A Sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on September 27, 2015, by the Revd Dr Sam Wells
Reading for address: Numbers 11
You’re at your brother’s. You’re in the kitchen. Everyone else is out somewhere. The house is quiet. You’re sitting together at the kitchen table, each holding a cup of coffee. Your brother’s offered you biscuits, cake, sugar – anything to keep the façade of hospitality going and delay the conversation you know is coming. In the end you put your hand on his shoulder, just for a moment, as you don’t really do tenderness, and you say, as gently and patiently as you can, ‘What is it?’
You can see he’s fighting his emotions, not used to being so intimate with you. He can’t open his mouth lest words give way to convulsive sobs and bellows of distress. So he holds a fist to his cheek, until he’s steady enough to let a handful of words slip out. ‘I just keep asking myself, why?’ And suddenly you can see it all. Everything he’s been struggling with, these last ten years. Waves of anger, when you know to keep out of his way. Strains of guilt, when he wonders if he somehow brought it all on himself. Struggles for faith, when he can’t find any purpose in the course of events. Depression that induces him to lose all sense of meaning in anything. And a creeping paralysis, a feeling of powerlessness in which he sees himself as victim with no ability to make a plan or pull himself together.
There’s nothing you can say. All you can tell him is, ‘I’m here. I’m with you. This will end. And even if it doesn’t, I’m not going away.’ Inside you’re desperately scratching around for words of consolation. And then, searching the ceiling for hope, your eyes settle curiously on a pile of papers on top of the kitchen cupboard. You ask, not wanting to change the subject, but needing to know, ‘What are those papers?’ Your brother, glad of the lightening of the mood and the momentary shift of attention away from his troubles, replies ‘I think it’s some kind of manuscript for a book. I’ve never got round to reading it. It’s all in old-fashioned handwriting.’ You climb on a stool and fetch down the papers. And together you begin to make out a story – a story about your ancestors.
You’re mesmerised. This ancient story put your brother’s misery in perspective. But it’s not just that: the two narratives have a lot of similar features. This old manuscript tells of a family that thought they’d escaped from persecution, and believed they were on their way to freedom, but got waylaid. They felt just the kinds of things your brother was feeling. They felt angry, and guilty. They asked, ‘Why?’ They got terribly depressed. They were full of doubts. They had the same creeping paralysis and powerlessness. A lot of the manuscript wasn’t about the oppression they’d left behind or the freedom they were looking forward to – it was about the conversations they had and the discoveries they made when they got waylaid.
And then you have an idea. You say, ‘Why don’t we spend the next month or two turning this manuscript into a book? It seems to be three or four different stories, but we can try to weave it into one narrative. I’ve got a gut feeling that if you find a way to sort out this story, our ancient story, you might find the key to sorting out your own story.’
What I’ve been describing is how the Bible came to be written. Israel was in Babylon, in exile, captured and deported by the Chaldeans, dragged a thousand miles due east. It was angry, guilty, depressed, despairing, doubtful, paralysed, powerless. Just like your brother in the kitchen. And what Israel did, like your brother with the manuscript, was to piece together the half-remembered stories of its people from a thousand years before, stories of slavery, escape, and freedom. But most crucial of all were the stories at the heart of the narrative, stories of the time in the wilderness, when slavery was a memory but true freedom was still out of reach. These stories were crucial because that’s how Israel was feeling in a new wilderness called Babylon, in a desolate season called exile. We recognise the feeling: it’s like refugees who’ve escaped the theatre of war but not found a place to call home. The exiles in Babylon wrote down their people’s wilderness history, because it had important lessons for their own present and future. Like your brother in the kitchen, they said ‘Why?’ But behind the ‘why’ was a mixture of grief, bewilderment, and an urgent need to make a plan. What emerged was the bedrock of what today we call the Old Testament. Today’s reading from the book of Numbers is part of that bedrock.
In Numbers chapter 11 we find the children of Israel, lost in the wilderness, have given in to nostalgia for bygone days and craving for tasty food. God has given them a daily supply of manna to meet them in their hunger. But they’re bored of manna. ‘Remember Egypt!’ they say, forgetting the slavery and cruelty and fear; ‘we had meat, fish, cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions, and garlic.’ In other words meat, vegetables, seasoning, starters, dessert – you name it. They’re gripped by bodily craving, self-pity, and greed: the kinds of things that overcome you on a journey where you’ve lost sight of where you’re going. God gets angry. Craving, self-pity and greed indicate forgetfulness of where they’d come from, ingratitude for what God had done for them, and small-mindedness about what their calling was to be.
Moses is also cross, but for a different reason. Moses is snapping under the pressure. He’s overwhelmed by responsibility, unpopularity, disappointment, failure, overwork, and lack of encouragement. You could say he’s in a mini-exile all of his own. The people are being highly demanding – but he doesn’t blame them, he blames God. He’s quite the prima donna, saying to God, ‘I’m about done with the whole Israel-covenant-and wilderness deal, and you should just kill me right now.’ You can see the flouncing out and hear the slamming door.
God responds in a very practical way. Why, one wonders, does Moses think everything good in the world has to come through him? Moses can’t have it both ways. If you regard yourself indispensable, you don’t get to complain of burnout. God appoints 70 elders and fills them with the Holy Spirit like Moses. And then, in the final scene, we see Moses has learnt his lesson. Joshua comes complaining that there are two people operating as elders when they weren’t among the 70 on whom the Spirit descended. Moses recognises that God, not he, is sovereign, that God can work through these other people just as well as through the official elders, and that he, Moses, needs all the help he can get. He makes quite a journey of humility in this chapter and comes out with a much more sustainable, collaborative kind of leadership.
It’s a wonderfully vivid story of humanity, humour, hubris and humility. But it’s teaching Israel in exile some straightforward and unmistakable lessons. Lesson One is, play the long game – foster good memories lest your urgent bodily cravings and self-absorption make you lose sight of gratitude, faith and hope towards God. Lesson Two is, keep a sense of perspective – don’t get so caught up with your own indispensability and self-importance that you assume you have to do everything yourself and salvation can only come through you. Lesson Three is, let God make you part of a team – recognise the gift of colleagues, friends and partners and enjoy the fellowship of sharing God’s service. Lesson Four is, don’t turn your faith and your faith community into you own empire. It’s not about you. God will advance God’s work as God chooses. It’s not up to you how God speaks and who God speaks through. Those are the four wilderness lessons Israel learns in this chapter. Those are four of the lessons that eventually Israel held dear on its return from exile some years later.
And those are four lessons at the heart of the Christian faith. Lesson One, the bigger story, we call scripture. Lesson Two, the true centre of the story, we call Jesus. Lesson Three, the sense that we’re not alone in all this, we call church. And Lesson Four, the way God continues to surprise us, we call kingdom. We read the book of Numbers today because it shows us the heart of our faith.
Let’s go back to you sitting beside your brother in his kitchen. He’s in exile – angry, regretful, bewildered, powerless. Maybe he begins to recall a time he was in a similar wilderness long ago, and what lessons he learned then. Maybe you talk about what the Israelites learned in their own wilderness. It could be that he can identify with the people, craving, longing, yearning for bodily satisfaction; or with Moses, overwhelmed and self-absorbed, only able to see his own stress-levels. Maybe what your brother needs is to know he’s not in this alone, that God has sent the Holy Spirit on others, maybe as many as 70, to share the burden with him and walk together till the wilderness time is over. And it could be your brother will perceive that what he really needs to receive is coming to him from a source he never took seriously or even noticed.
Are you in the wilderness today? Are you sitting in that kitchen, hardly able to get the words out for fear once they start you won’t be able to quell the tears? Hear a story of the many blessings God has given you, the friends and companions God is sending you, and the way God can bring salvation through people you’d never even noticed. In exile look back to times God has been present in the wilderness, perhaps even more tangibly than ever in the Promised Land. Don’t lose sight of the glory God has prepared for you, however hard it may be to see right now. Find your story in God’s story. And discover who the Bible was written for. It was written for you.
