Pray . . . to Whom?

Exodus 16: 2-15 Rev. Tyler Amundson September 18, 2011

1-3 On the fifteenth day of the second month after they had left Egypt, the whole company of Israel moved on from Elim to the Wilderness of Sin which is between Elim and Sinai. The whole company of Israel complained against Moses and Aaron there in the wilderness. The Israelites said, "Why didn't God let us die in comfort in Egypt where we had lamb stew and all the bread we could eat? You've brought us out into this wilderness to starve us to death, the whole company of Israel!"

4-5 God said to Moses, "I'm going to rain bread down from the skies for you. The people will go out and gather each day's ration. I'm going to test them to see if they'll live according to my Teaching or not. On the sixth day, when they prepare what they have gathered, it will turn out to be twice as much as their daily ration."

6-7 Moses and Aaron told the People of Israel, "This evening you will know that it is God who brought you out of Egypt; and in the morning you will see the Glory of God. Yes, he's listened to your complaints against him. You haven't been complaining against us, you know, but against

8 Moses said, "Since it will be God who gives you meat for your meal in the evening and your fill of bread in the morning, it's God who will have listened to your complaints against him. Who are we in all this? You haven't been complaining to us—you've been complaining to

9 Moses instructed Aaron: "Tell the whole company of Israel: 'Come near to God. He's heard your complaints.'"

10 When Aaron gave out the instructions to the whole company of Israel, they turned to face the wilderness. And there it was: the Glory of God visible in the Cloud.

11-12 God spoke to Moses, "I've listened to the complaints of the Israelites. Now tell them: 'At dusk you will eat meat and at dawn you'll eat your fill of bread; and you'll realize that I am God, your God.'"

13-15 That evening quail flew in and covered the camp and in the morning there was a layer of dew all over the camp. When the layer of dew had lifted, there on the wilderness ground was a fine flaky something, fine as frost on the ground. The Israelites took one look and said to one another, man-hu (What is it?). They had no idea what it was.

15-16 So Moses told them, "It's the bread God has given you to eat. And these are God's instructions: 'Gather enough for each person, about two quarts per person; gather enough for everyone in your tent.'"[i]

This scripture is usually read when the pastor wants to demonstrate that God provides in our time of need. Usually the people of Israel are made an example of in that they do not yet trust God. However, I think too many times in our attempts to be righteous people we sacrifice the position of the Israelites as immature and naive. We treat them like spiritual teenagers. Acting as if they are emotionally disconnected from the reality of a relationship with God.

This is how we think of teenagers - adolescents - in society. Disconnected from reality, playing to the next emotion, and ignoring the consequences. This is sometimes true...teenagers can be all of these things and can be rather irrational. However, I think in our culture too many times we exclude teenagers from decisions because we fear the rawness of their thought process. The way in which teenagers make decisions entirely based on right or wrong and on justice and fairness. It is in truth where we all go in moments of crisis. We become spiritual adolescents trying to understand how our emotions, our sense of justice, fits into a world that is sometimes all too cruel. Too often we forget in adulthood that the raw adolescent experience is what shaped and formed so much of who we are today. Our adolescent engagement with the world allowed us to compare ideas, to decide pieces of our path, and to make decisions about our future. If this is the case I hope we all find ourselves in several adolescent engagements in our lives, so that we can find new direction. Adolescence becomes a gift to discover ourselves as we change.

One of the Jewish commentaries I read about this scripture passage for today stated this was the moment, “...at Sinai where the Israelites come of age and begin their forty-year adolescence.”[ii] So today I invite you to look at the Israelites, not as spiritual adolescents experiencing a journey that you look back on fondly, but as spiritual explorers first taking the risk to encounter God in a world that was dangerous and scary.

Now as you look at the title of the sermon you see that prayer is an important feature. Prayer is one of those sermons you expect to hear every year. The pastor gets up in front and gives a nice general talk about how a good prayer life makes your life better, covering all the basic ways to pray and encouraging you to find time in your life for prayer. These sermons usually result in a lot of people leaving worship feeling guilty for not praying enough over the last year. I have no desire to do this today...your prayer life in the past was exactly what it needed to be to bring you to this moment now. Instead, I want to explore what it is we exactly do when we pray and to whom exactly are we praying.

Last Sunday we as United States citizens looked back on the horrible tragedy of September 11, 2001. This was a day in our history that changed how we imagined the world. I was watching a special from the PBS newsmagazine Frontline that aired a year after September 11th. The special was called Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero. One theme in particular struck me from the show. It was that before September 11th we as US citizens considered ourselves pretty impervious to acts of violence from the outside. The rest of the world was experiencing violence and knew of the possibility, but we remained fairly ignorant. Then after that day in September of 2001 we began to ask questions. Our faith was challenged and we began to have questions about good and evil in a deep way. We began to ask what good prayer did if God would not stop these horrible acts of violence. Our image of God had to stand up to a much tougher test than individual tragedy. It had to comprehend acts of terrible violence.

I was an actual adolescent on September 11 th. I am sure I prayed that day because my parents were on an airplane. I am sure a lot of people prayed that day, because we did not know what was going on. It was a raw emotional prayer pleading with God to do something about what was going on. Following that day I am sure God also got a lot of prayers of anger about why God would let something like this happen. This was raw...this was an adolescent engagement with our changing perception of the world around us. Prayer was a central piece of this because we were in conversation with God about all of this change.

Being an adolescent here at St. Paul’s I was told that prayer was “a conversation with God.” To this day I still believe this is true. It is our chance to engage the Divine, our Creator, our Mother, our Father, our Savior, and the Spirit around us. Prayer is that opportunity we have to passionately be in conversation with that which is beyond ourselves and even each other.

However, the one piece that I have learned along the way is that conversation can take on all the emotions it needs. In fact “conversation with God” should be passionate and involve our whole being. This is where I turn back to the Israelites in our scripture text. Here they are for all intents and purposes whining in the Desert. If you picked up this story and just read it that is exactly what you would think. The Israelites are whining to Moses and God about how they don’t have enough. We think, “those ungrateful SOBs. They just got rushed away from Egypt and brought out of slavery and now all they can do is complain.”

Wait though - perhaps there is more going on here. My professor of Hebrew Bible at Iliff, Amy Erickson, would always point us to look at the different character’s points of view in the Bible. In the case of this text, this is what she says about the Israelites, “This week's lectionary text contains the second story of the Israelite's journey through the wilderness. It was only at the end of chapter 15 that they found themselves, by the skin of their teeth, on the other side of the Red Sea and celebrated their freedom from and Yahweh's victory over Pharaoh. Prior to the events narrated in this passage, they have spent part of that time at an oasis in Elim, perhaps to regain their strength and prepare for the journey to come. And once they have set out, they find themselves in a battle for survival. The inhospitable environment of what we know as the Sinai Peninsula and southern Israel prompted the Hebrew Bible as well as the New Testament to imagine this desert wilderness as a land of chaos and death. It is, of course, to the wilderness that Jesus must go to endure forty hunger-filled days of temptation and testing by the devil himself (Luke 4:1-13). The Israelites' move from the oasis into the depths of the wilderness signifies a move directly into the heart of risk.”[iii]

Wait a minute! The Israelites really might have something to complain about! This doesn’t sound like an easy life and before they left, God had pretty much ignored their cries in Egypt for a long time until Moses came along. I understand the adolescent fit with Moses and God leading them out in the middle of nowhere. The Israelites were risking their whole lives, and everything had not always gone their way. God had not always given their requests, and they had suffered long and hard with Pharaoh.

Many of us have experienced loss, both untimely and natural. There does not seem to be a good answer to why this happens. There is no good answer. During my adolescence one of my favorite movies was Patch Adams. In the movie Patch or Hunter Adams in his recovery from depression decides to attend medical school because he finds his passion for life in helping people. He is unorthodox and funny and likes to be passionately in conversation with his patients. He teaches that people are good, but then his dear friend and love of his life is killed by a patient. In the scene I am going to show you he prays to God in the most honest way I have ever seen. He complains and he struggles with God. (Scene where Patch Adams is on cliff wondering about his future talking to God).

Who then is it we pray to? A fickle God that answers one prayer and not the other?

At times in my life, both recent and in the past, I have felt like Patch. Cursing at God for what God has done, wondering what possible good can come of the bad things that have happened. Wondering why these bad things have happened to people in my life or to myself?

I wish there was an easy answer to this. I wish I could say, “I prayed to God and my prayers were answered and everything was alright.”

The truth is that I don’t believe God answers one person’s prayers and not the others. I have no conception of a God that intervenes in human life on a regular basis. It is fair then to ask, “Why pray to God? God doesn’t answer, is it just good for the blood pressure?”

I believe God does answer. God answers by being present. Prayer opens us up to the presence of God. In the Patch Adams story God was present in the butterfly. For those of you who have never seen the movie. Patch’s friend and partner who dies states that all she ever wanted to be was free like a butterfly. God was present to Patch after his prayer.

In the Hebrew Scripture text for today. The Israelites in their struggling with Moses and God actually end up seeing God. Did you catch that in verse 10?

“When Aaron gave out the instructions to the whole company of Israel, they turned to face the wilderness. And there it was: the Glory of God visible in the Cloud. [iv]

Prayer helps us to recognize God's presence.

Prayer allows us to passionately seek God again. Through prayer we engage God with that teenage passion. We feel like a teenage adolescent screaming at the top of our lungs the lyrics to the Bon Jovi Song, “Whooo living on a prayer!” I don’t know about you, but as a teenager music was my prayer.

So I asked in the sermon title, “Pray...to whom?”

It wasn’t a trick answer...

God is the answer...

We pray and engage God passionately like the teenaged and adolescent Israelites in hope that through our engagement with God we might better know a God who offers us love, compassion and experiences all of the struggles of life with us. Christ demonstrated this to us in how he struggled with God in prayer to understand the world he experienced.

God suffers with us. When we suffer God is there and suffers too. We believe in a God that knows us personally and never leaves us.

God with us in our struggle will help us find a way in life. This may be the hardest to believe because all we have is metaphor to go on. A butterfly, the presence of the almighty on the edge of the wilderness. God is there with us always and prayer opens us to God.

But just like a teenager we continue to question God...we should. This life is difficult to understand and the blessings of life are hard to see in loss. God doesn’t just answer prayer here or there. It would be so much easier if it were so. Instead God is there with us, made clear to us through our prayer...God is with all of us no matter what.

So as you think of prayer, imagine it as a passionate conversation with God. Like a teenager has with a parent, or a beloved adult. One that never has a clear answer, but instead reveals all the more clearly the love that adult has for the adolescent.

We pray to our God of love, compassion, and mutual struggle to be with us as we seek to find a way to live on this earth. As we seek to live lives of love and justice for all creation. We ask God to be present with us.

[i] Peterson, Eugene H. The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language. Colorado

Springs: NavPress, 2002, 11 Sep. 2011 <http://www.biblegateway.com/>

[ii] Drinkwater, Gregg, Joshua Lesser, and David Shneer. Torah queeries: weekly commentaries

on the Hebrew Bible. NYU Press, 2009. 89.

[iii] Erickson, A. (PhD). Commentary on alternate first reading. Retrieved from http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?tab=2&alt=1

[iv] Peterson, Eugene H. The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language. Colorado

Springs: NavPress, 2002, 11 Sep. 2011 <http://www.biblegateway.com/>