The Humor in Our Sin

Propers: The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 18), A.D. 2018 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

There is a certain gallows humor in the Bible that I think we often overlook. And in few places does this penchant for the absurd shine through more clearly than in the story of the Israelites in the wilderness. The Exodus is a funny book—if for no reason other than its brutal honesty regarding just how ridiculous our behavior as human beings tends to be.

Let’s recap, shall we? The Hebrews suffer some 400 years of oppression, forced labor, and mass infanticide. They call out to God for a savior, whom He sends—and not just any savior, but Moses, a prince of Egypt, a man with a foot in both worlds. And he shows up working wonders and proclaiming release for the captives; and how does his own family respond to this answering of their prayers? How do God’s chosen people react to God’s chosen Lawgiver? They complain: Thanks a lot, Moses. Thanks for riling up Pharaoh. Thanks for making everything worse!

So God works greater wonders through Moses. He calls down plagues upon the dark gods of Egypt, revealing their impotence before the Creator of All Worlds. He preserves His people from illness and pestilence and famine and hail. He showers them with the silver and gold of their captors, parts for them the Red Sea as an escape route, and leads them in a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. In all of this, God lays low the greatest superpower of the ancient world in order to liberate slaves, servants, nobodies—whom He loves.

So now they’re out in the wilderness, being led to the Promised Land—the land of milk and honey, the land of their ancestor Abraham—and what do they do? They complain, again. “If only we’d died in Egypt, where at least we had good food!” Thanks a lot for liberation, Moses. Glad we aren’t slaves anymore, Moses. But now where are we supposed to find a decent place to eat?”

It takes a lot of nerve to watch God wipe out the chariots of Egypt before your eyes, and then turn around and say, “Well, I’m bored. Can we go back now?” But that’s the thing about the Hebrew Bible; it’s very self-critiquing. No other ancient people’s record is so bluntly honest about their own shortcomings and sins.

All of which brings us to this morning’s story of the manna. The people are complaining. They’ve got their gold, their silver, their families and their freedom, but they miss the fleshpots of Egypt—which, incidentally, would make a great name for a band. And then suddenly they get up one morning to find something strange covering the ground like frost. They don’t know what it is, but it reminds them of bread, light and flaky, and tastes like wafers made with honey, which is to say, delicious.

It’s all over the place. They can just pick it off the ground effortlessly and eat their fill. It’s a bit like waking up to find the world covered in cookies or gingerbread. They’ve never seen anything like this, so they call it manna, which means “What is this?” On Fridays Moses tells them to gather twice as much, so that on Saturdays they can observe the Sabbath rest, not even having to bend over to gather it.

And then in the evening, believe it or not, the wind blows in an exhausted flock of migrating quails, which collapse right in the middle of the camp, again covering the ground like dew, like frost. And so in the morning you have fresh, sweet bread delivered to your door—or at least to the entrance to your tent—and in the evening fresh meat without even having to hunt or catch the birds. The meal comes to you, and comes in abundance.

Oh, and there’s plenty to drink, too. Moses goes around by the power of God turning bitter waters into sweet, camping where a dozen fresh springs pop up.

It’s an image that is ridiculous. God answers their prayers, answers their complaints, superabundantly, humorously. He did everything but send genies to be their waiters and waitresses. And how do you suppose that they respond? Are the people joyful, grateful? Are they abashed at their earlier grumblings? Of course not. They complain. They always complain. For 40 years they complain.

There’s even a scene in the Exodus whereby God and Moses sound like a pair of exasperated parents: “Look what your people are doing!” God says to Moses. “Oh, no,” Moses replies, “those are Your people, not mine. Don’t blame me.” There is humor here, even if it’s a gallows humor, a humor that highlights our sin. Because we’re just like this, aren’t we? We complain about how bad we have it, thinking that if life were just a bit better then we might be grateful for it.

But the truth is that the more we have, and the better we have it, the more we tend to complain. Gifts become expectations. Grace becomes entitlement. If we are not grateful for the little that we have, then we shan’t be grateful for a lot.

Which is not to say that we all have it easy, or that all complaints are baseless. But many a truth hath been told in jest, and the truth told here is that those who are ungrateful will likely remain so regardless of our possessions or positions. And so we chuckle at the Exodus, because the people in it are all-too-familiar, all-too-human. In them we see our own ingratitude, our own self-delusions, our own twisted hearts. And there is grace even in this, for we know that God understands.

Of course, the true Bread from Heaven is not manna but the One whom manna prefigures: that is, Jesus Christ our Lord. Jesus is the Bread of Life. Like wheat that falls to the earth and is buried—only to rise again to feed the world—Jesus is God come down, God emptying Himself, becoming human, becoming mortal, that the Creator might now enter into His own Creation, and thus pour out His own immortal Life for us, for the life of our world.

In Jesus, God gives to us all that He has, all that He is. As the ancient Fathers liked to put it, “God became man so that man might become a god.” These days we have a pithier saying, perhaps more to the point: you are what you eat. So then, if Jesus is our Bread of Life, Jesus our true Cup of Salvation, and in this Meal, we, like all who have gone before us and all who follow after, eat the Body, drink the Blood, of God incarnate on this earth—what then does that make us?

It makes us Jesus. It makes all of us, together, the living Temple and Bride and Body of Christ still at work in this world, still forgiving, still healing, still and forever calling wayward sinners home. “Eat this Bread. Drink this Cup. Come to Me and never be hungry. Eat this Bread. Drink this Cup. Come to Me and you will not thirst.”

Brothers and sisters, I am often overcome by the worries of this world—by boredom and stress and that uniquely American exhaustion that seems to set in amidst the ever-growing piles of our ridiculous abundance. And caught up in these diversions, these distractions, I find myself thinking, “What has He done for me lately? What difference does God really make in my life today?”

Thus do I sound like Israel in the wilderness. I sound like people surrounded by sweetbreads spread out as frost upon the ground and quails falling straight from the skies into their stewpots, yet who still somehow find reason to complain. “Waiter, this food is terrible—and such small portions!”

And so I have to laugh. Because here I am surrounded by the superabundance of God’s mercy—God as my Bread, God in my Cup, God’s Spirit in my soul, God’s Blood in my veins—and still I think, “Is this all? Is that all You’ve got?” Ah, my dear Christians, I am such a fool. And that makes me laugh. Gallows humor, I suppose.

Every Sunday we are given that of which the people of ancient Israel could only dream. We are given forgiveness, resurrection, purpose and new life. We are given God Himself poured out into us, into my own ungrateful heart, utterly out of love, utterly out of grace. We are given a God we can see and touch and taste and eat, a God so generous that we would fall cowering to the earth if we even began to realize what all we are gifted in this one holy sacred Meal.

He knows all our sins. He knows all our hearts. He knows how stupid and silly each one of us can be. And yet He comes every Sunday, to meet us in that Font and on this Altar, because our lives—your life—is more precious to Him than His own.

For the bread of God is that which comes down from Heaven and gives life to the world.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.