Sermon for 2006 May 7, St Mary Magdalen, Sheet

Bible readings: Exodus 16:4-15, Revelation 2:12-17

Does God want us to lead simpler lives? I think we tend to work on the assumption that he does. A few years ago I was talking to a colleague who lived in a pretty village on the edge of a small thriving market town, and I was extolling the virtues of the Farmers’ Market in the town. She said she couldn’t afford the high prices. She and her partner could only afford junk food. And I must admit I was a bit nosy. I knew that they were "dinkies" [double income, no kids] so I had to probe a little further: "that seems a bit surprising," I said. Well, it’s the loan for the second car, see. Stop digging, Mike, you’re not here to tell other people how to live their lives. "But why do you need two cars, you both work in the same place, you spend a lot of time together". Well, he’s doing overtime because we need the cash, and I need the other car to get to the gym. I didn’t have the courage to offer my solution: sell the car, cancel the gym subscription, cycle to the Farmers’ Market – take the long way there (and get your partner to follow behind in the car so he could pick up the fruit and veg.) Surely God wants us to live simpler lives?

God provided the people of Israel with a special food that tested their trust in him. If they did simply trust God to provide what they needed day by day, with double on Fridays, they would be able to live for forty years. But those who couldn’t cope with that loss of control had to start storing it up. You can imagine it getting out of hand, like Jesus’ story of having to build bigger and bigger barns to store things up. They would have to fit burglar alarms, security fencing, have the whole lot valued every so often to calculate how much tax they would need to pay on it, they would have to test the manna mountain to make sure it was still fit to eat. And it wasn’t. It went bad. Full of maggots, because they failed to put simple trust in God that he would meet their needs for the day.

So it would seem that God does want us to live simple lives. We look in admiration, even envy, at people who achieve this – who live simply off the land. Driving over lemons in Andalucia, living a crofter’s life in the Scottish Highlands, yes, surely, simplicity is next to godliness. But is it? We certainly have a deep-seated desire to simplify things. Why else would there be so much spam or adverts inviting you to consolidate all your debts into one? No more messy bills, just one neat and tidy, very clean but huge bill? Well this does not count as financial advice, but if I were in that situation and happened to have a bargepole, I would not be touching them with it for a loan! That deep-seated desire goes right through into religious belief. Fundamentalism is attractive. A simple message, simple truths, black and white.

Is it as simple as that? Well, life is complicated. Our lives are complicated. On Bank Holiday Monday I thought I’d better have a go at the pile of paper that had come into the house over the last few weeks and hadn’t yet been dealt with. The reason I had to deal with it is that the pile had started to fall over! And are you going to tell me that God disapproves of our complicated lives? That he is not present in the piles of paper, the forms to fill in, dates and times to sort out. Seen our calendar? It’s like those numbers in the film A Beautiful Mind, crowding in and shouting at us with their connections and clashes!

Of course he is there. God does complicated! What could be more complicated than the book of Revelation? Do you understand it? Even these practical letters to seven churches are full of pitfalls to avoid, difficult allusions, complicated symbols. Another example: take almost anything from nature.

Termite mounds are huge and complex, and when you look at the way the thousands of termites move around you can liken the whole thing to an organism in its own right. One reason termites are so successful is that they can eat almost anything. They can do this by being host to microbes in their guts which can digest things like cellulose. These microbes are called mixotrichs and the amazing thing is that they themselves are colonies of creatures. What seem to be hairs on the mixotrich’s body are actually long wiggly bacteria, each one an organism in its own right with a complete genetic code.

Thanks as ever to Richard Dawkins for showing us how the wonders of creation have evolved! Complexity is the name of the game. So maybe God does not want us to live simple lives – there is nothing much simple about the way he has created us or the way he has revealed himself to us. But that doesn’t seem quite right either. There is still that clarion call to simplicity ringing in our ears.

Let’s try to move towards a resolution. What is it that we admire about people with simple faith? Is it the simplicity of their lives? No, it’s almost the opposite. It’s the way they embrace life with all its richness and complexity and yet show an unbending trust in God. They do not turn their backs on the difficult and the complicated and the unresolved parts of life. Somehow they shine through it to point us to Jesus.

So we need to accept that life is not simple and that Jesus did not come to make our lives simple. But we also long to have that simple trust in God because it seems to be the key not just to coping but to embracing life, overcoming everything that threatens life.

The reading in Exodus tells us a lot about how that trust can work. There are perhaps three principles that we can discern:

The first is that stuff happens, and when it does it ill behoves us to look for scapegoats. Blame is one of the key features of our culture. The Israelites wanted to blame Moses and Aaron for the fact that they were out in the desert starving to death (or so they thought). Moses said "Who are we that you should grumble against us. The Lord has heard your grumbling against him". In fact when things seem to go wrong the Lord wants us to blame him. It’s not by accident that the image of the scapegoat is used for Jesus. When you don’t like what is happening, complain to God and he will hear your grumbling. When I was a young Christian I read a book by someone who lived by the principle of praising God for everything. Not just in spite of everything but for everything. I tried this but it didn’t work. It seemed to work for him but not for me and not I suspect for most people. I gradually learned that if you moan to the Lord he will listen.

The second principle of trusting God is to be obedient. It was very important that the people obeyed his instructions about how to gather the manna. It’s important to be provided with a lifejacket on a boat or a plane but it’s just as important to listen to the lady or read the card about how to use it. Engineers are particularly bad at this. I’m an engineer. We have a phrase, "When all else fails, read the instructions". We have another phrase that has four words, three of which are "read the manual". Through the Bible, through the advice of wise people and through the witness of our conscience we are given God’s instructions and if we want to go beyond the complaining stage we must listen and be obedient to his call.

The third principle is to let go. Back to my Easter Day rollercoasters perhaps? We cannot at the same time trust God and insist on building our own elaborate mechanisms and systems to try to insure ourselves against God getting it wrong. So those who tried to store the manna (in case God failed to provide for their needs) not only missed the point, they came a cropper. In our New Testament reading, some of the people of Pergamum were trying out their own religion, eating food that had been sacrificed to idols and committing sexual immorality. The writer’s message was to repent, to turn round from that mistaken way and to follow the truth. The promise is interesting: To him who overcomes I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone with a new name written on it. In other words if you trust me enough to let go of your own schemes, I will provide for your needs and I will assure you of your place in my family. Remember, if we look a little wider in this part of the book of Revelation, these promises are the words of him who holds the seven starts in his right hand, who is the First and the last, who has the sharp double-edged sword, the Son of God, whose eyes are like blazing fire and whose feet are like burnished bronze, who holds the sevenfold spirit of God, him who is holy and true, who holds the key of David, the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the ruler of creation.

This is God we are speaking of. Does he want us to lead simpler lives? No, not necessarily, but he does want us to trust him.