don't eat alone

I know. I haven’t been here in a while.

I’ve missed it. And I’m working to change that pattern for the days ahead. I’ll start with my sermon for today. I am preaching in two places this morning: remotely at United Churches of Durham CT and in person at First Congregational Church of Guilford, which was also recorded earlier in the week since not everyone can get into the sanctuary. Here is what I had to say.

“Small Mercies” Exodus 13:12-23

Back in the days of Blockbuster Video and VHS tapes, Ginger and our friend Cherry rented the movie Casino. It was so long that it took two tapes. They popped one in the VCR and were a little puzzled that the movie just started without any titles or credits, but they chalked it up to Martin Scorsese being a creative director. Still some things didn’t make sense. When they got to the end of the tape and the final credits began to roll, they realized they had started in the middle of the movie.

Our lectionary passage this morning is the beginning of the second tape, as far as the story of the Hebrew people goes. It will make more sense if we give it a larger context. The Book of Exodus is telling the story of how the Hebrews became a people, a nation, and a community of faith. It is also the story of their learning to live in relationship to God in new ways. It began with their Exodus from Egypt. Then the wandered in the wilderness of the Sinai Peninsula for forty years.

In one of the early chapters of this story, the people complained because they didn’t have enough to eat. No–they didn’t just complain. They whined. “Why did God bring us out here to die? We would be better off back in Egypt.”

In response, God rained bread every morning like dew–manna–which inspired our hymn for today: “Morning by morning, new mercies I see.” In the evening quail flew into the camp and just sat there. Though this part of the story is told only once, the food supply chain was never broken. I want you to remember that the meals didn’t stop for forty years. Hang on to that detail.

One more piece of this prelude: the chapter of the story we are reading today begins with Moses going up the mountain to get the Ten Commandments. He was gone so long that the people began to think he was never coming back and they got anxious. Their pleading makes me think of the line from the chorus of John Prine’s “Angel from Montgomery”—“. . . just give me one thing that I can hold on to.”

So they melted all their jewelry and built a Golden Calf to give them that one thing: something they could see and touch—a god they could grasp. Moses came down the mountain with the Tablets, saw the calf, got mad, threw down the tablets and broke them, and then burned the calf to ashes, mixed the ashes with water, and made the people swallow the consequences of their actions. Moses was mad, God was mad, and they people were distraught.

The Hebrew people, as I said, were in the process of becoming a people. They had spent generations in Egypt being defined by who they were not and as they physically wandered in the Sinai, they were spiritually wandering as well, trying to figure out who they were. To see themselves as God’s people meant they had to come to terms with God. For all the parted seas and giant gestures of deliverance, the Hebrews lived with a basic insecurity that God was not going to hang around. They wanted constant reassurance. They wanted a god they could touch, a god they could understand. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks says,
“We now understand the entire drama set in motion by the making of the Golden Calf. Moses pleaded with God to come closer to the people, so that they would encounter [God] not only at unrepeatable moments in the form of miracles but regularly, on a daily basis, and not only as a force that threatens to obliterate all it touches but as a Presence that can be sensed in the heart of the camp.”

In the aftermath of the Golden Calf, Moses pitched his tent outside the camp. Both he and God kept their distance from the people, who wanted presence most of all, but didn’t know how to ask for it. From the camp, they could see that God came to Moses in the form of a “pillar of cloud, and that Moses and God were in conversation in a way the people had not experienced: it gave the appearance of two old friends talking.

Moses was a man acquainted with powerful revelation. God first spoke to him through a burning bush that never burned up. When Moses raised his arms, the sea parted and the people escaped Egypt. The Torah records more than one conversation between God and Moses where Moses bargains with God. In this passage, Moses asks to see God face to face and God says,

See, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock; and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by; then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen.

I want to go back to the detail I asked you to hold on to earlier: the manna and quail had never stopped. Morning my morning, God had showed up and the new mercies had continued, but Moses and the Hebrew people had lost sight of them somehow.

The Hebrew people wandered for forty years across an area about the size of the state of Maine. When they left Egypt, they thought, I’m sure, that everything was going to be okay. They were freed from their enslavement. God was with them. But it was just the beginning. What they thought would end quickly dragged on for generations. They didn’t know when it was going to end. They didn’t know what to expect. They built the golden calf so they could have a deity they grasp. They wanted a quantifiable life and a quantifiable god. They wanted certainty. They wanted another grand gesture on God’s part to give them a sense of presence and what they got was breakfast every morning.

In one of my favorite movies, Miss Firecracker, Carnelle Scott is a woman who is well-acquainted with grief and tragedy, and who is also in the last year of her eligibility for the Miss Firecracker Contest in Yazoo City, Mississippi. Her cousin Elain had won it years before when Carnelle was a child, and Carnelle is sure she can do the same and that winning the title will change everything. She places fifth.

Later, she says to Mac Sam, the come-and-go love of her life, and also one of her biggest encouragers, “I just want to know what I can reasonably expect out of life.”

“Not much,” he answers, laughing and coughing at the same time.

“But something,” she persists.

“Eternal grace,” he says.

We are wandering into the eighth month of distance and isolation connected to COVID-19. In many ways, we are less sure about when this will be over than ever. We are a little over two weeks away from an election that will answer some questions but leave much of our cultural turmoil and division still in play. We are struggling to deepen and widen our understanding of what it means to be a people as we come try to come to terms with the structural racism and bigotry baked into our systems. We, too, want some certainty about what is coming next. We, too, pin our hopes too easily on grand gestures. We, too, want to know what we can reasonably expect out of life.

But, like, the Hebrew people, we will find our hope and our humanity in the small merices. We find our faith in the stories we tell that give us a sense of God’s presence, not in a full-on, in your face kind of way, but in how we remember what God has done in our midst. The cliché says that the devil is in the details. No. That’s where God is.

Micah 6:8 is a verse we quote often: “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God.” The oldest translations read “love mercy” instead of “love kindness.” The manna on the ground each day was an offering of God’s kindness. With that in mind, listen to Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem, “Kindness”

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

In the musical Godspell, one of Jesus’ followers sings, “Day by day, day by day, O, dear Lord, three things I pray: to see thee more clearly, love thee more dearly, follow thee more nearly day by day.”

In the messy details of our lives, in our hunger for assurance, in our trust that we are held by eternal grace, and in all that is uncertain about what lies ahead, our daily kindnesses are our best reminder of God presence and our connectedness. Morning by morning. Evening by evening. Sorrow by sorrow. New mercies we see—day by day by day by day by day. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

I preached this week for our church. The passage was Matthew 14:13-24—the story of the Feeding of the Five Thousand—which is one of my favorites. Since our sanctuary is not air conditioned, we filmed in Ginger’s office.

One of the songs that was popular when I was in high school that has managed to stick around for almost half a century is a tune by the Scottish band Stealers Wheel called “Stuck in the Middle with You,” which includes the memorable lines

clowns to the left of me jokers to the right
here I am stuck in the middle with you

A pandemic anthem well before its time, don’t you think?

I did too, as I worked on my sermon this week—only to be reminded that Ginger had referenced the song in her first virtual sermon back in March. But since March feels like it was years and not months ago, the song bears repeating because we are still stuck—or so it seems.

As August begins, we have gone almost five months since we last worshipped together in our meeting house or chatted at coffee hour. I am way behind on my NHQ–my Necessary Hug Quota. Because of my knee surgery in April of 2019, which sidelined me from cooking for most of the summer, our barn has gone almost a year without people gathered around our table for dinner. How I wish we could be together so we could share what we miss and the griefs—yes, plural—we are all holding. Whatever stories we are telling in these days of protest and pandemic, they are grief stories: stories of being stuck in the middle without resolution—and without each other.

I was grateful to find that the lectionary passage was the story we most commonly know as the Feeding of the Five Thousand, which you may not know is a grief story of its own. Our reading starts in the middle of things, as lectionary passages often do. The first sentence is the giveaway: “And hearing this, Jesus withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place to be by himself.”

“And hearing this . . .” The English teacher in me wants to say, “Your antecedent is unclear. What did he hear?

The first twelve verses of Chapter 14 give us that context. The short version is John the Baptist was murdered by Herod on a drunken whim. His disciples buried him and then came to tell Jesus. And hearing this, Jesus did all he could to get away from everyone and everything to grieve the loss of his cousin, colleague, and friend. But he couldn’t get away. The crowds of people hoping for healing were relentless in both their need and pursuit of him and they followed him out of town into the desert, as did the disciples whom, I imagine, were doing their best to deal with their grief over John’s death as well as Jesus’ sorrow, which was new to them as well.

When Jesus became aware of what was happening, Matthew says, “. . . he was moved inwardly with compassion for them” and instead of continuing to run away Jesus turned back into the mass of people and began to listen to their grief stories, to share their loads, and to offer healing. This went on all day and into the evening. The disciples’ response was a little less compassionate, though I think they thought they were trying to help. “We’re out here in the desert and it’s after supper time; don’t you think we should send them into the villages so they don’t starve?” Part of being a disciple, it seems, meant living with the grief of inadequacy, which was wearisome, I’m sure.

Jesus’ response was direct: “They don’t need to go away. You give them something to eat.”

Their response was also straightforward. “We have nothing here but five loaves and two fishes.” In Matthew’s version, they didn’t even have a cute little kid who was offering his sack supper. They just knew they didn’t have enough. The hunger of the crowd was not something they could solve. It didn’t matter what they did, they couldn’t fix the problem.

“Bring them here to me,” Jesus said. Then he turned to the crowd and asked them to recline, as they would if they were going to eat. (For our purposes, let us imagine they were masked and appropriately distanced.) He blessed the food and then gave it to the disciples to distribute. With several thousand people on a hillside, it is hard to grasp the logistics of it all, but the people seemed to know that dinner was being served. They sat down and began to pass the food as it came to them. Everyone ate and there were leftovers.

The willing suspension of disbelief has always come fairly easily for me, so I have never had much of a problem with taking the miracle stories of Jesus at face value, or, as one of my seminary professors used to describe them, as parables in event, which is to say the miracle of this meal is pointing to something other than the amazing set of circumstances.

The state of my life often affects what I see in the story. These months we have spent in quarantine, as many have turned mask-wearing into a violation of their constitutional rights, have helped me to see that the miracle in this story is that a whole mountain of grieving people looking beyond themselves and feeding one another.

I don’t think Jesus knew, necessarily, that it was all going to work out when he started passing out bits of bread and fish. He just knew it was the right thing to do. If you have food and you see hungry people, you feed them. You offer what you have. And then see where it goes.

The lectionary passage stops with the count of how many were fed and, in doing so, leaves the story too quickly. But the next verse, verse 22, says, “Then he insisted that the disciples embark into the boat and precede him to the other side, until he should dismiss the crowds.”

The day had begun for Jesus with an ambush of grief that had sent him searching for self-isolation. It ended with him being not quite ready to leave when dinner was over: “You go on and I’ll catch up. I want to say goodbye to everyone”—and, yes, I realize that is an extrovert’s take on the story. Still, Jesus found some healing there as well. As the disciples walked down to the water, I imagine them hearing Jesus humming,

clowns to the left of me, jokers to my right . . .

And then they went on to the next day, which held new grief of its own, and some old stuff as well.

Jesus didn’t take care of people or tell the disciples to feed the crowd because it made everything better. Healing people didn’t bring John back to life. Handing out fish and bread didn’t eradicate the Roman occupation. But they were the right things to do. The hopeful things.

Vaclav Havel was a playwright who became the president of Czechoslovakia in the late 80s. He told of something that took place just a few weeks before he unexpectedly became a head of state. He was out in the countryside at a dinner party and fell down a sewer pipe. In his words, he almost drowned in that “fundamental mud” but someone had the wherewithal to get a long ladder and saved him. That he was in a sewer and that he became a state official were equally absurd circumstances. In that context, he wrote about hope.

Hope in this deep and powerful sense is not the same as joy when things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but rather an ability to work for something to succeed. Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It’s not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. It is this hope, above all, that gives us strength to live and to continually try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now. In the face of this absurdity, life is too precious a thing to permit its devaluation by living pointlessly, emptily, without meaning, without love, and, finally, without hope.

We have more days coming that we can imagine when we are not going to know how long this is going to last, or what is going to happen next, or when life will feel recognizable again. The days ahead are also going to leave us feeling like the disciples, more often than not, when it comes to how what we think we have to offer stacks up against the needs around us. Whatever happens, even in life beyond the pandemic and quarantine, life is not going to feel like the life we think we remember. But Jesus, to use Havel’s words, didn’t do what he did because he knew it would all turn out okay, he did it because he was certain it made sense to share what food they had. And then he stayed to talk, and to listen.

One of the verses of our song for today goes

trying to make some sense of it all
and I can see it makes no sense at all
it is cool to go to sleep on the floor
‘cause I don’t think I can take anymore . . .

So much of life right now doesn’t make sense, from the virus to the vitriol of our national discourse. Truly, there are clowns to the left and jokers to the right. The world feels full of naysayers, nutjobs, and ne’er-do-wells in every direction. It doesn’t make sense to keep screaming at each other. It doesn’t make sense to just wish that life would go back to normal—whatever that was. It doesn’t make sense to just hunker down and take care of ourselves and let everyone else fend for themselves.

What does make sense is to do all we can to let those stuck in the middle with us know that we are all wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and worthy to be loved. What does make sense is to see these days as open space that offers us the chance to change, how we treat one another on both personal and societal levels. We are stuck in the middle together. What makes sense is to offer all that we have to a hungry world. To feed one another any way we can—even the clowns and the jokers. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

P.S.—Seems only fitting for this to be our postlude.