To Be Kept for the Generations to Come: Take That Science!

PRAYER OF CONSECRATION Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.  Jesus, I belong to you. I lift up my heart to you. I set my mind on you. I fix my eyes on you. I offer my body to you as a living sacrifice. Jesus, we belong to you.  Praying in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.  Exodus 16:31–36 The people of Israel called the bread manna. It was white like coriander seed and tasted like wafers made with honey. Moses said, “This is what the Lord has commanded: ‘Take an omer of manna and keep it for the generations to come, so they can see the bread I gave you to eat in the wilderness when I brought you out of Egypt.’” So Moses said to Aaron, “Take a jar and put an omer of manna in it. Then place it before the Lord to be kept for the generations to come.” As the Lord commanded Moses, Aaron put the manna with the tablets of the covenant law, so that it might be preserved. The Israelites ate manna forty years, until they came to a land that was settled; they ate manna until they reached the border of Canaan. (An omer is one-tenth of an ephah.) CONSIDER THIS So, I have a question for Moses today. How much is an ephah? Seriously, that last parenthetical bit warms my heart. (An omer is one-tenth of an ephah.) It tells me this. If Moses could have done it, he would have translated an ephah into pounds or fluid ounces or liters or whatever the measurement of the day might be. And suddenly, I remembered the internet, so I googled it: "How much is an omer in today's measurements." I got this: "An omer is a unit of measurement in the Bible that is equivalent to about 2.3 liters (0.61 US gallons) in today's measurements. It is also equivalent to the volume of 43.2 chicken eggs, or one-tenth of an ephah. In dry weight, an omer weighs between 1.56–1.77 kg (3.4–3.9 lb)." Further, it told me the word omer is sometimes translated into the word "sheaf" and is the amount of grain large enough to be bundled together.  Why does all this detail matter? Because this is the stuff of history and not mythology. This is not a "once upon a time" story but, as Exodus 16:1 reports, an "on the fifteenth day of the second month after they had come out of Egypt" reality. Faith and religion so readily get filed in the category of spirituality, and spirituality is inherently subjective and mystical and impossible to measure. And things mystical and unmeasurable, in time, become mythological. And centuries hence, they get cataloged in the "warm and fuzzy" fairy tale section of the bookstore. Moses is saying this thing that is happening right now—this wonder bread that is miraculously appearing on the desert floor every morning for the next forty years—is not that. This is as real as real gets. It can be measured and preserved and verified and seen with our eyes and touched with our hands. So Moses said to Aaron, “Take a jar and put an omer of manna in it. Then place it before the Lord to be kept for the generations to come.” Moses knew us. He knew we would never believe him if he just said manna mysteriously appeared on the desert floor every morning. He knew some of us would immediately spiritualize it and then turn it into some kind of metaphor, while others of us would mythologize it and explain that these ancient people were children of their age and hadn't yet arrived at the scientific revolution, which would explain how everything that couldn't be measured couldn't be proved. He knew us. Hence, we get this: (An omer is one-tenth of an ephah.) Take that scientific method. It is 2.3 liters or .61 US gallons or just under 4 lbs dry.  Here's my big takeaway today. The deliverance we need now is from religion and into reality. We must be delivered from our faith in God as religion and into our faith in God as everyday life. We must be delivered from our faith in God as subjective spirituality and into our faith in God as concrete reality. It is not a matter of subjectivity and feeling but of something that can be measured and put in a jar and, as the text says so clearly: kept for the generations to come.  It's in that same category that we will later see these words: "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life" (1 John 1:1). THE PRAYER FOR DELIVERANCE Lord Jesus, you are my Deliverer.  Thank you for revealing to us that an omer is one-tenth of an ephah and that it will almost fit into a half-gallon mason jar. Thank you that the burning bush was a real bush burning with real fire and for the real miracle that it was not burning up. Thank you that you don't provide fuzzy feelings of spiritual support but of concrete bread that fills our empty stomachs and sustains our real lives. We receive your deliverance from a faith that feels like religion and into a faith that interacts and engages with real life. We receive your deliverance from religion as mythological stories and church as a sociological support group and into faith as an impenetrable shield and church as the only order on the face of the earth that the gates of hell cannot prevail against. Would you lead us into a way of discipleship and disciple-making that is of another order of magnitude from the thin and anemic version we have adopted?  It will be for our good, for others' gain, and for your glory.  Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be. World without end, amen! Amen!