provision

Dear Daughters,

Last fall, my women’s Bible study group at church began working through the Gospel of Mark together. I particularly enjoyed reading N. T. Wright’s Mark for Everyone commentary, guiding the group’s discussion, and unpacking the tricky passages.

I’ve read Mark before, both in snippets and straight through in one sitting, and I’ve certainly heard a lot of sermons preached on it. In fact, Pastor Bob preached through the book of Mark over the course of one liturgical year in recent memory. Your dad even translated it when he was studying Koine Greek as an undergraduate.

So it’s very familiar to me. And at 16 chapters, it’s the shortest Gospel. It’s all in a rush, it seems, especially when you read straight through it.

But reading Mark as a group this time, especially with all of the summarizing and re-hashing of the themes every week last fall, really illuminated the Gospel for me in a way that caught me off guard. It’s not just short and speedy and simple. Nope, it’s downright radical, girls. Seriously. It’s upside-down Kingdom, challenge the status-quo, packed-full-of-symbolism radical. This is powerful stuff, this Word of God.

It’s always good to be reminded of that.

My group took a break from Mark to read a different book this spring, but we picked it up again during Lent, starting with Mark 10. To kick off our discussion, I asked my friends to think back over the first nine chapters of the book and reflect on what stood out to them.

I’m sure it was no surprise when I told them the three things I had been carrying in my heart these last months because, quite honestly, when I’ve got something on my heart, I preach it. All the time. You’ll know this about me someday.

The first was the radical pull-back-the-veil, reveal-things-as-they-really-are nature of Jesus’ baptism scene. How radical would it be for us to hear God’s message to Jesus as a message about our own calling as God’s beloved children? “You are my beloved child,” God says. You are. YOU.

The second was the Gerasene demoniac’s healing. This has always struck me as a strange one, the focus often on the demons requesting to go into a herd of pigs—talk about crazy stuff in the Bible! —but N. T. Wright points out something I had never thought about before. This man, this Gentile who had been tearing his body apart because of possession and illness, is not just healed by Jesus, but commissioned by Jesus. Jesus tells him to go back to his community—most likely a Gentile community, given the location—and tell what God has done for him. This man, this nobody, is actually the first apostle to the Gentiles. How powerful is that?

And then, lastly, the bread. Oh, the bread. I’ve been preaching about the bread every time I can.

God’s message throughout the Gospels is a message of abundance and provision. It’s the message throughout Scripture, of course, but it comes up powerfully in the life of Jesus.

Here in Mark, the disciples see Jesus perform radical miracles of the body and spirit, they hear him teach and explain a radical Kingdom of God, and they are sent out and tasked with doing miracles themselves. Mark tells us they do it. They actually cast out demons without Jesus there with them.

Then they witness Jesus doing another crazy thing for a crazy big crowd of people. They even help him do it. God transforms a measly amount of bread and fish into enough food for over 5000 people, and there are twelve baskets of bread leftover. Leftover, post-miracle abundance.

But then, and this is what stays with me: a little while later, the disciples are freaking out when a storm comes up and they’re on a boat without Jesus. But Jesus, once again being his radical self, comes walking out on the water to them. Mark says Jesus “intended to pass them by,” which evokes a lot of things, including Moses being permitted to see the full revelation of God from behind as God passes by him in the cleft. The disciples here are seeing something they cannot believe, and it scares them. When things calm down a big, Mark says, in passing, that they were scared and confused because “they didn’t understand about the bread.”

They see God in the flesh, but they did not understand about God’s provision. They saw bread multiplied for the masses, but they did not understand that God had sent the true Bread of Life who was big enough, strong enough, enough enough. They were themselves able to cast out demons, but they doubted the ability of God to cast away their fears.

If only they had understood about the bread.

If only they had understood about God’s provision.

If only they had understood about God’s abundance.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the last few months.

Do I understand about the bread?

Do I recognize the message of abundance the Gospel announces to the world? This is not a name-it-and-claim it abundance. This is not a reward-for-good-behavior abundance. This is not a give-and-you-will-be-blessed abundance.

This is the sheer, undeserved, over-the-top abundance of grace.

And it is for everyone. Not just you, girls. Not just me. Not just other pew-dwellers.

This abundance is offered to the most ornery of political leaders.

This abundance is offered to the shut-in across the street.

This abundance is offered to the registered sex offenders in our neighborhood.

This abundance is offered to the mom of the kid at preschool that kind of grates on your nerves.

This is radical abundance. There is enough to go around. It won’t run out. And offering it to others does not lessen the value of it, the generosity of it.

We Christians say we believe in the grace and love of God, but I worry that we don’t act like we believe in it.

I don’t think we act like we believe that it applies to others, that much is darn sure as far as I witness Christian behavior in my own community and on my own Facebook newsfeed, but I also don’t think we act like we believe it in our own lives.

And still I wonder:

Do I understand about the bread of heaven? Do I understand that this life is not my own? This house is not my own? That you are first and foremost daughters of God more than you are my daughters? Yes, I think that is the message of scripture.

This world is not ours. Our lives are not ours.

Everything we have is undeserved. And there is enough to go around.

If only they had understood about the bread…

I don’t know, ya’ll. I might still be preaching this message when you’re grown-up and reading these letters.

If I’m not, remind me.

Love,

Your Momma

Dear Daughters,

I was thinking recently about the Israelites in the wilderness, after Moses tells them that God is going to provide bread for them to eat. The next morning, they wake up and there’s this flakey stuff on the ground, and Exodus tells us that they didn’t know what it was. They called it manna, which literally means, “What is it?”

It didn’t look like bread, girls. It was nothing like bread.

We lose the wordplay that emphasizes this part of the story when we call it simply manna today. We hear manna mentioned in sermons and don’t think much of it. But when we say, “God provided manna,” we aren’t saying “God provided sustenance,” we’re saying, “God provided something unrecognizable.”

They called it “What is it?”

Or, you could say, they called it “What the heck?”

Actually, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that calling it manna was a bit like calling it “Are you kidding me, Moses?” A bit like calling it “I don’t know what ya’ll are thinking, but this ain’t no bread.”

This was not the bread that was promised.

Those of us who grew up steeped in scripture and in church tradition hear the word “bread,” and we hear all the connections and metaphor we’re meant to hear—not just Jesus as the bread of life, but the last supper and communion and the bread and grape juice, the loaves of bread that multiplied to feed five thousand families, the breaking of bread that opens the eyes of the disciples in Emmaus to see that the risen Jesus is among them, Elijah promising the widow that her flour will never run out.

There’s a lot of bread in scripture. A lot of provision in scripture. A lot of promise in scripture.

But this flakey stuff the Israelites find all over the ground?

It doesn’t look like bread.

It doesn’t look like what was promised.

I was thinking about all of this on a grumpy day a few weeks ago. It was one of those days I didn’t particularly feel like being a mom.

Are you kidding me, Moses?

I didn’t feel like reheating my tea in the microwave again, eating my lukewarm egg on cold toast, choosing between leaving the bathroom door unlatched to let you come toddling in or closing the door and listening to you knock, knock, knock, Momma, Momma, Momma…

This ain’t no bread.

I didn’t feel like the incessant chatter requiring my constant response that is conversation with young children—in the car, at the dinner table, whispered in bed at 5 am.

What the heck?

I didn’t feel like giving up my quiet time in the afternoon to a crying toddler, didn’t feel like playing playdough or getting bundled up to go outside or coloring in coloring books, didn’t feel like letting you “help” make the cookies.

This is not the bread that was promised.

Yes, that’s what I was thinking. This is not the bread that was promised.

And what I meant was: This is not fun.

This is not what I want provision to look like.

This is not the bread I want to eat in this season.

I want to go and bake my own bread, thank you very much. I want cinnamon rolls and French toast and bagels and a sub from a central Pennsylvania pizza place.

So there. Honesty for you.

Sometimes, this is not the bread I want to eat, and so I am not very grateful.

Sometimes it feels like all I’m doing is scraping the flakey stuff off the grass every morning and pretending it’s nourishment.

I figure that’s okay. I’m in good company. Forty years later, it was still nourishing the Israelites, this not-what-I-thought-was-bread stuff, this are-you-kidding-with-me stuff.

Because, of course, it was the Israelites who had it wrong. They didn’t recognize it, but it was exactly what was promised.

It was bread.

It was provision.

It was hope.

It got them through the desert.

But I can guarantee you one thing—they sure were tired of it by the end.

Love,

Your Momma