Benefits of Complaining: August 4, 2024

 Year B, Pentecost 11                 Exodus 16: 2-4, 9-15                                                               

I am always fascinated by people who say thing like, “well there’s no point in complaining.”  I always want to ask, are you sure?  I understand that sometimes it goes too far.  When all we do is complain and refuse to act, then we are just sabotaging ourselves and making others miserable in the process. I think that a little complaining can be healthy, especially if the person who is listening is sympathetic and might help you deal with the problem at hand. The other time when complaining can be helpful is when we are talking to God.  I will admit that there were times in the Bible when complaining kind of ticked off God. There were also times, like our story in Exodus, when it worked out well for everyone involved. 

          Some like to make a big deal of the complaining of the Hebrew people in the exodus story.  I remember in one church I served, there was a lay reader who generally read in a monotone, except when it came to the Exodus story.  Then she moved into this rather nasally whine that woke everybody up and elicited a raised eyebrow from the rector.  People love to imitate the whine of the Hebrew people.   They get a bad rap and I wonder if they really deserve it. They were after all in the desert with very little food or water.  It’s not like they were just on a long stretch of highway between Starbucks.  So why are we so quick to judge them?  

To some, they seem ungrateful. God just saved them from slavery and parted a body of water so that they could escape and now they are complaining again!  I admit their comment that it would have been better that they had died in Egypt where they had plenty to eat was a little obnoxious.  But they were hungry and scared.  People say desperate things when they are in desperate situations.  Plus, the God that they had experienced, the all-powerful God who rained down plagues and killed thousands of people was not necessarily the same tender hearted God that we picture.  In their minds, they had a God who was a warrior and a deliverer, but maybe not a provider of food and love.

          While Moses was a little annoyed with the people and their complaints, God showed no such judgment.  As soon as they complained to Moses, God said to Moses, “I am going to rain bread from heaven for you…”  Problem solved.  Yet God provided an interesting caveat.  “…each day people shall go out and gather enough for that day.  In that way I will test them, whether they will follow my instructions or not.”  The instructions were clear.  The people were to gather only enough…only enough as they needed for that one day.  But these were hungry people who had just been through a period of slavery and uncertainty.  Sure, God had freed them from slavery but that was after a long period of suffering.  Some Biblical scholars surmise that they were enslaved for 400 years.  The people who were freed had seen many of their loved ones die in slavery.  They had seen infants killed.  That was a high price to pay and not one that would be easily forgotten.  The people needed more than one miraculous act to believe in God.  They needed a relationship with God.

          God addressed that need in a couple of ways.  He started with communication.  He communicated directly with the leaders (Moses and Moses’ brother Aaron).   Then he did something rather surprising. Aaron told the people to “Draw near to the Lord, for he has heard your complaining.”   With those words, the glory of the Lord appeared to them.  All the people saw it.  Imagine if after every time I recommended that you grow closer to God, God appeared.  That would be effective, would it not?  What I find particularly interesting is that God never told Moses or Aaron that he would appear to the people.  He said that he would provide food, but he never mentioned that cloud of glory. It was an affirmation for not only the people, but the leadership as well.  They needed it too.

          The next way that God encouraged a closer relationship with him was by providing a test.  Most of us probably do not have warm and fuzzy feelings about tests.  I have not taken a test in about twenty years and I still have nightmares about them.  Recently I read about a new method they are attempting in education.  The teacher starts the year with a test. It would be similar to the test that the student would take at the end of the year, but there would be no grade.  The idea is that the student would see what was expected of them for the year.  The teacher would also know what areas needed more time than others. 

This is similar to the kind of test that God was providing.  There was no grade, but there were results.  It was not a test as much as it was another teaching opportunity.  The people were only supposed to gather as much as they needed.  But they were hungry. They were used to having to grab everything they could get because they did not know where the next meal was coming from.  Need is a relative term.  They probably felt they needed as much as they could gather.  Of course they could not eat all that they gathered, so they stored it for the next day….just in case God did not deliver the bread from heaven.   When they woke up, the food that they had stored was infested with worms AND the manna from heaven rained down again.  They didn’t pass the test, but they still got the bread and they learned something.  This God was not a warrior, and not merely a deliverer.  This God was God who cared about their day to day needs but also a God who expected obedience.  

          Perhaps we are quick to judge the Hebrew people for their complaints because we are also quick to judge ourselves for our own lack of faith, our lack of confidence in God.   That is what complaints about or to God seem to indicate to so many…a lack of faith.   Yet the complaints of the Hebrew people resulted in a closer relationship with God.  Now I am not encouraging you all to start complaining…especially not to me (unless it is non-church related in which case, fire away)!  However there is something to say about complaining to God.  Sometimes when we are questioning our faith or when we are frustrated with our own life, it is tempting to shut God out, but that is the time when we really need to talk to God, even if it sounds like whining. 

In the Episcopal Church we have loads of beautiful prayers, but there have been times in my life when those prayers didn’t cut it.  Instead I needed to weep, or rage or just whine.  And you know what--those prayers were just as appreciated as those lovely ones we have in our prayer book, maybe even more so. God wants all of us, not just the polished or polite part of us. When it comes to communicating with God, it’s not about the presentation, it’s simply a matter of follow through.  God wants to hear us.  We probably won’t get the immediate response that the Hebrew people received in Exodus, but what if that communication creates an openness in our hearts, an openness to the glory of God, the love of God, the presence of God. If there is even a chance of that, then that’s a conversation worth having.

Love come first: August 8, 2015

Year B, Pentecost 11                                                                 
Ephesians 4:25-5:2                                                                             

 

My first high school was a pretty diverse school, which was a wonderful experience because it meant that I was friends with a lot of different kinds of people.  Most of my friends were not Christian.  There was a Christian group at the school, but I did not feel as though I fit in with that group, partly because they met before school started, which seemed like an ungodly hour to me.  There was one girl in that group who just baffled me. She was always cheerful.  She smiled all the time.  I never heard her say anything rude or inconsiderate.   For a while, I thought this had to be a front.  She could not be sincere.  However, I soon began to admire her as a wonderful example of a Christian. But then I got worried because I was nothing like her.  As some of you may have noticed, I frown when I am thinking, and I am thinking most of the time.  It’s hereditary.  Everyone in my family does it.   At the time I remember thinking if being Christian means I have to smile all the time, I am in serious trouble.

As I matured in my life as a Christian, I realized that Christians look a lot different and even act differently than one another.  As Christians we are called to emulate not other Christians, but Jesus Christ.  This realization makes me feel slightly better, but also frustrated at times.  First of all, emulating someone you have never seen is pretty tricky.  And emulating someone you have never seen who is also perfect, is that much harder. 

One of the reasons that we read the Bible is to get a picture of Jesus, to get to know Jesus.  Paul’s letters can be especially helpful because he was trying to help people be Christian.    The portion of Ephesians we heard today contains some of that practical advice.  Don’t say mean things.  Only say things that will build other people up.  Don’t steal; instead share with the needy.  Put away all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tender hearted, forgiving one another…  While these things are not necessarily easy to achieve, they make sense.   They are really nothing new, not even at the time this was written.  Being kind to one another was not a new Christian concept. However, there are a couple things in this portion of the letter that are more nuanced.  They are not just advice on how to be a good person.

One of the first things Paul says is, “Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger...”  Later he adds, “Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger…”   Well which is it, are we supposed to be angry, or not?  I would say that generally, people think Christians should not be angry.  That has led to a lot of guilt on the part of people who experience anger.  That means they ignore it and don’t deal with it.  Then it festers until it either weighs them down, or explodes and creates even more problems. 

            Human emotion is not a sin.  It is what we do with that emotion that leads to sin.  Paul says it is ok to be angry.  It is even good to be angry sometimes.  Jesus got angry several times in the scriptures.  The prophets of the Old Testament were often angry.  Yet there are different kinds of anger and different ways of handling that anger.  There was a period in my life where I was really angry.  And my dear husband listened as I ranted and raved about this and that.  I was sure that my anger was justified.  It was even righteous.  It wasn’t just anger, it was righteous indignation.  But it didn’t go away.  It lasted for months and I didn’t feel any better.  I didn’t do anything positive with the anger.  It just consumed me.  At some point, probably while contemplating a sermon, I realized that there was nothing righteous about my anger.  It was just anger and the righteous thing was to release it. 

            How do you know whether or not your anger is justified, whether it is righteous?  It’s actually pretty simple.  When Jesus was angry, it came from a place of love.  He was angry because people did not want him to heal people on the Sabbath.  He was angry when the poor were ignored.  He was angry when people willfully misunderstood his father’s words.  He was angry when people took his words and twisted them to fit their own needs.  Those are the kinds of things that we should be angry about.   

            Yet I would guess that normally we are angered because we feel slighted, because our pride is wounded, or when people hurt us.  And I am not saying that getting angry about those things is wrong, because it is a natural reaction.  But that is the kind of anger that we need to let go of as soon as possible.   Paul even provides a timeline.  Don’t let the sun go down on your anger.  So you’ve got about day, and no more than that.  If you hold on to it longer, it will hurt you and it will make it difficult to follow in the footsteps of Jesus.  We should also keep in mind that love comes before anger. If the origin of our anger is something other than love, then it is not righteous.   Love comes first.

            Now you might think, well what about righteous anger?  Can I be angry about that for long periods of time?  If you want to hold on to righteous anger, you must first sure that you are right, that you know exactly how Jesus feels about the thing you are angry about.  Not only that, you need to examine the rest of your life pretty carefully and make sure that you are following Christ in every way that you can.   Personally, I am going to try to be like Jesus. But I am not confident that I know the mind of God.  In fact, I am pretty sure that I don’t.  So I will follow Jesus to the best of my ability and pray that I can see myself and others as he sees us.  But I am going to try not to claim righteous anger, at least not until I am sure that I have mastered the necessary precursor to righteous anger, which is loving God and loving my neighbor.   Love comes first. 

            Being Christian is not always about being cheerful and smiling a lot.  Horrible things are happening in this world every day and we should be angry about those things.  But the answer is not bitterness or visions of revenge, but instead focusing on what we can do to be agents of change in this world. But before we change the world, we need to allow God to change us.  I have often said that, “God loves you just the way you are.”  I believe that with my whole heart.  But recently I heard someone say, “God loves you just the way you are, but he refuses to leave you that way.  He wants you to be like Jesus.”    I know that sounds like a tall order, but God is not as worried about the end product as he is about the process of becoming like Jesus.  Paul wrote, “Be imitators of God…”   Another translation of that is, “Keep on becoming imitators of God…”  That is not grammatically correct, but I think it makes the point a little more clear.  As Christians, we do not claim perfection.  We are not finished products.  We are in the process of becoming godly and the moment when we think our transformation is complete is the moment when we know it’s time to start over.  The process of becoming like Jesus is never over.  Just remember, love comes first.