Fairhaven UMC

I want to push a little further into Exodus 16 here because you might as well know what happens for the whole chapter. So we just finished here where flow stopped and the bread has come and you would think that everything would be normal and we’d be good. They’re fed, they have the bread now. Of course, that’s not what happens. We see multiple different responses to the bread. Some people listen. Some people only collect as much as they need for the day. And then there are others who collect more in the hopes that they can stockpile it, that they can secure it to make sure they still have some for the next days. That bread, over the course of the evening, when they try to keep it in a jar, became infested with worms and stank. That’s an important piece there, too. Moses ends up being furious with these people, and they seem to finally learn their lesson towards the end of the chapter. But what happens after that is God commands that one jar of manna can be kept, just one, and it’s to be kept in the tabernacle in front of the ark where the people can see it and remember for all generations that God provided for them in the desert.

Give us this day our daily bread. We pray it at least once a week. I know you do because we just did. You probably pray it more than that. And it’s a really reassuring line in the Lord’s Prayer, I think, that Jesus tells us all we need to do is ask the Father to give us what we need to make it through the day ahead of us. And yet, when we find the Israelites in the Sinai Desert this morning, wandering and starving, we’re forced to see the image of daily bread in a different kind of light.

And this chapter opens in the midst of a severe crisis. There’s about to be a rebellion, a mutiny against Moses and Aaron. The Israelites are murmuring is the traditional way that that’s translated, that there’s just this kind of buzz of rebellion. The people are hungry. We don’t know how long they’ve gone without eating. At the end of chapter 15, God miraculously gave them water from this bitter spring. He ends three days of thirst after they make it across the Red Sea. They don’t get to drink for three days, but then he miraculously transforms this spring into sweet water. And after that, they make camp at an oasis of 12 springs and 70 palm trees. And we can assume there there’s at least something to eat. But now they’re on the move again. They’re not in an oasis anymore. They’re in the middle of the desert in a region called Sin. And they are grumbling and furious as they just lash out against Moses. And they say, oh, how we wish the Lord had just put us to death while we were still in Egypt. There we could sit by the pots of cooking meat and eat our fill of bread, and instead you’ve brought us out into this desert to starve this whole assembly into death.

And it’s amazing, this constantly happens in Exodus. How fast the Israelites move from miracle to mutiny. Constantly. Just a month prior, a chapter ago, all the people were united. They’d just made it across the sea, and they were singing praises to God. One of these beautiful hymns in the Old Testament. I will sing to the Lord for an overflowing victory. Horse and rider he threw into the sea. The Lord is my strength and my power. He has become my salvation. This is my God whom I will praise. The God of my ancestors whom I will acclaim. The Lord is a warrior. The Lord is his name. They all are singing this on the banks of the Red Sea. And now, a month later, the people are ready to swim back across it. into the chains that Pharaoh has had waiting for them, because at least in Egypt, they knew the smell of cooking meat.

Better a predictable slavery than an unfamiliar freedom. And so God speaks to Moses, and this is interesting, by the way, because as you read this chapter, it doesn’t seem like Moses is asking. God has something to say to Moses without him asking first. He needs him to know. And God speaks to him about how God is going to respond to this murmuring, this rebellion that’s bubbling up. And God’s plan is this. Bread will rain down from heaven every night. And every morning, the people may gather it for food, but each person can only gather one omer, which is enough grain for one person for one day. It’s about two quarts. The only exception is the day before the Sabbath, when they’re allowed to collect enough for two days, allowing them to rest on the Sabbath day, even in the midst of this desert, of this struggle, of this suffering. Sabbath rest is still respected. That day is still sacred and peaceful.

And as a bonus, a huge flock of quails is going to come the very first night. It covers the camp. It’s covered with these game birds and gives them meat to hunt. And so Moses gathers and addresses the people to tell them what God has said, and he repeats it. The Lord will give you meat in the evening and your fill of bread in the morning because the Lord heard the complaints you made against him. And then I think it’s interesting here, too, he distances himself. Point to Aaron, he goes, who are we? Your complaints aren’t against us, but the Lord. Definitely trying to quell this rebellion here.

But Moses is clear and firm in sharing the instructions that he received from God. Don’t keep any of it until morning. And naturally, the people don’t listen. The rumbling of their bellies and the memory of their hunger is louder than the sound of God’s voice. And some of them decide that the best thing to do is to stock up. Again, they keep manna for the next days. But within a single night, it rots. It fills with worms. It stinks with the smell of decay. It’s inedible. Can’t be kept. and Moses is furious finding out that the people did this.

Some disobey in the opposite way. We also find out later in this chapter, they refuse to collect double the day before the Sabbath, and they go out the morning of the Sabbath to go find their breakfast, and oh, nothing there. God this time lashes out, not Moses, but God this time, and addresses Moses for the failures of the people and says to Moses, how long will you refuse to obey my commandments and instructions? Their leader is responsible for the way they’re behaving.

And this singular most important role of the manna here that’s dispensed by God’s will on God’s schedule is to remind the people that the one who brought them out of Egypt is the one who maintains their life and their well-being every single day still. It’s not themselves. It’s not Moses. It’s not Aaron. It’s God. The bread comes from God. Give us this day, they might pray, before they go out to the desert to collect their rations flavored like honey, our daily bread. No more, no less. And to keep that memory alive, God commands this jar of manna be kept in the tabernacle so that all future generations can see that the same God who brought the plagues upon the Egyptians, who plunged Pharaoh’s chariots into the deep, who split the Red Sea, also fed them day by day in the midst of the desert. As much as liberation and power and this warrior spirit are part of who God is, so is this motherly daily bread.

But here’s the thing that every Israelite in the Sinai knows, whether they say it out loud, and some of them actively rebel against it, but they all know this is true. Relying on God’s daily bread sucks. And we’re tempted to be pious about that. And we say to ourselves, God gives us just what we need to make it through the day. But that is not often what it feels like. We don’t feel particularly grateful for that. And these Israelites are not less faithful than we are. I think we have to remember this. They have seen in the past month the power of God before their eyes in ways that we can only dream of. They saw the sea parted with Moses’ staff. They saw the plagues, the frogs, the rivers of blood. They were freed from slavery, and they know that God did it. So it’s all that they don’t believe. They know full well God cares for them, but the fear remains. And I have to deeply sympathize with those Israelites in the Sinai who can’t help themselves to gather extra manna. Because, you know, what if it doesn’t come tomorrow? What if it doesn’t come tomorrow? What if God decides to stop? They’ve been hungry before. And you and I have felt the pain of needing God’s help before, the desperation that emerges when it doesn’t come when or how we want it. What if it doesn’t come?

But daily bread means just enough for the day. And it means trusting that God is going to be as good tomorrow as God has been today and yesterday and the moment he split the sea. And it is an incredibly difficult spiritual discipline to pray for daily bread like we do in the Lord’s Prayer and mean it. And I can confess that I am not at all there to the degree that I hope to be. God measures out grace. God measures out providence as God sees fit. We don’t get to stockpile it. There’s no way to stockpile it. Whether it’s this bread that’s scattered on the frost or this full day’s wages given to a worker that shows up at five, God refuses to work to give on our terms. And God provides what is needed for our lives. No more, no less.

And these stories force us to deal with the reality of our lives. That no matter what we might prefer to think, our lives are in God’s hands. and we’re just infinitely better off when we live that way because you can’t and aren’t self-sufficient. It’s by God’s blessing, not the strength of our efforts, not our worthiness that our work comes to fruition. It’s by God’s grace that we are fed in the deserts of our lives, in our minds, in our bodies, in our souls. God is the provider. All that we have is a trust from God, one day at a time, because there can only ever be manna for today.

As you all know, as we’ve discussed a little bit this morning, stormies do any day now, right? And something has happened to me within the past couple months, and that is that I have become deeply, viscerally anxious about this baby coming. I’m very serious about this. I’ve dealt with anxiety for quite a few years now. But this is the worst that it’s been in a long time. And it’s hard to explain what that means unless you’ve dealt with it yourself, as I’m sure many of you have, because like worrying isn’t the issue, right? Anxiety like something like this is something else. And I told Stormy earlier this week that I can’t pinpoint exactly what’s going on with me here, but I have a hypothesis. And that is that I have absolutely zero control over anything that’s to come in these next few weeks or like 20 years. And this is probably the first time, if I’m honest, this is probably the first time since I’ve been a conscious human being that I have felt this way. Completely out of control.

All I can do is grab my bag of, you know, T-shirts and sweatpants and cookies, grab it, put it in the car and sit in the hospital bed, sit in the hospital room for however many hours it takes. I have no details of what’s going to happen. Besides, at the end of it, there will be a baby buckled in the backseat of my car in the car seat that’s already there haunting me. I can think, you know, what if I can’t do it? Right. What if I’m a nervous wreck for the rest of my life all day long? or I can just feel that gnawing in my stomach all the time. But whenever I have those questions, you know, what if I can’t do it? God has an answer. And that answer is what we hear in Exodus 16. Go out tomorrow morning and gather the bread for the day. The answer will be exactly the same tomorrow. Go out in the morning, gather the bread that you need for the day. One day at a time, God will give the manna this miraculous nourishment that God knows I need to make it. And regrettably, this has not cured my anxiety.

If only it were as easy as knowing that everything is going to be okay. Again, the Israelites of the Exodus, they know God’s power quite well. They know God can handle it. They have walked the seafloor of the Red Sea, and yet they are still anxious enough to find themselves desperately squirreling away some extra jars of manna that turn into worm-filled rot, right? The work that God does in us, that we do with God’s help, happens over the whole course of our journey as we first accept that God’s grace comes on God’s schedule. And this is what a life of faith, of growth in faith looks like as we move from doubt first, Then maybe to gritting our teeth and affirming that God will provide even if we don’t feel it. And eventually, hopefully, losing that deeply human compulsion to bring an extra jar just in case.

So whatever desert you find yourself walking through this week, whether it’s a hospital room, an empty house, some uncertain future that’s keeping your stomach tied, we can decide to leave that extra jar behind. You don’t have tomorrow’s grace yet. You only have today’s, and that’s all you ever get. So go out and gather what you need for the hours right in front of you and trust that when tomorrow morning breaks, all you need is going to be there again. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Whenever I was a sophomore in college, my roommate and I drew the short straw in the housing lottery. That’s how we did it every year. We gathered in the, they made it digital by the end of my time there, which was much less fun. But we all gathered in the union, all the whole class together. And we drew, as I said, the short straw. You know, my roommate and I, quiet, civilized young men, model students of the community, and accordingly, our hope was to be assigned a room in one of the converted fraternity houses on campus. The fraternities had been, you know, removed from their houses because they rioted a couple times in the 80s, so now those were dorms. I lived in one of those my first year. It was great. This beautiful, like, Harry Potter castle-looking house, maybe two or three dozen residents. You had deck that overlooked the soccer field, a shared kitchen, these beautiful old common rooms full of dark wood and books and portraits of long dead people. That’s not what we got. What we got, unfortunately, was exactly the opposite of what we had hoped for, and that was a room on the fourth floor of Shorney Hall, which was the biggest dorm on campus, an enormous 1960s building that if I squint and look across the river at the Allegheny County Jail, it’s kind of what it looks like. And our particular hallway was the absolute worst because it housed the football team and their underground fraternity who were absolutely awful to live with. They would yell and run up and down the hall all night. They’d fill the place with all kinds of varieties of smoke, grind food into the carpet, into the walls, vandalize every available surface, the abuse the bathrooms went through. Unimaginable.

On one occasion, my roommate and I walked out to go to class one morning and found a whole salad encrusted to our door. And my RA, who to my surprise is apparently a doctor now, was completely unable to handle any of this. my hall’s residents were eventually summoned by university administration to participate in what the university called a restorative justice circle. And what that entailed, as fun as it sounds, it entailed spending four Wednesday evenings sitting in a circle, sharing our feelings about how we felt harmed on one hand or persecuted on the other hand, and how we might move forward in peace. And I remember the last meeting when one of the most unpleasant football players, who now leads my class’s alumni association, by the way, raised his hand for the last word. And he said, you know, well, I think we just have to remember that we’re all 20-year-old guys and it’s just going to be this way. A month of this. And it was immediately clear that nothing would ever change if we had ever had that hope to begin with, which I really didn’t. There were no consequences. The whole process was a joke. There was no justice to be had. The university never had any intention of fixing the problem if it would actually take any work. Those guys kept on peeing in the radiators. And those were four miserable nights that I’m never going to get back.

We generally imagine that there are two main ways of pursuing justice. And the first is something like I just described. It’s a silly example, but it’s impunity, you might call it. There’s no justice there at all. You know, you have a process that pretends to be something looking like justice. And we see this day in and day out. You know, you have a disruptive co-worker that everyone just kind of tiptoes around or they don’t do anything and we just kind of work around them. You have a family member whose bad behavior is excused because, oh, that’s how they are, right? A bully in a church or other organization who gets away with it because no one wants to confront them. We prefer polite impunity over the friction of telling the truth. And the other reflex besides impunity is retribution. This is the other option. You hurt me, so I’m going to hurt you. You cut me off, I’m going to cut you off. You talk about me, I’m going to tear you down. You break a rule, you get punished. And the goal is pain for pain there. But neither of these is really redemption. It doesn’t fix anything. Impunity ignores the wound and just lets us keep working around it until things get worse and worse. Retribution might make us feel better, but it doesn’t necessarily solve the problem.

In today’s Gospel reading from Matthew 18, we encounter a third model. And this is a somewhat unique text, not completely, but somewhat unique text in the midst of the Gospels, because it’s incredibly practical. Jesus gives us this straightforward set of instructions, which is a breath of fresh air, maybe, from how he normally talks. This isn’t a parable. This isn’t some theological up-in-the-air concept. He gives you a step-by-step list of what to do. And he lays out this explicit path for handling sin and conflict, specifically within the church. You know, you kind of work on it here, and you learn how to do it in the rest of your life. And notice what the goal is here. It’s not punishment, and it’s not impunity pretending like it’s grace where bad behavior is just kind of coddled and accepted. Instead, what is sought here is reconciliation but with accountability.

And so, while Jesus gives us clear-cut instructions here, they’re not easy because no one wants to do it. And I’m talking about myself. We are not used to being held accountable by other Christians for our actions. We don’t like it. We can’t stand the notion of being subject to one another. How dare someone tell us we are wrong? And on the other end of it, you know, if we’re the party that’s been sinned against, there’s nothing we’d less like to do than go confront the person who’s done it. And the ways our society has evolved in modern history make this even harder than it was then. Not so long ago, your congregation, by virtue of just where you lived, was your congregation. You know, you had a particular parish, right? And these were the people that you were gonna be stuck with. Take it or leave it. Today, it is very easy to shop around for a new community if the first one irritates us or hurts us or holds us accountable for our bad behavior. You know, we’re not stuck anymore in situations of discomfort. unlike my terrible dorm or a Christian in a country village 200 years ago where that’s all you had. We are consumers with a choice. And today you’re able to simply disappear if you’d like. Drive five minutes down 51 to a different church where no one knows you or your past or your sins or shortcomings. Now, this sounds like freedom, but I would suggest to you that it’s kind of tragic. It can be superficial. It can be lonely. Because imagine if your family or your spouse was only allowed to know the very surface of who you are, without any of your faults or uncertainties ever coming up. That’s not really being known. It’s not being in relationship with somebody if they don’t actually know you. We can’t be healed if we refuse to acknowledge what our wounds are, what our weaknesses are, and we cannot be truly loved if we don’t let anyone actually know us.

Jesus in Matthew 18 and throughout the New Testament calls us to something higher than that. Again, mutual accountability to one another. I address your sins against you. You, against me. You address my sins against you, not out of a desire that the other person is punished, but so that we might grow through it, that we become more holy through it, and also that the church might be strengthened. Jesus offers this step-by-step procedure. First, go alone and have a conversation with the person about it. And then if that doesn’t work, bring two or three others to go talk to them again. And note that the point of that, in part, is that those two or three others that you talk to, they might be like, hey, actually, you’re wrong. That’s a possibility, right? And then if all that fails, tell the church, the leadership of the church, and treat the offender like a Gentile or a tax collector. And that sounds really brutal, but it’s important to understand what that means, to treat someone like a Gentile or a tax collector. First, and maybe this is the most important thing to know about that, Matthew, the writer of this gospel, was a tax collector. So obviously this is a group of people that he doesn’t think of as beyond redemption. To treat someone as a Gentile or a tax collector doesn’t mean they’re to be hated, but to hopefully be reconciled, to be re-evangelized, to be given the good news of Jesus again and brought back. Whenever they’re a Gentile or a tax collector, they’re no longer part of the community because they’ve removed themselves by their own behavior, by harming other people. You could call that excommunication, I guess. but the point of a move like that is not retribution. It’s not supposed to hurt for the sake of hurting. The hope is that God is going to reveal to them the error of their ways and they’ll come back. The whole church’s goal is to win them over once more with the gospel just like the first time. Hear the good news again. Receive the grace of God again. Be a brother or sister again.

And this type of mutual accountability has been an enormous focus of Methodism since our roots, arguably the entire reason for the existence of Methodism. The Westleys, other early Methodists, refused to accept that you could have a church where you sit comfortably in the same pew for 50 years and never actually change. They knew that if our faith doesn’t ask anything difficult, It can’t heal anything broken in us. It can’t renew us in any way. And that’s why Wesley insisted on what he called social holiness. And that doesn’t just mean charity. It doesn’t just mean, you know, sort of like social justice. It does. But beyond that, it’s this work of what he called watching over one another in love. These people, the early Methodists, became vulnerable to each other. They entered into this discomfort of really being seen. Whenever they’d gather every week, it wasn’t just to do a Bible study or to learn something. It was to ask, how is your soul? How is that problem that you were dealing with last week? What has God done? What have you prayed about since then? How have you handled it? And they risked in all of that being called out for their sins, for their blind spots, for their bad habits, because that’s how they sought to grow. And this is what Matthew 18 is about. It’s not a system for just maintaining order. It’s not a system for deciding who wins an argument. Instead, Christian accountability is about our relationship with God and our sanctification as Christians. It’s about you being changed.

And so for the first Methodist, the Matthew 18 process was non-negotiable. There was one exception. It applies to mutual conflict among people in the church. If there’s a situation of abuse or danger, even Wesley said, no, we don’t do that. We do something different. It’s dangerous. But between people on the same playing field, Jesus gives us this blueprint for reconciliation. Not a toll for abusers or to impose power, but for reconciliation. And Wesley preached an entire sermon on this exact text from Matthew today called the cure of evil speaking. We don’t use that terminology anymore, evil speaking, but this is what he meant. Almost every church and relational breakdown happens, he said, because we do the process backwards. Instead of going to our brother or sister, we tell our friends, we vent in the parking lot. We tell everybody on earth what the problem is except for the person who caused the problem. And Wesley emphasizes that this passive aggression is unacceptable for one and also doesn’t work. And that confronting a brother or sister must happen and must be drenched in love. This is the quote that he has on it. Great care is to be taken, that this is done in a right spirit and in a right manner. You pray first, you check your anger, and you speak in love. Not with accusations, not with a manifesto, but in love.

But Wesley also warned, this part stuck out to me, that whenever we are hurt, whenever we are angry, we will invent a hundred clever, spiritual-sounding excuses why we can’t have that conversation. And he called that an attempt to shun the cross, to dodge the discomfort, the friction that love is going to sometimes require. And this observation hurts, but you and I both know that he’s right, that we’d love to find a reason why we can’t talk through whatever our problem is. It’s not going to work. I don’t know what I would say. They’re not going to listen to me. I get that. But there can be no opportunity throughout all of this process to hand the responsibility over to someone else to deal with. There is nobody else. We can’t take our ball and go home. We have to do that thing where we intervene with two or three others, where we go to the leaders of the church. All of these, even past that first step of us doing it ourselves, still require us to stay engaged. You can’t turn this over to anybody else. No matter how much we’d rather cut and run, this is a person-to-person thing. And the same thing applies to the third parties who are helping us. Strength and love is required from these two or three others who come to arbitrate. It’s hard to sit in the middle of two people who have a conflict. And courage is also required from church leaders if things rise to that third level. Asking somebody to step away until they can stop hurting other people is very uncomfortably painful. No one ever wants to do that. But through all of this, Jesus emphasizes from the first line in this passage, The whole point is to hopefully regain a brother or a sister. That’s how Jesus puts it. If they listen to you, you have regained a brother or a sister. It’s not just that we get an apology for what’s been done. We’re not sure that some abstract sense of justice is served. Though, of course, we’re going to want that. Like, you know you want someone to apologize to you. But the point is to regain a sibling. And the imagery Jesus is using here reminds me of the parable of the prodigal son. You know, the son who has gone away, who’s taken his inheritance, goes to live this life of sin, partying, whatever. Whenever he comes back, he’s celebrated because he has come back from the dead. That’s what his father says. This brother of yours was dead and now he is alive. Because reconciliation is to be understood as a miracle like resurrection. And in our world, it really is. And the passage ends with what sounds like a pretty cozy verse. We tend to use it in a cozy kind of way. Where two or three are gathered in my name, Jesus says. I am there with them. And we usually hear this as a reminder that even in small gatherings, small congregations, a little group praying, Jesus is there. That’s true. But look what it means in the context of this passage. That two or three line, where two or three are gathered, as Jesus is saying it, he’s referring to two or three people who are gathered to do this difficult process, this work of reconciliation, of working through their faults, because they have decided that the body of Christ is more important than winning. Jesus is saying where two or three people are gathered to do that, in that place, in that discomfort, in that tense moment, that will hopefully lead to a new life, I’m there, specifically. We can’t expect to meet Jesus in community, the place where he promises to be, if we flee the friction where he is at work. If our reflex is to hit the road, to cut people off, to hop to a different place the moment things get tense, we’re fleeing from the body of Christ. We’re running away from the only place where resurrection can really happen between people. And Jesus is with us when we dare to stay in the room and not to participate in some fake justice circle that just glosses over what happened, not to plot retribution against each other, but to take up the cross of truth telling, of grace. And that is the only way forward. That is a justice that actually restores. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.