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God, I'm mad at your people!

Numbers 11:1-13

January 23, 2005

Complaining in the Desert

¹Now when the people complained in the hearing of the LORD about their misfortunes, the LORD heard it and his anger was kindled. Then the fire of the LORD burned against them, and consumed some outlying parts of the camp. ²But the people cried out to Moses; and Moses prayed to the LORD, and the fire abated. ³So that place was called Taberah,^£ because the fire of the LORD burned against them.

⁴The rabble among them had a strong craving; and the Israelites also wept again, and said, “If only we had meat to eat! ⁵We remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic; ⁶but now our strength is dried up, and there is nothing at all but this manna to look at.”

⁷Now the manna was like coriander seed, and its color was like the color of gum resin. ⁸The people went around and gathered it, ground it in mills or beat it in mortars, then boiled it in pots and made cakes of it; and the taste of it was like the taste of cakes baked with oil. ⁹When the dew fell on the camp in the night, the manna would fall with it.

¹⁰Moses heard the people weeping throughout their families, all at the entrances of their tents. Then the LORD became very angry, and Moses was displeased. ¹¹So Moses said to the LORD, “Why have you treated your servant so badly? Why have I not found favor in your sight, that you lay the burden of all this people on me? ¹²Did I conceive all this people? Did I give birth to them, that you should say to me, ‘Carry them in your bosom, as a nurse carries a sucking child,’ to the land that you promised on oath to their ancestors? ¹³Where am I to get meat to give to all this people? For they come weeping to me and say, ‘Give us meat to eat!’ ¹⁴I am not able to carry all this people alone, for they are too heavy for me. ¹⁵If this is the way you are going to treat me, put me to death at once—if I have found favor in your sight—and do not let me see my misery.”

 How many of us here today are New England Patriots fans?  Once again, the New England Patriots, the professional football team that represents this region in the National Football League, have achieved a remarkable feat. 

They have earned the right to play in the Superbowl, in hopes of being crowned champion of the league and being awarded the Vince Lombardi trophy.  This will mark the third time in four years that this team has gotten to the Superbowl.  Their star coach Bill Belichick, has equaled the number of wins that Vince Lombardi himself, the man who’s name is on the championship trophy, enjoyed in such games.

If they win the championship game, many football experts have already said that they will consider this team a dynasty, a club whose quality is rivaled by perhaps two or three others in the seventy-five year history of the sport. 

All of this achievement makes for a golden age for local fans.  But it wasn’t always so with the Patriots.  For those who are fans, they know.  For many years, the New England Patriots were the laughingstock, the most inept and ridiculed club in all of football.

One of the men who helped bring the team out of those embarrassing days was a man named Bill Parcells.  But he only brought them so far, before he too, embarrassed the team and all its fans.  In January of 1997, Bill Parcells led his team to a loss in the Superbowl.  Days later, he accepted a job as the head coach of a rival team.  Apparently, he had become quite disgruntled with his bosses, the teams owners.  He argued with them over control of the team.  They wanted him to stick to coaching and he wanted to be the team’s general manager in addition to his position as coach.  You see he wanted the additional responsibility of picking and choosing his own players.

When he was asked about this decision some time after the fiasco of his departure from the New England Patriots, he said these words, which have since become infamous.  He said, “They want you to cook the meal, the least they could do is let you shop for the groceries.”

Perhaps he said some other things to his bosses as well.  Its not farfetched to imagine that he went to the team owner and said to him, “I can’t win with these guys, and I want to choose the guys I’m going to use to form my team!  If you don’t let me, I’m gone!”

He revealed frustration, anger, and eventually rebellion against his superiors, because he wanted greater authority, because he wanted to do the selecting, the choosing and make all the decisions himself.

One of the great ironies of that situation is that the team he helped bring to respectability, eventually returned to the championship and won it twice, and now is on the verge of a third time, led by one of his assistants.  And who’s choosing the players, making most of the final decisions of who gets to play there?  It’s not exclusively the coach, as Parcells would have wanted, but Parcells’ own son-in-law, a man by the name of Scott Pioli, who has won Executive of the Year honors as the New England Patriots, Vice-President of Personnel, and would not have had the job if Parcells had gotten his way.

“I didn’t choose these players,” said the coach to his boss, “I want more authority to do my own thing!  To choose my own team!”

In the passage from Numbers 11, we read this morning, Moses complains to God in a similar, angry, frustrated and rebellious way.

Moses said to the LORD, “Why have you treated your servant so badly? Why have I not found favor in your sight, that you lay the burden of all this people on me? ¹²Did I conceive all this people? Did I give birth to them, that you should say to me, ‘Carry them in your bosom, as a nurse carries a sucking child,’ to the land that you promised on oath to their ancestors? ¹³Where am I to get meat to give to all this people? For they come weeping to me and say, ‘Give us meat to eat!’ ¹⁴I am not able to carry all this people alone, for they are too heavy for me. ¹⁵If this is the way you are going to treat me, put me to death at once—if I have found favor in your sight—and do not let me see my misery.”

Have you ever found yourself in church, frustrated with the people who are sitting in the pews to the left and right of you, in front of you and behind you?  Perhaps at a congregational meeting, perhaps seething during a worship service over something that happened at a meeting during the week?  Or perhaps glaring at someone across the room at coffee time, because of something they did to you in a business dealing or in a simple breakdown of integrity in a personal relationship beyond the church’s doors?

Did you ever feel like going to the pastor at the time or even to God and saying, “I don’t want this person on my team,  If this is the way I’m going to be treated, I don’t want any part of this!  Did I choose these people?  I don’t want them!  I can’t handle this kind of stress!  I certainly don’t NEED this kind of stress in my life!  I’m LEAVING!”

Have you ever heard the phrase, “You can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your family!”

Well, what about the church?  Who chooses the people in the church? 

Why do we choose to come to chuch?

Sometimes we can’t say logically why we are a part of a particular church of Christ’s, but we know that we are and that is enough for us.

In the third century, St. Cyprian wrote to a friend, Donatus:

This seems a cheerful world, Donatus, when I view it from this fair garden under the shadow of these vines. But if I climbed some great mountain and looked out over the wide lands, you know very well what I would see. Brigands on the high road, pirates on the seas, in the amphitheaters men murdered to please the applauding crowds, under all roofs misery and selfishness. It is really a bad world, Donatus, an incredibly bad world.

Yet in the midst of it, I have found a quiet and holy people. They have discovered a joy which is a thousand times better than any pleasure of this sinful life. They are despised and persecuted, but they care not. They have overcome the world. These people, Donatus, are the Christians ... and I am one of them.

St. Cyprian found what he called a quiet and holy people.  But it’s not always like that is it?  And the people of God have never been through and through a quiet and holy people, they’ve been much more a rag-tag bunch of misfits.

One theologian asks this question:

“Who, after all, are the people that march in the biblical parade?

Certainly not those who were the center of attention in the ancient world. Not the kings and nobility of Babylon and Persia, nor the pharaohs and architects of Egypt, nor the poets and philosophers of Greece, nor the emperors and generals and engineers of Rome. It is a parade of children, shepherds, gypsies, slaves, and refugees. It is a parade of 'the maimed, the blind, and the halt.' It is a parade of nobodies and the prophets of nobodies. The 'chosen' of God are clearly not chosen on the basis of having the most to offer, but if anything on the basis of having nothing to offer but themselves. And the 'reward' for this chosenness is often that of being the clown, the scapegoat, the butt of the joke, the mock 'king of the Jews,' the 'fool for Christ's sake.' (147)

For the people of God, the entire hierarchy of human values and the ladders of human greatness and self-importance are inverted and collapsed. All normal expectations and the clever stratagems of the prudent are baffled. Servants appear in the stead of their masters and mistresses. Riffraff are admitted to the royal banquet table. The nobodies stand up and are counted. Peasants are crowned king and queen for a day. A ragged band of slaves become the chosen people of God. And the meek inherit the earth. It is a world in which beggars are more at home than the wealthy, sinners than the righteous, children than their parents, and clowns and fools than priests and scribes.

Ultimately its God who chooses these people.  It’s God who attracts such riff-raff and expects them to thrive together!  Why?

This theologian claims its so that everything may be righted.... This is the consistent theme that runs throughout the biblical tradition. In relation to God, all human greatness is as nothing. And yet because of this nothingness before God, even the lowliest and least is of immeasurable value. What is taken away with one hand is given back with the other, fully, graciously, and to all.  ‘It is a world of such magic and mystery that everybody becomes nobody, and the nobodies somebody.'

And for this reason, so that we all might be counted as nothing and then from that nothingness, lifted up to the heavens, God chooses who will be in the church.  And he chooses, not selectively and exclusively, but with a net cast wide, wide enough to catch every fish in the ocean.

So where does that leave us?  If we can’t choose whose going to be on our team, if we can’t shop for the groceries, if that’s the prerogative of God himself, do we have any choice in anything? 

Yes of course.  We can choose to stay or to go.  To cook the meal, even if we can’t shop for the groceries.  And why should we do that? Why should we give up such authority and control and autonomy?  Because this isn’t about some football game, this meal is the Heavenly banquet of the King of all Creation.

If we can’t quite choose who we’ll be with, there are still many things we CAN choose, like what kind of team member we’ll be.  Like what kind of person we’ll be.  Like what depth will our participation in the whole reach.  How much will we give?  How much will we take?  God calls us to both give AND take abundantly!  And leaves the ultimate choices regarding that to ourselves.

, and if we choose Christ in the midst of all those choices, the miracles that are possible are sometimes inconceivable and utterly unexpected.

In the mid-1930s, a German pastor was abducted from his church, handcuffed, taken to prison and immediately put into a five-foot cell. Suspected of aiding Jews, there was no hearing, no trial — not even time to let his family know what had happened to him.

For weeks, this gentle pastor asked the prison guard outside his cell door if he could use the phone at the end of the hall to call his wife and family and, at least, let them know he was alive. The guard, however, was a contemptible man who hated anyone who had to do with Jewry. He not only wouldn’t let the pastor use the phone, he also determined in his heart to make the pastor’s life as miserable as possible.

The sadistic guard purposefully skipped the pastor’s cell when meals were handed out; he made the pastor go weeks without a shower; he kept lights burning in his room so he couldn’t sleep; he blasted his short-wave radio, hoping the constant noise would break the pastor’s spirit; he used filthy language; he pushed him; he shoved him; and, when he could, he arranged for the pastor to have the most difficult job in the labor force.

The pastor, on the other hand, prayed over and over again not to let his natural hate for this guard consume him. He “chose” instead to forgive him and to show him God’s unconditional love. As the months went by, whenever he could, the pastor smiled at the guard; he thanked him when his meals did come; when the guard was near his cell, the pastor told him about his own wife and his children; he even questioned the guard about his own family and about his goals, ideas and visions; and, one time, for a quick moment, he had a chance to tell the guard about Christ and his love. The guard never answered a word, but, obviously, heard it all.

After months of choosing to unconditionally love this terrible guard, God’s love finally broke through. One night, as the pastor was again quietly talking to him, the guard cracked a smile. The next day, instead of his cell being skipped for lunch, the pastor got two. The following evening, he was allowed not only to go to the showers, but also to stay as long as he wanted. The lights began going off at night in his cell and the radio noise ceased. Finally, one afternoon, the guard came into the pastor’s cell, asked him for his home phone number, and he, personally, made the long-awaited call to the pastor’s family.

A few months later the pastor was mysteriously released, with no questions asked.

—Nancy Missler, “Against the tide: Faith choices,” Koinonia House Online, khouse.org. Retrieved February 19, 2004.

“God why have you given me this burden?  Why have you put me in this place with this contemptible, hateful man?”  Wouldn’t this have been a natural response to God?  And if you remember from our last sermon, two weeks ago, isn’t this somewhat what Jonah prayed to God?  “Don’t make me do this!  I don’t want to go and preach and prophecy and change the life of those nasty Ninevites!”  And didn’t we say that this kind of a reaction to God is actually welcomed and respected by God?  That if we have such animosity and anger at God, God welcomes it from us? 

Is that what the Pastor in the Nazi jail cell did?  Perhaps, it is.  Perhaps it isn’t.  We don’t really know what his prayer to God was in this case.  But his choice was to choose this man, this hateful, awful, Nazi, world hating, people hating prison guard as his brother.  He wasn’t even a member of his church, or the body of Christ, but he chose to accept this man as an equal before God and a person worthy of his kindness.

These are very difficult choices.  They are very difficult emotions, anger, hatred, tolerance of people or rejection of both of others and of God’s authority.

We have all found ourselves in circumstances of profound crisis.  Should I accept this person, whom I feel like I’d like to leave behind?  Or should I just leave!  Leave, him or her.  Leave the situation and leave my responsibility.  Sometimes its right to leave.  Sometimes its right to stay.  Its usually in God’s will that we somehow love this person, and leaving him or her may actually be the most loving thing you can do! 

Ultimately, like Jonah last week and Moses this week, no matter what the struggle is, no matter how difficult the emotion and the choices before us, God welcomes our passion, welcomes our need to cry out and struggle and even blame God himself.  God listens to Moses’ complaining cry like he did to Jonah, and Abraham and all the others throughout human history who have cried to the heavens.  And whatever the decision and the choice become, God give strength and power and will to carry out that decision.

When we are frustrated by the people of the God, by each other, by any of the difficulties in the world around us, I pray that we may always have the courage and the inclination to turn to God with our struggle and receive his grace, his power and his healing as we live out our choices and decisions.

Amen.