Proper 21 Year B 2024: Numbers 11:4-6,10-16,24-29

 My husband and I like to play video games together. When I say “we” play them, we’ve tried to play cooperative games, but what works best for us is that he plays a game and I backseat game - like backseat driving, but far less annoying, or so I hope. A couple of years ago “we” played a game called Immortality. In this game, you solve the mystery of a missing actress through “found footage” from three of her unreleased movies. Each movie has its own storyline, but in it are other storylines applicable to your investigation, so each clip from these unreleased movies are doubly interesting: for what they say in the context of the story the movie is telling and how they speak to you as the detective searching through the footage.

Our lesson from Numbers today does the same thing: several stories about humanity hidden within the larger story. While the story told throughout the Pentateuch is one unified story of how Israel became established as God’s people, from Creation to arrival at the Promised Land, it is also a timeless story of humanity. In today’s lesson from Numbers, we see three vignettes that speak to those timeless struggles of humanity: fear of the unknown, our need for help, and our weird relationship with power. You can even see they were chosen that way for the lectionary: there are clarifying verses left out between each vignette.

So I’m just going to focus today on that first vignette, where we hear the people, the “rabble”, moaning about their incredibly rose-colored memories of Egypt. Of the wonderful variety of foods they ate. How all they have to eat here is this boring manna. Actually, rose-colored is an understatement. I would say that eating as much as we want - which is not a hallmark of being enslaved, so it’s probably hyperbole - is not a fair exchange for enslavement. At the beginning of the Exodus, the Lord said to Moses, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey.” (Exodus 3:7-8) 

Life wasn’t great in Egypt. But it was predictable. Complaining that manna is boring is wild - how long do you think you’d have to be eating this miracle food that arrives every morning and keeps you alive in the desert before you find it boring? But I think there’s much more behind the complaints, as is often the case - that what we’re complaining about isn’t the real issue. It’s fear that’s driving these complaints. The promise of this land flowing with milk and honey is not of a land they’ve seen. It’s just that: a promise. And absence makes the heart grow fonder…because with the passage of time, what you’re missing becomes less real and more of a fantasy. It’s been a minute since they were in Egypt; they’ve been wandering in the desert for more than two years by now, and while this is the same generation that had been enslaved - they’re not remembering stories from their grandparents, these are the memories of literally the same persons who were enslaved, but the edges of their memories have been softened by distance from the past and by the unknown that is the future. At least in Egypt they knew what to expect. They pretty much knew what tomorrow would bring. And that’s part of the human condition. How often are we willing to stay in situations that aren’t great because if we left, we aren’t sure what the next step would be and it’s easy to look back wistfully instead of moving ahead.

We watch a lot of Disney movies in my house, so I’ve seen Frozen II…several times. And one of the overarching themes in the movie is taking each step forward into the unknown and doing the next right thing. And there’s a time in the movie where - spoilers - Elsa dies and her sister Anna, who has followed and supported Elsa while trying to keep her from going too far, realizes Elsa’s gone and is trying to figure out what to do. Because there was still work to do, but Anna couldn’t put together how to do it. She couldn’t see as far into the future as she felt like she could when her sister was with her. And the answer she found was to not try and see several miles down the road, but to see her next single step. As Anna sings, “So I’ll walk through this night / Stumbling blindly toward the light / And do the next right thing / And with the dawn, what comes then / When it’s clear that everything will never be the same again? / Then I’ll make the choice / To hear that voice / And do the next right thing.”

This is a Disney-fied version of a common Alcoholics Anonymous slogan: one day at a time. It speaks to how you don’t have to figure out how you’re not going to drink for the rest of your life. What a colossal mountain. And like the Israelites in the desert, the unmanageable mess that drinking was starts to feel like a reasonable alternative to the unknown of the rest of your life. One day at a time encourages you to do the next right thing. If you don’t think you can go the rest of your life without a drink, what about this hour? The rest of the day? Then the rest of another day? And then another?

And this is applicable to so many other things in our lives. How many times we’re willing to be even low-key unhappy for a long time because we’re more afraid that the future is less happy than we are hopeful that the future is more happy. In today’s reading, the Israelites are so afraid of this future that’s seeming more and more uncertain that they are willing to return to slavery so they can have better food. Their fear leads them to minimize their cries of misery that were heard by the Lord and to say amongst themselves, “it wasn’t that bad”. It was that bad.

If you left a bad relationship. A bad job. A bad friendship. A bad living situation. If you gave up a substance that was making your life unmanageable. And if things aren’t all better now. If the exchange doesn’t quite seem to be worth it. If you’re questioning whether or not it was really that bad, since life remains hard, I want to affirm to you: it was that bad. It was. You weren’t crazy. You weren’t blowing things out of proportion. And God hears your cries of misery in the same way as he hears the Israelites’ cries. Don’t let today’s imperfections make yesterday’s misery seem ok. The Israelites knew they were doing what God called them to do. They were eating miracle food. They were being guided by a pillar of cloud by day and fire by night and were still like, you know, maybe let’s go back to our enslavers. Instead, they should listen to Anna and do the next right thing.

God invites us to trust. To do the next right thing. To take God’s hand and move forward into being the people God is calling us to be. To live one day at a time, one breath at a time, one prayer at a time. Amen.