Jeff Garrison
Skidaway Island Presbyterian Church
Numbers 11:21-30
March 3, 2019
I’ve been out of the pulpit here for two weeks—it seems like a long time. Last week Deanie preached and the week before was the Presbytery pulpit exchange. You got to hear Pete Ullmann from Jessup while I preached at First Presbyterian Church in Brunswick. Don’t worry about missing anything; it was a sermon you all heard back in January. It’s good to be back in this pulpit, this morning.
We are coming to the end of our series on the “Land Between,” and our study from the 11th Chapter of the Book of Numbers. Next week, we’ll begin our Lent Journey, as we make our way toward Easter. Our theme for our Lenten series will be “Busy.” It’s a timely series; we all struggle with busyness. As a way of catching our breath, we’re going to be encouraged by scripture to reconnect to an unhurried God. As a warning, we’ll be doing a few different things in worship. It’ll be exciting, so come and invite others who feel hurried in life to join us for a refreshing break each week as we gather on Sunday.
Now, let’s go back to the “Land Between,” that desert setting we’ve been traveling over since the end of January. We have seen how this barren land in which we all travel at one point or another is fertile ground for us to complain and even have a melt-down. It’s also a place where we learn to trust God to provide what we need, and where God might discipline us. All of this, our being in the “Land Between” and God’s response, helps us grow. In the Sinai desert, God was forging the Hebrew people into a nation. When we find ourselves in such situations, we should ponder what God might be preparing us to do. What’s God’s future for us? For our text today, we’re going to look at Numbers 11:21-30. Listen: 
Little Tommy was riding in the backseat as the family came home from church. “What did you learn in Sunday School today,” his father asked.
We learned about Moses and the Israelites crossing the Red Sea,” Tommy said.
What about it?” his dad asked.
“Well, the Israelites had their back against the sea as Pharaoh’s army approached. It looked like it was going to be a slaughter. So Moses quickly summoned his combat engineers to throw together a pontoon bridge and they hastened to get everyone across. And as the Egyptians followed them across the bridge, Moses called up his Air Force and had them scramble jets who strafed and then bombed the bridge, sending Pharaoh’s army to the bottom of the sea.
His mother almost had whiplash as she turned around in her seat and looked back at Tommy. Her face was red. “Was that what your teacher taught?” she demanded. “Did she tell you all that?”
“Well, not exactly,” Tommy hesitantly responded. “But if you don’t believe my story, you certainly won’t believe hers.
Moses might be the earthly leader of the Israelites, but he’s not the one in charge. It is very clear from the beginning that God is calling the shots. God freed the people from slavery. God saved them from the Egyptian army when their backs were up against the sea. God provided food and water for his people in an inhospitable land. Moses may be the leader of these people, but he knows it’s not within his power to do any of this. God has been active.
This also applies even to the church throughout history. The key to our success isn’t from the strength of our leaders, but from the humbled willingness of God’s people to allow God to work through us to accomplish his purposes. When we are aligned with God, we can do great things. When God is against us, even the most skilled leader will be ineffective. By the way, our mission isn’t success in worldly standards. Our mission is to be faithful to the God who resurrect the dead.
Now back to Moses. He’s the face people see. And because they still aren’t sure what’s up, he’s the one who receives all the complaints. He’s weary and needs help. But unlike the people who have questioned God’s goodness, thinking the Almighty led them into the desert to die, Moses trusts the Lord. After all, God has always comes through. When Israel’s back was up against the sea, it wasn’t Moses who parted the sea. He might have lifted his arms as we see in the movies, but it was God, the one who watches out for Israel, who saves the day.
God has plans for this group of people. God doesn’t just want them to just exist. Nor, I believe, does God just want us to exist. God wants them (and us) to thrive. God wants them (and us) to grow and to be a community in which all the world is bless. So let’s look at our text for today and see how this works.
We have already seen how God provided for the people’s dietary needs, with manna and quail, as well as for Moses well-being, with others that shared the leadership burden. God has Moses bring seventy leaders into the tent and endow them with some of Moses’ spirit, giving them the power and responsibility to help lead the people. But when we looked at this text earlier (on Scout Sunday where I spoke about the patrol method and how the 70 were like patrol leaders), I cut the text off before getting to the part about how the experience of these leaders extended beyond the 70. What we find in this text is that we worship a God of surprises, and that people 3,500 years ago were no different than today. They don’t like surprises; they don’t like changes; they’re jealous when someone outside their group has a special experience.
Let’s look at the text. After the elders were commissioned, they received the spirit and prophesied. That was all well and good, and expected. But what happens next is that there were two men, who were not in the assembly, who showed signs of having the spirit placed upon them. They, too, prophesied. This was disturbing, for these were not ones who were supposed to be doing this. A runner (a 14th Century BC tattle-tale) was sent to Moses saying, Eldad and Medad are prophesying in camp. Joshua was ready to have them stopped but it didn’t bother Moses. “Let them be,” Moses responded. “Are you jealous for me? Wouldn’t it be nice if all God’s people were prophets?”
Moses shows us what a mature leader comfortable with his relationship with God looks like.
You know, a similar thing happened in the ministry of Jesus. The disciples learned that there were others casting out demons using the name of Jesus. Some of the disciples, like Joshua, was ready to defend Jesus’ power and honor and put an end to the practice. But Jesus said, “No, don’t do that. If they’re using my name, they be for us and not against us.”[1] Mature leadership provides a calming presence and rejoices when others do well.
What can we take from this passage? How might it apply to our topic of growth? There are two things that come to mind. First of all, as we see in the story of the Exodus, we have to take the risk to follow and to trust God. It can be scary at times, but if we are willing to take that risk, God will protect and watch over us. Faith isn’t about certainty; if it was, it wouldn’t be faith. Faith is about trust. Do we trust God enough to take a risk that will allow God to show us that he’s with us? When God’s church grapples at what its future might be, those who are willing to take a risk are the ones rewarded. It’s easy to sit back and do nothing, but that’s not the type of followers Jesus calls. As the Session of this church works on our strategic plan for the future (and this is a process), I hope you will be open to new directions. God calls us to risk in faith, not for our glory, but for God’s. Are we up for taking risks? We can’t keep doing the same thing that might have worked for us 30 or 40 years ago. Times change and new strategies are required. We are called to be people of faith and we must live into our calling.
Secondly, we learn in this passage that we’re not in control and we need to let God’s Spirit work. Those who were upset with Eldad and Medad show a human tendency to have preconceived ideas of what it looks like when God shows up. We have to be ready for surprises, for God’s ideas may be different from ours. God has this incredible love for all people, not just those who look, think and act like us. We might be surprised what God is doing in our midst and it might make us uncomfortable. Someone might come up with a new idea that we’ve never tried before, or that was half-heartedly tried years ago. Is our first reaction to immediately reject it? Or are we willing to see if God’s Spirit’s is leading us in a different direction? The truth of Jesus Christ never changes, but how we live out that truth within a changing culture will be different.
Remember, it’s not about us. We’re called to have faith, to trust, and to follow Jesus as we move through the “Land Between.” And if we have faith, we will experience growth in our own lives and within the community. We might not know what that growth really looks like until afterwards, but when we are there, we will know that God has been with us. Amen.
©2019
[1] Mark 9:38-39, Luke 9:49-50.
Jeff Garrison 
Robert Ruark began quail hunting with his granddad at the age of eight. The opening story in his wonderful book, The Old Man and the Boy, is about a quail hunt. To the chagrin of his mother and grandmother, his grandfather, “the Old Man,” brought him a 20 gauge shotgun. They headed out into a pea field with two dogs. Quickly, the dogs were pointing and the Old Man gave him a shell and told him to load up. He broke open the barrel, slipped the shell into the breech, and snapped it closed. Then as his pulled the gun up to hold at a forty-five degree angle across his chest, to be ready for when the birds flushed, he quietly slipped the safety off and stepped toward the dogs.
Shocked and a bit hurt, the young Robert Ruark handed his gun to his granddad, who set the safety, then headed out to the dogs. As the covey flushed, he shot a bird. When he came back, the boy yelled, “Why’d you take the gun away from me? It’s my gun. It ain’t your gun.”
I wonder what the Old Man would have thought about the way the Israelites hunted quail. He probably wouldn’t care for it, but I expect he would understand God’s intention of teaching the Hebrew people some good habits such as placing their trust in the Lord. The land between is a good place to learn good habits.
It’s almost as if God decides to overwhelm the Hebrew people with quail as a way to show them his power. They should have been thankful that the birds were quail and not ravens. Had it been the later, Alfred Hitchcock’s movie, “The Birds,” would could have been Biblical. But instead of the birds attacking, they are easily caught by the Israelites.
I’ve been reading Eugene Peterson’s collection of sermons on Jeremiah, a prophet at a time when Israel was again facing some discipline. We don’t like the idea of discipline or judgment, do we? But it’s a frequent topic in scripture, probably because we (as humans) are so hard headed. Listen to what Peterson says about the topic:
Scripture discusses judgment and discipline a lot. Some of you may think there’s too much judgment and discipline in Bible, but as Jeff Manion reminds us in his book, The Land Between, we have an advantage. As Paul wrote to Timothy, “Scripture is useful in building us up,” and if we allow Scripture to work in such a manner, we can learn from the mistakes of others.
Yesterday afternoon I was sailing in a race. There was J-105, a much larger and faster boat than any of the rest of us. This boat set the mark. We were coming back up the river, against the tide, which is a time that you try to keep your boat out of the current as much as possible. One way to do this is to hug the side of the channel where the current is less. But there’s the risk of running aground. We watched that J-105, knowing that its keel was much deeper than ours. If it had problems with shoals and ran aground (which would have been the only way we could have caught it), we would know to steer clear. Scripture is like that, we get to see the mistakes of the Israelites and the early disciples, and can steer clear of them. We can learn from their discipline!
There are many Proverbs that speak of the need for discipline.
In the land between, we see that God, our Heavenly Father, disciplines his people in order for them to grow into a nation. When we are disciplined by God, we need to remember that God is loving us. God is correcting our behavior so that we might grow in our love and trust of him. Sometimes discipline is hard. I don’t know why so many people had to get sick and some of them had to die. But the God who gives us the breath of life can also take it away. But as we see, God wants his people to trust him as they are led through the desert and into the Promised Land. It’s an important lesson, for if they don’t trust him, the people will be lost. And that goes for us, too. If we don’t trust God, we are lost. Trust God; accept his discipline as a sign of love. God wants something better from us and for us. Amen.
U. S. Grant is an amazing story. Even how he came upon his name (which was latter joked to be Unconditional Surrender Grant) is an interesting story. At the dawn of the Civil War, Grant was broke, having failed in several business attempts. He had been dismissed from the army due to his drinking problems. Eight years later, after having led the Union forces to victory, Grant is the President of the United States. In this massive biography, Ron Chernow tells Grant’s story. Chernow challenges many of the presuppositions that are often held about Grant such as his military achievement was due to his superior numbers and that he, like his presidency, was corrupt. While acknowledging the truth of the Union superiority in numbers and the corruption of his administration, Chernow believes that Grant was a superior officer and he, himself, wasn’t corrupt. Grant’s greatest fault, according to Chernow, was his loyalty to friends. It appears Grant best action and clearest head was in the chaos of battle. In his private life he often overlooked the faults of his friends and was too trusting. In battle, he had no problems removing ineffective commanders.
Jeff Garrison
We are currently working our way through the 11th chapter of the book of Numbers. Some may wonder, “why Numbers?” After all, it’s an obscure book in the Old Testament, filled with whinny, self-centered people. What could Numbers have to do with us? Well, we’re not much different. We complain, we whine, we focus on our wants and desires, as we struggle trusting God…
In this chapter of Numbers, the Hebrew people are in a crisis. They are in the land between, a hostile place between their former lives as slaves in Egypt and their promised future in the land of milk and honey. But they haven’t yet arrived and, in this in-between land, God forges them into a nation. They learn about temptations. In the last two weeks, we saw how it’s easy to be greedy and to complain in this land. The people’s complaints demonstrate their lack of trust in God. Moses, caught in his own land between, is being pulled apart by a grumbling people who want him to do their bidding and a God who expects him to lead the people. Although Moses also complains, he takes his complaints to God. “Believers argue with God,” I quoted last week, “skeptics argue with one another.”
My first patrol leader was Gerald. He always seemed so mature even though he was probably 14 when I was 11. It rained on our first camping trip. That night Gerald gave his tent to two boys whose tent was flooded. Gerald said he would sleep in their tent. “Wow, this guy cares about us,” we thought. Of course, he was partly guilty for he suggested our tents to be lined up in a straight line and equal distance from one another. This one tent happened to be in a low spot. The next morning, Gerald was up early, helping build a fire. He was full of energy for one who had slept in a wet tent. We later learned he slept in the scout trailer which was even drier the rest of the tents.
In our text today, we see God answering Moses’ pleas for help. God consecrates leading men of Israel. They’ll serve essentially as patrol leaders. Moses, with only his brother Aaron to help, has become weary by attempting to take care of everyone’s needs. Moses is like a scoutmaster without patrol leaders or an army general with no junior officers and no NCOs to implement the plan. To address Moses’ weariness, God has Moses pick seventy leaders from among the people and then takes some of the Spirit that was on Moses and gives it to those seventy. A new generation of leadership is established. This is the way the scouting program works. Those in leadership positions are constantly training new ones as younger scouts slowly take on the responsibility of the troop. And it’s the way the church is to work. As new leaders are elected, they are ordained by the church with the older leaders laying their hands on the new as a sign of ordination.
The people who have been complaining will also experience God’s answer to their prayer. Moses is to have them to get ready. They’re going to be eating meat! Of course, because they haven’t trusted God, they’ll eat so much meat they will get sick of it. It’ll be coming out of their nostrils, which isn’t a very pleasing picture. They had thought God had brought them into the wilderness in order that they might die, but now they’ll once again experience God’s power. God is able to answer their prayers and, in this case, will answer it in a way that they’ll wish God hadn’t.
You know, it’s amazing I still love peanut butter. One day, when I was in the second or third grade, I was hungry after the academic rigors of the classroom. I came home from school and went into the kitchen in search of nourishment. I spotted a large jar of peanut butter, a three pounder. It’d just been open. It was full. Seeing no one around, I unscrewed the lid and dug out a finger-full. I licked it off my finger. It was so good! Then went for another scoop. I bet none of the Scouts have every done this, have you? About the point that I had dug out a second finger full of peanut butter, my mom walked into the kitchen and yelled a few chosen words that I had not known were in her vocabulary.
When we are in the land between, there are plenty of opportunities to experience and learn from God’s graciousness. This is true for our scouts and all the rest of us, for we are in the land between, often, throughout our lives. We are all on a journey to a promised land, to the promised kingdom, to the heavenly banquet. And along the way, we should learn what we can. Amen.
Jeff Garrison
Last week, we saw how the “land between” was a dangerous place. Not only are there the obvious ones. For the Hebrews in the wilderness, such dangers included thirsting, starving, or dying by snake bite. For us, the dangers may be an illness, financial ruin, the loss of a relationship, the death of a loved one. These journeys are stressful. Israel had been called into this place by God, who is trying to teach her to trust him. But what if God doesn’t show up one day? What if God doesn’t provide? Of course, because God has called them into the wilderness, they should trust the Lord. So for two years, they have been trusting God for daily food and during this time, God has not failed them. This leads to the second danger, which we saw last week, which occurs in the land between: complaint. Instead of being grateful, the Israelites become greedy. They bicker and grumble about the quality of food. Such complaints fires up God’s anger, forcing Moses to intercede.
This week, our text focuses on Moses. He’s the leader of these bickering people. Moses is in his own “land between.” He’s caught in the middle. God is on one side and an ungrateful people on the other. It’s a lonely place. All those complaints are getting to him. He can’t please the people. God wants him to be the leader and the people just want him to do their bidding. He’s God’s servant, but the people are looking at Moses as if he’s their errand boy. 1400 years later, Jesus will remind us that we can’t serve two masters.
While we are not told that Moses contemplated suicide, we do witness in today’s text that he’s ready to die. He has certainly thought about death. It seems more desirable than continuing to live in the desert where life is hard enough, but is made unbearable by a bunch of whiners. Death seems better than to live in the middle and be pulled into two different directions at the same time. Moses has had enough. I like how The Message translation handles Moses’ complaint to God:
In addition to leadership being hard, often leadership is thrust upon people. Moses never asked to lead Israel out of Egypt. If you remember, he begged God to find someone else. He came up with all kind of excuses. “Lord, they’re not going to believe me.”
Billy Beasley, The Preacher’s Letter. (Little Elm, TX: eLectio Publishing, 2018), 265 pages
Ralph grew up in Goler Gulch in the Mojave Desert. He escaped that hard-scrabble life thanks to the Army Air Corp, spending the final few weeks of the Second World War in the Pacific. Afterwards, on the GI Bill, he earned a chemistry degree, but having grown in a mining camp, he remained interested in the industry. Because of this, he took a special interest in my dissertation on role of the church in the Nevada mining camps.
In the Book of Exodus, we’re also told more about manna, the collecting and gathering of this substance. The word manna means, “What is it?” Both books tell us it tasted like coriander seed.
It sounds like I justified Israel’s anger over their diet, doesn’t it? Certainly, it is not anything we would want to endure, right? But the point is that at some time or another in our lives and in our Christian journey, we’re going to be in the Land Between. We are going to be at the point in which all seems old and bland and that all there is to do is to wait. At such a time, we’re going to think like me in O’Hara: “how much longer can I endure this boredom?” Instead, I should have been thankful I was safely on the ground. It’s easy for us, like Israel, to fall into the trap of complaining. “Oh great, manna again.” Like Israel, it’s easy for us to start blaming. “Moses, why did you bring us out here, we had plenty to eat in Egypt? Did you bring us out here to die?”
Hear this, the Land Between can be a dangerous place for our souls. As we transition to a new normal, we have to guard our hearts against the spirit of despair. If we go down the direction of despair, we easily end up believing that God is not good. Then we become bitter. Or we give up on God. Instead, we need to be patient and believe that God is preparing us for something better.
When we enter this Land Between (which we must all travel sooner or later—as individuals and as a part of the communities in which we live), we must look around and give God thanks for the blessings we enjoy. We must be content and patient. We’re Christians, we should be the hopeful ones in the crowd. Israel should have been thankful they were no longer enduring the whips of their former masters and that, even in the wilderness, God was providing for their needs. In the wilderness, where God was actively working to forge them into a new nation, God sustain them. And God will sustain us.
When you enter a period of transition, don’t be like Israel. Believe in God. Trust in God. Give thanks for that blessings, however small they might be, that you have been given. And wait in hope, because you have faith in God. Amen.
