Saturday, August 29, 2015
Sermon for the Tenth Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 13B ~
August 2, 2015
Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
And as Aaron
spoke to the whole congregation of the Israelites, they looked toward the
wilderness, and the glory of the LORD appeared in the cloud.
The LORD spoke to Moses and said,
"I have
heard the complaining of the Israelites; say to them,
`At twilight
you shall eat meat,
and in the
morning you shall have your fill of bread;
then you shall
know that I am the LORD your God. '"
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity,
Manna comes to the Israelites when they are in the desert and
when they are hungry, and with the manna
comes knowledge of God. In other words, life
and knowledge of God comes to those who go into the wilderness and fast. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Each
soul recapitulates the paschal journey out of Egypt, through the desert, to the
Promised Land. The story of the Exodus and wandering in the wasteland has a
legitimate, spiritual meaning on the level of the soul’s journey. It is not the
only meaning, and it may not even be the most important meaning, but it is ONE
of the meanings of the Exodus: each of us must leave the fleshpots of Egypt –
the place security and slavery – and go out into the desert. There and only
there is where we encounter God. Salvation is communal, not individual.
Nevertheless, we feel our longing for salvation individually – just like we
feel our physical hunger.
To be in the desert is to be
hungry: in the wilderness, we will get hungry, and it will seem as though we
are sure to die. And we are going to die. That is the point. We must die
to our Egypt-consciousness in order to enter the Promised Land. Our hunger –
our fasting – is indispensable to this journey.
Fasting represents the whole array
of ascetic practice. It is not punishment of the body, but training. As an
athlete trains her body not to destroy, but to develop it, so too our spiritual
exercises are training. That’s what asceticism
means, from the Greek askhsis, meaning athletic training. It may not be altogether
pleasant, at the time. (To say the least.) To the Egypt-head it seems like
foolishness ending in death, and so we are inclined to grumble, like the
Israelites, and say that we had been better off in Egypt.
Sooner or later. We have ultimate doubts. "Why did we ever leave? We must have
been crazy to believe Moses. All in all,
we had a pretty good thing going back in Egypt, compared to this. Now we are just going to die." And all of that makes a good deal of
sense. In order to make any spiritual
progress, we have to take a big chance, trust the impossible, risk our lives
and go out into the empty wasteland, where we starve. And we do starve to death, because the death
of our old Egypt-consciousness — our old slave-consciousness — is the purpose
of the first part of the journey. We
don't shed that consciousness simply by walking across the Red Sea. In fact, it seems that we have to come to the
point where we think it was all a mistake, there is no God, and we wish we had
never started on the journey at all, before we can receive the manna.
God’s answer to our grumbling is a
rain of quails. This strikes me as ridicule, almost scorn. The Israelites got
WAY more than they needed, as if to say “Oh, you doubt ME? Well get a load of
this!” They couldn’t possibly eat all that meat. It would have soon become a
smelly nuisance in the camp out in the desert. The point seems to be that God
knows what we need and we don’t. When we start to think that we would have been
better off never to have started the journey in the first place, we may get a
sickening surfeit of what we thought we needed.
He rained down flesh upon them like
dust * and winged birds like the sand
of the sea.
He let it fall in the midst of
their camp *
and round about their dwellings.
and round about their dwellings.
So they ate and were well filled, *
for he gave them what they craved.
for he gave them what they craved.
I think it significant that the
rain of quail – the exaggeration of divine abundance – happened only one night, while the manna came day after day. God first has
to teach us to get over our own Egypt-idea of what we need. Making fun of us
with the quails is part of God’s mercy. Without the quails, we would probably
find the manna insubstantial. This is
why the Collect prays that God’s mercy may continually cleanse Israel (the Church) as well as defend her. The cleansing is an indispensable part of God’s mercy,
and it comes first – before the defense.
By the way, the mistranslation of
the Lord’s Prayer – calling it daily
bread instead of supersubstantial
Bread – is both ancient and deliberate.
It indicates the universal understanding that the Bread for which we pray comes
every day and is not ordinary bread. It is manna.
The Bread of Angels. The warrant for this apostolic identification is today’s
Gospel, in which our Savior says that He is the Bread of Life.
There is an old epicurean saying
that hunger is the best sauce. The manna, the supersubstantial bread, would
seem insubstantial to us unless we
were fasting – dying of starvation from the perspective of our old
Egypt-consciousness. On the other hand, we cannot do without food altogether.
The rain of quails reminds us that God’s bounty fulfills our needs and more.
When we recognize that, we can accept the supersubstantial manna as the fulfillment of a more basic need.
So, our inner spiritual journey
resembles the biblical wandering in the wilderness. I think it vital to
remember that the journey is a communal one. We participate in it as persons –
each soul suffers her own hunger, as her own individual Egypt-consciousness
complains about its death. Mystics call this the “purgative way,” or “the
soul’s dark night.” But “…in the morning
you shall have your fill of bread; then you shall know that I am the LORD your
God.” And those who eat this Bread – this communal Bread – shall never die.
AMEN
MARANATHA
COME, LORD JESUS!
