Let Go: Leaving Behind What We Don’t Need
Exodus 16:1-15, 31-35
May 14, 2023
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley
Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Clypn290U1s
“We should have stayed in Egypt”, they said. Memory is a selective thing. Just a little while after their liberation, the Hebrew people forget how miserable they were in Egypt. They forget how hard it was to reach the daily quota of bricks demanded by Pharoah. They forget that when they asked for time off for worship, Pharoah doubled down and required them to provide their own straw and still produce the same number of bricks. They forget that they were insulted, called lazy and beaten every time they couldn’t meet the unreasonable demands. They forget all of that. Because they are hungry and anxious in the wilderness, all they remember is that back in Egypt, they had meat and bread.
The Hebrew people have endured much through the generations they’ve spent in Egypt. They are resilient. They are used to suffering, but this particular difficulty is new. They are not just afraid of being hungry, although that is a real fear. They are afraid of all that is foreign and terrifying in this strange place. They are afraid of the unknown. They are still carrying with them their best memories of Egypt, distorted though they may be. They have not left Egypt completely behind.
Holding on to and letting go of possessions is one way we have of managing our memories. We all do this in different ways, depending on our personalities and experiences of abundance or scarcity, depending on the size of our basements or attics or access to storage units. It’s complicated.
Three quick examples. My friend Lynn recently retired. In this new stage of her life, she’s been going through things, deciding what to keep and what to give away. She came across journals and diaries written when she was in high school and college, full of all the angst and curiosity and drama that characterized her life then. She said she decided that they were not under any circumstances to be left behind. In other words, she did not want them to be read by her children after her death, so she destroyed them now. Sometimes the decision is clear – I do not need this any more and neither does anyone else.
I was in a Zoom meeting last week with another friend. She came to this country from Germany decades ago. In the Zoom meeting I could tell that she was sitting at a desk, but I couldn’t see much else. She told me that she was resting her feet on two suitcases. Apparently the suitcases are stored under the desk to serve as a permanent foot-rest. The suitcases contain documents from her ancestors’ lives in Germany, including correspondence between her grandfather and great-grandfather and letters from her own father when he was a prisoner of war. They contain flyers that were produced during World War II. These flyers were distributed every week to people who wanted to go to worship. They detailed which churches had been bombed and which ones were still open for worship and which ones were structurally unsafe. She thinks they might be valuable for historical reasons.
She keeps her feet on the suitcases as a way of holding things carefully. They remind her “You are going to travel. What will you leave behind and what will take with you?” Her decision about this particular stuff is to hold on to it for now, but she is only carrying what will fit in these two suitcases.
One more example. I told you last week about the time that I did not move to Canada. For those who didn’t hear that story -- a long time ago, I was involved in an exciting search process with a church, and, after several months of promise, it all went sideways. What I didn’t mention last week was a large packet of documents that I had to deal with after the dust settled. The packet included stuff like months of correspondence with the search committee, forms from the denomination as they put me through their wringer, letters from church members expressing personal support or sharing their own distress, and also a few notes from people who told me why I was wrong and needed to repent. There were even one or two letters from other Canadian pastors, people who I have never met, who somehow learned the story and tracked down my address and sent a note of solidarity. I kept that packet for several years. Every once in a while I would come across it by accident or go looking for it on purpose. Sometimes I read through the pages as a way of justifying myself and keeping my anger alive. Sometimes I threw myself a pity party wishing for what might have been. It took several years, but finally I realized that holding on to those documents was only hurting me, so I put them into the shredder.
Deciding what to leave behind and what to take with us is complicated. Some stuff goes out immediately. Some stuff we carry for a good purpose and some we hang on to even when it is against our own interest to do so.
The Hebrew people are not traveling with many extra possessions. They only carry what they actually need to survive this long journey. They are not carrying many physical things, but the memories of life in Egypt have a certain weight. The fear of the unknown is making them anxious.
God responds to their anxiety by providing food. In the evening, quail blanket the camp. And in the morning, they find manna. They’ve never seen anything like it. They don’t even know what to call it. The word manna literally means “what is it?” They quickly come to understand that manna is going to take the place of bread in their lives. So they try to treat it like they treated bread in Egypt.
Walter Brueggemann notes “Egypt is a place where bread is gotten only for labor, where bread is only received as a reward for productivity, and where bread is always received in and with fearful anxiety . . . [but] ‘bread from heaven’ is an invitation to break with the destructive politics of bread production and the pressures upon which the empire depends, namely, fear, abuse, anxiety, and exploitation.” [1]
You see, in Egypt, they were also afraid of not having enough, and so they stored up what they got. They hoarded it. They didn’t share. Those were the practices of life in Egypt. When they moved to the wilderness, they brought those practices, those behaviors with them. They had to learn that they couldn’t gather more than one day’s worth of manna, because if they tried to store it, it went bad. They couldn’t hoard it. But if they each only took their share, there was always enough for everyone.
The manna offered daily reassurance that God was with them. The One who delivered them out of bondage in the fertile Nile valley would also sustain them in the dry, empty desert. The other message of the manna was that life in the wilderness is completely different from life in Egypt.
The stuff they knew how to do, the occupations they were good at, the knowledge that had been passed down from one generation to the next in Egypt would not apply very often in the lives that the current and future generations were going to live. They had to leave that way of life behind.
…
When Lewis and Clark were charged with exploring the Louisiana Purchase in 1804, they believed, as everyone did at the time, that there was a water route from Missouri all the way to the Pacific Ocean. So they set out in canoes on the Missouri River. This worked until they got to mouth of the river and had to carry the canoes. They crossed over the Lemhi Pass in what is now Montana, thinking that the next water way was just around the bend, only to be stopped by the Rocky Mountains. In his book, Canoeing the Mountains, Todd Bolsinger describes this history as an example of adaptive change.[2] He says that when Lewis and Clark encountered the Rockies, then they started to understand that the world ahead of them was not like the world behind them. They had all the best tools and expertise for one kind of exploration, but canoes are no use when you’ve run out of water. They had to leave the canoes behind and take on an entirely different kind of expedition.
This is what the Hebrew people learned in the wilderness. The life ahead of them was not like the life behind them. They had to change their ways of thinking and behaving. The tools and expertise that kept them alive during Pharoah’s oppression were not going to work anymore.
Todd Bolsinger, who wrote Canoeing the Mountains, was a pastor for 27 years. Now he is a seminary professor. He wrote that book in 2018 because he believes that churches and many other institutions have arrived at a place like Lewis and Clark did, like the Hebrew people did. The world ahead of us is not like the world behind us. If we are to complete the mission which God has given us, we have to adapt. We have to change.
You already know this. You are tired of hearing about it, tired of talking about it. We are intelligent people who want to thrive in the world ahead of us. We want to adapt. We want to embrace God’s calling. But we don’t yet understand how to do that, so we keep talking and wondering and listening and praying.
I’m inviting us again to consider the practices that might need to change, our ways of thinking and doing that will no longer work in the world that is now ahead of us. I started out talking about possessions that need to be managed. Sometimes we get rid of things easily. Sometimes we hold on to them with a purpose. Sometimes we have to cling to them even when they are hurtful. And I’m realizing that sometimes our possessions and our practices are so intertwined that we can’t separate them.
Right now, I own several fabric face masks. Three years ago, we learned about face masks. There weren’t enough N95’s being produced for everyone, so we reserved those for medical folks and the rest of us wore fabric ones. But now, I don’t know what to do with my fabric face masks. Should I hold on to them in case there’s a another shortage in the future? Should I re-purpose them? What good use could they serve? Maybe I should just start wearing mine again on a mission to bring back the good old days of 2020.
Friends, this is one of the hard questions we are dealing with as God’s people in this time. We are asking ourselves how we need to change to live in the world ahead of us. The world behind us required large church buildings and pulpits. It required stained glass windows and hymnbooks. Those things didn’t come and go like fabric face masks. They have served the church for hundreds of years. They enhanced and strengthened the lives of millions of Christians who passed down the faith from generation to generation. So we are loath to change them.
When we do it, it is with great fear and trembling, like when you removed the pews. But when we take that risk together, it is also a courageous, faithful act. Sometimes, paddling is just no longer an option and you have to leave the canoes behind.
We can well understand the fear of the Hebrew people. The mission to which God was calling them required a life completely different from what they had known. May we also come to trust the message of the manna – the message that God is with us in the wilderness, calling us to live where we are now, sustaining us into the life that is ahead of us. Amen.
[1] Walter Brueggemann, New Interpreter’s Bible, Volume 1, (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994), p. 815
[2] Todd Bolsinger, Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory ( Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2018).