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The Rev. Frank Logue
In the Wilderness with the Riffraff The ultimate computer nerd shirt is the one I saw that says there are 10 (one zero) types of people in this world: 1) those who understand binary, and 2) those who don’t. But, the better way of looking at it is there are two types of people in the world: 1) those who think there are two types of people in the world, and 2) those who don’t. Jesus puts it this way in our Gospel reading this morning, “Whoever is not against us is for us.” And in our Old Testament reading this morning from the book of Numbers there really are two types of people. An overly simplistic way of looking at life perhaps, but that’s OK, because while the Bible is the best selling book of all time, if the 66 books of the Bible were sold separately, the book of Numbers would never make it to the top twenty. The problem starts with the name itself, Numbers. Not a very promising title. Then there’s the fact that the book contains a census which is about as inspiring as reading the Jerusalem phone book and you can see the problem. But there is more to numbers than census. The book tells us much of the forty years which the Israelites spent between the Red Sea and the Promised Land. This makes the Jewish name for the book more fitting. In Hebrew the book is known as B’midvar, which means “in the wilderness.” In the wilderness isn’t just a better sounding name, it is also a more theologically significant one. We find a repeating theme in scripture in which real change and transformation comes in the wilderness or from people who come out of the wilderness. The two big examples from the New Testament are John the Baptist, whose ministry took place at the Jordan River on the edge of the wilderness and Jesus who emerged from temptation in the wilderness to begin his ministry. But the Old Testament in filled with people like Elijah with a strong wilderness connection and David who hid from Saul in the wilderness. And there is no greater wilderness experience than that of the whole people Israel who will emerge from the Wilderness to enter the Promised Land. In theological terms, the wilderness experiences serve as liminal experience. Liminal means “on the threshold.” So a liminal experience is one on the threshold. You already know the word subliminal which is just below the threshold of perception or at least the threshold of obvious perception. Liminal, out on the limits at the threshold of something new. For the Bible, those threshold experiences happen out on the edge of a society’s daily life in the wilderness. To move briefly from the Bible to consider the image of the wilderness a bit more metaphorically, we find liminal or threshold experiences in our lives are times like births, engagement, divorce, retirement, dying. So the time of pregnancy is liminal, as is engagement and the early part of marriage, so is the time when death is approaching or has just come for someone you love. All of these threshold experiences are very similar to the wilderness experience as the Bible understands it. To push this just a bit further, it is in these liminal times, these threshold experiences, that we are given a chance to redefine ourselves. In pregnancy we consider what sort of parents we will be and prepare the baby’s room. In engagement, we prepare for marriage and in the early years we set patterns as a couple. In a job change including retirement, we get a bit of redefinition of ourselves. And when someone we love dies, it calls for a reordering of our life without that person present in the same way and that too is an adjustment. Every pastor knows how important these times are. These are not the only times of redefinition, but they are very important transition points. And in all of them, the wilderness passages of the Bible help us to see how best to live into the threshold experience as we are on the verge of something new. In our reading from Numbers, the Israelites are betwixt and between. They have by now long left the banks of the Red Sea. The generation that toiled as slaves in Egypt is passing away. Now the memory of the tortuous labor has grown dim. What remains is the remembrance of a hearty diet. The text says “We remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic.” But remember, Israel wasn’t eating salmon dinners in a fine restaurant or cucumber sandwiches at a garden party. The Israelites were slaves. They ate for free because they worked for free. Pharaoh provided them with fish and all the fixin’s but only so they could make more bricks, cut more stone, move more blocks. Those pyramids and temples didn’t build themselves. UFOs or aliens notwithstanding, the Israelites had been slaves and now they would trade their freedom for something better to eat. They say “If only we had meat to eat!” and complain “now our strength is dried up, and there is nothing at all but this manna to look at.” Manna. This was the original wonder bread, the wonder bread from heaven in fact. I don’t call it wonder bread just to be funny. The Hebrew word “manna” literally means “what is it?” So Manna was wonder-what-this-stuff-is bread. What we are told is that every morning, the manna covered the ground like a fine mist. Everyone collected what they needed for the day and any manna leftover would rot. Manna was then the original daily bread. Except on Fridays when you got twice as much as you needed so you could rest on the Sabbath and that double portion stayed miraculously fresh. For the rationalist in you, there are two candidates for those who want to reverse engineer the miracle. The first is my Mom’s favorite of the possible answers and it is a small coriander-like seed that grows on low bushes in the Sinai to this day. My Mom has eaten bread made from this manna with Bedouins in the desert there who consider their daily bread to have been that bread of the Exodus experience. The other possibility is another natural phenomenon which continues in the same wilderness in which a scale insect (Gossyparia mannipara) which eats from the tamarisk tree exudes a substance which forms pale yellow friable flakes. Exudes, by the way is a gentle way of saying that we are discussing scale insect poop. Either of these are side points however, for whether we are discussing enough coriander to keep a hungry hoard full or enough insect poop to choke a nation, we are talking miracle here. Manna is wonder bread in the sense of finding enough food to eat while in the wilderness is a never ending source of wonder. So there is some irony in making a complaint out of “there is nothing at all but this manna to look at.” Because manna is a miracle and the people are saying everywhere we look we see nothing but the miracle of God providing for us and we want more. The wonder of finding food in an uninhabitable waste land is replaced by “Wonder what else there is to eat around here?” And this is where we return to the two types of people. In this story there are 1) the rabble and 2) the Israelites. Though I prefer the Jewish Publication Society translation of the book they call “In the Wilderness” that translates the word as Riffraff. As in, “The riffraff in their midst felt a gluttonous craving; and then the Israelites wept and said, “If only we had meat to eat!” The reason I like the word riffraff is that is refers to someone who is disreputable or worthless, but we find that they are part of who God brought out of Egypt too. Like Jesus who ministered among people others considered worthless, Moses also brought some of the riffraff out of Egypt. But who are these guys that make up the riffraff? As the two kinds of people are riffraff and Israelites, it is safe to assume the term means non-Israelites. And why we usually think in terms of the people of Israel being the ones who go out of Egypt in the Exodus experience the Bible says in Exodus chapter 12 that a “mixed multitude went up with them” meaning that there were others who lived and worked alongside them in Egypt who also went out with them. Percentage wise this was a small group that is now becoming significant as they lead the grumbling. So the riffraff are the non-Jews traveling along with the Israelites as they are being led by God and they now begin to grumble. Then the Israelites join in with the complaint as well. What we have is a group of people seeking to follow God. Their friends and family, who are not religious, begin complaining about how the whole following God thing is working out. Then the faithful join the faithless in grumbling against God. It happens all the time. Yet, it is not what is supposed to happen. The wilderness is the place to learn this lesson if you want to cross the threshold transformed. Let’s look at an alternate way of being. Because there will be times in your life when you are praying for healing for your mom or dad, husband or wife, or heaven forbid for you son or daughter and physical healing will not be coming the way you want it to. You believe for a miracle and seeing none. The riffraff will tell you to bet it all on the doctors. Never mind that there are plenty of doctors who would be thankful for those prayers, they’ll bet it all on medicine. If you fall into the chorus with the riffraff, you’ll place your whole trust on the medical team at work. But if you look with the eyes of faith, you can often see that there is nothing but manna everywhere you look. Miracles are already happening. Perhaps not what you want, when you want it. Something more like what you need when you need it. And you know what else. Sometimes, we are the riffraff. Sometimes you and I stop trusting that God is working in our lives or in the life of some family member or friend. Sometimes you and I can be the ones who don’t help someone else see the manna in their life and instead start the complaining for something more and different. There is power in these threshold experiences. Powerful positive change happens around the time of birth, baptism, marriage, divorce, job changes, retirement, dying and death. We can use the power of these liminal experiences to redefine ourselves as people of faith or not. In all these times of transition, we can once again define ourselves a Christian, whether a Christian couple or Christian parents, or a dying Christian, which is the most powerful witness of all to face death faithfully and without fear. And furthermore, when we are not the one crossing the threshold. When we are helping a family member plan her wedding. When we are holding the hand of a friend who is going through grief. When we are the one sitting by the bedside of someone we love who is dying. In all of these places, we can remember that the voice we speak with will either be the voice of a child of God or the voice of the riffraff. We can remember that ours are the eyes that can help someone see that there is nothing but manna as far as the eye can see. We can be the one who points to the godly way to cross these thresholds. Not through getting preachy or high and mighty, but by living faithfully alongside someone as he or she crosses through the wilderness to the Promised Land. If this sounds Christ-like, good, it should. For Jesus said in our Gospel reading today, “truly I tell you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by no means lose the reward.” And you are the one who can provide the godly counsel to someone going through the desert of divorce or dealing with a death and it will be like a cool cup of living water. And you can also provide that same refreshing perspective to someone on the threshold of a marriage or a birth or their baptism. And having helped others in their own transitions, when it comes to your own liminal experiences you’ll find it easier to listen to the voice of God instead of the complaints of the riffraff. And when you look up you will see nothing but manna stretching out to the horizon. Amen.
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