What is the What?
By Rev. Fritz Ritsch
September 14, 2014
Exodus 16: 2-16
In Exodus, a couple of chapters before the chapter we’re reading today, Pharaoh watches his former slaves, the Hebrews, starting to leave Egypt, and cries: “what is this we have done, releasing Israel from our service?” (14:5). But on the other end of the spectrum are the Hebrews themselves, free at last from slavery, but wandering seemingly lost in the desert, and they demand of Moses, who freed them, “What have you done to us?” (14:2) “Why are you crying out to me?” responds God, frustrated. “What shall we eat?” the people complain, and Moses and Aaron, his co-leader, respond in disgust, “What are we that you should grumble against us?” Once the Israelites have escaped their Egyptian slave masters, they have a serious case of corporate Buyers’ Remorse: “Why did you bring us up from Egypt?” they cry. And Moses responds, “Why are you in a contest with me? And why do test God?” Then Moses turns to God in exasperation: “What am I to do with these people?” (Zornberg, Avivah Gottlieb. The Particulars of Rapture. New York: Shocken Books, 2001. P. 206.)
Whats and whys dominate the thinking of the Israelites. Whats and whys often dominate our lives when we find ourselves in desert places. “Desert places” is a spiritual catch-all term for any place where we feel spiritually parched or hungry, any place where we feel lost and uncertain, as the Israelites do in the Sinai. We start questioning everything: “Why did I make that decision?” “What have I done?” And of course, there’s “Why did someone MAKE me do that?” or “What have you done?”—handing off responsibility, sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly, to someone else—or even better, handing it to God: “What have you done, God?”
Desert places are times of uncertainty and doubt. “Why are we here?’ We wonder, and so we search for someone or something to blame. “What have we done to deserve this?” we might ask. And dominating it all: “We don’t know what to do.” That’s the real issue eating at the children of Israel: “We don’t know what to do.” Not a question, but an assertion: of powerlessness, of helplessness, of lack of control. We don’t know what to do.
The perfect situation in which to discover how utterly dependent we are on God.
“What are we to eat?” The children of Israel grumble against Moses in the desert. The complaint goes deeper than hunger. The children of Israel feel that they’ve followed a hapless leader, a man without a strategy. They know what they have escaped from, but they don’t know what they’re escaping to. All they know is that right now, they are lost. And it’s not just Moses who has failed them, oh no. It’s Moses’ mysterious God who has failed. Because a God’s job is to give you hope when things are hopeless. God did all sorts of great things in the past—but what has God done for us lately?
God responds by littering the desert with a mysterious food substance. The Israelites look at uncertainly: “What is it?” they ask.
The Hebrew word that can be translated “What” or “Why” is Mah. And so it is with a supreme sense of irony that God answers the Hebrews’ “What” and “why” questions with manna, a word that can be rendered ‘whatchamacallit’ or ‘what’s-its-name.” God answers their ‘what’ with ‘whatchamacallit’: manna, bread from heaven.
The manna has two components: a natural one and a supernatural one. At one level, it’s quite material. Most scholars believe that manna was a natural secretion of branches or even of insects in the Sinai. But the supernatural aspect of it is that somehow this secretion will be enough to sustain an entire nation of people through years in the desert. Somehow, ‘watchamacallit’ will be enough.
Often when we’re lost in a desert place, we’re stuck in a new reality with no clear path forward, and indeed, without a real sense of “what” our goal is. It’s a scary place. What’s needed is trust in God, for we are truly and sincerely lost. We have nowhere else to turn.
And then God sends us “whatchamacallit.” God sends us something almost, but not quite, completely unlike what we’d have thought would be helpful. The person who helps us out turns out to be the person we’d have thought least likely to have done so. A church struggling to survive discovers that by doing the one thing it never thought it would do, it is in fact best serving God. Our first reaction is, “What is that?” We don’t like the look of it. I mean, honestly, who wants to eat weird secretions that bugs or plants laid out in the desert?
It’s the “what”–the least likely thing. And that’s the clue. The clue that God sent it, and we need to trust God.
I once saw a television show about a pastor trying to build a new church. A spat erupts and many people refuse to pledge to the capital campaign. The church is left without a roof. The pastor writes a sermon about the spirituality of giving and putting aside our differences in Christian love. The night before that Sunday he prays, “Lord, help us out of this mess!” The next morning he gets in the pulpit of his roofless church and it begins raining cats and dogs. He looks up at the sky and says, “This is help?” But it works. The money comes “flooding” in. He asked for help and God sent him “what?” And “what” was exactly what was needed.
Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg (Particulars of Rapture, P. 211) points us to the hidden “sagaciousness” in the question, “What shall we eat?” It’s not simply a question about food. It’s a question about our spiritual sustenance. It’s a question about faith. We look at ourselves—we look at the church—we look at the world around us—and we wonder and worry, “Do we have enough?” It’s not a selfish or greedy question. It’s a question that comes from our inner need, our inner knowledge that we are never whole until God makes us whole. It’s a worthy question as we approach stewardship season, too. Does St. Stephen have enough? Enough of what we need to sustain us, as a church and as individuals, in the times ahead? Enough to do its part to ease the burdens and sufferings of the world around us? Enough to satisfy the hungry heart?
Enough God?
And the answer is, we do, if we dare to trust God. The little whatchamacallit that we have to offer, the little bit of ‘what’ out of our wallets or our personal time or our heartfelt commitment, may not seem to be enough to sustain us and continue to guide us to the future, but they are if we don’t put our trust in ourselves, but in God. The manna in the desert looked like too little to do enough—not to mention, too weird, too unlikely to do any good. But God made it enough. And God will make it enough for us. What am I, what are any of us, that God has called us to God’s service at this time? Whatever we are—is enough. It’s enough, because God says it is enough. What can we do to serve the world, and our own needs? We can do what God gives us to do, what God brings our way, no matter how surprising or unlikely it is. God’s manna, God’s whatchamacallit is enough.
Our spiritual hunger is to believe that that is true. To believe it and to commit ourselves to it, not because we trust ourselves, or trust our leaders, or trust history, or have a great strategic plan—but because we trust God. It is that trust that feeds our spiritual hunger. It is that trust that is the ‘what’ that is missing from our lives.
And when we are lost, that’s when we need to trust most—and when we can be most certain that God will provide the WHAT that we need.