It Is Time to Make a Faithful Decision

 

 

I invite you to look at the image.

You have 30 seconds to turn this into a picture. … What do you draw?

This task was given to a grade 2 class. Guess what most drew.  A clock.

Now the same task was given to the class again but this time the students were given 30 mins. to complete the picture. If you were given 30 mins – what would you draw?

The teacher received pictures of pigs, and cats, and pizza… with the gift of time the capacity for creativity grew.

 

The Exodus reading began with verse 2 of chapter 16. The first verse that was not included reads: The whole congregation of the Israelites set out from Elim and came to the wilderness of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month after they had departed from the land of Egypt.

This verse is important. It is about time. A whole month has gone by since the people have crossed over the Sea. It means that the provisions they brought with them have run out. Now they will learn a couple of important lessons.

 

In the book I use to accompany the confirmation class learning the Bible, Daniel Erlander talks about the Hebrew people leaving Egypt and once crossing over the Reed Sea, they enter wilderness school. In the wilderness school there are three lessons that the people are to learn:

God gives manna for all. The lesson is that we own nothing. All is God’s. All is gift.

The second lesson is that hoarding stinks. There were those who took more than their daily manna, what they tried to keep rotted.

The third lesson is the gift of sabbath. This lesson teaches that extra time is a beautiful gift and it is a gift to be built into the way the people keep time.  Not only does Sabbath include worship, “Sabbath allows humans to experience full time the wonder of friendship – with God and others and all creation.”

What we learn by following the journey with the Hebrew people in wilderness school is that learning these lessons takes time; their story took 40 years. It takes time --- for what and who they will be to emerge.

 

Tomorrow a devotion about making decisions is going out to the email distribution list and will be posted on my blog. The devotion talks of six characteristics that mark faithful decision making. One of the characteristics is time.

 

Resurrection has been in this neighbourhood a long time, 108 years: faithfully marking Sabbath by worshipping together, receiving daily bread, and redistributing God’s manna and abundance. There is something interesting about this 108 year period of time. There was always daily bread – manna for all, both physical and spiritual, all the pieces that sustained a community of faith over tine. Twice in the journey and once again now, the congregation is discerning the manna accumulated and how best to configure and use it so as not to hoard, and to continue with passion a place to mark Sabbath with worship and give the gift of sabbath and rest to all.

Time in faith life runs in approximately 40 year cycles: coming up to 1955 the church hall is built, followed by a reimagining of the sanctuary space; in 1995 discussions of what to do with the church, the parsonage, partnering with campus ministry, using interns, reducing ministry, as money was tight and there were large capital expenses. Every 40 years faith community returns to wilderness school. It’s as if time were the gift that God is giving as daily bread. A time to reflect, to reevaluate, to remember what is important, to reimagine the proclamation of the gospel; to return relationship – of loving God, each other, and all creation.

As this journey in the wilderness comes towards the end of a 40 year cycle, we are nearing the Jordan river – where on the other side the people set up community to live out what they learned in the wilderness- this is what we are discerning now, preparing the place to worship and mark Sabbath, to receive daily bread, to redistribute God’s manna for the next 40 years.

 

Thankfully we are a community who has journeyed through articulating our values and beliefs. We know our gifts and the work of God that we do in the world. This tells us that it is time to make faithful decisions, we are at the cusp of coming out of the wilderness.

The people who left Egypt needed time to shed the layers of slavery and bondage under which they had lived. It meant being able to look back, not bellyaching for what they had and now miss, but actually, seeing, that where they came from was not the ‘good old days.’ It was slavery, it was persecution, it was genocide – the experience in the wilderness was the gift of time given to move the people from that disfunction and ungodly system to forming God community, God kindom, a community that would live by faith not by sight, in relationship with God, each other, and creation.

 

We have been practicing the lessons of wilderness school.

Receiving daily bread and sharing the bread, honouring the sabbath by providing the sacred space for worship -connecting people with God and God with us, and us with others, and all of us with creation and with God; and this whole conversation of what now? – is wrapped up in the lesson of hoarding stinks. Do we keep our resources to ourselves, living in a bondage to the past and keeping things the same, hoarding the manna that is left until it is all gone and we stand in the wilderness grumbling – or do we courageously realize it is time to leave the desert and get on with building a place for sabbath and sharing manna with all, that will carry humanity -in this place- for the next 40 years?

 

I think about the image I shared at the beginning. With 30 seconds many people draw a clock. With 30 mins creativity abounds and people imagine and draw all kinds of pictures. I see the circle as this faithful community, the two lines are the work we have done investigating and gathering information; the gift of time has opened up options, the lines are ready to move outside the circle and with decisiveness draw all over the page with God’s manna.

Thanks be to God. Amen.