Hilton Head Island, SC – February 25, 2024
The Chapel Without Walls
Exodus 16:1-8; Romans 8:18-25
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text - "If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger." - Exodus 16:3
The children of Israel have now been in the Sinai Peninsula for a month and a half. They have recently encountered some of the most amazing events in the history of humanity. Moses has appeared from nowhere, and has taken charge of an enslaved and dispirited people, and they who had given up all hope have suddenly become filled with great expectations for the future. Moses has appeared before the Pharaoh, and has told him that the God of Israel wants His people freed. The Pharaoh reluctantly has agreed, but each time he has changed his mind. So whenever this has happened, Moses has sent a plague against the Egyptians: frogs, gnats, flies, boils, thunder, hail, locusts, darkness, even the death of the first born in all the homes of the Egyptians.
But then, the biggest thing of all in this biggest of all biblical spectacles. At the assigned day, all the Israelites leave their slave homes and gather at the shore of the Red Sea (or the Gulf of Suez, or wherever), Moses says the word, the waters part, and the people walk across to the other side on dry land, without so much as a sloshed sandal. It is a miracle! It is the greatest miracle in the annals of Israel! Nothing before or after could ever come close to it for pure divine pizazz!
And now they are in the Sinai, and now they have been schlepping for a month and a half, and now they are - - - honked. They are really angry. What does Moses mean, taking them out of the safety they had known in Egypt into the utter uncertainty of the wilderness wandering? I don't know what a fleshpot is, but it certainly sounds better to sit beside than a dusty desert, which is all the people have now.
The people are peeved! They want action! Two days after the waters of the Red Sea parted, they wanted to see the trucks from Allied Van Lines and United and Mayflower start rolling toward the streets of Tel Aviv and West Jerusalem. A little milk, a little honey, a plump Rhode Island Red in every pot, and two Jaffa orange trees in every yard. They had high hopes, very high hopes, but nothing is happening! So they start to murmur, as the Bible so frequently understates what they do, and they are going to continue some more-or-less non-stop murmuring for the next thirty-nine years, ten and a half months. Six weeks they have been gone, and they have almost forty more years to go! Their great expectations are dashed, their high hopes are shattered, their confidence in their future has been badly shaken!
Therefore Moses says to them, "Well what did you expect? Did you think the Exodus would last for only two chapters? Did you think this thing would be over in a couple of days? We have all the rest of Exodus and Leviticus and Numbers and Deuteronomy to go, and already you're murmuring? Kwitcherbellyachin', for heaven's sake!"
Samuel Johnson, the incomparable eighteenth century lexicographer, author, and publisher, was given a manuscript by a would-be author. The man had great hopes for his work, and he assumed it would launch him on a magnificent career in writing. Then he received Dr. Johnson's letter of rejection. "Your manuscript is both good and original," said the witty and biting Dr. J., "but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good." And so, because the writer had pinned so much hope on making it big, he found himself saddled with so much despair.
Ernest Hemingway's story, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, is about another writer who is about to die. The writer Hemingway writes of his fictional writer, "Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well. Well, he would never have to fail at trying to write them either. Maybe you could never write them, and that was why you put them off and delayed the starting" (The Snows of Kilimanjaro, MacMillan, New York, 1961, p. 5).
Great expectations, especially of a naive or ill-founded variety, can stop us in our tracks. When they are not realized, they can catapult us into the depths of despondency.
If somebody close to you was not born with a severe mental impairment, there is no way you can expect that person to be act normally. Anyone who is four-foot-ten is not going to be a great basketball player. Anyone who was born with only one arm is not going to be a great violist. Where did we ever get the notion that things which can't be can be? Why do we set ourselves up for a plunge into sorrow, knowing that what we hope for or expect is not likely or maybe even not possible?
Every evening we see it on the television screen. The Israelis keep pounding the hapless Gazans, who have no safe place to which they can flee. Most of the world condemns the Israelis, but they won’t stop until Bibi Netanyahu decides it is time to stop. Illegal and legal immigrants keep crossing our southern border by the thousands. No matter what is done to deter them, desperate people will find a way to enter. The effects of climate change are shown from around the world. “News” is a breeding ground for dismay. Great expectations can make life miserable if they are never realized.
We are in the midst of some very hard times. We are faced with late Forties and Fifties-type economic and political expectations in the Twenty-twenties. When are we going to start getting realistic? When shall we begin to understand that the world and its nations and peoples and we ourselves cannot produce what we have led ourselves to believe we can produce? When will we grasp the fact that in uncertain times there is bound to be an uncertain future?
All of these things are big things. Where can we see some little things, some personal areas where you and I individually might have expectations which are far too great? Well, there is the area of medical care. Hardly a week goes by without my being reminded again of people who expect too much from our medical system, the one we like to boast is the best in the world, and maybe it is. Nevertheless, most patients seem to anticipate that whatever it is that brings them to the doctor or the hospital can be cured, and that it can be cured quickly and cheaply. You can forget cheap; it is likely to cost a bundle, even if it is an ingrown toenail or a mere case of rampaging heartburn. As for a cure, there are scores of individual conditions doctors shall never be able completely to eliminate. Then there is that one universal condition to which doctors and everyone else shall inevitably fall victim, the one called "death." If all that is true, then why do we hold it against doctors and hospitals when they don't automatically accomplish what we expect them to accomplish?
The whole world is in the process of being inundated by refugees and immigrants. People from underdeveloped nations have been flooding into the Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Poland, Columbias, Guyana, and elsewhere by the millions. Most of them are the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free of which Emma Lazarus wrote and whom the Statue of Liberty purportedly welcomes to our own now-teeming shore. In a London Times article about this problem, Bernard Levin said, "I cannot believe that the poor of the earth will be willing to remain poor indefinitely. I do not even believe that the poor of the earth will for much longer be content with the speed at which their impoverishment is being alleviated.... Lebensraum, Hitler called it: not a very propitious recollection. There is enough room for all to live. But how to live, and where, and with what to eat, and with how much fuel, and with what massive quantity of resentment - these are urgent questions." Mr. Levin concludes, "I am by no means sure that the world has answers."
Those questions are the kind which most of us, including our politicians, prefer to put on the back burner. We pride ourselves on being a Can-Do society, and if there is something we can't do, or can't do quickly, we tend to neglect it, until it becomes such a huge issue that we can no longer ignore it.
Wallace Stegner won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Angle of Repose. The narrator of the story is a man in advanced middle age who recalls the lives of his grandparents, to whom he was very close. Now he spends his time in a wheelchair, because he has had one leg amputated. He muses to himself, "In my mind I write letters to the newspapers, saying Dear Editor, As a modern man and a one-legged man, I can tell you that the conditions are similar. We have been cut off, the past has been ended and the family has broken up and the present is adrift in its wheelchair. I had a wife who after twenty-five years of marriage took on the coloration of the 1960s. I have a son who, though we are affectionate with each other, is no more my true son than if he breathed through gills" (Angle of Repose, Penguin, New York, 1971, p. 17).
What if you had great expectations for how your life was going to turn out, and it didn't turn out that way? What if you imagined your children would certainly be headed in a certain direction, and they went off in the opposite direction? What if you have always wanted something, a very worthwhile something, something which would benefit the whole world as well as yourself, but it hasn't happened, and neither you nor the world have had even a fleeting taste of it? What if life just hasn't worked out as you thought it would --- or should?
If we expect too much, we ought also to learn to expect not to get it all. But that's a hard thing to do, isn't it? After all, "A man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for" as Robert Browning said: isn't that so? Why shouldn't we have great expectations? How can we get anywhere if we don't have at least a pretty fair idea of where we want to be?
On the other hand, we mustn’t allow misfortune to weigh us down. Late in life, Dick Van Dyke and three young men formed a vocal quartet called The Vantastix. In an album entitled Put on a Happy Face, they sang a series of upbeat songs, as befits Dick Van Dyke’s nature. High Hopes says that “Once there was a silly old ram/ Tried to punch a hole in a dam/ No one could make that ram scram/ He just kept buttin’ that dam/ ‘Cause he had high hopes, he had high hopes/ He had high in the sky apple pie hopes.” Bare Necessities reminds us that if we have the new essentials required for life, we will be okay. Then there was “Accentuate the Positive/ Eliminate the negative/ And latch on to the affirmative/ And don’t mess with Mr. In-Between.”
In his letter to the Romans, Paul referred to “the glory that is to be revealed to us” (v. 8:18).
It is isn’t here yet, but it is coming. “For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (vs. 24-5).
Hope sustains us, even when there is no hope what we hope for will happen. Or, and Miss Emily Dickinson of Amherst, Massachusetts said, “Hope is the thing with feathers/ That perches in the soul/ And sings the tune without the words/ And never stops at all.”
In a New Yorker cartoon, Moses is standing at the edge of the Red Sea. His arms are outstretched, and the waters are piled high on either side, to the left and to the right. So over his shoulder, Moses says to the children of Israel, who are a huge anxiety-ridden mob behind him, "Remember, this is a one-shot, not an entitlement."
That really sums up what this sermon is about. We ought to perceive many if not most of our realized expectations as one-shot events, not perpetual, lifelong entitlements. Further, we should learn not to expect everything for which we have expectations or hope. Everybody has blessings from God, showers of blessings, as the old Gospel song says, but there is a limit to what we can reasonably count on, even from God. When we have crossed one Red Sea, that is probably a sufficient exodus experience for the remainder of our earthly pilgrimage. To anticipate more such occurrences is unduly to press the outrageously lavish grace of God.
When we attain the wisdom of knowing that whatever we want may not be what we are likely to get, that lower expectations are much more apt to bring much greater bliss, we too shall be able to celebrate everything: our families and friends, our community and nation, our shrinking planet with its expanding population, the people we don't know who nevertheless contribute to the richness of our lives, and most of all to cherish and celebrate God, from whom all blessings flow. And then because of all that, we can also celebrate.