"Dangerous Wisdom" | Nathan LeRud | September 29, 2024

If you've ever been on a family road trip, crammed into the back of a station wagon, bickering with your sister, staring out the window, complaining to your parents about the lack of bathroom breaks, you might start to get a sense of what's going on in the Book of Numbers when the people start complaining about the food.

The comedian John Meany tells a story about being on a family road trip when he was a kid, crammed into the back of the car with his siblings. They see on the horizon the golden arches of McDonald's– the every late 80s suburban kid's culinary fantasy. And encapsulated in those arches, those fries (man, those fries). So the kids start chanting, right: "McDonald's! McDonald's! McDonald's!" And finally to shut them up, the dad pulls into the drive-thru. The kids start to cheer. Happy meals for everybody! Dad drives up to the drive-thru window, orders one black coffee to go, and just keeps on driving.

John Meany's dad is my hero.

The Israelites are tired of manna, and who can blame them? They say, we remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for nothing. The cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, the garlic. You can almost hear them salivating. And it honestly, it sounds pretty great compared to the– I mean, we think manna is like this coriander-flavored tamarind tree foam that they get every day. Can you imagine eating coriander-flavored foam every day, world without end? You would start salivating for lemons and melons and cucumbers, too.

So the people are angry, Moses is angry ,and God is angry. This is the summer road trip from hell. And Moses turns to God in his frustration and says, I never asked to be the leader of your chosen people, would you like to help me out?

So God comes up with a plan which does not really, at least in this story, does not really address the food problem. It addresses maybe the larger issue here, which is the leadership problem right?

This is the moment when the twelve tribes of Israel begin their transition away from a charismatic leadership model focused on one guy into something that starts to feel a little bit more like an institution with layers of responsibility and hierarchy. And more people to respond to the complaints.

God says, I will take some of the spirit that is on you, Moses, and I will give it to the 70 elders whom you've called out from among the people. Seventy is like a, it's a symbolic number in Hebrew scripture. It's a number that corresponds, we think, to like the size of an ancient near-Eastern ruler's war council. So that's probably where this number comes from.

But if you're like me, you're doing the math in your head and thinking, 12 tribes of Israel, 70 elders– 70 does not go into 12 evenly. And the ancient rabbis actually spent a lot of time on this question.

There's a funny story from the the Talmud, which is an ancient rabbinical commentary on scripture, where Moses says back to God, look, if I choose six elders from every tribe I will end up with 72, and that's too too many. If I choose five from every tribe, I end up with 60 which is not enough, If I choose five from some tribe and six from others, I'm going to bring about strife and envy and competition. So what do you want me to do, you've given me an impossible number. And Moses's solution in the Talmud is to put 72 slips of paper into a jar, and on 70 of them is written the word "Elder." I am not making this up, this is the Talmud.

On 70 of them is written the word "Elder." Two of the slips are blank. And he calls six men from every tribe, 72 guys, everybody draws a slip, and these two these two guys Eldad and Medad draw the blank slips, so they stay back in the camp when Moses assembles the 70 elders in the tent of meeting, the place where God's spirit is.

But as in the story from the Book of Numbers that we just heard, God's spirit is like not restricted by the boundaries of this tent, so when the spirit of God comes upon the elders, when they start prophesying, Eldad and Medad back in the camp are prophesying, too.

And there's this nosy little kid who should really mind his own business, but he comes running up to Moses– "Eldad and Medad are prophesying in the camp!"

And Joshua, Moses's assistant, is outraged. "My Lord Moses, stop them! They have not been authorized to do that!" And Moses knows that God's spirit refuses to be confined, that way it cannot be controlled or hemmed in or restricted to the certain– the certain people who drew the right slip, right? Every time a human institution attempts to manage God's spirit, God is going to find a way to circumvent the rules.

"Are you jealous for my sake?" Moses asks Joshua.

And then he says this famous line, this beautiful line:

"Would that all the Lord's people were prophets, would that God would put God's spirit on every single one of them."

That's the promise that haunts this entire biblical narrative, right, from the the prophet Joel a couple hundred years later, where God says, "I will pour out my spirit on all the people. Your young ones will see visions, your old ones will dream dreams."

It comes to a kind of fruition in the story of Pentecost that we read every spring from the book of Acts. These 120 people who are gathered in an upper room in Jerusalem, they start speaking all these different languages. These divided tongues appear on their heads.

They're prophesying, right? That's what it looks like according to the ancient texts. That's what happens when God's spirit lands in a room. It's something that you can feel. People start speaking in strange ways, behaving in weird ways.

It's scripture's great dream, this dream of a sanctified people. Not that they're are some people who are holy priests, elders, whatever, who have some kind of unique access to God. No, the dream is that all God's people would be caught up in the spirit, would experience the spirit of vision and wisdom and truth. Would that all the Lord's people were prophets.

[aside] Is that me? Yeah that's me. Okay, I lost my little– the little foam thing on this mic, so it's a little, it's a little more reactive this morning.

So last Thursday, Liz and Charissa and Katie and Shana and I were (your dean and four canons, right?). We gathered for our weekly, our yearly Leadership Retreat.

"Canon," some of you know, this "Canon" is just a fancy Cathedral job title. It refers to anybody, whether or not they're a priest, who holds a leadership position in a cathedral.

So Shana and I are priests, Liz and Charissa and Katie are not. But we're all canons, right? We operate very much as a team.

So we started meeting week– uh, monthly about a year ago. We were looking for a different kind of conversation than we're able to have week-by-week in staff meetings right? A kind of a deeper-level conversation so that we could check in with one another on how things were going, we could plan upcoming events, but mostly so we could have a little bit of time to dream about where God is calling this community to go.

So on Thursday ,we're talking about pastoral care. We brought in Linda Potter, who many of you know, to talk with us about pastoral care. And because we we each are experiencing some different tensions in our role as pastors here, we all rotate through this.

We call it Canon in Residence, it's sort of like the pastor-on-call job. We're each on deck every few weeks to respond to pastoral emergencies as they come in. Often that means navigating requests for money or assistance, often it's just praying with people who don't know where else to turn, and sometimes, people will ask Liz and Charissa and Katie, the three the three lay canons who rotate through that job, sometimes they'll ask them, "Are you a priest? My husband is dying and I want a priest to come and say and say last rites. Are you a priest?"

And so each of them have figured out some good ways to say no, I'm not a priest, but I can say a prayer with you. I can come and visit you in the hospital if that's something you'd like. I can bring you communion. And sometimes the person on the other end of the line will just hang up at that point: they are looking for a priest and that's not what they got, so they're done. More often, in our experience what people really want is someone who will see them and will listen to them, really and truly listen to them. And Liz and Charissa and Katie are some of the best listeners that I know. They are priests in all the ways that matter.

And it turns out there's actually not there's not a lot in this very hierarchical Episcopal church with our rules and regulations, right, there's not a lot that distinguishes us one from another on this team, at least not not practically.

Shana and I can pray the prayers at Eucharist, we can pronounce absolution of sin, whatever you think that means, and we can bless stuff.

And it turns out that non-priested people can do the absolution and the blessing, too, it's just slightly different wording that they get.

But that's really all, right? There's not a lot practically that distinguishes those of us who wear a little white plastic collar around our necks from people who wear normal collars.

And that's you, right, that's every single one of you sitting in this room wearing a normal collar.

And this is the thing: we need you.

This is what we discovered this last week: this work that we do of pastoring, it's really lonely a lot of the time.

There's something that stirs in me when I hear this story from the Book of Numbers and I hear Moses's plea to God: "I am not able to carry this people alone. They are too heavy for me."

He's not talking about the way they weigh in on a scale, right? There's a lot happening in this community, and I suspect that every leader of a community, religious or not, knows a little bit about what Moses means when he prays this prayer.

So I've been thinking about this story, this ancient story from Hebrew scripture about a time before there were priests, before there were bshops and deacons and canons, before there was a temple, before there was a professional religious class of people who were set aside to handle all the holy stuff to be this intermediary between God and normal people.

What we've done here at Trinity is to try to spread that spirit of God stuff around as broadly and profligately and sometimes as non-canonically as we possibly can.

I've got these incredible colleagues. The staff of this Cathedral are some of the holiest and best prophets I have ever known. We pray together, we work together, we laugh together, and I got to tell you, if I am hit by a truck tomorrow and I'm lying on my deathbed in some hospital, I'll tell you who I want to come say prayers with me on my deathbed: you call up Charissa Simmons and you call up Katie Webb and you call up Liz Harlan-Ferlo and Shana McCauley.

It is not their ontological status that makes them good at their jobs: it is the spirit of God at work in their lives and in their ministries. And I have to say, I feel so lucky that they have answered yes to this call to serve as, I mean, Trinity's canons– that's technically their their term– but really, this is our version, our vision of Moses's team of elders.

And sometimes the ways that we are asked to prophesy, the ways in which we exercise that work– sometimes that work takes us outside of the the clear-cut boundaries of the tent of meeting.

What I have learned is that every time the church tries to police God's spirit, to control it, restrict it– I mean, you know, we said, "Just men can do that," for centuries.

Then we started saying, "Well, maybe women can do it too, but straight women."

And then it was like, "well, gender-conforming people can do it." But like– or "Just people who wear the fancy plastic collar around their neck," right?

The church has been doing this for a long time, and God always has this mischievous way of making sure that there's always those two extra: there's always an Eldad and a Medad prophesying out outside the tent. This pesky reminder that try as we might, religious institutions do not get to tell God how to be God. God is going to do whatever God is gonna do.

And I got to tell you, sometimes the best stuff happens outside the tent. The most powerful healing happens in the camps, it happens out in the world, out in the places where people are gathered, the places where people sometimes endlessly complain about their food. Eldad and Medad might be the two most important elders Moses called that day– they're the ones who actually seem to be addressing the real issue here, which is not "70 elders gathered in a tent meeting;" it's that the people are not happy with the food they're getting. And Eldad and Medad are the only ones who are actually responding to their immediate needs.

So my prayer is that God will continue to break open this hidebound, rule-obsessed, canon-policing church.

This congregation, this little camp of wilderness wanderers with a profligate spirit of holiness and truth, an extravagant, improvident, risky, and dangerous wisdom: that that spirit will spread so broadly and so deeply that each one of us might begin to to prophesy.

What does that mean? To speak, to share our experience that we might actually find the truth. To name the ways that we actually live to tell truth to institutions in our world that desperately need to hear the honesty of our real lives– the lives that we really live, right, not that the lives that the church tells us we ought to live.

My prayer is that Moses's dream for this world actually comes true, even in our own day. Would that all the Lord's people were prophets.