How does God feed us? (Sermon prep for Sept. 18 by Ray Webster)

The first reading is Exodus 16:2-15

I always like to step back and look at the setting of Bible stories. We come in today on the people of Israel after the Exodus.

God has acted in history to set them free. The great formative foundational action by God has taken place. The Hebrew people are no longer slaves in Egypt. They are free people on the other side of the Red Sea and you would think wow, they should be dancing in the desert, and singing the Hallelujah Chorus. Wrong.

They were not happy. They were mad. They were complaining.

What they were remembering was not what God did but the good old days back in Egypt, when they were taken care of or at least thought they were being taken care of.

And their complaining is clearly directed at Moses and his brother Aaron, who led them out here into the middle of nowhere. Where they were hungry.

Of course the “good old days” back in Egypt were under the conditions of slavery, which did mean one got minimal food to survive – as long as one’s master wanted one to survive.

This very human complaining would characterize the people of Israel for good deal of there early freedom.

What the people of Israel did NOT say was OK we are free, what does God want us to do and to be? It would take forty years in the wilderness to sort that out.

God had acted to free them – but the people are strikingly hazy about who God is and where God is and what God might be doing, let alone wanting them to do.

But now the writer tells us God fed them in the wilderness. God sent meat in the evening (quails in the New Revised Standard Version) and bread in the morning – the mysterious manna in the wilderness.

God gave bread to the people to eat.

How does God feed us, here in Chicago today? What is the bread we are given?

There is the Bible. By means of the Scriptures God speaks to us the Word God has for us – always, at its center, the word of God’s love for each person. Each one. No one left out.

God feeds us in the Eucharist in which the bread and wine are the great signs of God’s presence with us and love for us in Jesus Christ.

God feeds us when we go to God in times of quiet prayer, as Jesus did throughout his ministry.

When we think and pray about a decision or an opinion, I believe God by the Holy Spirit dwelling within us (I love the Quaker image of the Inner Light) guides our consciences. I also believe God gives us the strength and courage and wisdom and love to carry what we are given to carry and do what we are given to do.

In Thomas Aquinas wisdom is the first of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and I believe God gives us the wisdom to love.

These are all ways God feeds us on our journey in Chicago today.

The second reading is from the Letter of Paul to the Philippians 1:21-30

We begin today reading from Paul’s letter to the Christian church in Philippi. Paul calls them to live in a manner of life worthy of the Gospel of Christ, and to face persecution as Paul has faced persecution.

The Gospel reading is from Matthew 20:1-16.

The setting of these stories of Jesus teaching his disciples is his journey from the north of Israel down to the city of Jerusalem.

Last week Jesus spoke strongly about forgiving. From the cross Jesus would pray, “Father, forgive them” – giving us in those words, and in the words of the Lord’s Prayer, that prayer to make our own.

Today he gives us this earthy teaching – relevant to any of his communities – that the newcomer is loved and welcomed by God just as much as the old timer who has borne the burden of the day.

For the wages given to each disciple is the friendship and love of God in Jesus Christ and God does not ration that out.

It strikes me that in our first reading about God feeding the people in the wilderness, and the Gospel reading about the wages paid to God’s servants by God, the great fundamental accent is on what God is doing.

Good to step back periodically in the life of the church to ask what God is up to? God is up to a whole lot – loving each person. The newcomer. The old timer. The outsider (how Jesus went to such effort to reach the outsider). The people on the “in” (Saul of Tarsus was educated on the “in”) and the people of the “outs” (like a tax collector named Levi who took the new name Matthew, which is the name given to this Gospel from which we are reading). And you and me.

(Ray Webster)