Craving the Past, Salted with Fire

Sunday, September 29, 2024 – Mark 9:30-37 also Numbers 11:4-6, 10-16, 24-29, Psalm 19:7-14, James 5:13-20

I first began to understand the connection between food and its effects on my physical and emotional health in the mid-1990s, when I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia. Not only did I experience physical pain and chronic fatigue, but also depression and anxiety. It was an intuitive healer named Angela that first suggested I cut dairy and wheat out of my diet.

Within a matter of weeks, I felt like a different person. My pain was almost entirely gone, I had more energy, and my internal landscape got sunnier. I also lost a bunch of weight.

By 1999, I was feeling really good about myself. At this same time, the world of internet dating had just begun with Yahoo Personals, and I gave that a try. At one point, I remember having nine dates in a 7-day period. I thought to myself, “whose life is this?” As someone who’d historically had difficulty establishing relationships, it certainly didn’t feel like my life.

I ended up meeting and dating a man named Rick. Unfortunately, he turned out to be a narcissist and pathological liar, and when that all blew up, I sank into a major depression. Many of my clean eating habits went out the window. Ever since then, I’ve wrestled on and off with cravings for all the foods I know I can’t eat. Sometimes I happily eat the right things, but at other times, I just want the foods that I want and find it too easy to fall off the healthy eating wagon. As a foodie, I can relate to the “rabble” that craved meat and all the delicious foods they’d left behind in Egypt.

I can understand strong cravings, even if what you crave brings consequences that aren’t worth it. Change is hard, and leaving behind all that is familiar – even if it was bad for you – is hard on the human soul. That’s why I wish God didn’t come across as such a jerk in this story. Because from the perspective of us poor, limited humans, God sure seems to have unrealistic expectations of both the Israelites and of Moses. In fact, it makes me very happy to see Moses give God a piece of his mind.

I love the examples of people arguing with God in the biblical literature, because I argue with God. All. The. Time. That’s why the Bible is such a treasure. It shows us ourselves.

Yes, the Bible also shows us glimpses of God, especially through the revelatory character of Jesus of Nazareth. But it honestly tells us much more about the human condition and the ways in which people wrestle with both the difficulties of earthly life and with this great mystery we call God.

Our readings today reveal so much about this human journey. First, they give us insight into our struggles with change and the kind of leadership needed during difficult times. Next, they reveal the nature of the Spirit of God and its relationship with the human family. And finally, we get some good advice on how to deal with our troubles.

First, we know that the Israelites have been led out of slavery in Egypt toward the hope of a promised land but must first spend 40 years in the wilderness. In the biblical narrative, the wilderness is always a space of transition, of movement from one identity to another. We see it here with the Israelites, and we also see it in Jesus, as his time in the wilderness moved him from who he was before he was baptized into his healing ministry (And don’t think the number 40 wasn’t written intentionally to draw parallels to the 40 years).

But embracing a whole new identity isn’t easy.

The Israelites were now free, but wandering in a difficult landscape, where they were fed by God in the form of manna. They should be grateful, right? Instead, we read about the “rabble” and their cravings, stirring up discontent among the rest and causing them to weep. In a way, I can’t blame them. Maybe they were just sick of manna.

But they were craving the conditions of their slavery! Yeah, well, I miss the days when I could eat pizza, lasagna, and ice cream, too. In digging into this text, I learned that the “rabble” were not Israelites. In a way, we could think of them as people who were not entirely bought into God’s vision. So, they stirred up some trouble.

This is a common problem for company leaders who come up with new visions requiring big change but don’t take the time to get the buy-in from all the people who need to be part of the effort. It’s also common in churches.

The people are whining and Moses isn’t pleased. He’s also pretty ticked off at God, saying, “Did I conceive and birth these people? I’m not able to carry them alone, they’re too heavy for me. Either help me or kill me, for heaven’s sake!” Moses pushes back on God and God’s expectations. It seems to me in this text that maybe both Moses and God learn something in this interaction.

So, God delegates some of the burden of leadership to the seventy elders. I’m sure Moses is relieved to have this help. But Joshua gets his nose out of joint when two of the elders are prophesying outside of the sanctuary tent. He gets petty and territorial, demanding Moses stop them. This is another messed up human tendency – we want to keep the goodies to ourselves and our little group while God wants to spread them around!

Moses is a wise leader when he says that he wishes that all people were prophets. Jesus shows the same wise leadership when the narrow-minded disciples again want to limit the power of the Spirit of God and who God blesses. But Jesus says, “Whoever is not against us is for us.”

The Spirit of God can’t be contained. It can’t be limited to only our little circle. God will have none of that kind of thinking.

The Bible in its Hebrew and Christian testaments is one long story of the struggle of humans to relate to and understand the joys and sorrows of human life, and this creative mystery that we call God. We believe that God is love and loving, and that God is powerful, and yet we see so much pain and evil around us.

Unfortunately, it seems as if suffering is just wired into this embodied life.

So, it helps us to see how our spiritual ancestors struggled with this truth. We know that we exist in a long line of generations who have wrestled with these big questions and with God. We know that we have company when we struggle with cravings for things that will hurt us, or when we want to stir up trouble because we are afraid and stressed, or when we are challenged by leadership woes.

James gives us some good advice. When we’re sick, when we struggle, he says we should pray. When we’re happy, we should sing. We should also confess our failings to each other, and anoint each other with oil, to invite God’s spirit to help us.

Jesus says that we’ll be “salted with fire.” I take that to mean that we are seasoned and strengthened by adversity. But rather than taking our pain out on each other or sowing mistrust, he tells us to be at peace with one another. We can take this difficult yoke of being human upon ourselves, accept it, trust that God is always with us, and then reach out to each other in love and in peace.