Life within God's provision (Aug 11)

Readings, Psalm 130 and John 6: 35, 41-51
Image, Twilight in the Wilderness, Frederic Edwin Church (1860)

Let us consider the wilderness generation, those who received the manna from heaven and followed God for forty years. A generation passing away beneath the pillar of smoke by day, and fire by night. In one reading, this is a tragedy. Those who saw the sea part and sung the songs of deliverance on freedom’s shore, who saw the holy mountain and heard the covenantal promise, nonetheless display such distrust and division that they would never see the promised land. Sin destines them to wander until each member of that generation is buried in the dust. Only when the new census is taken, and not one name recorded at the mountain of God remains, shall the nation reach the promised land. Clearly a tragedy.
 
However, there’s another reading.* Despite their failings, and the judgment brought upon them by their mistakes, God, in steadfast love, gifts this generation an unparalleled privilege. For this generation pass their years receiving their daily bread from God. Each day the manna and the quail from heaven – never enough to store, but always enough to eat. Forty years as pilgrim people, freed from tomorrow’s worries: life in the benevolence of God. With the future all but closed off, they waded in the waters of God’s presence until their rest. What other generation has lived in such times as these, fed from the hand of God, falling to sleep beneath the stars of God’s creation and the fire of God’s presence? They may perish before seeing the promised land, but they lived within the nurturing sphere of God’s grace, a devotional walk, uninterrupted by the demands and distractions of daily life. In this reading the wilderness generation prefigure what John refers to as eternal life, that life lived fully attuned to the presence and promise of God, that life which begins now and reaches perfection in the age to come, that life of abundance which Jesus came to gift to all.
 
I am the bread of life, Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. Jesus, proclaims himself this very present provision of God. His body descended from heaven to give eternal life, feeding a pilgrim people (as the Basis says) on the way to a promised end. The Christian yearns for a life like the wilderness generation, enveloped by God’s steadfast love and provision. For the church lives in the time-in-between, an Advent people proclaiming Christ’s resurrection while hastening and waiting for Christ’s return. We are those wait for the Lord, more than those who watch for morning. Of course, this future is out of our reach, belonging to God alone, arriving at an appointed time of which not even the angels are privy. Therefore, like that wilderness generation, we live in the perpetual now of God’s grace.
 
This is, in part, why Jesus teaches us not to store up treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume. Do not worry about your life, he teaches, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. The Christian is the one who considers the lilies of the field and in so doing learns to eat the bread of life which strengthens us to strive first for the kingdom of God and God’s righteousness.
 
Now I do not wish to imply that this kind of life is reached with ease. The wilderness generation did not achieve this state of perpetual intimacy with God’s daily provision out of their piety. Their life was gifted to them after their many errors. So too, we do not achieve sparrow like bliss through gritted teeth, we do not simply decide to stop worrying. These are gifts given out of God’s steadfast love, Christ’s abundant grace, and the Spirit’s freedom.
 
And yet, even though this kind of life cannot be gained by effort, we are called not only to wait, but to hasten. That is to say, while we cannot recreate the conditions by which we might learn to be like the lily, we seek to order the rhythm of our lives together to taste the living bread and seek first the kingdom of God. A rhythm, we might learn (in part at least) from today’s psalm… which begins in the depths. 
 
Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.
   Lord, hear my voice!
As so many prayers, we cry out when we find ourselves in the depths. Whether the grind of daily life, or those heightened moments of calamity, we begin when we are honest about our situation. Rather than plaster on an image of shiny happy people, we turn to God when we see where we are, acknowledge what has befallen us, and cry out. 
 
If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities,
   Lord, who could stand?
Honesty begets honesty. If we can tell the truth about the depths of woe in our world, we can then tell the truth about our own depths. We can allow ourselves the introspection of Saint Paul, who spoke truly of the human condition when he wrote, I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. This honesty leads to the recognition that our hope is not ground in our possibility of perfection, but in God, in whom there is the forgiveness of sins and the possibility of renewal. 
 
I wait for the Lord, my soul waits,
   and in his word I hope;
my soul waits for the Lord
   more than those who watch for the morning,
   more than those who watch for the morning.
We recognise the time in which we live: Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again. We place our hope in the Word as our soul waits for the Lord to come again in glory and wipe all tears from our eyes, beat the swords into ploughshares, and bring about the consummation of the age when God shall be all in all. 
 
For with the Lord there is steadfast love,
   and with the Living God is great power to redeem.
Though we despair, though we sin and fall short of the glory of God, though we wait with anticipation for the day when only love remains, we do so with joyful confidence because out of God’s great love for the world, Jesus was sent not to condemn but reconcile all things to God. In this we know and trust, God’s great power to redeem. 
 
What is notable, is that even at the end of this psalm, even here with the promise of redemption, the psalmist remains in the time of anticipation, even, perhaps, in the depths. Like the generation living beneath the fire of God, they are, after all, still in the wilderness. Like the church today, we remain, after all, in the present age of sin and shame. All this occurs here – there is no account of a reversal of fortunes and little on earth that could be confused with heaven. And yet, in faith and hope we hasten and wait for the horizon where God shall come like the dawn, and a new morning shall break.
 
We do not have to reach the promised land of longed-for inward perfection in order to come and taste the bread of life. We do not need to drag ourselves out of the depths of our own making nor those of the world’s ills in order to experience the eternal life offered in Christ’s own body. We do not need to live with the lightness of the sparrow in order to consider the lilies. A doctor goes to the sick, bread is given to the hungry, and Christ comes to the weary. As our High Priest, familiar with our travails, Christ gives his body to us in our depths – for there is no depth he has not descended – so that we shall not hunger or thirst while we wait for morning. Instead, we are fed by Christ and clothed in God’s righteousness, in order that we may share what we have received with those fellow-travellers crying out from the depths, yet to see the manna in the wilderness illuminated by the fire by night.

* I owe this reading to Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg's Bewilderments: Reflections on the Book of Numbers ​(Schoken Books, 2015)