LENT 2020: Day 16

• Lent 2020: Day 16 Saturday, March 14, 2020:
  Psalm 95; Exodus 16:27-35; John 4:1-6

Moses said, “This is the thing the LORD has commanded:
    a full omer of manna be kept for your generations, so that they may see the bread with which I fed you in the wilderness when I brought you out of the land of Egypt.”

This chapter in Exodus started with the people longing for the reliable meals they had as slaves in Egypt — and it ends with a token of remembrance of the reliability of God to provide.

As Terrence Fretheim observes, “The idealized and unwarranted memories of Pharaoh’s food are to be replaced with the genuine memories of the bread from God.” 

I love this image of saving a little bit of manna to pass on for generations to come, a physical reminder of the lessons learned during difficult times.

It’s counter-cultural. This is not the way we think in American today. We are constantly discarding the old in the neverending quest for the new.

This is precisely what makes the church so unique.

There aren’t many places in our nation where you can find multiple generations together, but the church exists across time.

We have the stories of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, of Moses, of the Exile, of the early church, of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, of the Reformation, of the Civil Rights Movement.

We also have the stories of our own congregation.

As we continue our Lenten journey, may we talk across our generational divides and share the wisdom that only experience can offer. May we share the stories of how God provided in the wildernesses — whether financial, marital, political, spiritual, or whatever — of the 20th century, so that we are equipped to face the wildernesses of the 21st century.