A wilderness menu

THE American novelist Marilynne Robinson, writing about growing up in the Idaho mountains and woods, talks about the wilderness that surrounded her.

She writes: “That never felt like emptiness. It always felt like presence.”

The children of ancient Israel, released from slavery in Egypt, are led by Moses towards a Promised Land. But they have to travel through a wilderness to get there.

There are oases, but the journey onward through the wilderness of Sin (not the same as our English word, but you have to wonder…) takes God’s chosen people through discomfort and the danger of hunger and thirst. Only a month or so into their exodus, they begin to look back to their already dimming memories of slavery where, forgetting the oppression, even their short rations there seemed luxurious.

In the passage the Israelites are called the ‘congregation’ of Israel, a sign of their new identity beyond their slave state, but it is clear that this new identity had not yet become part of their nature. They have not yet become who they are to be, and grown into an understanding of what it will mean to be a child of God.

Childishly they complain and lament.

Their food crisis is almost a Biblical equivalent of the back-seat-of-a-car cry of a child: “I’m hungry. Are we there yet?”

Here, when the congregation of Israel cries out, God hears, God responds, and God is hospitable. Where might we be hospitable in the wilderness times of others?

In the desert, far from home, with few if any signs of natural resource, the image we are given is of God raining bread, and quails, upon the people.

Photo: iStock

In the wilderness, with no one else to help, God provides.

Some may spend too much time wondering how this wilderness menu might have happened, pondering the migratory habits of quails, or what manna really was and how nutritional it might have been.

That is not the point of this story. The point is that God listened, and that God provided. God’s hospitable provision for God’s people is found not only in the extraordinary but in the everyday.

We often miss the glory of God in the ordinary because we are too busy looking for the surprise and the miracle and the unusual.

God can make extraordinary provision, but we should never overlook the presence and provision of God in what seems ordinary and everyday. “Give us this day our daily bread” we pray each day in the Lord’s Prayer, and every day the ordinary miracle of farmer, baker, shopkeeper, customer melds together.

The Israelites fed on quails and manna in the wilderness for forty years, which might have tested even the culinary skills of Mary Berry or Nigella! The manna finished when the Israelites crossed over the Jordan into the Promised Land with Joshua. So important was the hospitable gift of manna that the writer of the Letter of the Hebrews mentions that inside the Ark of the Covenant, when it resided in the Holy of Holies in the Temple of Jerusalem, the contents included the stone tablets on which the Ten Commandments were written, Aaron’s rod that had budded, and the golden urn that contained a portion of manna. A reminder that thankfulness for food has its place in everyday worship.

The hospitality of God continues in the wilderness years, and in the years of plenty. ¤

The Very Rev Dr Derek Browning Is minister at Edinburgh: Morningside