I know what you’re thinking: Didn’t we just last week get Israel out of Egypt? Yes indeed, Charlton Heston and all. But now we’ve got to finish the job and get Egypt out of Israel. We’ve had an exodus; now we need an exorcism.

It’s an odd thing about human nature: you are a slave to one master, and even though you finally break free, you find that master still has a grip on you. Freedom is an inside thing as well as outside, spiritual as well as political. But even at the political level alone it has to be learned.

The American Revolution was like that. It’s hard to realize today, but much of what burned the colonists was the English nobility looking down on them, calling them Americans, as if it were a dirty word. They didn’t respect the colonists as full-blooded British citizens with all the rights obtaining thereto. We like to think our founders were motivated by principle alone – No taxation without representation! But that really supported the case rather than giving rise to it. What the colonists felt was the inferiority that comes from being looked down on by their supposed betters. They were determined to prove themselves every bit the equals of the English nobility.

Yet once we were free from the crown, we had a hard time figuring out how to live free. The first twenty years of the American experiment was filled with passionate infighting over how the government would be set up. Could a republic succeed? Could there be a central government without tyranny? There was no common history or shared culture that wasn’t owed to the conflict against the English Pharaoh, George III. And then there were the African slaves. It wasn’t just the black slaves, though, that were slaves of the times; the whole country was still enslaved in their mentality. All the issues they dealt with were rooted in their pre-independence, or, if you will, their pre-exodus experience. Like the children of Israel after the exodus, America wandered in the wilderness before it learned how to live free. We are learning still.

Six weeks into the wilderness and Israel is getting hungry and worried. We say they wandered in the wilderness, but they also wondered in the wilderness. As the hunger pangs mounted, they let their minds wander back to Egypt and they wondered about the past they left behind. At least there we had three square meals a day, they thought. They remembered the smell of barbeque filling their nostrils as it wafted across the fence from their Egyptian neighbors. The rabbis say the bread makers in Egypt were famous – 57 kinds of bread, 38 different kinds of cakes. The French must have been in Egypt too. Well, never mind they were slaves. Never mind they had no chance at a future other than the one Pharaoh might order depending upon his mood that day. Life was better in Egypt than there in the wilderness, because in addition to food, they woke up every day knowing what to expect. If biblical religion is anything, it’s a call to come out from all captivity that robs you from living each day with the wonder of what God might do next. God not only wants to get Israel out of Egypt but Egypt out of Israel.

The first big test is here, and it’s over hunger. You know you’ve reached middle age when you start getting colonoscopies for the fun of it. (Well, sort of.) Your doctor tells you, Even though you have no symptoms, you are at that age now when … Don’t you just love those words – you are at the age now when…? I used to. You are at the age now when you can stay home without a babysitter. You are at the age now when you can drive without your father in the car. You are at the age now when you can vote. Man, those were good words. Now it’s, You are at the age now when – and whatever follows is all about what you’d better stop doing, about what you’d better have checked out. Right, so I did that 24-hour prep the other day for the scope that would follow. No food all day and the night before. Drink that delicious stuff that cleans you out by sending you to sit in the smallest room of the house. Isn’t this why you love to come to church? Anyway, I went to watch my daughter at the cheerleading game that night – Oh, yeah, they also played football, don’t you know?! Well, all round me people were talking about where they were going to dinner, who made the best pizza in town and what not. And I’m thinking, What is this punishment? I’d have given up golf for a week for a juicy cheeseburger.

The Hebrews felt that way but they knew Jake’s was back in Egypt. No franchises in the wilderness. So they complain to Moses and Aaron. They forget about the miracles in Egypt that got them free. They forget that God opened the sea and led them safely across. All they remember is an idealized view of life in Egypt.

It’s like the way we tell our kids about our childhood. Now, it really is true that I traveled an hour and half to high school and back every day. I walked half a mile to the bus, often in the snow, and yes, somehow uphill both ways. I did have shoes, though. I rode the Staten Island ferry, and then a subway from Manhattan to Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. They were good days but harder than today. That’s what I tell my kids. You don’t know how good you have it. You have nothing to complain about. But we complained too.

Moses does just what he should do: he turns the complaints of Israel into complaints against God. He doesn’t deflect them the way politicians tend to, taking credit for the good things and passing the buck when things go bad. It wasn’t Moses that got them out of Egypt and it isn’t Moses that will provide for them in the wilderness. George Washington was critical to transitioning America in her wilderness phase into a society of laws instead of men. He reminded us that we lived in a land of immense resources provided by the hand of Providence. Moses did the same for Israel. They would soon become a people of law, with the Ten Commandments as their guide. But first they needed a man to guide them to see that God was guiding them and that the world was filled with bread for the journey from the hand of God.

God hears the people’s grumbling and griping. God hears and God provides. God doesn’t just save us to abandon us. God doesn’t give new birth to us and drop us on the doorstep of the wilderness orphanage. God doesn’t set us free to see us return to slavery. God saves and God provides. God tells Moses that as long as they are in the wilderness, there’ll be two meals a day – manna in the morning and quail in the evening. Not bad, but what was it, manna? Well, we don’t really know. Some kind of sweet substance that appeared white and flaky on the ground. When the Hebrews saw it on the ground, they called it manna – probably from the words man hu, which mean, “What is it?” Every morning they would go get a bowl of “What is it?” for themselves and their family. No one knows what it tasted like, but the rabbis tell us it tasted different to every person. Whatever a man liked, they said, he found it in the manna. Mine would have tasted like dark chocolate. It probably tasted like chicken. Doesn’t everything? The important thing is not how it tasted, though, but that God provided for them in every way when they had become fearful that they were without the resources for life outside of Egypt.

And isn’t that the way we feel as the church in America today? Things are not like they used to be? If you grew up in the north, day was when preachers like Phillips Brooks or George Buttrick or Harry Emerson Fosdick would have their sermons reprinted in the newspapers on Monday. Here in the south you might remember when the school principal was also the Sunday school superintendent and the county judge was the chairman of the deacons. If not your First Baptist Church, then surely First Methodist across the street. You could pray the Lord’s Prayer before school and see the Ten Commandments on the wall, and if you broke one, your Royal Ambassadors director probably paddled you down the hall. But now all the foreigners and Yankees and humanists have ruined those good old days. Some Christians complain that we are in a culture war, that we have to fight to bring back those good old days, that we are all under assault and going to hell in a hand basket unless we rise up and take back our country.

This may be the underlying story of the conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention in the last 25 years. The Religious Right wants to take back over the government and restore its vision of America, its values in laws designed to coerce rather than coax morality in the citizenry. And the leaders of the SBC have done the same, codifying right beliefs in their new creed.

That sounds like too much Egypt in Israel to me. Seems like a return to captivity. We are in the wilderness now, and maybe should start by accepting that and wondering whether God has actually led us here. The church cannot depend any longer upon the institutions of the community to support its mission. Stores are open on Sundays, soccer games are scheduled for Sunday mornings, and neighbors don’t want to let churches build bigger parking lots in their back yard because they don’t think churches deserve to grow at the expense of their convenience. We long for the captivity of Egypt again when the church at least knew it’s place and felt useful to the empire.

But what is the proper attitude of the church in times like these? Yes, we are in the wilderness. But let’s give thanks to God that need not be so captive to culture. Rather than complain about our situation, we ought to count our blessings. We can celebrate what is and what is possible, instead of crying about what was or can’t be. Rather than bemoan the loss of our status, we can remember we are citizens of a greater kingdom. We can now learn to pray more and depend more on God. We can see more clearly our hope is in God and take up our mission in this world. We can face forward with faith, becoming people of adventure, traveling light with heavy hope in our hearts, on our way to the land God has promised us.

When George Schultz was Reagan’s secretary of state, he had a ritual test for every ambassador that returned for his first visit back to the Washington. He would spin the globe in his office and ask the ambassador to put a finger on his country. When his good friend and former Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield returned from Japan, he put him through the same routine. But this time, Ambassador Mansfield put his finger on the United States and said, That’s my country. Schultz is fond of telling that story as a way of reminding us all that wherever we go we are not to forget to look after the welfare and interests of the true country to which we belong. [Quoted in Homiletics (Sept 2002): 49.]

You and I have a choice as much as Israel did: we can believe that our true country is the one that keeps us in bondage to bread that will die with us, or we can believe that we belong to a country yet to be seen that is ruled by a God that provides for our every need. Which will it be – Egypt or Israel? Do we live in poverty or plenty? Will it be a chronicling of complaints or a counting of blessings?