NUMBERS 11:4-6, 10-16, 24-29
PSALM 19:7-14
JAMES 4:7 – 5:6
MARK 9:38-43, 45, 47-48
Sermon - 9/28/03
We Are All Eldad and Medad
Moses said to Joshua, “Would that all the
Lord’s people were prophets, that the LORD would put the Spirit upon them!”
Moses was experiencing what we today would
call leadership burn-out. In the weeks
leading up to the episode described in today’s Old Testament reading, God,
often working through his servant Moses, had humbled the Egyptian empire with
plagues, delivered the defenseless Hebrew people from the Egyptian army and led
them across the Red Sea from slavery to freedom, guided them into a desert
wilderness none of them save Moses had ever seen before and provided them with
water and food when they had no clue how to get either.
Now, naturally, all the people could do in
response was—complain about the menu!
“We remember the fish we used to eat in
Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, the
garlic; but now our strength is all dried up, and there is nothing at all but
this manna to look at.” So they
lamented—conveniently forgetting that whatever it was they really had to
eat in Egypt—a complainer’s memory can often be a convenient one—when they ate
it they were slaves! Is eating the occasional onion worth being
shackled and whipped?
Anyway, Moses bore the brunt of all their
complaints, and he was understandably very sick of the complaints and of the
complainers. He had witnessed the
miracles, was grateful to God, and much preferred a monotonous diet as a free
man than any cuisine you could name as a slave. So Moses, understandably, complained mightily to the LORD.
The LORD, in turn, saw that Moses needed a
leadership team to assist him—and to deal with the whiners among the
people. So the LORD put a share of the
Spirit on 70 hand-picked elders, or leaders, of the people, who had an ecstatic
religious experience at the time the Spirit came to them, and then returned to
normal behavior but with the blessing and guidance of the Spirit within
them. So far, so good.
BUT—two of the chosen elders, Eldad and
Medad, never made it out to the special tent set aside for their commissioning
by God, and had their ecstatic religious experiences right in the middle of the
camp, near the “ordinary people.”
Moses’ assistant Joshua, a military man used
to having things done according to proper rules and regulations, was shocked by
this, and asked his commander, Moses, to forbid Eldad and Medad to be filled
with the Spirit in the midst of the “regular people.”
Moses himself had a wonderful dream of a
time when “all the LORD’s people”—not
just those who were ordained, as we would say—received the Spirit. Not only was he not bent out of shape at
spiritual gifts being manifested in the sight of non-ordained people, he
envisioned a time when the Spirit would come to all the faithful.
The Christian faith declares that this time
has come; the time is now. We believe that all those who are baptized
receive the Holy Spirit at baptism. As the prayer after a baptism says, “Sustain them, O Lord, in your Holy
Spirit. Give them an inquiring and
discerning heart, the courage to will and to persevere, a spirit to know and to
love you, and the gift of joy and wonder in all your works.”
That’s what The Book of Common Prayer
says now. But for many years, while
Christianity theoretically proclaimed that the baptized received the Holy
Spirit, the way many churches operated
made it look as though Joshua had won.
Spiritual gifts and power were thought to be reserved for the ordained,
and only to be used in certain, “churchy” ways.
A look at Christian history would show the
increasing concentration of church power within the hands of the ordained over
the centuries after Christ, less participation by laity in worship (or even in
receiving communion) during the Middle Ages and how controversial it was in the
16th century when lay people—in some places—started reading the
Bible in their own language on their own.
And how extremely controversial it was when women wanted to start Bible
studies with women leaders!
But even as recently as the 1950’s and
1960’s, “ministry” as many people meant the term, was only those somewhat
mysterious things that ordained ministers did, and those guys—they were
all guys then, in the Episcopal Church anyway—did as much as possible of any
visible church function, leaving little room for any “uppity” lay people to get
ideas. And as for the idea that the
Spirit might guide, empower—nay, command Christians to do things outside the
stained-glass confines of church buildings themselves, well!
Such notions belonged to such dangerous
radicals as the 19th century folk who opposed slavery, supported
free public education, built hospitals and opposed child labor. Why weren’t they tending to “spiritual
issues?” Why weren’t they staying in
the “tent” where they belonged, far away from the people in the “camp?” Why couldn’t Eldad and Medad just “put a lid
on it?”
My favorite response to this
frequently-voiced critique is that of a 19th century Anglican priest
who served a parish in the East End of London, where working class and poor
people lived in Dickensian squalor with no sewers, and the predictable array of
diseases caused by poor sanitation. The
West End of London—where the rich folk lived—had sewers, but the rich
folk were disturbed when this priest joined the movement to build sewers for
everybody. They declared he should go
back to “tending the spiritual needs of his flock.” He responded, “I care about sewers because I believe in the
Incarnation.” If our human bodily
natures are important enough to God so that God not only made us, but
became incarnate as one of us, what happens to human bodies must be
awfully important to God. And
therefore, what happens to human bodies darned well ought to be important to us.
I also believe in the Incarnation. And so does everyone who says that part of
the Creed. And to me, like that
long-ago brother priest of mine, that means caring about what happens to human
beings who are incarnate—in living bodies—now.
Caring, I believe, can take at least three
concrete, action-oriented forms beyond prayers and tender loving care. The three forms are charity, justice and empowerment.
In 19th century London, that
might have meant feeding the poor, demanding that Parliament build basic
sanitary facilities in all parts of town, and broadening the electorate so that
all classes of people could speak for themselves. I’m describing a movement in 19th century England
which was primarily lay Christians, as it should be, although the clergy
often got quoted.
Today, to take the example of Elijah’s
Promise in New Brunswick, charity is feeding people at the soup kitchen,
justice includes ensuring that shelters and soup kitchens continue to be
allowed in the city, empowerment is training people to get good jobs, for
example through the cooking school training program of Elijah’s Promise.
Let’s look at a larger issue: children’s health. Charity asks, “What can we do to help a particular child who
faces enormous medical bills for cancer treatment?” That’s not an abstract question, but one we at St. Barnabas are
working on right now.
Justice asks, “Why are there 9.2 million
children with no health insurance at all in America, the richest nation
in the world?”
Empowerment asks, “Why do 11 million
children under the age of five die every year in our world?” I’ll give you a hint: 90% of those deaths are in just 42
countries, 42 poor countries which in medical terms are still wrestling with 19th
century conditions and diseases that have not killed masses of children in the
industrialized nations in a very, very long time.
The statistics come from the September 22,
2003 issue of Newsweek on Children’s Health. I don’t claim to have the solutions, but I do believe that we and
all Christians are called to wrestle with these and other very real problems
that affect people in very real ways.
We are all called to use our spiritual gifts—especially “an
inquiring and discerning heart and the courage to will and persevere” to tackle
these problems, because Moses’ dream has come true: We are all Eldad and Medad,
we are “in the camp” where regular people live, not segregated in a churchy
ghetto, and the Spirit has come to us all.
And the Spirit is pulling us into a
boundless, challenging journey, for as The Catechism in The Book of Common
Prayer says, “The duty of all Christians is to follow Christ; to come
together week by week for corporate worship; and to work, pray, and give for the spread of the Kingdom of God.”
(The Rev.) Francis A. Hubbard
St. Barnabas Episcopal Church