Pentecost 10(B) – Exodus 16:2-4, 9-15; John 6:24-35
Jesus says, “You’re not looking for me because I set you free. You’re looking for me because you’re enslaved to hunger, because you ate bread and you want more. Why don’t you know I set you free?”
The Israelites complaining in the desert have always struck me as a little strange. Not that it’s not human nature to complain, even in the best of times. I’ve made that analogy before, and which of us doesn’t get a little whiny when we’re hungry? But when you notice the actual content of their complaint? “We had it so much better back in Egypt. Sure we were slaves, but at least we had enough to eat.”
Now, I like to eat as much as the next person. But the two of these things aren’t even comparable. The Israelites are saying that they would rather go back to being slaves in Egypt. Back to a land where they were oppressed, where pharaoh ordered them to take on hard, forced labor. Back to a life without freedom, where even their children were killed under pharaoh’s orders.
Now they were a little hungry. But isn’t being a little hungry better than being slaves? Or do we put ourselves back into situations of slavery?
Ben was surprised how hard things got in middle school. It wasn’t just the classes, but the lifestyle changed as well. He had to work hard to stay on the popular kids’ side. They were really kind of bullies, to be honest, but it was better to be the bully-er than the bully-ed, wasn’t it? He could see the pain in the other kids’ eyes when he and his group of friends came along. Deep down, he wanted to put a stop to it, to stop getting his own affirmation from taking others down, to call out his “friends” when they ganged up on one of the unpopular kids. But he felt trapped, and so he kept up the game, letting it eat away at him, day after day…
Janet was fourteen when she was first checked into an alcohol rehab center. She knew it was destroying her life, her family, her friendships. But it had this draw that she just couldn’t seem to pull away from. The first few times through the system, she played the game well, and then got out and got back to her life, drinking as usual. But finally, one day, it took. She knew she could make a difference in her own life, and took the program seriously. Now she was twenty, and had been sober for about a year, was keeping down a job, had her life back in control. But there was something in her that whispered, just one drink, it won’t hurt, will it? And she could feel her resolve slipping…
Seventeen years of marriage, and Mike was finally free of it. The abuse, when his wife would get angry and start hitting him, and… And it was embarrassing enough that he couldn’t get help, couldn’t admit to not being strong enough to fight back, not being able to manage his home well enough to make the abuse stop. This was something that happened to women, not to men, right? And when it was his children taking the beatings, he felt even more helpless. Somehow, he’d finally found the courage to leave. After seventeen years, he was free. But how would he explain it to his friends, his family, his neighbors? How could he tell them why he’d left? And really, how could he live without her? She was his wife, and he loved her, despite the abuse. And so he was thinking about going back, even though he knew how angry she’d be when he returned, he was thinking about going back…
What are you enslaved to? What’s your pharaoh? We all have something, big or small, that keeps us from being our full, whole selves, the people God made us to be, that we know is unhealthy, but we keep going back to it anyway. That we can’t seem to get away from. That even when we think we’ve left it behind us, we still find ourselves falling back into the trap, still enslaved.
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Jesus says, “If you want to realize that you’ve been set free, you have to know who it is that set you free. You have to believe in the one God sent to you. Believe in me.”
There’s a little tidbit in the first verse of our Exodus passage that’s easy to miss. It says that “The whole congregation of the Israelites complained against Moses and Aaron.” Not against God. Against Moses.
They’d been led out of Egypt, out of slavery. They heard as Moses and Aaron spoke powerful words to Pharaoh. They watched Moses call down plagues upon Egypt. They walked through the sea that Moses parted. All this time, they’d been following Moses, not paying attention to the One who Moses was following. They trusted in Moses’s power, not God’s.
No wonder they want to go back. Because when the day is over, Pharaoh is the ruler of all of Egypt, a great empire, with vast resources, laborers, food, money, land, the most powerful of all the kingdoms of the ancient world. And Moses? Is just Moses. Some guy who dragged them all out of that powerful land into the desert where they have nothing. Moses’s power, ultimately, fails.
Maybe that’s why, sometimes, we fall back into our own house of slavery. We fall back into the trap of those things that keep us from being truly free. Because we rely on our own willpower to keep us out of them. And ultimately, human power will always fail.
We heard a lot about bullying in New Orleans. It seemed like one of the gathering’s accidental sub-themes. Granted, the ELCA has an anti-bullying initiative that it’s working on right now, so that could be part of the reason. But nearly every speaker we heard talked about bullying. And so we gathered back in our hotel one night, the sixteen of us from Immanuel, and talked about it. And we all agreed: It takes a lot of courage to stand up and say something, to stop bullying in its tracks. And probably none of us have that superhuman courage. None of us, not even me, a 32-year old pastor who has seen what bullying can do in the long haul. I’ve done courageous things in my life before, but stopping a teenager from making fun of another? Naw, that’s too difficult.
The wisdom of the twelve-step programs, the only really effective salve in our world for the diseases of alcoholism and other addictions, says that you NEED God in order to make it work. You can’t get free of these things unless you have a “higher power.” Try to rely on yourself, on human power, and you’ll never succeed.
And that’s true for abuse, too. The power of the abuser, making you a victim, pushing you down and keeping you down, and calling it love in the meantime, and convincing you that it’s true, can not be overpowered by a human being. Only God can break that cycle.
And so we need to not only be set free. We need to know that it’s God setting us free. We need to know God’s presence, pulling us up out of slavery. We need to be able to know we can rely on God to keep us out of that pit, because if we cling to any other branch, it won’t be sturdy enough.
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Jesus says, “I am the bread of life. I am the sign that God is here. Eat this bread, and you’ll never be hungry again.”
We know how the story in Exodus goes. God provides quails and bread, manna, for the Israelites to eat. But that’s not all God does in this story. When these things are announced to the people, it says that, “They looked toward the wilderness, and the glory of the LORD appeared in the cloud.” God didn’t just give them food, but God let them know that He was there with them, that HE was the one providing the food, so that the Israelites could trust in Him. God knows we need His presence, and so God provides it.
I know a young woman, a teenager, whose courage has led her to speak out about bullying. Whose courage has driven her to stand up in assemblies before whole high schools and talk about what bullying has done to her in her life. She’s a girl who embodies great courage and strength. But it’s her faith in God that gives her the courage and strength to do it. And when she feels she’s not strong enough, when she falters, she turns to the faith of her parents, their faith in her and in God, and to the strong foundation of God’s presence in her life, and somehow she finds the courage again.
I know a man who has been sober for a decade. It’s been a struggle all the while, and there’s no question. Even ten years later, the alcohol has that pull on him. It’s there in his head, a drive that’s become so ingrained that it’s physical. But there’s another voice in there too. The voice that gets recharged every Sunday morning, when he gathers with other people of faith and finds new strength to carry on with his fight. The voice of the Holy Spirit, who keeps bringing him back to his center, to the new life he’s found in Christ. And this voice is strong, and has power!
I know a woman whose husband beat her for thirty-four years. It took his death to break her free of it. But the cycle has been broken. She’s married again, to a husband who truly loves her, who respects her and treats her as a human being. She’s had some trouble adjusting to her new life, realizing, accepting the fact that she’s not going to be hit for changing the TV channel or burning the soup. But they keep working on it together, she and her husband. And their mutual prayers, their church membership, their inviting of God into their marriage has been an important part of that growth. God is present for them.
Jesus says, “I am the bread.” And he offers us this bread, the bread of his own body in the Eucharist, so we can see, and touch, and taste that God is here. Come and know God has set you free. Amen.