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Redeemer Lutheran Church - LCMS

Kimberly’s message

 

Manna Every Day

 

 

At the last Circuit Winkel (circuit pastors monthly meeting), I listened to the area pastors comment on the extraordinary ordinariness of Lutheran theology.  We Lutherans aren’t in to all the “new” and “cutting edge” worship and theology many churches gravitate towards today.  We don’t think worship should be “exciting” or “invigorating”.  We don’t necessarily think we should come away “lifted up”.  We do the same thing every week: liturgy, psalms, hymns, the Lord’s Supper.   Written down like that it would seem we Lutherans are flat out boring.

 

The Hebrews thought their spiritual life was pretty boring, too.  They had seen God do miraculous things like the Ten Plagues, the Passover, parting the Red Sea, and even having a pillar of cloud lead them by day while a pillar of fire lighted the night.  Then they ran out of food.  They cried out to God, and He supplied their need with manna.  What a miracle!  A new, delicious food mysteriously and faithfully given to them by their Creator and Redeemer. (By the way, “manna” sounds like the Hebrew for “what is it?”.) 

 

And then there was manna the next morning.  And the next.  And the next.  And the next.  And the next for weeks on end.  It was manna, nothing but manna, every day.  In their eyes, God’s wonderful provision became a mundane, monotonous chore.  The people complained to Moses and rejected God’s good gift.  As you can imagine, this did not please the LORD.  He did give them quail to pacify their disdain of monotony, but He also sent a plague to punish them for rejecting His gifts. (Numbers 11)

 

Today we Christians face the same temptations the Hebrews in the desert did.  We want to “experience” God.  We want to “see” Him in every day life, not just on Sundays.  And there are Bible studies and programs to do this; they come with taglines like “Help your people see God working!” or “Open your heart to experience God’s power!”  They seem to say that if we would look at the world in the right way we could discover what God is doing, right here and now; that we could be happier or more content if we just had something more.  All these programs and books seem to neglect that our Heavenly Father has told us what He has done and what He will do in Scripture and forget that He comes to us in simple, ordinary means.  They look for the next new thing while God is holding out manna.

 

All of this is not to say we can’t learn to be more aware of how God gives us gifts in the beauty of a sunny fall day or a stable government that allows us to live and work in peace.  It’s not to say that we can’t ask the Holy Spirit to lead us deeper into God’s wonderful truth as we search the Scriptures.  It’s not to say God will never do miracles or act in a way that defies explanation.  But it should encourage us to remember how God prefers to come to us, hidden in the mundane things of life: in water, Word and Spirit; in bread and wine, in Body and Blood, in preaching and teaching, in a Baby born to a humble teen mom, in a Man who would die on a cross. 

 

Yes, our Lutheran faith and practices can seem a bit like manna every day, but if God wants to come to us in simple, uncomplicated means who are we to argue?  The liturgy, drawn from God’s own words breathed into prophets and apostles, teaches how God would have us pray and points us back to Him as our only source for life.  The water of Baptism drowns our sinful self every day so that we walk in the newness of life.  The ancient and just plain old hymns sing clearly and vividly about our Savior.  The bread and wine are truly a gift as they offer us the Body and Blood of Jesus, making us part of His own Body.

 

Yes, it may be manna every day—or at least every Sunday—but it’s God’s gracious, merciful, miraculous provision for our lives here on earth.  It’s how God has chosen to sustain us in a world filled with trouble and despair.  He gives us Himself.  What a gift to be thankful for this season!

In Gods grace,

Dcs. Kimberly