Freedom is No Picnic

Exodus 16:1-15

A sermon by K. Toivanen at EMUC, 9/28/2008

One of the TV shows that I enjoy watching is ‘Survivorman’. In each episode, Les Stroud spends one week in a remote wilderness location, surviving on only what he can find to eat and drink in the wild. Dropped off at the designated location by his crew, Les is completely alone for the week, left to manage all of the filming and the transporting of his equipment on his own. He is equipped with a communication device in case of emergency only.

Hailing from Huntsville area, Les has an extensive background in outdoor camping and survival. Before an episode is filmed, Les meets with local people to find out about the dangers of the region and what kind of food he can hope to find in the wild. Carrying only a "Leatherman" multitool (similar to a Swiss army knife), Les has successfully caught fish and small animals for food. Sometimes he’s survived for a week only on grubs and a kind of herbal hot drink that he makes from local plants. In the most recent episode I watched, Les was in the Kalahari Desert where he ate grilled scorpions and drank water sucked from plant roots. He has faced the very real threats of hypothermia in the north, heat stroke in tropical climates - in one episode he was even stalked by a jaguar!

It makes for fascinating entertainment and the learning of a few new outdoor survival skills, but at the end of each episode, we know Les returns to the comforts of home, to catch up on his sleep, to sit down at a ‘proper meal’ and to edit his film for production.

As we continue today with the ongoing saga of Moses and the Israelites, their wilderness experience is a far cry from that of ‘Survivorman’. Having passed through the Red Sea last week, this week’s reading from the book of Exodus takes us into the wilderness wanderings, a period of forty years where the people of Israel traveled in the region of the Sinai Peninsula, a kind of temporary dwelling between Egypt, the land of slavery - and Canaan, the promised land of freedom.

When Moses came to his people with the promise that God would lead them out of slavery and into freedom, I’m not sure what they were expecting but it probably wasn’t this. Life in Egypt was hard and cruel, but at least they had a place of shelter and a stew pot on the fire. Out here in this barren landscape, the dream of freedom has been replaced with fears of what lies ahead, complaints about the lack of food and a growing mistrust of Moses and Aaron and of God.

This is not a one-week Survivorman adventure episode; those who have signed on for this freedom journey are in for the long haul.

Being in the wilderness is one of the central themes of the Bible. We have the wilderness stories of the Israelites, the prophetic writers refer of the wilderness in their messages to the Hebrew people living in exile and of course Jesus spends 40 days in the wilderness preparing for his ministry.

The wilderness is a powerful metaphor that I’m sure everyone relates to at some level. Speaking of a time of your life as "something of a wilderness experience" is a common and instantly recognizable description.

The metaphorical wilderness is what the social psychologists and anthropologists call a "liminal space". That is to say, it is a betwixt and between space, a place that is neither one thing nor the other. The old has been left behind, but the new has not yet been found. And so it is an unsettled place, a place of wandering and wondering and waiting. The circumstances that lead us into the wilderness can vary considerably.

We can flee into the wilderness to escape a way of life we no longer want to live - perhaps it’s been a life of boredom or a life pressuring us to be someone we cannot be any longer. Perhaps it’s been a life of painful relationships that we can no longer endure.

We can be driven into the wilderness by the actions of others - a job termination, the rejection by a spouse or a close friend or lover. A diagnosis of cancer or the loss of our health, a tragic accident or the death of a loved one can unexpectedly drive us into the wilderness.

We can stumble into the wilderness by making gradual changes in our lifestyle; by moving to a new perspective or a revised set of values. One day, we look around and to our surprise we find that everything has shifted and we’re no longer in a familiar place. In such a wilderness we begin to wonder, who are my friends now, what is my support system, how will I learn to be at home in this strange place?

We can venture deliberately into the wilderness. In many traditional or aboriginal societies, young men and sometimes young women were required to venture into the wilderness as part of the rites of initiation into adulthood. The wilderness experience usually involved physical hardships such as fasting or enduring a harsh environment. In our day, venturing deliberately into the wilderness can also result in hardship as we wean ourselves off predictable and perhaps comfortable patterns of living.

Regardless of the way in which we end up in the wilderness, there is no going back. The break is irrevocable. The young adult cannot return to being a child. The bereaved person cannot resurrect their loved ones. The community cannot return to the innocence it enjoyed before the shattering news was made known. The person facing an illness or disability cannot return to a body that was once unscarred and without blemish. There can be no return to the old dynamics of a relationship after certain words have been spoken and actions taken.

The only way out of the wilderness is to move forward and to pass through to the other side. And like the Israelites facing the wilderness of the Sinai Peninsula, this often takes more time than we may have anticipated. And like the Israelites, the real question to ask is how will we survive in the wilderness until we find out way through to the other side?

Some folks fight the wilderness every step of the way. They look around and see only a harsh, barren landscape, devoid of the necessities of life. Refusing to believe that life is possible in such a place, they fall into depression, yearning for what once was, reminiscing like the Israelites, that previous circumstances were far better and far happier, even if, in reality, that was never the case.

Others deal with the wilderness by making life miserable for themselves and others, grumbling and complaining to any companions around them and putting the blame on those they believe are somehow responsible for leading them into this wilderness place. More often than not, God is on the receiving end of the blame and complaints, even as the grumblers announce that God is nowhere to be found in ‘God-forsaken’ wilderness.

The good news in today’s scripture, is of course, that God is to be found even and perhaps even more profoundly in our wilderness times and places. Listen again to one of the verses from the scripture this morning… "When Aaron gave out the instructions to the whole company of Israel, they turned to face the wilderness. And there it was: the glory of God visible in the Cloud".

At the very moment that the Israelites turn away from Egypt and from the past to which they can no longer return and turn instead to face the wilderness, they turn their face to God. It is a huge turning point; both physically and spiritually - and with it is the birth of a new trust in God and a willingness to believe that they have not been led into this place to starve and to die.

To be sure, the wilderness is not the most comfortable place. It is not a place to put down your roots and to build a permanent dwelling. The wilderness is a place of deprivation - depriving the Israelites and us of what we once thought we needed to survive. No question about it, we grieve and long for what we’ve left behind whether it be a pot of lamb stew or gourmet dinners at expensive restaurants, whether it be job security or the innocence of youth,

whether it be the house with a picket fence or a body free of illness; whether it be the love of one who has gone or the community where we felt so much at home.

And while the wilderness might not be the easiest place to live - remember it is that betwixt and between place, it is still a place where we are fed - quail at dusk and manna at dawn. It is a place where God reaches out to nourish us with what we need for each day.

Sure it takes some getting used to. The Israelites knew that you could eat quail; they knew how to prepare it and cook it - but this flaky stuff that they were supposed to gather to eat each morning, what on earth was this? Some of you may know that the word manna is really a play on words meaning ‘What is it?’ How could they get used this manna? It sure didn’t look or taste like any food they had eaten before.

Lesson number one: To survive in the wilderness, we need to accept the manna; the food that God gives to us for our nourishment - in other words we need to be willing to try new foods, to be open to a God who will provide for us in ways that are unexpected and even unfamiliar to us.

The first step in being open to this God is to stop grumbling and complaining.

Grumbling falsifies the past. When the Israelites grumbled they falsified the past by saying, ‘There in Egypt, we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted’, but of course it wasn’t really true - in reality, they were an enslaved and oppressed people, living off the meager rations that their masters gave to them.

Not only does grumbling often falsify the past, it also infects our spirits, teaching us to distrust God. Grumbling denies the goodness of God by whispering to us that in difficult and hard circumstances God simply abandons us and cuts us off from love and hope. Grumbling has the power to block our hearts and to cloud our vision so that we might not even see the gift of manna that God is raining down upon us.

There is another alternative—to move from grumbling to gratitude; another theme woven throughout the Bible. To live each day with a word of praise on our lips and a prayer of thanks from our hearts moves us from perceiving the wilderness as God-forsaken times and places - to perceiving them as times and places where God is with us - nourishing, shaping and preparing us as we journey to God’s ‘destination location’ of freedom and liberation.

May God give us eyes to see to the manna that is raining down upon us and with hearts full of gratitude may we accept this gift and to let it nourish us for a life lived in God’s freedom. Amen.