"What is It? -- God does not always come as we expect..."

The Hebrews knew God and God’s ways. They knew that God had come to them in their captivity, and that through mighty deeds of power – through all those plagues sent down on Egypt, through that miraculous passage through the Red Sea waters – they had been brought to freedom and new life. But now they are enslaved to a different master, to hunger, and of the God they think they have come to know they can see no sign. (Exodus 16:2-15)

            And then they wake up one morning and stagger out into the desert and find a layer of dew spread all over the ground, and when it had lifted, a sticky, flaky, whitish substance on the ground. They scratch their heads, look at one another, and say in Hebrew man-hu, which means “What is it?”

            And then, like in that old cereal commercial, one of them gets their younger brother Mikey to try it, and Mikey says “I like it”, and next thing you know they gather the manna up in baskets and bake it and find that once again they have been freed to new life.  They were not, as they had thought, alone and forgotten. God was with them, and God would provide.

            Their story is our story, a story that is often repeated in the lives of God’s people. It is a story that gives us hope when we find ourselves seemingly alone and feeling abandoned in our own personal wildernesses. A story that happens at those times when we must make the move from “What is it?” to “It is a sign that God is with us!”

            I was counseling a couple this past week in preparation for their wedding, and the bride-to-be related how she had lost her mother three years ago.  That must have been terrible, I said, and hard not just on you but on your relationship as well. It was hard, she said, but he was terrific through it all, and the hard times really brought us closer together.

            What is it?  The power of death to divide, or love to grow?

            I was listening to sports talk radio awhile back, and the hosts were commenting on a story that had just broken in the papers, about how on the eve of her wedding day the bride-to-be was accidently pushed into the shallow end of a swimming pool by a bridesmaid, breaking her neck and leaving her paralyzed from the neck down. What the hosts found incomprehensible was that the groom went through with the wedding. They were apparently unable to understand that loving another, through sickness and in health, might not be a duty, but a privilege, not a burden, but a calling.

            What is it? The end of promises made, or the beginning of living into new possibilities?

            Michael Piazza, writing in his blog this week, tells of Valerie.

     “Valerie was 34. She remembered that day last year like it was yesterday. She sat on the sofa stunned, unable to move. She had gone to the doctor to get the results of some tests. She assumed he would tell her she was anemic and needed to take vitamins or something. She wasn't remotely prepared to hear him speak of death, especially her death. She was 34. She had a good job, lots of friends. She did volunteer work for the crisis center and went to church. How could she be terminal?
     Now, a year later she sat on that same sofa amazed at all that had happened in that year. Her body clearly showed the wear of someone fighting to survive, but there was something inside of her that had never felt so alive. It was amazing the changes that had come over her since she learned that she might die sooner than later. Valerie wrote in her journal:

     I'd always been the cautious one, afraid of my own shadow. I wouldn't take risks or do unexpected things. Now, that I have had to face the fact that no one gets out of this life alive, I've been saying “boo” to all of those ghosts. It is amazing how easily all of the things you fear disappear when you are willing to confront them. If you are going to die anyway, why let them keep pushing you around? I just wish I had remembered sooner that I was going to die anyway.
     I've always been afraid of what people would think of me. As a result, I was cynical, condescending, and judgmental of others. It is funny how that works. But, today, when I went downstairs for lunch, I took a handful of quarters and walked up and down the street putting money in parking meters that were about to expire. The meter maid must have thought I was nuts, but today I wasn't afraid of what she might think of me. Now, my biggest fear is that I might waste a single moment of this precious life. Nothing makes me feel more alive than doing random acts of kindness.
     I wish I could tell everyone that if you have to be afraid of something, don't let it be what people might think. Be afraid that you might let a day slip by without really living it, without doing some good. That's the only thing worth fearing. The fear of wasting your life can make you more alive than you ever dreamed of being. I only wish I had some way to tell people before it is too late for them.”

      What is it? An unfairness that makes everything thereafter meaningless, or a wake-up call to an abundant life that is there for the taking each and every precious day?

Back in January, in response to declining worship attendance particularly among young families, we had an all-church off-site retreat to see if we might discern a new way forward. Once again the old adage “Watch what you pray for, you might get it” was proved true, because one of those young mothers we had taken pains to invite finally spoke up and said, “Why don’t we have a Saturday afternoon service?”

Now I had all sots of answers running through my mind, beginning with “But that’s something that Catholics do!”, continuing on with “And where will we find the money?”, and ending with “But Saturday is my day off and my wife will kill me!”

But she went on to explain how hard it is for young families to make it to church on Sunday mornings, what with sports games and practices, drama rehearsals, Chinese lessons and so on, never mind that they would like to have an occasional morning to just lounge around the house. So we put together a planning team, and the enthusiasm and ideas and participation have been over the top, and the word of mouth is spreading and all sorts of folk other than young families are telling us that they want to come, and now we are gearing up for a kick-off service on October 1.

What is it? More “stuff” that just has to get done, or a chance to experience the winds of the Spirit gusting through a three-hundred years young Meetinghouse?

Friends, the lesson for us all is clear. People with the gift of faith are as those with a new set of contact lessons, able to see that there is no wilderness in which we might travel that God is not with us, an abiding, empowering, healing, gifting, liberating presence. We can see that what others might view as a barren, inhospitable desert can be transformed by God into a fertile, nourishing garden.

God will come, but not always in the ways we expect, in the form we want, or on the timetable we would demand. But God hears, and God answers, and God comes.

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