Sermons
October 5, 2025 (Proper 22)
“We don’t know where our next meal is coming from.”
Exodus 16:1-18
I have no idea what it’s like to be truly hungry.
There was only one time in my whole life that I even came close: one summer when Mike and I both found ourselves unemployed at the same time. He qualified for unemployment, but I didn’t, and while we were waiting for his first unemployment check, we paid all the bills that we could pay—left a couple of them that we thought it’d be safe to let slide—and had $28 left in the bank, with no idea how long it would be till we had any more. All there was to eat in our house was a package of freezer-burned chicken soup. We thinned that out and choked it down—it tasted terrible—for a couple meals, then it was gone.
That very day, his first unemployment check arrived, and we were able to go to the store and stock up.
That’s the only time I ever came close to being really hungry—not hungry in the “it’s been a long time since lunch” sense, but actual, “no idea when I’ll eat again” hungry. Part of the reason for this, of course, is that I grew up toward the end of the incredible, widespread prosperity that most people in this country enjoyed after World War II. But that’s not all of it.
My family owned a restaurant and a grocery store. We ate at the cafeteria almost every Sunday after church, and any time we needed groceries we just went down to Kwik Stop and got what we needed. We would charge them, and sign the little slip; but when those slips got back to the office, the secretary, who processed charges and deducted them from people’s paychecks, she would just throw ours away. When we needed bulk items, like when my mom wanted to make a big batch of chili, we would just go get what we needed from the cafeteria’s coolers and stockroom. If there were special items we wanted (like my New York Seltzer), my grandpa would add them onto his order from the wholesale suppliers.
I don’t know if this was the right way to do things, but it’s how we lived. And because of that, I was in college before I really gave any thought at all to how much food actually costs. It was just always available, in abundance, whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted it.
It was for a different reason, obviously, but the Israelites living in slavery in Egypt had a similar relationship with their food. For all the other types of oppression they faced, the Israelites apparently didn’t go hungry—or at least that’s how they remembered it as they stood in the midst of the barren wasteland that is the Sinai desert. They had pans of biscuits and bowls of gravy for breakfast, plenty of meat and bread at other times.
When God freed them from their enslavement and Moses led them out of Egypt, they first camped at an oasis called Elim. There they still had plenty to eat, abundant water, everything they had come to expect. But they didn’t stay there long; before much time went by they were led on into the wilderness.
Our language tends to be shaped by our surroundings, and in Hebrew the word generally translated into English as “wilderness” doesn’t mean the kind of wilderness we generally envision in this part of the world. Here we might picture an untamed forest or open prairie when we hear the word “wilderness.” But in Hebrew the word for “wilderness,” midbar, also means “desert.” Around the areas where the people who spoke ancient Hebrew lived, that was the kind of wilderness you would most frequently run into once you left places where the land had been cultivated.
When the Israelites wandered in the wilderness for forty years, they were actually out in the desert. And that desert is incredibly barren—almost like a moonscape; just dirt and rocks, very few green things anywhere.
As soon as the Israelites got away from the oasis of Elim, reality set in. There was nothing to eat in the desert. Nothing.
The people’s selective memory kicked in; of their time in Egypt they remembered only that they always had plenty to eat. Never mind that they had been worked to death, or that they had all been through that awful time when Pharaoh made an official decree requiring all male Hebrew babies to be killed. Never mind any of that; at least we had enough to eat.
In their anxiety about being hungry, they were quite ready to bargain away their freedom. “Let’s go back to Egypt and eat our fill; if the Lord wants to kill us, let us die there, with full stomachs.”
It’s interesting that God wasn’t angry with them for complaining about being hungry, or even for longing to be back in slavery where they at least had enough to eat. God simply responded with the announcement that the people would be fed.
We aren’t meant to miss the elements of worship in this story. God tells the people that they will be fed, and they are called to “draw near” to God. They turn and face the wilderness—turn their faces, as well as their hearts, away from Egypt—and God’s glory is revealed, right there in the barren desert.
Toward the end of the chapter, after today’s reading, we discover that a double portion of food was provided on the day before the Sabbath, so the people could have a day off even from the work of gathering and preparing the food God gave them. (Keep in mind that the Ten Commandments aren’t given until four chapters further on in Exodus.)
The people see God’s glory, and at night there was meat to eat—“quails came up and covered the camp.” Then the next morning, just as soon as the dew dried, there was this fine layer of flaky stuff on the ground, “the bread that the Lord has given you to eat,” as Moses told them. They called it “manna,” from the Hebrew word man-hu, which might loosely be translated with the name of one of my favorite candy bars, “Whatchamacallit.” They gathered it, the same measure for each person, and found that big appetites and small all ended up with enough to eat and be satisfied, but with no leftovers. (They tried, that first day, to hold back some leftovers, but they found that it went bad overnight. Turns out the “bread of anxious toil”[1] isn’t really fit to eat.)
On the sixth day there was twice as much, and the leftovers didn’t spoil, so they could take the Sabbath off and not go hungry—this is very different from the life of a slave, who never gets a day off. Even so, some people still went out on Sabbath morning to try and gather manna. It took them awhile to get used to trusting God.
It seems that the scholars have a bit of an argument going about the manna and quails. Some want to make sure we know the giving of the manna and quails is very different from anything that happens on an everyday basis. The food comes from God, a miracle, totally supernatural in nature.
But others emphasize the ordinariness of what happens. They point out that, to this day, people who live in the Sinai desert gather the secretions of an insect that feeds on the tamarisk tree and bake it into cakes that they call manna. They say there’s a phenomenon seen in that area from time to time, in which the wind carries birds who land so exhausted that they can be caught by hand.
Of course the dailiness of these two things, and the fact that there is always just enough, no more, no less, do indicate that there’s something deeper going on; but the stuff the Israelites eat in the desert is what people have eaten for centuries in that place, and continue to eat to this day. It’s common, and ordinary, and easily explainable. Is it therefore not to be considered a miracle from God?
I think it is.
Some people of faith see a miracle as something that happens at precisely the right time, even if it’s a perfectly ordinary thing that happens all the time. And even though there is apparently still manna in the Sinai wilderness, even though we have a plausible scientific explanation for it and for the quails, it’s clear from the story that God provides it for God’s people. It’s also clear that, even though these things are perfectly natural, normal things, God was involved in making sure the people were able to gather precisely what they needed for each day, and able to keep leftovers just one day a week, so they could have a day of Sabbath rest.
God wanted the people to know they were receiving their daily bread from God’s own hand, and to learn that God could be trusted to provide it, day in and day out, without the people having to hoard it or be anxious about it. (This is a lesson a lot of us still struggle to learn.)
But the daily ordinariness of it is important, because it reminds us that God’s presence is not just to be found in special places and spectacular phenomena. God is present and active in the everyday events of life, as we work and prepare food and eat it and raise our families and clean our houses and do all the other normal things we do every day.
[1] Psalm 127:2