"Bread of Heaven"

 

  "I will rain down bread from heaven for you." (verse 4)

 

"When the Israelites saw it, they said to each other, 'What is it?' (mahn hu) for they did not know what it was. Moses said to them, 'It is the bread the Lord has given you to eat.' " (verse 15)

"They asked, and he brought them quail; he fed them well with the bread of heaven." (Psalm 105:40)

 

            Each Wednesday evening we serve dinner downstairs. Every week a few people say, "This is my very favorite dinner tonight. I was hoping it would be taco night" (or spaghetti night, or sausage corn chowder night). And every week there are some who walk by the choices and cannot find anything they like to eat until they get to the peanut butter sandwiches at the end of the line. There are some who come through the line and accept what is offered with a look of grim resignation on their faces, and some who each week have an expression of good cheer. We cannot meet every taste every week. We do not have the wide range or variety of choices such as you might find at Portillo's or the Old Country Buffet. What we can provide is a sense of security or assurance – there will be something for you to eat. The risk is that you may not want to eat what is provided.

            Today we meet Israel in the wilderness, and they are wondering what there is to eat. They are offered manna and quail, and then every day for the next forty years it is pretty much manna. They don't have to ask. Chapter 16 begins with Israel grumbling. They have been in the wilderness now for about a month and a half, and the hardship of life there is settling in. They complain to Moses. They are hungry people who do not know how to find bread in the desert. In their grumbling we hear more than simple hunger. They are dissatisfied, they are hard-hearted, they want more than the Lord is providing.

            This is a "teachable moment." Jim Bruckner writes that "the Lord used their grumbling as an opportunity to educate the people in walking in trust and following instructions." God responded to the grumbling in a gracious manner. John Durham says that "the Lord provided nourishment for the body with the manna and quail, and nourishment for the soul with Sabbath rest." The focus in the text is on the manna, and it is the daily manna that enabled the people to know the presence of God in their lives, and the instructions concerning the manna taught them how to observe the Sabbath.

            What is at stake here? We know that freedom from any kind of slavery can easily lead to a different form of slavery. When a person breaks a long-standing, bad habit or some kind of compulsive behavior, they often take up another, often more damaging, habit. If one finds release from an addiction to alcohol, it is common that smoking or overeating or prescription drugs can take the place the alcohol held. We tend to be uneasy with newfound freedom.

So here in the wilderness God is forming the ex-slaves into a community that will be free from oppression and bondage to sin. They had been for so many years controlled by the brute force of slave masters. Now they needed to live by God's law and God's grace. That is not easy to do. So God uses the provision of manna to teach them to live by Sabbath. Their Egyptian slave drivers never let them rest. In their freedom they are given a gift of one day of rest per week. In Egypt there was no such thing as a week, there was only unrelenting work. But how were they to use this gift of time, of rest, for good, and not turn it into indulgence or pressured over-work?

            So God used the manna to teach them the Sabbath. If they tried to hoard the manna, to store it against the unknown future, it spoiled. If they trusted God, then on the sixth day they collected twice as much, and it did not spoil. There was food on the day of rest. But if they went out on the Sabbath to get ahead, to store up more, then they found nothing. Their labor on the Sabbath was in vain. So they learned to rest, to obey and to trust God.

            The word "Sabbath" means "stop." The newly freed slaves, people whose lives had been filled with unending and crushing hard work, needed to learn how to stop one day a week. In doing so, they learned to live by the gift of God. If they do not learn how to stop for a time, to be content in God, then their long habit of constant work will lead them to greed, to overworking, to hoarding; and that is idolatry.

            So their hunger led them to grumbling and their grumbling led them to experience the provision of God. The daily manna caused them to build a relationship of trust and obedience with the Lord. Durham points out that God gave them provision in the morning (manna) and in the evening (quail). He gave them provision for their souls every week in Sabbath rest. He gave them provision for the duration of their wilderness time; every day for 40 years they were fed. Then they entered a land of milk and honey.

            I feel we are on the verge of losing that trust and assurance of God's provision in our society. Our world looks more like Egypt than it does like the Lord's wilderness. We are pushed to cover every possible situation with more work, until many find they cannot rest.

  Do you have time for God? Time to talk to God? Do you have time to listen to God? Bruckner writes, "Resting requires trust in God to provide – and it requires the acceptance of the gift of God. Resting acknowledges the work of God's holiness in your life, which is received by doing nothing."

            Doing nothing is OK. Doing nothing is OK, when it leads you to trust in the Lord. Last Wednesday I was standing by myself in the far corner of the kitchen by the stove, waiting for the noodles to boil, and Kathy Khang said it looked like I had been "put in time out." Some of you need to be put in "time out." Some of you need to go for walks more often. Some of you need to stop on the Sabbath.

            Some of you can't do that. You know that you cannot let down, it is simply not possible for you right now. If that is true for you, it would be good if you could at least see rest as something that is positive, and that you do not reward your over-busy life. It would be good for you to hope for a time when you could experience rest that would lead you to trust God. And I hope that you might be able to try resting and trusting, even for short periods of time. That will be tested. There is always resistance when we trust God.

            The other purpose in the gift of manna was to help the people learn to trust God and be assured of his presence. Every day when they picked up the manna, they were reminded of the presence of God in their lives. Bruckner says the glory of the Lord came in the form of Manna each day. "It was a continual sign of God's presence throughout the wilderness wanderings. This is similar to the presence of the Lord in the bread of the last supper."

            So we are to eat the bread the Lord provides for us. We eat the bread in Communion. "Take and eat, this is my body which is broken for you." Eating the communion bread is a sign of our commitment to Christ.

We are to eat the daily bread we pray for in the Lord's Prayer. There is grace that is new every morning. Do you recognize the grace of the Lord in each day? And if you recognize it, do you welcome it?

            We are to eat the Bread of Heaven. We are reminded that Jesus said that man does not live by bread alone, but by the word of God. That word is one of hope. We eat the bread of hope, of our anticipation of the Kingdom of God. We pray that God would give us the things that are above. Keep your eyes on Jesus, who "for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God."

            Amen.