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The Church of the Redeemer

October 1, 2006

the Reverend Dorsey McConnell

The Spirit of Moses

Text:  Numbers 11:4-30

 The rabble said, “we remember [what] we used to eat in Egypt for nothing:  the… melons and the garlic… and now there is nothing at all, but this manna to look at.”  … And Moses said to the Lord, “… If this is the way you are going to treat me, then put me to death at once… and do not let me see my misery.”

         Have some sympathy for Moses.   He has led six hundred thousand people for over a year through a barren land fraught with natural hazards;  he has continually reminded this same people that God has chosen them, saved them from slavery, led them “with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm,” out of a land of oppression and toward a promised land flowing with milk and honey;  He has taught them, disciplined them, showered them with signs of their favor in the eyes of the Lord;  they have repaid him with lying, cheating and stealing on a grand scale, idolatry, betrayal, sexual misconduct, mutiny, embezzlement and murder, and now they are complaining about the food.  It is all too much.  And Moses loses it.           

He loses it monumentally.  In spite of its brevity (it is only five verses long, from 11:11 -15), this is one of the great rants in history.  As fierce as his tirade is, however, and even taking into account all the great crises Moses has been through, one can’t help thinking that, as a leader, he could have made another choice.  He might have risen above it.  After all, Moses has a distinct advantage over everyone else in the story, in that he is privileged to talk directly with God, as one would speak to a friend, the Scripture says.  It ought to be easier for him to keep in mind the big picture, namely where they have come from, where they’re going, how they’re going to get there.  If he ever doubts God’s power all he has to do is ask him, “Holy One, forgive me, but I’m a little confused at the moment, would you mind going over the details one more time?”  One would think that, of all people, Moses would be able to hang on to the probability that God had not gotten them this far just to drop them all.  But none of this is in evidence.  In fact, when he turns to God, he embodies not the voice of faith, but the litany of the faithless. He sounds very much like the complaining “rabble” who set him off. 

The “rabble” for instance, forget the truth.  They may have had occasional access to garlic and melons in Egypt, but as slaves, they wouldn’t have eaten them every day.  And what about the fact that they were slaves, not guest workers, exchange students, or visiting lecturers, but slaves tethered to carts like animals, hauling massive stones up ramps to build a tomb for the very master who was crushing them—none of this appears in their nostalgia for Egypt.  They need a correction, a reminder, and who better to give it to them than Moses.  But instead he folds up; in his turn, he complains and he sounds a lot like the “rabble.”  Like the “rabble”, Moses forgets the truth.  For the truth is, he has never been alone in his task.  The first chapters of Numbers go to great length to describe the administrative organization of the people of Israel, their division into tribes, the appointment of their leaders, the detailed census conducted among them, even the traffic pattern for their movement on the road.  This was not a mob, this was a corporation, and on the human level, there is no reason to think it was not being well run, or that Moses did not have adequate help. 

What was missing was not administrative assistance, but spiritual conversion.   The best part of two years spent walking with God apparently hadn’t done much in that regard for the people of Israel.  In spite of the parting of the waters, all the revelations on Sinai, the giving of the law, their being disciplined over the incident of the Golden Calf, the people of Israel were apparently no closer to being a people of faith than they had been when they were still in Egypt, on the wrong side of the Red Sea, with Pharaoh’s chariots bearing down on them.  The complaints of Numbers 11, on this side of the Red Sea, look very much like the hysteria of Exodus 14, on that side.  Same people, same sins, and in spite of the miraculous escape, and a hefty dose of signs and wonders, no spiritual progress.  And Moses looks no better either.  As a matter of fact, he looks worse.  Gone is the boldness and the courage; gone the memory that it was God who actually did all this; sad the cry of a spiritual leader who can only mirror the hunger and sense of abandonment of his flock.

For the greater tragedy is that Moses has forgotten how much power is his by means of God’s spirit that is upon him.  Moses is God’s chosen prophet, and as such, the spirit of the Lord is flooding around him all the time, coursing through him, blessing, preserving, protecting and guiding him every moment, from breath to breath.   The treasury of heaven is open to him, with all its vision and hope of what life with God can be like.  But Moses has forgotten all that.  He is like a wealthy man who sits in rags just outside the doorway of his castle and assumes he is poor because he is facing away from it and has forgotten the magnificence that is all around him, behind him, above him.  So God arranges a demonstration.  Take seventy elders, God says (who, by the way, are already officers, already leaders, already appointed as the assistants Moses says he needs) and I will take some of the spirit that rests upon you—not all of the spirit, not even most of the spirit, just a little portion of the spirit that already rests upon you Moses, I shall redistribute it in front of your eyes, and you just watch what happens.  And so Moses does what he is told, and gathers the elders, and God takes a little bit of the spirit that is upon Moses and lets it rest on the seventy and the result is titanic.  Seventy administrators become seventy leaders and prophets of God, seventy visionaries seeing the future and all its hope with the eyes of God, seventy guides who lift up Moses, raise up this ragged rich man, turn him around and take him on a tour of his own house, saying to him, do you see what wealth is yours?  Do you see the hope and the future, the land of milk and honey, that already belongs to us all through faith in the gracious promise of God? 

And Moses sees.  He sees all that he had been blind to, he sees the little portion of the spirit refreshing, rebuilding, re-creating the leadership of Israel, sees the surplus of the spirit flowing into the camp, and hears about Eldad and Medad beginning to behave strangely, and by the time the town managers run to him to complain about them, (there is a lot of complaining in Numbers 11), a miracle has happened; Moses the giant, the Charlton Heston of the Bible, has become humbled.  No longer on his feet shaking his fist at heaven he is on his knees with tears of gratitude flowing down his face; instead of being dead under the burden of all he doesn’t have, he is alive by faith in the provision of God that is all around him, and his only desire is that everyone else could see what he sees and never again forget it; that’s why, when he hears the news, he smiles, and says through his tears, would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his Spirit on them.      

Sometimes the writers of the Bible write things very large for us so that we cannot possibly miss the point, as if to say (in this instance), no one was ever at the end of a longer rope than God’s servant Moses, and no one ever had a better reason to lose it than he, no betrayed spouse, no overwhelmed mom.  No broker looking at a bonus check several zeros shy of what he had been expecting.  No scientist staring at five years of her work going up in the smoke of inconclusive results.  No son or mother or father or daughter sitting helplessly by a bedside watching the person they love most slip away from a cruel disease.  If you have ever been in a situation similar to any of these, you will recognize the threshold that Moses came to, and you will understand why he lost it.  Yet, the witness of the New Testament declares unambiguously that what Moses prayed for, the church has received.  Yes, that’s right.  Through the Cross of Jesus and His Resurrection from the dead, the Lord has put his spirit on us, not just on some of us, but on all of us, all of us collectively, and upon each of us in our own lives and callings.  By grace, through faith, we possess the storehouse of God, the treasury of Christ’s promise, the vision of all that life could be and might be—filled with love and mercy, gratitude and hope—if only we could remember and see it. 

Like Moses, when we come to the end of our rope, we forget all this and in an instant are blind to it.  Life treats us harshly and we become like the rich man in rags at the door of his house.  How we need one another in such times!  For today, sitting next to you in this place, is the key to your hope written in the witness of another’s life, a member of this parish, a sister or brother in Christ, who themselves have endured great and terrible things, and have discovered, in their own way, that God did not bring them so far simply to let them go.  If God could take Moses at the end of his rope, an exhausted leader with six hundred thousand reasons to be bitter and disappointed, and turn him in a moment into a grateful, faithful, humble friend, astonished by grace, filled with the Spirit, amazed that life could be so grand and that he might be chosen to live it that way--  then how much more might we do the same for one another simply by drawing near to one another and telling a bit of our stories.  We might find that the Spirit does astonishing things in the course of it.  We might find ourselves gently lifted up by guides we never knew, introduced again to the house of hope we had forgotten we lived in, the anger and the pain of the past that had clung to us like rags all falling away, and find as we crossed the threshold, that we had truly come home.