PEOPLE'S CHURCH OF DOVER

Psalm 78:26-31                                          While the Food Was Still in Their Mouths

Sermon August 30, 2009:  People’s United Church of Christ, Dover, DE:  The Rev. Dan Griggs

 

            Have you ever wanted to argue with the Bible, but it just didn’t feel right?  How can you argue against the sacred text?  Don’t you need some kind of lightening rod if you do that?  Well this morning I think we want to argue with the Bible about this story of God’s tantrum when the Israelites in the exodus wanted more than bread, after living on that same bread day after day for two years. 

            When my father was a little boy, living on a farm out in the country in West Tennessee with his four sisters and two brothers, his mother and father, one autumn morning the house caught fire and burned to the ground.  The hamlet of Spring Creek didn’t have a fire company, so there was no way to put it out.  They lost everything but their shoes and whatever was in the cellar.  As the fire grew hotter and raged higher, his father went back in and threw everybody’s shoes out the window—remember, it was autumn.  Everybody got out safely, but it was a bad moment.  It would be six months before they could plant a garden and grow more food.  They looked in the cellar to inventory what would be on the menu all winter.  They had Ball jars of canned vegetables and a little meat—not much; and they had a large pile of sweet potatoes.  To hear my father tell it, that winter (about 1916), they ate sweet potatoes every day, for every meal.  My father never ate another sweet potato for the rest of his life—he was just sick of them.

            Now I don’t know how creative a cook my grandmother was, but I went online last week and looked up recipes for sweet potatoes.[1]  I was amazed at what people have figured out to do with them.  Here’s a partial list—let your mouth water like mine did.

 

 

Well, you get the idea.  I mean:  too much of anything is just too much.  I’m not talking about addictions—I mean those things you eat, or wear, or places you go, TV reruns you’ve seen ten times.  I don’t know how Harriet can just keep watching “I Love Lucy” episodes:  when I’m flipping channels and see “I Love Lucy” I try to surf on past it before the sound comes on—otherwise Harriet will hear it and that’s where the television will stay.  Of course she feels the same way about my flipping channels:  finally she just says, “Give me the remote, please.” 

 

            So after all the fireworks, miracles, wonders and liberation the Hebrews experienced as they marched out of Egyptian bondage, and after the earthquakes and lightening at Mount Sinai when God gave them the Ten Commandments, they struck out into the Sinai desert.  What they had to eat was “manna.”  The word “manna” is Hebrew:  it means “What is it?”  They didn’t know what it was, but they could make manna bread, manna soup, manna soufflé, mashed manna—you get the idea.  For two years they camped out in the desert eating this stuff.  Whoever wrote this story in the Book of Numbers about God and Moses getting angry when they asked for some meat   just hadn’t thought about it very much, don’t you think.  This story comes from the very earliest deposit of memories in the Hebrew Bible, but it has been worked over by several editors before being put into the form we have it in the Bible.[2]  Maybe it was somebody about the time of King David—hundreds of years after the exodus—who used this story to teach a lesson:  accept the good things God has already given you, and don’t gripe about what you don’t have.  That’s a good lesson; we all teach our children that lesson at one time or another.  Then the temple musician named Asaph took the story and worked it into a psalm—Psalm 78.[3]  Asaph used it to teach that same lesson, and it looks like he didn’t think about the situation either. 

            This kind of thing makes me want to argue with the Bible. I mean—after all—two years eating the same thing without a break?  And it’s a sin to mention that you’d like a little garlic or fish?  What if they had known then that they had 38 more years to go eating this “manna” before their children would take the Promised Land?  Moses would have had a riot on his hands, instead of grumbling. 

 

 

            Wait a minute!  Maybe the problem is not that they were tired of the “manna,” or even that they asked for a little variety in their diet.  Both the story in the Book of Numbers and this psalm emphasize the word “craving.”  The place where this happened, where they buried the people who died in the punishment, was given the name “Graves of Craving.”  It became a place on the map—the ancient map of Sinai, and also the map of their spiritual lives.  Because “craving” presents us with a problem over and above the boring menu. 

            The Yale professor of philosophical theology, Paul L. Holmer, published a little book several years ago in which he talked about “craving,” which he called “insatiability.”[4]  He wrote:

 

 

He wasn’t making this point just about food—he was talking about that feeling of dissatisfaction with the way things are that keeps pushing us, and the more we get the more we want.  Love between two people can deepen into a beautiful companionship that lasts a lifetime, but, Holmer  says:

 

 

Holmer wrote this book back in the 1980’s.  I wonder what he would say about the way consumerism developed in the last fifteen years, when everybody was expected to borrow, to use credit cards, to over-buy until our desires, our “cravings” could not be satisfied?  He wrote:

 

 

The word “meretricious” means centered on false promises—lies—the lie that there is such a thing as a “more” that can satisfy me better. 

            I think Paul Holmer has put his finger on the spiritual issue in the depths of this desert craving.  It isn’t that they wanted something more to eat—God actually granted that prayer.  The problem was that an insatiability had taken over the hearts of many of them, and not even “a land flowing with milk and honey” would be enough to satisfy their meretricious craving. 

            As for the way the narrator describes God’s wrath and Moses’ anger, I take that to be an accurate report of the way all primitive cultures think of God and the calamities that befall them.  The issue is not the way the narrator describes God:  the issue is insatiability, the restless heart; and we all know that issue personally.  This story speaks to us where we really live. 

 

            While the food was still in their mouths.  Is this not who we are, too?  I’m not advocating asceticism, the willful abandonment of comfort.  Some of the medieval monks not only wore scratchy hair shirts but also under the shirt they wore a heavy metal cross with spikes pressing into their flesh; and they never got a full night’s sleep, they never had a comfortable day, they never thought of any greater pleasure than getting that hair shirt and spiked cross off.  God isn’t calling you to asceticism, but rather to a peaceful heart, a strong mind able to grow in understanding, a healthy body able to fight off disease, a family who care about each other, a community where there is enough and to share.  “Craving” disrupts that.  “Insatiability” makes you and everybody around you miserable. 

            While the food was still in their mouths.  Does this line in Psalm 78 have anything to tell us about how our society’s present economic crisis can be understood, addressed, prevented from happening again in my life and yours?  Oh, I think so!  If you want peace in your deepest self, you need to deal with the things that lead to the “Graves of Craving.”

AMEN