Herb Brokering, Pastor and hymn writer - like Earth and All Stars, has also written a few parables.

One of them he begins with “Is there any word from the Lord…?”

If worship were just about reading from the Bible we could all stay home and read the assigned lesson on a Sunday and be done with it.

But as Christians we believe that there is more to God’s Word than what is written in a book; even if that book is the Bible.

A sermon for Lutherans is the Living Word.

We even have a fancy phrase for it “the efficacy of the Word.”

Pharmaceutical companies use it to talk about the effectiveness of their medications.

What I am trying to say is, that each week, as I prepare for Sunday Worship I spend time in thought, prayer and study. I do not take this task lightly.

It is an awesome responsibility.

I must remind you that these texts were not created in a vacuum.

Many of the passages from the OT came out of a long telling of the stories by the patriarch of a clan or community from one generation to another, long before they were written down. By the time they were written down they were collected not so much to preserve what we today know as God’s Word; as God’s Word re-interpreted in the context of a particular historical faith moment.

 Like the stories of the Israelites murmuring while “shlepping” around in the Sinai wilderness. Let me tell you a story that I’d like to use as a metaphor for what today’s sermon is about. A sort of hook to hang things on, so that when you leave here you will remember what the Word of the Lord was for today.

It is a story of two brothers, one ten the other twelve years old. They lived with their mother and father on a farm in Tennessee. Like all children who grow up on farms, they had certain chores like slop the hogs, carry in firewood and stack it behind the kitchen stove and for these two, finding the milk cows each evening before dark and bringing them back to the barn to be milked the next morning.

This was a large farm and there were not many fences.  These were free range cows. 

On one particular weekend the family was late getting home from a family outing. It was summer. The picnic had been cut short by cumulous clouds building up on the horizon.  By the time they got home, lighting was flashing across the sky and thunder was rolling down the meadow. Now this story gets interesting because the father had recently built a new barn and all that was left of the old one was the concrete slab next to the new barn. The father said something about leaving the barn door open so that the cows would hopefully find their way back to the barn. The two boys dreaded having to go look for the cows, especially in a storm, and so as the old '52 Ford pickup rounded the bend and the house and barn came into view. What a surprise. There in the driving rain, on a concrete slab that once housed the old barn, huddled together to ward off the storm were the cows, while the doors to the new barn where standing wide open.

I hesitate to tell you what my dad said… even in German.  The two boys of course were my brother and I. In some of my counseling sessions I used to tell clients who were stuck in life, that some people would rather stay in a familiar hell than an unfamiliar heaven. The British writer C.S.Lewis said the same thing in a small book called The Great Divorce. If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the flesh pots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger Ex.16.3. By the time this event became part of what we call Exodus, many years, perhaps even generations had passed since the murmuring and the complaining and the questioning of Moses’ leadership became part of the Bible.  I have been with you a little over two years. I haven’t heard any complaints, at least outwardly, of my leadership, but on occasion I have heard some murmuring about the good old days when MLC was safe at home on Landis Ave. We too have had our pilgrimage in the wilderness… the VFW with its “Members Only at the Bar” sign, now the Grange with its Summer traffic.

The occasional sigh and murmur of the “good old days” or “if we had not listened to the Synod…" has been heard among us.  Like the cows back on the farm in Tennessee, we too have a tendency to enshrine the old and huddle together in the cold and rain on a proverbial concrete slab, metaphorically speaking, rather than move into the future of a new beginning. 

Now, notice what God’s response is to their murmuring. No scolding, no guilt trip, no fire and brimstone rained down from heaven. Rather what is rained down from heaven is bread. “Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘ I am going to rain bread from heaven for you, and each day the people shall gather enough for that day… at twilight you shall eat meat, and in the morning you shall have your fill of bread; then you shall know that I am the Lord Yahweh."  Things haven’t changed much at my house, morning is toast and coffee and evening some sort of meat. Although we are doing our best to keep the meat part to a minimum.

But did you catch the part about “people shall gather enough only for that day"?

Gather as much of it as each of you needs… providing for those in their own tents.

That is what they did, some gathering more and some less… depending on the size of the families. Without reading you the rest, which you can do on your own…

Let me just say that it wasn’t too long until some began to gather more than they needed for that day or the weekend. And when they tried to eat what was horded, it had gone bad. Manna is daily bread for the day only… now let’s listen again to John’s telling of another bread story.

If you recall from last week's lesson, where John tells of Jesus taking two fish and five loaves of bread and feeding five thousand people on a grassy hillside and after all had eaten and were satisfied, he told his disciples to pick up the leftovers and they filled up twelve baskets.

And the crowds keep following Jesus. Food attracts crowds. If you want to have a good turnout for the congregational meeting Pastor, you had better have a dinner for them. Right?

When they finally caught up with him: “Hey! When did you get here?”

At this point John has Jesus make the connection between food for the stomach and food that gives us eternal life… food that nourishes not the flesh, but food that feeds the SOUL.

The Israelites were in the wilderness because they where running away from Pharoah much like our friends South of the border are running away from the slavery of poverty.

Theirs was their freedom march and they where given only enough food to keep them going until the next day.

To keep going meant that they had to let go of the past. Or, as the writer of Exodus puts it, the “flesh pots of Egypt”, the security of a roof over their head and the assurance of "bread". John makes a transition between the fast food that tickles the palate to the food that feeds the soul. The food that gives life meaning cannot be found in yesterday’s miracles. How often have I heard about past Christmases or Easters in such and such a church where the choir was angelic, the organist orchestral and the decorations, “oh Pastor you should have seen the church, with all the poinsettias, the chrismons.” But I have yet to hear someone tell me you should have heard the sermon. Christ was present in that woman. We tend to want to go back to what was, even if it wasn’t all that great! When the Bishop suggested I consider a call to MLC in Sea Isle, Mary Jo shed a tear or two. She was sitting next to me. We were sitting across the table from Roy Riley the Bishop of the NJ Synod. He is a good man. He looked past me at her then I turned and looked too. When he mentioned Sea Isle, she remembered summer days and cool nights and who knows what all, and the past became the present and she cried. She hasn’t cried since…

The lessons for today tell us that not everything needs to be repeated or even can be.

Yes, there is a hunger for the past in us that militates against the new. But the bread that nourishes is not old or stale. It is baked new each day.

The Hebrews of the Exodus could not hold on to their manna for a rainy day.  They had to eat it on the day they found it or it went bad. 

So use the gifts of God you receive today. Go out on a limb and use them up and have faith that God will give you enough for tomorrow; maybe in a totally new way.

Your experience of God should be new every day.

Maybe the day you made your first confession of His presence in your life is one that is special, but unless that moment is a daily event as you sample different loaves baked by the Lord, you will inevitably eat stale bread and wonder what ever happened to Him. Amen.