person said, the Catholic Church in Australia should start ordaining the women and married men and openly gay people to whom God is giving vocations. God does not leave a church without leaders; if there seems to be a lack of leaders it is likely that the church is looking for them in the wrong place.

In the same way, the Uniting Church has enough resources, including enough ordained ministers, to enable the Church to ‘be a fellowship of reconciliation, a body within which the diverse gifts of its members are used for the building up of the whole, an instrument through which Christ may work and bear witness to himself,’ to quote the Basis of Union. The trouble is that for too long we have focused our energies on trying to keep a congregation worshipping in every church building we inherited at Union. As I have said so often at Presbytery that I am sure everyone is sick of me, we have enough ministers for the number of Uniting Church members. We do not, however, have enough ministers for the number of Uniting Church buildings. I do hope that the Act2 process will help us rationalise our property, because I think that will help us to find the life in abundance that God offers.

I must confess that the only reason I got to the point of struggling to afford both food and utilities in those six months in Kew was that I had been conditioned to think of poverty as a failing. I am sure that if I had told the theological college that was about to pay for me to study in Switzerland for six months that I did not have enough money for groceries, money would have been found. But I was ashamed to mention it, and so I didn’t give the wider church the chance to help. If the one who has much is not to have too much, and the one who has little is not to have too little, this needs to be a society in which those with too little can ask for help without being blamed for their need. On the other hand, maybe I needed those experiences of the sudden, unexpected, almost miraculous, arrival of money so that as I grew more comfortable, I could remember to keep giving even a little more than is sensible in the hope of providing that same relief to others.

In today’s parable Jesus reminds us that God is both generous and able to do what God wishes with what belongs to God, which includes the church, the entire creation, and all of us. The creation is infused with the Creator’s generosity; all we need to do is receive what God wants to give us, without hoarding or depriving others of what God wants to give them, recognising that some of what God has given us She has given in trust for others. If we do so, we will live the abundant lives God promises, and we will be able to enjoy the sabbath rest with which God crowned creation. Amen.

[1] Joan Chittister and Rowan Williams, Uncommon Gratitude: Alleluia for All That Is (2010), p. 140.

[2] Uncommon Gratitude, p. 143.

[3] Walter Bruggemann, ‘The Liturgy of Abundance, The Myth of Scarcity,’ (1999).