One of the things that I have frequently encountered not just in other people, but in my own heart is the struggle with doubt. The struggle is a kind of hunger; starving for the food of certain provisions of food, of love, of purpose and meaning. It starts as a struggle with doubt about God’s provision; his love, protection, and guidance. But the fear generated by a feeling that one is in fact without these provisions in sight, often leads to a deeper doubt: is there even a God, or the God of the Christian Scriptures at all? And then we cling. Oh we cling to what we think feeds us: things that secure us, make us feel in control, make us feel righteous, make us feel loved and desirable, and purposeful. We cling as if this is the only food we will ever receive.
Our reading from Exodus broaches this very approach by the Israelites: God you’ve released us from our slavery to Egypt. Read: you have released us from our slavery to sin, all is supposed to be well isn’t it? Yet you’ve brought us out into the desert where we’re starving. Did you bring us out here to kill us? Let me be the first to admit that this is a constant struggle for me. Has God got me? Or must I anxiously toil and play the game in accordance with the rules of corporate America just to make sure I demonstrate my worth and value and don’t end up without a home, without the provisions needed to live? It feels like everything is falling down around me: the church is in rapid decline everywhere, there is political and social turmoil, war and violence, and I really don’t know how to respond to these threats to my survival and safety. I don’t sense your presence, Lord. Have you got me? Have you got a plan for me? Do I have a purpose here or am I drifting like a baby set out in a basket on the Nile river like Moses to be disposed of? It’s very easy at this point, to allow fear, exhaustion, frustration, and confusion to overwhelm your trust, faith and hope in God.
This is what happens shortly after the particular reading from Exodus we had this morning: Israel will go on to create a golden calf in the hopes that they can somehow secure what they need. Our alternative reading from the second book of Samuel has an even greater warning attached. Recall the story of David and Bathsheba: King David - a king of renown, wealth, power and influence, stealing the wife, Bathsheba, of a poor man, Uriah, and killing him to secure the capacity to legitimately marry her. The Lord sends Nathan, a prophet, to tell David a parable in which a rich man steals an animal from a poor man in order to feed the rich man’s guests because he doesn’t want to rely upon his own provisions. David, drawing on his righteous goodness says, “the rich man should be put to death.” Nathan says, yes David, death is precisely what you deserve for your sin. You’ve stolen the wife of a man whose one major gift in life was his wife and you’ve done this in the face of God who had given you all the provision you needed. Yet, just as with Adam and Eve, and Israel, God’s provision was not enough for you.
The thing about this seemingly universal struggle to sustain true faith and hope that God is not that we sink into personal despair. Rather it is that our fear and the loss of acting out of faith and hope, prevents us from distinguishing our own desires from God’s provision; how he tells us again and again to use (or not use) the resources he’s provided us and how to treat one another. We trade God’s provisions for the world’s ways of measuring worth and value, and for the world’s means of obtaining what we want.
Cue: Christian nationalism playing out in Russia and the United States right now. It is destructive of everything God has given to us and it is met again and again with God’s people starving for his presence. Instead, people assert their own opinions, ideas, and social/political and familial formation for God’s own, like the fast food McDonald’s that never satisfies but instead makes us fat and sick. We’ve done this in our own Churches where we prioritise our own local communities over the good of all our brothers and sisters in the faith. In these cases, the ability to read Scripture and feel drawn out of oneself, allowing God’s Word to penetrate and challenge our presumptions, ends up falling on our very deaf ears.
It is hard to heed this call to persevere in faith when things seem to be falling apart. When we look to the world for signs of God’s presence - as the crowds asked of Jesus - too often we look through the lens of our fears about what’s going on. We are, as Paul says, blown about by the wind of every doctrine, every event, every news story, or we stick our heads in the sand as if God is not there at all. We allow our fear to build our worldview and so our responses, our ways of thinking and our words and actions.
Yet we see in Scripture as we compare the world’s events today to it: There is nothing new under the Son of Man. The events we encounter in our lives - all of them - have been repeated across all generations of history; our perception of them is the only new thing going on. God has never been absent in directing and sustaining us through the horrific situations that we inflict on one another; God has never been absent in his promise to provide eternal life, even if, in this one, we are the least, the last, the most broken. Hope and faith grow from one simple thing: perseverance in seeking Christ even in the darkest valleys of our experiences. AMEN
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