From Manna to Mandate
by Rev. TJ Lucas
Beloved Church Family,
I came to you at the height of the pandemic, and it felt like walking into a wilderness with no map and no marked trail. The years of ministry I had previously, the degrees and certifications I acquired, and all of the wisdom of trusted colleagues around me could not advise on how to best navigate such a historical circumstance. We could not gather for worship and when we finally could, we had to take precautions against a threat we did not fully understand nor could we see.
On the day I was ordained, no one could lay hands on me the way the church has done for generations, so I was set apart across distance, held up by a promise when I could not be held up by a touch. And yet God was there as God always is with us. We found our way through the wilderness we started in together.
Six years now we have walked this journey of faith alongside one another and it has run through more than one kind of wilderness. There were the wildernesses we expected, the ones every church knows, when we said goodbye to the pillars who held this house up and learned to stand in the space they left. There were the ones no one prepares you for: the storms that came with wind and water and damaged what we love. We are using that storm as an opportunity to rebuild in a way that allows for us to leave our mark on our historical building. There was also the the government shut down that called us into starting a monthly free meal we weren't sure we had the resources to pull off. Yet for almost a year we have served with open hearts, helping hands, and a fellowship hall. God called us and we set a table in the wilderness of this society for those wandering in hunger and thirst. Every moment--good and bad--taught us something new about who we are, as individuals and as a community. No matter what rose up in front of us, God made a way through for us. As I often proclaim, the Lord provides!
Now we find ourselves in the wilderness again, and this one has a melody-shaped hole in it, because we are once more without a musician. We know this terrain as we felt it when we lost Ernie Brown, our faithful organist. Though we did not have to wait long for God to guide us because Nicole came right behind him. And what a gift she has been throughout these years. Especially this past summer, we pulled off our best sermon series together yet as we dwelt in music of every genre-- looking for God in the secular songs of everyday life. We ended on a high note, as we should, with our beloved friend answering God's call to serve elsewhere. That is the strange holy thing about a wilderness: sometimes it is not only a place where we are left, it is a place where someone is sent. We grieve, and we bless her, and we are learning that both can be true in the same breath.
Which brings me back to the wilderness Israel walked, and to what we have been learning together these past weeks. On September 20th, we stood before a mirror in the desert and saw ourselves in a hungry, frightened, grumbling people, only thirty days out of Egypt and already they began to wonder if slavery would be better. They were hungry which isn't something they ever felt while enslaved. They recalled the big pots of meat and their fill of bread in Egypt. This unknown feeling of hunger in the wildnerness was driving them against their leaders and God. They wondered why they left the brutality of an enslaved life because their fear was clouding their lived realities.
Fear is a powerful force. It edited their story until their previous bondage looked like a buffet. How quick they were to forget the beatings, the children slaughtered, and the endless grind of day to day life. They complained to Moses about their hunger as it felt like certain death. And into that complaining, God did not send condemnation--he sent Manna. Enough just for today. A type of provision that fed the people in the physical while training them up in a spiritual way of trusting that God will provide it day to day. God did not give them stockpiles of food. He gave them food they could collect within God's provision and guidelines.
Then on September 27th, the people thirsted in the Exodus text and Moses got water from a rock. But Nicole preached one last message that Sunday and she chose to carry the story forward, turning us toward Philippians and the Gospel of Matthew. She told us about her lilac, cut down and given up for dead, that bloomed in the autumn when no one expected it.
In Philippians, Paul points us to the One who emptied himself and was raised up, and reminds us that God is at work in us, enabling us both to will and to work for God's good pleasure. In Matthew, a son who said "I will not" changes his mind and goes into the vineyard, while the one who made all the right promises never moves. God is not finished with what looks finished. The cut-back places in your life, the "no" you once spoke, the season you were sure had passed: none of it disqualifies you from blooming. Perhaps our church feels a little cut back, having to lose someone we have grown to love and that has flourished among us. But God does amazing things in our wildnerness, cutback moments if we atune ourselves to the divine presence of God in our midst.
Look to the Exodus arc--First the people needed bread, then water, and always the assurance that God was among them. Provision came, and provision teaches trust. Now, having been fed and watered and reminded that new life can come out of season, the people are brought to the foot of the mountain to receive the commandments in this week's upcoming scriptures. They are ready to learn what it looks like to live as people who have been provided for, and, I think, as people who can send one another out with open hands. They were guided from the basics of daily bread to a way of life--manna to mandate.
That is where we are headed as we launch a new sermon series and a new chapter for our church. This series entitled, Grace and Gratitude, is a five-week journey through the stories of Exodus and the teachings of Jesus, and it is for anyone who has ever felt fear and anxiety quietly running the script of their life. Those are the forces that build subtle idols of control, that cling to entitlement out of scarcity, that let unexamined pain dictate our relationships. Together we will learn to name our deepest fears, release the need to control the outcome, and process grief and expectation with open hands. Because true gratitude is not a forced smile. It is the calm, courage, and unexpected freedom that come from waiting on God's presence, and we have seen that presence in a pandemic, in a storm, at a food table, and in the music of a summer we will not forget.
This Sunday, when we look to the ten commandments and the parable of the tenants in the vineyard, we will have to ask a hard and holy question: what happens to a people who have been given everything and forget who gave it? We will sit with the difference between caretaking and claiming, between gratitude and entitlement, and ask what we are holding as a gift and what we are gripping as ours. We will ask it as a people who have been blessed by a musician we now have to release, and who are learning, once again, that what God gives us is never ours to keep and always ours to share.
So come, beloved, and bring your open hands. We are not just leaving Egypt, we are not stuck wandering in the wildneress, we are learning how to live free.
Lord, you fed us, you watered us, and you made us bloom when we thought we were done. Bless the ones you are sending, and steady the ones who stay. Prepare our hearts to receive your word each and everyday. Amen.
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Dwelling in the Word Practice
Please remember that this way of reading the text is a spiritual practice. It is not reading it for historical context or theology or anything that is academic. This is purely trying to tune your ear to hear a word from God. It is supposed to deepen your relationship with God and make reading your Bible less daunting.
Steps:
Lectio — the Inhale
Read the passage through once, slowly. This is your lectio. I like to think of it as a holy inhale of the Word. Remember the Divine breath of God carries and sustains each of us through our whole day. So just breathe it in. Let the words settle into you before you do anything else with them.
Meditatio — the Word That Shimmers
Read it a second time. This time, you're listening for one word or phrase that shimmers for you — something that catches, that stands out, that you can't quite let go of. You don't have to search for it. Just notice what finds you.
Oratio — Talking It Over
Now sit with whatever shimmered, and talk to God about it, openly and freely. You can read the text again before you do this, but you don't have to. This is your practice. Take these instructions and adapt them to whatever feels most natural to you. Let the prayer come out of you however it wants to. If we're doing this with other people this is also when we share out loud what stood out to us and what it's stirring in us.
Contemplatio — the Exhale
And finally, let it go. Rest in it. This is your exhale, your contemplatio — you're done working the passage now, you're simply resting in God's presence and letting whatever shimmered for you do the work in your daily life. You will find that whatever stood out to you in your time with God. In this practice, we'll find a way to speak to you as you go by your regular day. Just don't force it. It will come as you deep in and strengthen this practice.
Below are the scriptures for this upcoming week summarized in one line so you can select one more easily or you can find them in their entirety here:
Exodus 20:1–4, 7–9, 12–20: God delivers the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai, establishing holy boundaries for Israel's covenant life amidst intense divine presence.
Psalm 19: Creation silently proclaims God’s glory, while the perfect law revives the soul and guides believers toward blamelessness.
Isaiah 5:1–7: Prophetically allegorizes Israel as a meticulously tended vineyard that yielded rotten fruit, prompting divine judgment for yielding bloodshed instead of justice.
Psalm 80:7–15: Pleads with God to look down from heaven and restore the vulnerable "vine" He previously brought out of Egypt and planted.
Philippians 3:4b–14: Paul considers all his former credentials as loss compared to knowing Christ, straining forward to press toward the prize of God's heavenly call.
Matthew 21:33–46: Jesus tells the parable of the wicked tenants who reject and murder the vineyard owner's servants and son, warning that the kingdom of God will be given to those who produce its fruit.
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