September 29, 2024
Numbers 11:4-6, 10-16, 24-29
Mark 9:38-50
I do not share a lot of character traits with Moses, sad to say. I do not have a relationship with God such that I’m likely to receive stone tablets inscribed with commandments. I’m not likely to so impress a tyrant to free a substantial population of oppressed people – more’s the pity. I will probably not lead a group of people into a place of scarce resources. You might feel somewhat relieved about that last one. Frankly, so am I.
There is one characteristic that we share, however. Moses and I can both… whine.
Moses had reason to be upset, at least more reason than I usually do. As David G. Garber, Jr., writes at Working Preacher, “The lectionary verses return our focus to the character of Moses, caught between a weeping people and an angry God. Moses turns to the lament tradition and asks God why God set the burden of leadership upon him. Like Elijah, Jonah, and Job, Moses resorts to the extreme language of a death wish at the conclusion of his protest: ‘If this is the way you are going to treat me, put me to death at once—if I have found favor in your sight—and do not let me see my misery’ (verse 15).”
“If this is the way you are going to treat me, put me to death at once.” That’s quite a whine.
As Terence E. Fretheim writes at Working Preacher, “The people have been taken out of Egypt, but it proves difficult to take Egypt out of the people. The familiar orderliness of Egypt seems preferable to the insecurities of life lived from one oasis to the next.”
I understand Moses’ whining. I also understand the people’s concerns. Earlier in the Book of Exodus, God generally responded to their complaints with swift compassion. They were thirsty – there was water. They were hungry – there was manna. They were chaotic – there was Law.
Here in Numbers, however, as they moved away from Sinai toward their destination, God’s responses changed. As Margaret Odell writes at Working Preacher, “In Exodus, the same complaint sounded like vulnerability; here it smacks of rebellion. By the end of the chapter (and outside of this lectionary selection), God will respond to the complaint by sending so much quail it will come out of the Israelites’ nostrils. God judges complaining Israel with a blessing — or blesses them with judgment; it’s hard to tell.”
Before sending the quail, however, God did something else. God dealt with the whining leader before dealing with the weeping people. God gave Moses some help.
“Gather for me seventy of the elders of Israel,” God said. These were already leaders within their families and their extended clans. They would have arbitrated disputes and comforted disappointments and given good advice. They were not, however, regarded as part of the overall leadership of the travelling nation of Israel. People would bring some questions to an elder, but if it was about something more serious like, oh, we’re tired of manna, that would go to Moses.
But not any longer. The seventy elders would take up new roles of leadership within the nation. They would be able to answer questions that previously had gone only to Moses. They would reduce the burden, and also have the opportunity to proffer their own advice to the once-solo prophet.
Margaret Odell continues, “At the heart of Moses’ complaint, then, is a complaint about the divine character. What does divine favor mean, after all, if only Moses receives it? At the beginning of the long trek through the wilderness, Moses legitimately asks what is in store for him as the sole bearer of this people who were supposedly the apple of God’s eye.
“Fortunately, God does not respond to Moses’ actual request — ‘let me die!’ but to the substance of his complaint — that he is all alone with this burden.”
It’s a funny thing about singular leadership. It so seldom actually works. People who “go it alone” generally experience failure. They miss opportunities that others might have spotted. They choose out of ego or prejudice with poor results. Or like Moses, they simply lose connection with the people they’re trying to lead.
And they get whiney. Really whiney.
When leaders assemble a group of other leaders, there is a far greater likelihood that good ideas will get the attention they deserve. One sad example is the history of electrical transmission in the United States. Thomas Alva Edison was the great electrical genius whose work guided initial electrification efforts, but he made a significant mistaken calculation. He decided that direct current – DC, as most of us know it – would be the most efficient form in which to supply homes and businesses. Nikola Tesla, another genius, advocated for alternating current – AC. Edison assumed that they could overcome the transmission limits of DC, and it turned out he was wrong. That’s why we use AC in the power grid today.
Edison had, of course, plenty of people working with him. If any told him he was wrong, they didn’t have the influence they needed to.
In 1900, public health authorities in San Francisco, California, diagnosed cases of bubonic plague. In response, the Governor of California, Henry Gage, did precisely nothing. He denied that there was a problem for two solid years, during which the disease spread among the rat population and increasingly spread to people. It took a new governor and two more years of solid effort to end the epidemic.
Which returned, unfortunately, in the wake of thee 1906 earthquake, when conditions in the camps set up for survivors facilitated the spread of disease. Eventually it came under control once more.
I first learned about the San Francisco plague in 2020. All I could think was, “How little we’ve learned” about public health, contagious disease, and the ego of human leaders.
Arguably, one of the causes of the Protestant Reformation was the gap between the senior religious leaders of the Church and the people – or at least between senior and junior leaders. Martin Luther was an Augustinian monk, but not senior among them, when he composed his 99 Theses. John Calvin developed some of his Reformed theological ideas while still a student in France, before he moved to Geneva. Senior Church leaders first ignored, then tried to harshly punish these new ideas. And so the Church of the 1500s divided.
With a lot of whining on, I must admit, all sides.
I have mentioned, I think, that the Nominating Committee for our church is at work? We don’t need seventy elders, mercifully, but we do need some people of wisdom and discernment to take a place in our ministry together. Frankly, some of our long-time Moseses are tired. They need to take some time to, at the very least, catch their breath. It’s also true that fresh minds may have fresh ideas, and if you’ve ever thought to yourself, “Why doesn’t Church of the Holy Cross do…?” well, this is an opportunity to ask that question where decisions get made.
It must also be said that without the lay leadership of this church, I would be completely at a loss. Despite my carefully crafted reputation for complete knowledge of everything, the simple truth is that I don’t know everything. I sometimes think that the role of aging is to demonstrate, year by year, how little I know. It’s a reliable source of humility, for me at least.
And without the leaders of this congregation, one particular possibility raises its very ugly head. As I said, I’m not much like Moses. Except in our ability to whine.
Do you really want me whining? It’s not pretty.
I didn’t think so.
Joining church leadership to keep the pastor from whining is not, I admit, the best reason to do so. If that’s what you’ve got, I’ll take it. I really hope, however, that you join the leadership because you’ve got ideas, or because you’ve got wisdom, or because you’re feeling that inspiration of the Spirit that had Eldad and Medad – who couldn’t follow directions – prophesying in the camp.
As Debie Thomas writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “What can it mean if the divine spirit is suddenly showing up in the camp? Away from the tent? Away from Moses? Among men who don’t follow the rules? Won’t such lapses in propriety and etiquette end in chaos? What if the spirit keeps showing up in odd, unexpected places? What will happen then?”
Well, at minimum, it means your pastor will be smiling and praising God, not whining.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric tends to make changes while he is preaching, so the recorded video does not precisely match the prepared text.
The image is Moses Elects the Council of Seventy Elders by Jacob de Wit – AQGtI5P6nkpYyw at Google Cultural Institute maximum zoom level, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21988106.