Bread From Heaven In The Wilderness

Freedom can be terrifying when it doesn’t come with a full pantry and a clear map. We pick up the Exodus story right after the escape through the Red Sea, when the Israelites hit the wilderness and start wishing they were back in Egypt. It’s a startling moment of spiritual honesty: when the future feels uncertain, even slavery can start to look “stable.” We sit with that anxiety and ask what it reveals about the way fear, comfort, and habit can quietly run our lives.

From there, we talk about the “lowercase gods” that grab our attention and loyalty, not just the dramatic ones, but the ordinary attachments that promise relief: coffee, sweets, anger, procrastination, and the patterns we reach for when we’re stressed. The point isn’t shame. It’s clarity. The wilderness exposes what we’re leaning on, and why the old life can feel easier even when it isn’t good.

The heart of the passage is manna, “bread from heaven,” and God’s strange instruction to gather only what you need for today. We explore why that boundary is actually a gift, how daily provision forms daily trust, and why this sounds a lot like the wisdom of one-day-at-a-time spiritual practice. We also reflect on Walter Brueggemann’s insight that real glory shows up in vulnerable places, not in wealth, power, knowledge, or control. If you’re trying to rebuild faith, reset a habit, or find steady ground in a hard season, this is for you. Subscribe, share with a friend who’s in a wilderness season, and leave a review telling us what helps you practice “today is enough.”

Transcript

Catching Up On The Exodus Story

Pastor Darren 0:00

Well, hopefully you've gotten caught up on the story so far between uh uh um Carissa and what John's reading, and uh we're trying to give us a full experience of Exodus and the whole story. You know, if we're gonna dive in, we might as well really dive in there. So you're getting a uh the the whole story, as it were, and I hope you've been enjoying it. Uh we from last week uh we talked a bit about how they prepared to escape, these Israelites, uh, and then we ended kind of right as the Red Sea was parting, which thank you to Candy and Vinia, who found our little Red Sea thing here, kind of a cool uh backdrop for the altar. Uh so after they do escape, then there's some songs of celebration and Exodus, and we finally landed our passage today. Many people call it bread from heaven. So these Israelites they have been wandering, I think it's about 45 days now, having escaped, and now they're complaining about things, right? And God responds to their complaining by making sure that they have enough food for each day, and they are to take and to eat only that which they need for that day. And then God promises, or God promises, and then God delivers. It's kind of the story of Exodus, right? So if I I take us back to our theme that we're working through Exodus with, this theme of the journey to faith, you'll remember we talked about sometimes life will feel a bit like you're you're in a basket and you're floating down a river, and there's different influences and different pressures that are happening, and you're you're navigating that, and then amidst that journey, God comes to us with this invitation of some something better, a new way. Then we make a commitment to that new way. Remember the blood on the door last week, and then finally we um get to this passage where we are in that new life. And you would think there would be great happiness. Instead, the Israelites are not happy, they're wandering through the desert, through the wilderness. They're trying to figure it out. Food and drink are scarce. I'll remind you of verse 3. The Israelites said to them, If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the flesh pots and ate our fill of bread, for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger. Do you feel their anxiety? Do you feel they are upset? They're talking about how enslavement has its advantages. Right? At least we had food and water and shelter. Can you imagine being in a situation in which you would choose enslavement? This is where the Israelites are. I'll remind you, we've talked about these other influences that exist in the world around us, the gods, lowercase gods that grab our focus and they grab our attention, they grab our allegiance. When I talk about this, usually from in a place like this, most of us, we kind of dream up something really spiritually sinister, right? Something, some dark character in some movie. We don't immediately think of the everyday lowercase gods that will claim our attention, that will claim our focus, like coffee, he said with a mirror in front of him. Last year I tried to point out about this sinfulness with cookies. I got some threatening emails. I suspect the Girl Scout cartel. So this year we're going with coffee. It's been safe so far. But it helps us, doesn't it, to recognize the hold that sometimes these things have over us. Have you ever tried to quit coffee? Or to quit sweets, or just to just to lose weight, he said with a mirror in front of him. Right? It's it's not uh easy. I mean, with weight, now we're even getting shots that help us out with the darn thing. We're so beaten up over that. From there, that understanding of sin, that thing that gets a hold of us, it's a little easier to go to that extreme and talk about the things like drugs and alcohol that really can take over your life, in fact, lead to destroying your life. And if we have some courage, we might even take a look at some of the personal personality challenges that many of us have, really that all of us have, working on our patience, working on our anger, working on our procrastination. You know, just like the Israelites, we build the strength to leave that false, false God only to find that it's tough without that thing. Am I right? Like, holy smokes, that little sweet, it brings me happiness. My coffee gets me going in the morning, right? I can solve problems with my anger. Sometimes I make more problems with my anger, but still, this is what I know. This is what I know and how I know how to work. Have you been there? Because that's our Israelites. That's where that not only that, but the benefits that were supposed to come from this escape don't come very fast. Right? Because the invitation from God comes with this promise of something better. We think the something better is gonna come right away. Oh, great, I've made my commitment to you, God. Now you may bless me. By the way, you're welcome. Right? We get into that space where we think it's gonna change, right? And when it doesn't happen, we start looking back at that old habit. We start thinking about it differently in our minds. You know, the doctors say a little coffee is good for you. Hmm? Right? Anger's not always a bad emotion. How are we supposed to deal with social injustice in this world? Maybe I'm addicted, but at least it was something I liked. It gave me joy. It's here, right here, that we ought to recognize the real challenge of enslavement. Because yes, there is this power and it is physical, but it's also psychological, isn't it? It's also in our minds when we are enslaved, there's a certain uh comfort that comes from that predictability, and when we switch to faith, which can feel uncertain, especially at the beginning of that journey, it's tough. Trusting that there really is a better way, plus having faith that God feels we are worthy of it, sometimes that is the most challenging part of this new journey to faith. Getting back to the passage a bit, you probably noticed, but in a lot of the uh preparation for leaving and in the leaving itself, God is giving a lot of instruction that includes like behaviors and habits. I don't know if all of you were able to read, uh, but you probably noticed it. And you know, those of you who read, and you probably noticed it, and and you started picking it up pretty quickly, and you're like, oh, and it was one of those Bible passages where you're like, yada, yada, yada, okay, I get the picture. And we move forward to something that uh grabs our eye. But maybe we should be taking note of some of this behavior. Why is God doing this? Right? You'll see all the specificity of the instruction, all of it done with particular purpose, all of it done with particular remembrances of things that have happened. If we look again at what we see in our passage today, the Israelites are concerned, as they should be. Right, resources are light, but God responds, but God responds with caveats. You'll be given what you need for today, so only eat what you need for today. It sounds a little controlling, but at the same time, do you notice how a pattern can begin to develop? By taking only for today, we're trusting that there's a tomorrow. We're trusting that God is going to provide. We're building a faith. Personally, I hear some of that twelve-step language here, right? Uh the focus on now, focus on today. Have the trust and faith that you'll have what you need for today, today, and we'll worry about tomorrow, tomorrow. God is trying to help these Israelites develop the healthy life patterns, but also patterns that lead to faith, to trust, not only in God, my friends, but in ourselves. Finally, I wanted to point out that uh, and maybe this is something you're seeing too, the importance of this happening in the desert. Right? I have disappointing news for everyone. This kind of personal work, this shaping of ourselves, of our souls, of what we believe, this learning how to rely on God's presence, God's love, God's justice, this is the kind of work that you really can't do in a holiday spa. I'm sorry to have to bring you this news. We can't do this work, this work of shaping ourselves, while we're sipping complimentary orange juice over a mani petty. It just doesn't work. This is really stripped down work that we're doing as we're trying to shape ourselves and shape our faith. We have to go where we are vulnerable. We have to go where there are personal stakes. This is where we're going to develop some trust. When Jesus was ready to begin his ministry, he went and he got baptized, and then he went to the desert to get tempted by Satan. This is how he started his faith journey. This is how he prepared. He didn't go to the four seasons because that's not the place. We have to go where we are vulnerable. We have to go and learn to trust and learn to have faith. There's some good words to this that Walter Bruggerman has, and those of you who are working through that book uh uh would probably enjoy it. Uh, but he starts off by saying, but of course, the narrative is exactly to the point that the glory of God carried by Jesus is found precisely in the wilderness places of society. Thus, glory and slash wilderness, this is our Exodus understanding. The glory of God comes to us in the wilderness, in our articulation, comes to us as glory crucifixion. Meaning that glory, the understanding of God has to go through this darkness, this tough time. We need to understand how we are connected through our own imperfections, our own actions that that uh diminish Christ, even kill Christ. We need to find our way through our inadequacies, our vulnerabilities, our sinfulness, to be able to understand who we are being asked to be. Give me one more slide there. In that regard, the Christian confession is completely congruent with the Exodus narrative, the peculiar God evidences glory, meaning the legitimacy of governance, the legitimacy of God's presence to guide our lives because of the way God responds to us. That is learned in places of jeopardy. Finally, this last bit. The takeaway from this sequence of witnesses is that we should not be impressed by or enthralled to the prominent modes of glory expressed as wealth, power, knowledge, or control that seduce. The authentic, trustworthy aura of legitimacy is found precisely in arenas of vulnerability, among the blind, the deaf, the lepers, lepers, the lame, the dead, and the poor. Friends, the difficult news, but also the blessed news is the pathway to this faith is through our own wildernesses, our own deserts, because it's in that place that we are able to open ourselves and develop faith. The tendency at this point would be to begin to set some high bar of faith. Right? You see how it works now, okay? Give it all to God now. It's it's that easy. My hope is that the truth is the feeling is the opposite. To me, the hope that's revealed here is that our challenge as human beings, people looking to find God's abundance, looking to live amongst God's love and peace and justice, is not unique. We share that not only with each other, but with our brothers and sisters from 3,000 years ago. This is in many ways just a snapshot of what it means to be a human, and hopefully there's comfort in that to know that that is the journey. We have uh a journey that we take where we're navigating between spiritually healthy things and not so healthy things. We have tendencies and inclinations to both, depending on the circumstances. Our invitation is to strive to maximize the healthy. That might mean having to realign yourself from time to time. From this part of the Exodus story, we can learn that this can be difficult, but we also learn that there is a pathway. It's a pathway built around realigning our faith with trust for God's presence in the world and in yourself. It's a presence characterized by peace and justice and love, and it's that presence we are seeking. May God bless us on this quest to know and to live that presence. Amen.