Exodus 16:2-15
I have often heard teachers say “There’s no such thing as a stupid question.” It is meant to encourage people not to be embarrassed about asking questions. The problem is: it’s just not true. There are stupid questions. Of course, what is a stupid question is varies according to age or stage. If a first graders asks “How many states are there in the United States,” that is a fine question. If a sixth grader asks “How many states are there in the United States,” that may be a fine question for his or her stage of development. But Jackie was asked that question once by a college freshman who was from the United States and was a history major. (In her defense, she did offer an excuse for not knowing. She said, “I’m from West Virginia!”)
My daughter will occasionally ask me questions even though she already knows the answer, and I am not the most patient of moms, especially in the morning. “Do I have to go to school today?” Hmmm. Are you sick? Injured? Been abducted by aliens? No? Then “Do I have to go to school today” is a stupid question.
But my least favorite stupid question is “Are we there yet?” Let’s see. We’re on the interstate, driving 73 miles an hour—does it look like we’re there yet? This question is almost always followed by “How much longer?” The father of a friend of mine always gave the same answer when his kids asked this question: “About twenty minutes.” They could be leaving Portland Maine, heading for the other Portland, and his answer would always be: “About twenty minutes.” It was his way of saying “Quit asking! You’re bugging me!”
Whenever I read the story of Moses and the Israelites in the wilderness, I wonder if Moses felt like a father to thousands of children, all whining “Are we there yet? How much longer? I’m bored. Do we have any snacks?”
Then again, they weren’t being unreasonable to ask for food. They obviously needed food to survive. So according to the story, God provided. But there were some strings attached, or at least instructions they had to follow. God said: gather only enough food for one day except for on the day before the Sabbath, when they could gather enough for two days. Some of the people didn’t listen. They had learned in slavery that food could come and go on the whim of their taskmaster. They had learned to grab what they could for themselves. They had learned to hoard. And so they tried it with the manna, only to end up with their secret stash full of worms.
This reminds me of a dog I had years ago. She was a stray who had been out on her own for a long time, and by the looks of her when we got her, she had often gone hungry. So she had a bad habit of hoarding food. She would eat part of her dinner, and then she would flip her bowl over and push the remaining food under the edge of the cabinet, like she was trying to bury it. It seemed like she wasn’t sure she was going to get fed again, so she was hedging her bets, just in case. It took a long time for her to realize that she was always going to get fed. But still, years later, if she was feeling anxious by a change in the household (or whatever bizarre thing might make a slightly neurotic dog anxious) she would start trying to bury her food again. It was a sure sign that she was feeling some anxiety.
Well, the Israelites were feeling more than a little anxiety out in the wilderness, and they weren’t yet convinced that God was going to care for them and keep caring for them. So they tried to hoard. But God had worked that out. The fact that their manna would spoil after one day–this was actually part of God’s provision. God knew that the people had to unlearn what they had learned in slavery. Their old ways of receiving bread in Egypt were inappropriate in the wilderness. They had to change their whole way of eating, their way of receiving food. They had to lose the taste of Egypt that still lingered on their tongues. They could not save today’s food for tomorrow’s hunger. They had to learn to depend on God not just in general, but every day.
I wish we could learn that lesson. I wish we could learn—OK, I’ll be honest—I wish I could learn that I need God just as much on the good days as the bad, the days when my sermon flows as fast as I can type and the days when my sermon is pulled out of me one word at a time.
And I wish I could learn that what I gather today is enough. We pray “Give us this day our daily bread,” but we don’t mean it. We want our monthly bread, our yearly bread, our 401k bread. And of course there is nothing wrong with planning for the future. But too often we go from planning to hoarding. We collect so much more than we need.
Meanwhile, more than 45 million people in America live in poverty. That’s 14% of our country. According to the Department of Agriculture, 49 million people in America live in “food insecure households.”[1] And here at home:
- Nearly one in four children in Maine lacks “access to enough food to ensure adequate nutrition.[2]
- Approximately 18% of Mainers use food stamps
- 36% of Maine’s food insecure population makes too much money to qualify for food stamps “and must rely on the charity food assistance network.”[3]
That’s us. And just this week I threw away half a bag of lettuce, half a cucumber, several bananas, and at least two containers of leftovers that went bad because I didn’t remember to eat them. Of course, sharing is not as simple as walking outside and asking passersby if they’d like some chicken pesto. But it is as simple as shopping more carefully and wasting less food so that I can save more money so that I can give more away. It is that simple.
But it is so easy to forget. It is so easy to forget that we are connected, and that my choices and habits do affect others.
I have read in several places recently about how much money different billionaires in our country give to charitable organizations, particularly those in their names. In the past six years, Warren Buffett has given away 12.29% of his net worth in charitable contributions. Bill Gates gave away 9.25% of his net worth and Michael Bloomberg gave away 9%. The Walton family, of Wal-Mart fame, four of whom make Forbes list of top ten billionaires, gave away .012%. If these numbers are true, Bill Gates gave away 429 TIMES what the four Wal-Mart heirs gave away.[4]
As a parent, I have to ask myself: How do I raise my child, no matter how much money she has, to be more like Bill Gates than Jim Walton?
I got one idea this week, thanks to Sara Bloom. She brought her two-year-old granddaughter to my office on Wednesday. Gracie handed me a tub of macaroni and cheese to give to a child who might be hungry. It was just one tub. Sara said they will be back next week with more.
Which do you think a child will remember more? That at Thanksgiving time you donate a bag or two of groceries? Or that each week they bring one thing for someone who is hungry?
Mahatma Gandhi is credited with saying: “There are people in the world so hungry that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.” Yes, God appears in the form of bread. This is one of the ways we share God—by sharing bread and soup and tuna fish. And God appears in the form of manna—a substance so weird that its very name meant “What is it?” And God appears in provision in the wilderness, when we most need it but least expect it. And God appears in the voice of hungry children, asking when they will be fed. The answer we must not give is: About twenty minutes.
We must not forget that there are hungry people right outside our doors. They are hungry for food. Well, some of them. But that’s not all people are hungry for.
People in our community are hungry for connection . . . so hungry that they will stay online too late at night, scrolling through Facebook or Twitter or the comments section on Huffington Post, desperately trying to find confirmation that they are not alone.
People in our community are hungry for meaning . . . so hungry that they settle for slogans and platitudes, or proudly claim their “spiritual but not religious” label—which isn’t bad—but they don’t know that religion can be spiritual because we haven’t shown them that it is.
People in our community are hungry for healing . . . so hungry they’ll consume anything that promises relief, and they don’t think to come to us because, in too many cases, the church was what wounded them.
Here in the United Church of Christ we are really good at both charity and social justice work. We know that being Christians means we feed the hungry. We need projects like the Mission & Outreach Team’s focus on food to remind us, but it is just that—a reminder, a focus. But we get a little nervous when we talk about needing to feed the hungry souls. In order to do that, people will need to know we have something to offer. They will need to hear our spiritual journeys, hear our stories of faith and doubt and faith again. To feed their spirits, we have to feed our own.
Let’s feed those who lack sufficient food. Yes, please. We do that well. Let’s do that some more. But let’s not forget those who lack spiritual food. They, too, need to be fed. And not in “about twenty minutes.”
[1] http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/err-economic-research-report/err173.aspx
[2] http://www.gsfb.org/hunger/
[3] Ibid.
[4] http://walmart1percent.org/2014/09/18/analysis-walmart-heirs-are-the-least-charitable-of-americas-richest-billionaires/