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Sermon by Dr. Ellen Davis
Crescent Hill Presbyterian Church
July 13, 2010
Exodus 16
The Manna
Economy
Moving inside the Exodus story we just
heard, it is now just six weeks since God brought Israel out
of Egypt with a strong hand and an outstretched arm. On that
day Israel watched the hand of the LORD pile up the waters
of the Sea, so Israel passed through on dry ground. Then the
divine hand released the walls of water, and they collapsed
on Pharaoh's army. All this just six weeks ago, and now ...
what are the Israelites saying? "If only we had died by the
hand of the LORD in the land of Egypt, while we were sitting
by the stew pots, eating till we were stuffed!" (v.3).
That one sentence is enough to tell us
what happened to Israel during their generations in Egypt.
Slaves though they were, they learned to rely on the
deceptive abundance of Empire. The fertile Nile Valley was
the green miracle of the Ancient Near East. The Nile
provided food in abundance, and Pharaoh the god-king
controlled the Nile—or so he thought. Pharaoh’s agricultural
agents took in so much food, he needed whole storage‑cities
to hold the surplus, and slaves to build the store‑cities,
Rameses and Pithom. So Israelites built those cities,
serving Pharaoh’s purposes well enough – that is, until by
God’s grace Israel, too, prospered from the bounty of the
Nile. When the slaves “became fruitful...and multiplied”
(Ex. 1:7), then Pharaoh became frightened. To him
they looked like so many “swarmers” (1:7) – insects,reptiles
– and so he ground them under a crushing workload and threw
their boy-babies into the Nile. Then the people Israel cried
out to God, and God’s mighty hand took them out of Egypt.
Who could forget that: the horror and the
deliverance? But the ex-slaves did forget. No sooner were
they out of Egypt than the Israelites started longing for
the slave economy that had been steadily killing them off:
"If only we'd died happy, sitting by the stewpots, eating
until we were stuffed! For you [Moses and Aaron] have
brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole
congregation by starvation!" So now we see that deep in
their hearts, Israelites had bought into the economic system
of Pharaoh’s Empire, whose basic principle is typical of
every Empire: namely, maximize profit at the top, get as
much as you can, share it with as few as you can, but
convince everybody that they somehow benefit from the
system. This mode of economic operation is in our news every
day.
Now listen to how God responds to
Israel’s forgetfulness: “Look, I am about to rain down for
you bread from heaven, and the people shall go out and
collect just enough for each day, so that I may test them,
whether they will walk in my Torah (my Teaching) or not”
(v.4). With this grace-filled instruction, God begins to
outline for Israel a totally different kind of economic
system. Interesting – here on the far side of the Red Sea,
the very first thing God needs to get straight with Israel
is the economics of eating. The Manna Economy is the precise
opposite of the killing Economy of Empire. Israel gathering
manna one day at a time (no storing the stuff; it gets wormy
and rotten overnight) – now contrast that with
Pharaoh's vast cities of grain silos.
The key question of course, is where we
think our food comes from. To the Egyptian slaves, the
answer seemed to be that bread came from Pharaoh, who owned
all those wheat fields along the Nile and took all the grain
into his silos. But the manna economy rests on the
non-negotiable truth that bread comes from God; always and
everywhere food is God’s gift. That is why the manna
economy incorporates within itself the practice of keeping
Sabbath, a day for remembering that God is the Creator of
heaven and earth (Ex. 20:11) and thus the source of every
good material gift, food included. That is why the
Israelites collect a double portion on Friday, and on
Sabbath they stay home; they have time for gratitude, time
to rest in God’s sufficiency. These two simple practices—no
hoarding the manna, keeping Sabbath—these are the practical
means by which Israel is meant to remember that its life is
totally and blessedly dependent on God.
However, the Israelites don’t get it.
Some of them try to store the manna. We can sympathize,
can’t we? They’ve been slaves; they are living on the edge
in the wilderness. Who can blame them for wanting to have a
small margin of security? Again, some of them go out to
collect on Saturday – just to get a little extra. And God
shows zero-tolerance for these infractions. For the first
time God becomes angry with the Israelites, really angry:
“How long will you refuse to keep my commandments and my
teachings?” (16:28). From our perspective, God has tolerated
much worse than this: all that whining, even that insulting
innuendo of divine malevolence: “You have brought us out
here to kill us….” But what pushes God over the edge is
Israel’s inability or refusal to live by the rules of the
manna economy and thus acknowledge that all food is the
daily gift of God. If they can’t do that, then there will be
no deal, no covenant, between God and Israel.
Now, what is at stake for us in this long
and detailed story about Israel’s ideal food economy? The
Manna Economy is no less confrontational for us than for the
Israelites fresh out Egypt. It may in fact be more
confrontational for us than any previous generation, because
we are enmeshed, all of us, in a global food economy whose
size and power are unprecedented in history, and whose basic
principles are exactly opposed to those of the Manna
Economy. The Manna Economy is governed by actual human
need; its rhythms are God-centered, punctuated by Sabbath.
By contrast, we get our food via a system of ceaseless
industrial-scale production. It is a system of huge rotting
surpluses in one place and starvation in another. Everywhere
it shows a dangerous disregard for the earth as God’s own
creation. Across the globe, industrial agriculture is a
machine spinning crazily out of control, effecting massive
erosion of our land, drastic draining of rivers and
underground water supplies, widespread poisoning of water
systems. Some 38 percent of the world’s agricultural land
is now degraded;
half of Iowa’s original six feet of topsoil has gone south.
We are robbing the future, but let’s put a face on that: we
are robbing the young, our own children and grandchildren
and their children. Damage on this scale will be repaired
only in geological time.
We who live in big farming states know
from our local news sources, we see with our own eyes that
even now the suffering of land and people and animals is
immense, beyond calculation. Farm workers suffer from
chemical poisoning, food-factory workers from massive
injuries on the ever-accelerating production lines.
Factory-farmed animals are psychotic from toxins and
confinement; their effluents poison air, water, and perhaps
even the crops on which the still-raw manure is too often
sprayed. In contrast to the manna economy, in which everyone
has enough and no one has too much, this is a system of glut
and dearth, in which a few giant multinational corporations
get immensely rich, while the vast majority of farmers, in
this country and around the world, are driven out of
business, off the land, into desperation and increasingly
into violence against their families and themselves.
In our present situation, the manna story
presses us to consider how we as Christians might assume
some responsibility for how we and our culture as a whole
eat. If indeed our food economy is part and parcel of our
life with God and one another, then the first thing
necessary is to learn more about the real cost of our food.
Does the food that is cheap at the supermarket or
MacDonald’s entail inhumane treatment of people and animals,
permanent loss for the soil, depletion of safe seed and
water supplies? Does its chemical history make you nervous
about your long-term health, and even more your children’s?
Will our children look back at this generation and accuse us
of reckless waste of their food security?
The book of Exodus tells us that Pharaoh
ultimately destroyed his own empire through blind refusal to
acknowledge the God who is Creator of all. Through ten
devastating plagues, Pharaoh pits his puny and deluded power
against the true God, who answers his delusion by turning
Egypt’s dusty soil into lice and the life‑giving waters of
the Nile into blood. Pharaoh is a royal fool who uses his
power to destroy his own land. After the seventh plague,
Pharaoh’s courtiers shake their heads in broken-hearted
amazement and ask: “Do you not yet know that Egypt is
history – it’s gone!?” (10:7).
As a member of the reckless generation, I
am haunted by those words: “Do you not yet know that Egypt
is history?” Do we not yet know that a large swath of the
Gulf Coast is history? That some 500 mountains in
Appalachia, along with their creeks and valleys, are
history? That the High Plains Aquifer, the Colorado River,
countless more rivers and streams are on their way to being
history?
So the biblical story condemns us for our
grossly destructive practices, and this is terrible news.
But the reason for bringing this story into a place of Good
News, into our worship today, is that it also encourages us,
guides us in putting our food production practices on the
church’s agenda. The Bible asserts repeatedly, starting with
the first chapter of Genesis, that eating is part of our
life with God. And this manna story gives us
permission—more, it gives us a mandate to bring food into
our faith life, to talk, as the people of God, about how we
are eating. The principles of the manna economy—take only
what you need, remember that all food comes from God—these
are to be the permanent principles of every godly economy.
That is why, when the Israelites get to the Promised Land of
Canaan, a jarful of manna is set in the sanctuary, right in
front of the Ark of the covenant, as a keepsake for all
generations. Eating faithfully is the basic covenantal act;
indeed it is the fundamental act of every healthy community.
The Bible cares how we get our food, because this is the
very first place that justice establishes itself in our
lives, or else it departs from us as we eat against the
principles of the divine economy.
That simple understanding of food justice
underlies these remarkable lines from Psalm 85, the work of
a poet who surely comes from the Israelite Heartland, knows
the social realities of food production, and knows also that
always and everywhere, food comes from God:
Surely [God’s] salvation is near to those
who fear him,
that Glory may dwell in our land.
…Righteousness and peace kiss;
faithfulness springs up from the earth,
Yes, the
Lord gives what
is good,
and our land yields its bounty. (Ps.
85:10-13)
May it be so for us, in this land and
throughout the earth, generation to generation. Amen.
Ellen F. Davis
Duke Divinity School
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