The Morning After - "Post-Sunday Worship Musings"

In a magazine article I just read, I was reminded of that pivotal story in the Bible that describes the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt. The story of the Exodus tells a story of promise and fulfillment; longing and realization. Yet, that story by itself is incomplete. It is much more than just a record of some event in ancient history. I have read that some of the Jewish Rabbis relate that each generation must relive that story in their own time and context. In that sense, the Exodus story is retold over and over again by successive generations as they identify their own captivities and the quest for freedom from bondage to them. And, it is ultimately God's story and the story of humankind's willingness to enter into this journey with God.

During that movement from captivity to freedom, God fed the Israelites in the wilderness with the miraculous provision of manna to sustain them on the way. In the 16th chapter of Exodus, where this story is told, we find that the Israelites are complaining about the food that they have been receiving from Moses. They recalled the "old days" when everything seemed better, even though they had in reality been under bondage to Egypt as slaves. When God gave the Israelites this miraculous food, they named it manna, which means, "What is it?." Verse 13 states that "It looked like coriander seed, whitish. And it tasted like a cracker with honey."

As the Rabbis have written, we, too, face our own "journey" through our time. As people of the church, we no longer live in the place where we used to. Technology, society, globalization and the increased inter-dependency and inter-relatedness of nations and peoples, as well as the decline in the "authority" of the institutional Christian church in many parts of the world, have created a new wilderness that we must "walk" through. It is certainly tempting to look with exasperation on the state of the church today and to long for the "good old days" when we new the hymns we sang each Sunday, when all of our children attended Sunday school, when new churches were being built, and all of the stores were closed and the only traffic we encountered was that of people driving to and from church or, perhaps, going out for a Sunday-after-church drive.

But the world has moved on.  And we, all of us and the church, are called to be on the move, watching and hoping for the best for our world and for the successive generations that will inhabit it; gazing at that pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire both day and night that signals where God would have us go (See Exodus, chapter 13).  Our journey is not about keeping the church as it was, as though it could be petrified into a state of permanency. The church should not be static and moribund. Rather, like our God, the church must be dynamic and generative. We must be a gathering of people energized by faith, hope and love.

We cannot be a church that longs for the imagined past (everything really wasn't all that great, anyway.) And, we cannot even be only a church that strives to satisfy today's members and friends. We must gather together those who are yet to fully experience the strengthening love and compassion of God. We must gather with great intention what God has provided as sustenance for us, namely, the doing of God's will, living with trust in our God, letting go when needed and stretching out to grasp what God offers to us today.