“It’s The Hobbit,” I tell him. How does he not remember this. He queued it up on the streaming service when we were discussing what to watch and made the decision.
“That is NOT The Hobbit!” he declares with certainty.
“It’s Peter Jackson’s interpretation,” I explain patiently. “You know he takes liberties and is into gross overproduction.”
“This is not taking liberties and overproduction,” my spouse tells me. “He’s completely made it all up. You’ve read The Hobbit. Haven’t you?” he asks.
At this point in our marriage, I had not read The Hobbit. “I’ve started it a few times,” I tell him honestly, but I just couldn’t get into it. I’ve got my copy around here somewhere, I’ll give it another go.”
Ultimately, my spouse pulled out his copy and I read it the next weekend. “What the heck did we watch last weekend?” I asked my spouse as I finished the final page and closed the book.
“Right!?!?!?!?” he exclaimed.
“That movie bore NO RESEMBLANCE WHATSOEVER to the book. I mean, the book is 280 pages of Bilbo Baggins ignoring the promise of the journey he’s one while bemoaning the troubles of this journey while extoling comforts of his bed and a desire for bacon. Where was the bacon!?!?!?!?”
Last week found Moses standing on a mountain, observing the prints of their journey as they moved toward promised land with the knowledge he would never enter it. Terry did a wonderful job sharing with us the need to look back from whence we’ve come and continue moving forward, even if we never see the fruit of the seeds we’ve planted. This week, we find the same group of Israelites, led by the same Moses, looking a little too far back, bemoaning the difficulties of their current situation and extoling the virtues of the only home they’ve ever known – a place of brutality and oppression. The Israelites are calling for a return to their lives as enslaved people in the land of Egypt, forced to build cities, work in the fields beaten by their oppressors, and their sons killed at birth. Somehow, in this moment, the promise of the future in a land flowing with milk and honey seems less appealing than oppression of the past where at “we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread.”
Forgotten is so quickly is God’s safety and protection – bringing about ten plagues: turning the Nile to blood, frogs, flies, diseased livestock, boils, thunder and hail, locusts, darkness, and the death of every first born Egyptian. The Israelites saved from each plague. They fled into the desert, Moses raised his staff at the edge of the Red Sea, parted the waters, and they crossed on dry land; the pursuing Egyptian army drowning in their wake. In the desert, the bitter waters of Mara were purified and turned sweet to slake their thirst. Now…. Well, now they are hungry. And once again, they complain against Moses. And once again, God meets all their needs – exactly they need it. Just enough bread for today.
What do we do when we see more need than resources? When we feel needs greater than we can meet? Part of preaching is about making a several thousand-year-old text relevant to our world today. But how do we do that while remaining faithful to the history of the text and the culture in which it was produced? It’s a hard task and I don’t believe the answer is in claiming that there are perfect parallels between the Israelites’ flight to freedom and our experiences of oppression today. I don’t believe that the specific promises given to a particular people in a particular place at a particular time can be universalized to my person circumstances today.
Wonderful and terrible things happen to people every day. Wonderful things sometimes happen to terrible people. And terrible things sometimes happen to good people. I cannot stand before you and pretend otherwise. Nor am I so presumptuous as to believe that I can making meaning out of anyone’s experiences and claim “God has a purpose for this!” And so I’m left instead to wonder about the Israelites, wandering in the desert, thirsty, hungry, and longing for the familiar even if it means giving up the chance at something unimaginably better. And I think about the nature of the divine – and how the Israelites have been delivered out of oppression and slavery; how they have been promised a land of their own, flowing with milk and honey; how they’ve been spared plagues and death; how they’ve been given water to drink; how they’ve been led to an oasis for rest.
And I wonder – is God so capricious as to meet the Israelites needs only because they complain so loudly? Is that truly the God they worshipped? Is that truly the God of our faith today?
And I can’t help but think … that’s not my God, nor is it any kind of God I want in my life.
So, I look instead at my own life. There have certainly been times when I have cried out for deliverance. There have been times when I have wandered through a barren wilderness of my own. There have been times when the tenuous hope for an uncertain future feels too painful and I find myself longing for the comfort of a known, if awful, past. Then, I think about the shift that happened, about thirteen years ago, that changed everything.
It was November and on social media, folks were doing “30 Days of Gratitude.” Each day, they would name three things for which they were grateful. I joined in and when November came to an end, I decided to carry on, with intention, for an entire year. Every day for one year, I listed three things for which I was grateful. It wasn’t always easy and there occasion repeats from day to day. And at the end of a year, I quietly stopped publicly naming three things for which I am grateful every day.
But in that year, something happened to my brain. My intentional shift in focus seemed to train my brain to unconsciously shift my focus. Suddenly, I felt more resilient. I was able to face failures, stand up, dust myself off, and move ahead. I was able to more objectively view my past, identify patterns, and make changes. I felt stronger, more autonomous, and in control of my life in ways that defied logic. Despite the, not insignificant, challenges in my life, I knew deep inside that ultimately I would be okay – even if I didn’t know, in that moment, what okay looked like or how I’d get there. In choosing to be grateful for all I do have, the actual or perceived lack in my life somehow became less significant.
Now, I am well aware that correlation does not prove causation. Little in life is a straightforward cause and effect. But almost nine years after my gratitude practice began, my spouse received an email from a job recruiter, inquiring as to his interest in a job in the Portland metro area. Three weeks later, he had a job offer, resigned his then-current position, and five weeks after that began working remote. At that point, we had five weeks to buy a house, sell a house, pack our lives and our cats into boxes, moving trucks, and our car, quit my job, find a new job, and move everything to Oregon. Ten weeks between learning we were moving and the day we arrived.
I had a lovely and robust community in Minnesota. I miss folks daily. It was hard to say good-bye. You know what I don’t miss? The oppressive heat and humidity that sometimes starts in March (95 degree days) and ends in October. The oppressive cold and snow that starts in October and ends in May (multiple feet of snow that don’t completely melt before the next storm piles more on – months on end of frozen tundra, seeking to navigate a small car around corners and over snow berms on the side streets that are only plowed when at least 8” of snow has fallen). Do you know, I still sometimes wake up on hot nights in August from nightmares about the winter of 2018 – 30” of snow fell in the month of February and then in mid-April, the night before my birthday, another 14” fell overnight.
I wake up from these nightmares, heart racing, dread filling me, terror at the thought of another winter – and then I remember: I am in Oregon. I take a deep breath and relax knowing that I will not have to endure that kind of winter again. And even while living in Minnesota’s brutally cold and snowy winters and her unbearably hot and humid summers, I chose to be grateful every day. I had a home that was safe, a spouse who cherishes me, a community that encouraged me, a job that fulfilled me. All of these realities were carried forward to Oregon – a land flowing with milk and honey.
And I wonder – if we shift our focus from a fear of scarcity and obsessing about what we lack to a trust in abundance and gratitude for all that we have – might we also find that we have enough for today? Might we trust that the God who has carried us safe thus far is the same God who will provide us enough bread for the journey – and maybe a bit more? And when we believe that there is enough, might we also gather around the table and share, with each other, the good news that God’s abundant love is always more than we can hope for or imagine?
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