Text: Exodus 16: 1-18
Friends, over the next several weeks in worship, we are going to talk about how we connect our faith, our life, and our finances.
And while on one very practical level our stewardship time helps our church leaders to set a budget for the coming year, there is a much bigger reason that we take time every year to talk about generosity and stewardship.
Because even if we want to avoid the conversation, Jesus is very interested in what we do with our money and resources.
Your money story is a spiritual story and when we let God into this part of our lives, we find grace and love and transformation and joy.
Let us pray…
“Enough” by John van de Laar
Worry and stress are not hard for us, God,
We do them without thinking:
There is always the potential of threat
To our security,
Our comfort,
Our health,
Our relationships,
Our lives.
And we foolishly think that we could silence the fear
If we just had enough money,
Enough insurance,
Enough toys,
Enough stored away for a rainy day.
It’s never enough, though;
The voice of our fear will not be dismissed so easily.
But in the small, silent places within us is another voice;
One that beckons us into the foolishness of faith,
That points our gaze to the birds and the flowers,
That in unguarded moments, lets our muscles relax.
And our hearts lean into loved ones.;
In unexpected whispers we hear it,
Calling us to remember your promises,
Your grace,
Your faithfulness;
And, suddenly, we discover,
That it is enough.
Amen.
In the words that I just shared with you from John van de Laar, we hear echoes of the story that the world tries to tell us about money.
There is never enough.
We live with fear and stress and worry… and so much of that has been compounded by the pandemic and economic uncertainties and supply chain disruptions and… and…
There is always something out there with the potential to bring it all crashing to the ground.
Even in the moments when everything is okay…
When we find our footing…
When we have experienced a transformation for good…
We struggle to let go of the fear.
That is what we find in Exodus.
It is a story of a people who just a month and a half before were still in the land of Egypt.
They were living in “an economy of fear and deprivation,” writes Erin Weber-Johnson but God liberated them from oppression.
Can you imagine the joy and the freedom and the excitement of being able to write a new story for your life?
And yet they struggled to let go of their fear.
They were not yet sure what it meant to trust in God, they were already looking back upon their days in captivity with rose-colored glasses.
You see, they remembered that at the end of those days, they could sit by the fire and their pots were full and bread was plentiful… or at least it seemed that way in their memories.
They forgot that they could never produce enough to satisfy their oppressor.
Whether they lived or died, how many bricks they had to make, what materials they had to do so with… it was all based upon the whims of Pharaoh and their overseers.
The work was brutal and unending… or as Walter Bruggemann describes it “the endless rat race for sufficiency.”
Like livestock must be fed and equipment has to be maintained, the Egyptians knew they had to keep their workforce alive in order for them to work.
But it was never really enough.
The bare necessities of food and water… which the Israelites found themselves crying out for in the new barren land… are not enough
And to be honest, many of us experience this in our own lives, don’t we?
We work and we work, thinking eventually we might have enough money to provide for more than our basic needs… we work incredibly hard so that someday we might enjoy our life and by the time we get there we are too tired and worn out to experience it.
Our quest for “enough” is killing us.
Or perhaps your story is more like that of Pharoah.
We so fiercely guard what we have acquired that we begin to see outside forces as a threat to our power and position.
So we rail against taxes and we bemoan immigrants and we cry out about what belongs to us.
Or maybe it is far simpler… we hoard what we have without even being aware of the people we have impacted.
We have moved far beyond “enough”; filling our closets, and homes, and garages, and storage units with things and we cannot even remember why and we are too afraid or ashamed to consider the consequences of such a life.
Both of these stories are ruled by fear.
A fear that there never has been and never will be enough.
As Rev. Sarah Are writes,
Our anxiety is loud.
Our fear is loud.
Our anger is loud.
Our shame is loud.
Mental illness is loud.
Doubt is loud.
But there is another voice that is whispering in the background.
A voice that hovered over the waters of creation.
A voice that led the Israelites out of slavery with a pillar of fire.
A voice that promises not just to feed us, but to love us, to guide us, to give us rest.
When the Israelites found themselves in the middle of nowhere, utterly dependent upon God, it terrified them.
But that is precisely when God steps in and reminded them… I am enough. I will provide.
“At twilight you will eat meat. And in the morning you will have your fill of bread.” (Ex. 16: 12)
This food comes without requiring any labor other than stepping outside of their tent and gathering it up.
The only strings attached were that they didn’t take more than they needed.
If they did, it rotted and became infested with worms and stank.
OOF… Do you hear that… if we take more than we need it is just going to rot away.
And then, here was the kicker.
On the sixth day, they were told gather enough so that on the seventh they could rest.
God provided. God was enough.
You know, I got to thinking about that prayer that we say every single week in worship.
We ask for God to give us our daily bread.
Our manna from heaven.
And if you look at the Greek work that Jesus uses here it is: epiousios, which we understand to mean that which is necessary and sufficient, that which gives substance to our lives.
We are asking for God to teach us, shape us, remind us what truly is enough.
As we remember this story of manna in the wilderness, it wasn’t just about food.
It was also about learning who they were, who we are, as people who are loved by God.
It was about learning to obey God’s commands.
It was about learning to trust in God’s faithfulness.
It was about learning what it meant to share with one another.
And it was about learning to rest on God’s Sabbath.
And we are called to remember that our fears and our anxiety and what Walter Bruggemann calls “the endless rat race for sufficiency” (Money and Possessions), are never going to bring us enough.
We are called to remember God’s provision, God’s grace, and God’s faithfulness – not just with our minds, but to let these truths sink into our very bones and our daily existence so that we, too, will be shaped as God’s people.
You know… maybe the Lord’s Prayer should be our daily practice.
Our daily gathering of manna from heaven.
Our daily reminder of who we are and whose we are.
Because when we cry out, “give us this day our daily bread,” we are not simply asking God to make sure there is food on my table tonight.
We are asking for God to provide for all who hunger. To make sure that everyone has enough.
Those who hunger for rest.
Those who hunger for connection and relationship.
Those who hunger for liberation and freedom from oppression or addiction or worry.
We here at Immanuel believe that God is calling us to love, serve, and pray so that all who hunger might be fed by God’s grace.
We dream of a future where no one in our zip code goes to bed hungry at night.
We dream of a church where children and grandparents are growing together as they share meals and laughter.
We dream of a community where every need is met because we have so many volunteers at Immanuel willing to give of their time and talents and resources.
And that means putting hands and feet on this prayer and rolling up our sleeves and getting to work.
In our church money story, we can remember times we all rallied together to accomplish big things with God’s help – like when Faith Hall was built.
But with the uncertainty in the world today, stories of fear and scarcity and doubt start to creep in again.
We can get focused on making sure there is enough to keep the lights on and lose sight of God’s promises and faithfulness and who God has called us to become.
This fall, as our leaders wrestled with our goals for 2022, one step we knew we wanted to embrace was leading with mission. We want to be a church known for how we are reaching out to love our neighbor.
And so, we have a few goals related to that like focusing on a local 2022 Volunteers in Mission Trip, but we also discussed how we might have to adjust our own church money story to truly lead with mission.
We want to get to a place where 100% of our budget is supported by annual pledges SO THAT everything else that comes into our church, all of the other money and gifts that we receive can be given away.
We are trying to realign our own money story around what is enough so that we can turn around and bless our neighbors with everything else.
That is just one way that we are going to become the church God is yearning for us to be. A church where all who hunger are fed by God’s grace.
It is just one way that we are going to remember that God is enough. Amen.
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