Sermon at Choral Evensong

Sunday 21st April 2024

Exodus 16.4-15;

Revelation 2.12-17

Angela Tilby,
Canon of Honour

Some of you may remember Rabbi Lionel Blue, who was a gifted broadcaster and a personal friend of mine over many years. I, along with many others, loved him, for his wit, gentleness and honesty about the human condition, his wisdom about God and faith and suffering and hope. He helped me realise two things about Judaism. One was that the feasts and festivals were all marked by food: he loved food I have to say – and his ancient mother, who was of Russian origin and whom I met a number of times – used to ensure he and his friends were well fed. She was herself a remarkable woman with a searing openness that always hovered between laughter and tragedy. Lionel used to say of his mother that she never complained of pain. It was always, as he put it, EGONY. 

He once co-wrote a book about food called A Taste of Heaven. His point was that Judaism is a gutsy religion, there is something visceral about its spiritual, that we pious Christians sometimes miss. The meaning is absorbed more through flavours and smells and textures than through theology and doctrine. I often think of Lionel on Good Friday especially if I am preaching at a Three Hours service. By the time we get to the last hymn, and I always request We Sing the Praise of him who died, to the tune Bow Brickhill – I only have to hear the organ introduction to be on the point of fainting with anticipation of my first hot cross bun slathered in butter. So, God and food, Manna in the wilderness, Give us this day our daily bread. Bread of heaven on thee we feed. Do thIs in remembrance of me. Take, eat.

The second thing I absorbed from Lionel, and from other Jewish friends as well, was how in Judaism faith is learnt through argument. We Christians, he implied, are far too polite in our approach to God. We should learn to complain more, to question more, to disagree more effectively, though with less lack of charity. If you’ve ever seen the inside of a Jewish Yeshiva school where students are taught to hammer away at scripture and to disagree loudly and aggressively with one another for the sake of God’s word, you’ll have an idea of what I mean.

Both these themes, food and argument, come together in our first reading. God has heard the complaints of the people of Israel in the wilderness and announces that he is going to rain down bread for them; bread for the morning after an evening feast of fresh quails. There is an alternative version of this story in the book of Numbers which contains one of my favourite verses of scripture, where the people look back sadly to the benefits of life as slaves in Egypt: ‘If only we had meat to eat! We remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for nothing: the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions and the garlic’. They were slaves, for heavens sake! But free and hungry in the wilderness they could only remember the salads and casseroles of captivity. So they were very suspicious indeed of the white flaky stuff that they found on the ground at daybreak. What is it? The Hebrew for What is it is Manna – so manna from heaven. What is it, whotzit? Not the most polite response to God’s bounty. When we get all pious about manna from heaven in all those Eucharistic hymns– you know the sort of thing: ‘Life imparting heavenly manna..’ ‘O manna from above…’ Remember that manna is a question, what is it? Doesn’t quite work in a pious context: ‘Life imparting heavenly Wotsit – stricken rock with streaming side….Perhaps a lot of divisive debates about the nature of the presence of Christ in the Eucharist would be cut short if we remembered the impious question: What is it? Before disagreeing about what precisely it is. The version of the story in Numbers gives us a bit more information about manna – it looked like coriander seed – I’ve got some of that in the kitchen – and it was the colour of gum resin. And there’s even a recipe. ‘The people went around and gathered it, ground it in mills or beat it in mortars and then boiled it in pots and made cakes of it; and the taste of it was like the taste of cakes baked in oil.’ So there.

I think the point of all this is to show that God provides for his people, though not always in the way they might like. It is not Deliveroo or Ubereats. In the wilderness of the desert, in the wilderness of this life what we need to survive is not always what we want but what God provides: Manna, What is it? And it is alright if we question and complain and find all sorts of unlikely uses for what is given, sometimes we do have to eat the bread of anxious toil because there is no other bread available, to go through horrors of illness, bereavement, anxiety, to chew down on what makes us queasy because it is all there is.

We can learn much from Judaism and a readiness to be thankful for what God provides while arguing with God about what is not provided is important in prayer. Look at the psalms and they are full of questions about injustice, they berate God for not slaying the wicked more effectively, they bang on and on about suffering, about loneliness and sickness and death and the fear of death. The prayer of the psalms, as Lionel Blue’s mother might have said, is not about pain but EGONY.

Saying and praying the psalms has always been an important part of the Christian spiritual tradition and here in the cathedral the psalms are said, prayed or sung, morning and night, not least because in some ways they articulate the cries of the world, the cry of wonder, the cry of thankfulness, the cry of distress and the endless questions, the ‘What is it?’ of the human heart. In our second reading the writer promises a gift of what is called ‘the hidden manna’ – bread for the heart for the soul? And a secret new name that is only known to the one who receives it. These are the rewards of those who conquer, those who overcome. And much of our conquering and overcoming today is to with endurance, with bearing the burdens that life puts upon us and finding the grace and mercy of God in spite of and within all that challenges and infuriates us.

We are all called to take up our cross and follow Christ. And the cross is not always the cross we might prefer: the cross that quietly massages our egos, that allows us to feel self-righteous and martyred. It is the boring everyday cross of not getting what we want, of not liking our bodies or our circumstances or our relations, of being misunderstood, of being anxious or low in spirits, or just puzzlement: What is it? Endurance matters, faith matters, but we should never forget that God invites us to question him, or that God’s answers suggest the Almighty has a robust sense of humour.

Angela Tilby

Canon of Honour