A lot of the time, a sermon will begin with a story or example, something to suggest up front that what you’re about to hear is relevant and will have meaning for your life. Today I’m going to take a different approach. I still believe that one of the reasons we come to church is to tap into ancient and important wisdom—I believe that if we dig deeply and curiously into this collection of ancient texts called the Bible, that there is something important to be found, something worth our attention. I think you believe it too.
So today, I’m just going to open the Bible and tell you a story from the Book of Numbers. It’s one of the appointed texts for this Sunday, which the church calls the Day of Pentecost. It comes from deep in the pages of the first five books of the Bible, known as the Penteteuch, or what our Jewish friends call the Torah or the books of the Law. This part of the Bible is challenging reading. Many well-meaning people who make a decision to read the Bible from cover to cover will make it through Genesis and Exodus but they give up somewhere in Leviticus before they get to Numbers—some of this reading is hard going. But this story is worth reading; and I think the relevancy will reveal itself along the way.
So first, some context: The Book of “Numbers”—where the heck does that title come from? Numbers, or Arithmoi is from the Greek Bibles of the early Christian era, calling attention to two censuses—two countings—that are taken in the book; there’s one at the beginning, and one in the middle. These two countings of the people frame the story, hence, Numbers. The more descriptive title of the book comes in original Hebrew translations, which call the book Bemidbar, or “in the wilderness,” a phrase from the opening line of the book.
And that’s what this book is—a story of what happens to the Israelites “in the wilderness.” Some of you know that the Bible begins with Genesis, a collection of epic stories that help explain where the Israelites came from and how they came to be a people who eventually became enslaved in Egypt. Exodus is then the story of their liberation from that slavery. After they are set free from slavery, God’s people cross the Red Sea of out Egypt and will wander in the wilderness for forty years on their way to their new home in the Promised Land. Numbers or Bemidbar, is the story of the 40 years in the wilderness.
The wilderness story is divided into two distinct parts. The first part is the story of the generation of people who are led out of Egypt and into freedom. These are the people who remember what things were like in Egypt, the oppression of their taskmasters and the bricks without straw; they remember the miraculous plagues God brought as an incentive to the Pharoah to set them free, and they remember crossing through the parted waters of the Red Sea and receiving manna, bread from heaven in the wilderness, to allow them to live. They saw these things with their own eyes.
A new generation is born in the wilderness. They have not witnessed any of these things, but learn about them in the stories they hear from their elders. As the story goes, the first generation will die in the wilderness; and it is the second generation will make it to the Promised Land. The two censuses, the “Numbers” that frame this story, define those generations and their stories.
Here is the great irony of this story in the wilderness: It is the second generation, and not the first one, who show great faith in God. You would think that the people who witnessed all of the wonderful things God had done for them, you would think that they would be endlessly devoted to God, who had done so much for them; but the story says otherwise. The first generation complains endlessly about how difficult life is in the wilderness, frequently falls away from God—they make golden calves to worship, and complain about the wilderness, and they keep asking Moses to take them back to Egypt. And that generation never makes it to the Promised Land. And you get the idea that they can’t make it not because the Promised Land isn’t there, but the idea is that they can’t find it because they don’t really believe in it. They don’t wander for 40 years because their compass is broken but because they just can’t seem to read it. It is only the second generation that has the faithfulness—the vision, if you will—to get to the Promised Land.
If that irony just doesn’t make sense to you, I invite you to consider for a moment the time in which we ourselves are living. Many of us are aware that we live—that we are perhaps a bit stuck—in a culture marked by a lot of things we don’t like: rampant materialism, media full of violence and overly sexualized, a country where people have a lot of stuff, but mental illness, loneliness, and poor health outcomes as a result of both are growing. There’s so much wealth and so much inequality and waste. Many of us also have a sense that if we could only simplify our lives and get back to basics, we would collectively be much happier than we are. But often we have no idea how to do that; we feel trapped in the life we’ve got. So we keep doing things the way we’ve been doing them. The Israelites knew that slavery in Egypt had been awful. But slavery in Egypt was, as the saying goes, “the devil they knew.” And what they feared even more was the uncertainty of a life of freedom because it was unknown to them. For all these reasons, it’s only the second generation, who have no memory of Egypt, who are finally able to break free from that old life and welcome a new way of being.
In the middle of this larger story I’ve been telling you, there’s a shorter one we read this morning. In chapter 11, the Israelites are once again complaining to Moses to take them back to Egypt. Remember that God has been providing food for them, this manna that falls from heaven with the dew every morning, and can be made into cakes that give them all the sustenance they need, and they don’t need to hunt or farm for it, and quite importantly—they are not enslaved any more; they are free. But they keep complaining to Moses, they say, “We remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic; but now our strength is dried up and there is nothing at all for us but this manna to look at.” (Numbers 11:6)
God’s people can’t find the Promised Land, they can’t see what God is trying to show them. They remind me of a modern family on some wonderful wilderness adventure—maybe a safari in Africa or a whale watching tour, and they are surrounded by all of the beauty and grandeur of God’s creation, and a guide prepares wonderful wholesome meals three times a day…but the kids keep asking for sour patch kids and mom and dad can’t stop wondering why there isn’t a Starbucks anyplace, and they all keep missing the amazing landscape around them because they’re constantly looking for a cell phone signal, so they can catch up on cable news and the latest celebrity gossip. You just feel sorry for them; but if we’re honest, we can see bits and pieces of our own lives in the ways they are acting.
Well, back in the ancient desert, the Israelites have the same problem, so Moses takes 70 elders from the people out to the tent where the ark of the covenant, and there God meets them—the God’s Spirit comes to rest upon them. They have an epiphany, an “ah-ha” moment, an experience of grace, and for a moment, they see things as they really are, they bow down and worship God, they recommit themselves to finding the Promised Land. But here’s the really sad part of the story. As soon as they leave the tent, the Spirit departs from them, and they return to camp unchanged. It’s as if that family I was telling you about on the African safari, something really amazing happens such that they finally put down their cell phones and are drawn into the wonder around them; they are swept up in something that feels profound and life changing…but then they get on the plane and go home, and everything goes back to the way it was before. Two weeks later they feel stuck and unhappy again, and they get little more than a passing yearning to get back to the happiness they think they can only get in Africa.
That’s essentially the story of the Israelites, but there’s this other thing that happens. There are these two others, their names are Eldad and Medad…and they don’t go to the tent for the meeting, they stay back at the camp. And one way or another, because you can’t really keep the Spirit of God locked up in a tent, there’s some of God’s Spirit that kind of leaks out and falls upon Eldad and Medad, and they, right there in the camp, start to see God’s amazing work going on around them. They can suddenly see how good the manna is, and they can remember how awful it was in Egypt, and they want to get to the Promised Land, and they start talking about it with their friends. But the elders who went to the tent, they are so stuck in their bad attitudes that Joshua, a leader among them, says to Moses, “did you know there are these two guys Eldad and Medad back talking to people about God…and they didn’t even go to the tent.” And Moses, who has failings and frustrations of his own, but who never totally falls away, Moses, thinks about it for a moment, and then he says to Joshua: “Wouldn’t it be great if everyone of us were like Eldad and Medad?”
Today is known as the Day of Pentecost in the church. Those of you who are lifelong churchgoers—the elders who always show up in the tent, so to speak—some of you will remember that on this day we remember the gift of the Holy Spirit coming to the disciples of Jesus. We usually read a story from the beginning of the Book of Acts and talk about the Holy Spirit coming down like fire from heaven, causing the disciples to speak miraculously in languages they do not know. It’s a great story. I’ve told it many times, enough that all of us, including me, often forget about its power. So today instead, I chose this more obscure story that reminds us that sometimes the Spirit of God does its work not by fire from heaven and speaking in tongues and not just in church, or on a distant safari, but sometimes God’s Spirit sneaks out of the tent, and changes our lives in little ways we didn’t see coming. Finding God’s presence in the everyday life we share—that’s going to be the focus of my sermons for the next couple of months as we talk about what I’ll call “sacred community.”
My prayer today is that God’s Spirit will be among us in the movements of our everyday lives, in our struggles to put down our cell phones and our lattes, to embrace in fullness the blessings of our families and friends and neighbors. My prayer is that in the day that God has given us, we will try to move a little closer to the Promised Land. Amen.