The whole congregation of the Israelites complained, saying, “If only we had died by God’s hand in Egypt, where we sat by the stew pots and ate our fill of bread; but you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill the whole assembly with hunger.” (Exodus 16:2-3)
Once upon a time, there was a pastor who was beginning to feel stagnant, and stale, and trapped. She waited and waited for God to open the door of a small inner-city church; but at last, and to her shock, God called her to serve a regional crowd instead. “Who am I to do this?” she asked as she doubted and wrestled and argued with God. Finally, however, she obeyed; and she moved and began working among the people there. But after a year or so of people gathering and growing, and miracles abounding, she began to grumble.
“God, I am a city person,” she said. “It would have been better for me to stay stagnant, and stale, and trapped, there by the fleshpots of Melbourne. At least I had Vietnamese restaurants, and a theological library to nourish and sustain me.” And God rolled God’s eyes, and sent more people to tell her stories, and the wind and the birds to teach her, and a few old friends to visit, and some new friends to emerge—and she looked all these good gifts and groaned, “This is my time in the wilderness, God. I’m ravenous. Kill me now!!”
I’m making fun of myself—but I’m not alone in my grumbling. I’ve been here seven years, and I’ve heard it all. This church plant was fresh and exciting for a while, and so full of promise; but the reality of an ordinary pastor working with ordinary, tired and busy people soon became stale. Sundays came around quickly; turning up was too difficult. We didn’t consult together, except when we talked too much. We had communion too often, and we didn’t share food often enough.
What else? We were too weird, yet too conventional; too focused on families, yet too adult; too diverse, yet not diverse enough. The pastor did too little, or too much; we didn’t want rosters, except when we did. We met indoors too often, except when we were too often outside; there was too much preaching, except when there wasn’t. Our journey seemed aimless: we headed this way, then that. We moved too slowly for some, too fast for others; and almost certainly in all the wrong directions. The people of God always grumble; it’s right there in Exodus, and it’s still with us.
But now I’m close to finishing up, some of us are remembering the time before Sanctuary. And some of us are remembering that we took the paths we did for a reason: because people were hungry. People described their faith as desiccated, shrivelled up, almost non-existent. People said they were ravenous for Bible, for communion, for prayer, and for a place to belong to. People said it had been years since they had been properly fed. And so we gathered around Word and Table in order to be fed by the stories, to be fed by the bread, to be fed by each other and the presence which deeply satisfies. Indeed, for many it’s been like bread raining down from heaven at times: a miracle of God’s nourishment and abundance.
Shalom,
Alison
Emailed to Sanctuary on 4 October 2023 © Alison Sampson, 2023. Photo by Kelsey Dody on Unsplash.
Alison and the whale 