Pilgrimage
Numbers 13:17-14:9
What Reality Do You Choose?
01-13-13
We live in a very affluent society when you look at the
rest of the world or even to the not so distant past of our own. One of the dreaded questions I know our
family faces daily, and the same may be true for your family, is this question;
“What is for dinner?” Back in the 1800s
I have a feeling this was an easy questions to answer in Indian Trail. You ate whatever was available. You ate whatever meat, baked goods and home
grown vegetables. “What’s for dinner?”
wasn’t a hard question because there weren’t a lot of options.
Skip to today and that question gets a little
harder. Now in our refrigerators,
freezers, and pantries there are probably a half a dozen meals that could
possibly be made. Now which one do you
want to make becomes a little harder.
Then there is the option if you don’t eat at home. If you go out where will go? Do you go to one of the umpteen fast food
chains, or the local restaurants, or the ones in Monroe, or Waxhaw or
Matthews? Instead of one option now
there are actually hundreds and so the question gets even harder when we are
asked daily, “What’s for dinner?”
Think about it another way. If someone asked you to pick them up some
shampoo at the store what would you pick up?
There may have been two or three options 70 years ago, but not there are
whole isles in the grocery store that give you 30 some odd options for shampoo,
let alone conditioner. Does the person
want one that smells fruity or like coconut?
Do they want one boosts the volume of their hair, helps fight dandruff,
or leaves a nice shine. You couldn’t
even say, “Could you pick me up some Pantene because there are about 12
different varieties of Pantene on the store shelves. With the amount of choices we have in our
society it is a challenge if not a nuisance to make decisions.
It is always nerve racking meeting a new church for the
first time. You don’t know who you are
meeting. You don’t know what agendas you
are going to be met with. You don’t know
the truth about a lot of the situation before you get there and dive in. A friend of mine received a call from her DS
and was told that she was going to her next appointment. After trying to figure out where that church
was and where the town was, she asked about the church situation. The DS informed her that they have had a couple
of interim pastors until they could appointment her there. This peaked her interested and she asked more
about why they needed two interim pastors.
The DS told her that the pastor had been sick.
Some weeks later she met with the Pastor Parish Relations
Committee Chair and the Lay Member to Annual Conference. During the conversation she asked them about
their recent history and why they needed two interim pastors. They looked at each other and then at me and
they looked embarrassed. She told me she
was thinking to herself, what is there to be embarrassed by your pastor getting
sick? But then they finally opened up a
little and shared their story. Come to
find out their pastor had an affair with the music director. The pastor confessed everything to their DS
the right before Christmas. The church
was rocked to their core and had been dealing with all the feelings that come
with a pastor being removed from their appointment, spending Christmas with no
pastor, and then two interim pastors who came in to lead the congregation until
she was appointed. As this pastor moved
into this appointment reality started to sink in as she talked with key leaders
and other laity.
What was interesting was finding out later that they
still do not like talking about that incident.
They feel ashamed and scared to admit what had happened. It wasn’t their fault, they didn’t do
anything. It was something that the
pastor and the music director did but the congregation members were the
casualties. As the PPRC Chair stood to
read a letter from their now former pastor the Sunday of Christmas Eve and the
congregation was faced with a new reality they had a choice to make. They could have folded up, melted down, and
ran or they could pull together as the Body of Christ and rise above the
fray.
In today’s scripture we have a major decision
happening. The Hebrew people had left
Egypt and they have traveled from Egypt, across the Red Sea, through the
wilderness to the edge of the Promise Land.
They are camped on the outskirts and ask 12 spies to venture in and see
what they can see. He asks them to ,
“inspect the land. What is like? Are the
people who live in it strong or weak, few or many? Is the land in which they live good or
bad? Are the towns in which they live
camps or fortresses? Is the land rich or
poor? Are there trees in it or
not?” Moses is walking with over a
million people and he wants to make sure things are okay when they decided to
move into the land that God promises.
They are right there but they had to do some research first.
So the 12 spies go in and explore for 40 days. They see a fertile land and plenty of grapes
growing. They take a cluster with them
on their journey to prove how nice the land is.
When they come back all 12 spies agree that this land is full of milk
and honey and show the fruit as proof.
They are honest about the people they saw too and the huge fortified
cities. They list the clans they saw and
the areas they lived in. Worry starts to
creep through the people and people start to panic.
Put yourself in the shoes of the people. They follow Moses out of slavery in Egypt and
through this strange land to the place where their leaders promised was from
God. When they get there they find it
full of people but also potential. Now
they are faced with a decision to make and two options come up. Ten of the spies, give one option and two of them give another.
How we define reality is extremely important. The spies did a great job when they first
returned. They named the land correctly
saying it was full of milk and honey and people in fortified cities. They named their current reality well. The church I spoke about earlier had to name
the reality that their congregation when through a hard time and went through
trauma. When we are faced with choices
or those moments in our lives when we know a decision has to be made, naming
the reality we live in is extremely important.
All 12 spies do an excellent job in this.
The problem arises when they interpret that reality in
light of the decision they have to make.
There are two options available to the Hebrew people. They can run away from the promised land because
they task seems to big or they can move forward into what God has
promised. They can make this decision
from two places, out of fear or out of faith.
Ten of the spies give their recommendation from a place of fear or
perceived reality. This perceived
reality leads them to give us Numbers 13:33, “We saw ourselves as grasshoppers,
and that’s how we appeared to them.” The
task of going into the Promise Land was so big that the people living there
turned into giants. The ten spies said
they were grasshoppers when compared to them.
Fear got a hold of their reality and turned normal people into
giants.
The “Grasshopper report” came out of a place of
fear. The fortified cities, the
population that already existed, the Hittites, Jubusites, Amorites and
Canaanites were all too much and so the rumors were spread that these people
were giants. You can start to get a
sense of the fear involved. The other
thing involved was the murmuring. “Murmuring
is the language of perceived reality.”[1] God’s chosen people love to murmur. That is true today as it was back in Moses’
time. It didn’t take them long to start
either. They had just left Egypt, just
walked across the dry ground through the Red Sea. They were simply three days into their
journey when Exodus 15:24 records their first account of murmuring, “the people
murmured against Moses.” When things get
scary the people of God complain, whisper, gossip. But this is all the language of perceived
reality, the reality defined by fear.
“Murmuring is the word that describes life in churches
that allow fears of the present and future to be coupled with a desire to cling
to the past.” Focus is moved from hope
in the future to fears of the future.
The ‘what ifs’ creep in and taint the dream or callings God is laying on
the people. This is when the “Back to
Egypt Committees” rear their heads. When
things got bad for the Hebrew people they suggested that they leave Moses and
go back to Egypt. At least there they
knew where they would get their food and where they would sleep. This is true but they tended to forget that
this is also when they were being brutally oppressed as slaves. But that is the issue with perceived reality,
the past, even though it may not be as good as the present, still looks better
than the unknown future.
Now that things are getting tough again, “the entire
community raised their voice and the people wept that night.” They laid all the blame at their leaders
feet. It is all Moses and Aaron’s
fault! “Let’s pick a leader and let’s go
back to Egypt.” Now I am sure this never
happens in modern day congregations. I
am sure there has never been people who blamed the pastor, the Chair of a Committee,
or a Committee as a whole as being the source of their problems. I am quite certain that never has happened
here at Indian Trail United Methodist Church.
I am certain you all understand sarcasm.
It is really easy to place blame on leaders or on the pastor. But once again that is a symptom of perceived
reality or of a murmuring congregation.
As the book I’m using for this sermon series says, “People live out the
behavior pattern of murmuring as they cling to the perceived security of the
past even when the past has the power to enslave them in the present.”
Now if perceived reality is bad what is the better way to
interpret the reality we are in? For
that we go to Caleb and Joshua. They are
the two spies that spoke up and gave a different perspective. How they interpreted reality is called
Envisioned Reality. Do you remember what
they reported to Moses and Aaron. We
find this in Numbers 14:7-9. They say,
“The land we crossed through to explore is an exceptionally good
land. If the Lord is pleased with us, he’ll bring us into
this land and give it to us. It’s a land that’s full of milk and
honey. Only don’t rebel against the Lord and don’t be
afraid of the people of the land. They are our prey. Their defense has
deserted them, but the Lord is with us. So don’t be afraid of them.” They came from a place of faith in God not of
fear. They realized that if God brought
them out of Egypt, through the Red Sea, provided for them during their journey,
guided them with pillars of fire and smoke, they why wouldn’t God lead them
triumphantly into the Promise Land like God promised?
That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be hard. To defeat the current inhabitants and take
over the land would be very difficult.
Yet, Caleb and Joshua encouraged the congregation of Israel to face the
giants without fear. The other ten spies
had a “Grasshopper sized” perception of reality whereas Caleb and Joshua had a
“God sized” perception. They made their
recommendation from a place of faith in God instead of fear. They knew that if the vision of the future,
the calling of God, is real then the people will succeed no matter how great
the task.
What we are faced as a congregation journeying towards
the Promise Land is where we will make decisions from, perceived reality or
envisioned reality? Will we make
decisions from a place of fear or a place of faith? Here is an important question we need to
consider, “The question a local church must answer as it plans its ministries
is the following: will we plan our ministries based on memories of the past, or
will we plan ministries formed by the promises of Jesus Christ?”
We know that both reports regarding the Promised Land
became true. The people decided to first
follow the words of the ten and because of their lack of faith God sent them to
spend 40 years in the wilderness. He
said no one from that generation would get the privilege to enter the land he
promised. When we do not have faith in God and what God
promises there are consequences and there is judgment. When we live and make decisions through faith
we experience and envisioned reality. A reality
that is filled with God’s grace and love.
It doesn’t promise to be easy but it is the Promised Land. So the question we are left with today and
the one we will discuss tomorrow night is this: “As we consider the Promised
Land Jesus envisioned (last week’s sermon), what vision of reality will we
choose to live into?”
And all God’s people said…Amen.
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