An Antidote to Grumbling

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

We can’t read today’s OT and Gospel lessons and not chuckle a bit. Why? Because in each of the stories, we see humans grumbling about their current situations and when we think about it for a moment, we realize that we are just like them! For various reasons, we grumble about all sorts of things and some of us seem to really enjoy our grumbling because we do it more often than not. I am not talking here about the kind of grumbling that should rightly occur when we see injustice or poverty or things that degrade or dehumanize us. I am talking about the kind of grumbling that occurs when things do not go the way we think they should. And so today, I want to look at what these lessons tell us about grumbling and what we might learn from that.

In our OT lesson, we see the Israelites complaining about their present condition in the wilderness. God has delivered them from their slavery in Egypt in a most dramatic fashion. So far so good. Folks usually don’t grumble when they see the Almighty doing things like parting the Red Sea. Such acts of power are stark reminders of how ridiculous our concerns are about whether God is big enough to take care of us and our needs.

But now things have apparently changed for God’s people. Yes, God still accompanies them. The pillars of cloud and fire are there to lead God’s people and protect them. The problem is, God’s people are still wandering in the wilderness and they are getting tired of it. They start longing for the good old days when they were slaves to the Egyptians. Why? Because they had plenty of food to eat there. Their basic needs were being met, with the exception of their freedom. But we all know you can’t live by freedom alone. You need food in your belly and so the Israelites grumbled against Moses and Aaron. After all, that’s safer than grumbling against God.

Then there are the workers in Jesus’ parable in today’s Gospel lesson. They too are grumbling but apparently for a different reason. In this case they are grumbling over what they see as a fairness issue. In this parable, Jesus clearly has in mind the relationship between God and his people as the vineyard owner and workers were well-known metaphors for both parties respectively.

We notice several peculiar things in this parable. First, we notice that the landowner seems to genuinely care about his people. He doesn’t send out a hired hand to round up those who need work. The landowner goes out to see for himself what is the condition on the streets. We also notice the generosity of the landowner because he pays the day laborers a very generous wage, certainly more than the usual daily rate because there typically was an oversupply of day laborers in Jesus’ day, which would have driven wages down. Despite this, the landowner pays these workers a premium wage. But here is where it gets interesting because at the end of the day he pays everyone he hires the same wage and that really irritates those whom the landowner hired first. “Not fair! Not fair!” they exclaim.

Do you see what is going on here? We tend to grumble when things don’t seem to be going the way we expect or think we deserve. It is usually indicative of our human pride in which we elevate ourselves to become the center of the universe and when our expectations are violated, we get irritated or downright indignant and start to grumble. We see this illustrated in the Israelites in our OT lesson. They didn’t believe God really cared about them or would take care of their most basic needs. The laborers in the Gospel lesson didn’t think they had been treated fairly, at least those who had been hired first. And so they all grumbled against God because they essentially believed they knew better than God about their own needs. Do you see how ludicrous that is? Can the finite and fallible creature really know better than the infinite and all-knowing Creator?

Before we answer that, however, we had best take a look in the mirror because even Christians behave like this on occasion. You see, we live in the “already-not yet.” We have seen the cross and believe that God really has acted decisively on our behalf to give us eternal life. We have also seen the empty tomb and believe in the hope and promise of New Creation that Jesus’ resurrection previews and promises. That is the “not yet” part and it gives us real hope as we await its full arrival because we know our future is secured.

But in the meantime, we still have to live in the wilderness, which is a common biblical metaphor for living in God’s good but broken world. We are still afflicted by all kinds of nasty things that make us grumble, from physical illness to relational problems to economic worries. The list is endless and like the Israelites in the desert, we too cry out to God and grumble to him because we too often think we know better than God and wonder if he really is big enough to meet our needs. We all get this dynamic because we all have been there and done that.

And what is God’s response to our grumbling? If God were like the rest of us, we would typically expect God to give it right back to us. After all, isn’t that how most of us react to the persistent grumbling of others (which is never as justifiable as our own)? We tend to get irritated and give it right back to the grumbler, or at least show little sympathy or care about it.

But it is to the glory of God that he does not do that to us. Instead, God is infinitely patient and generous with us as we see in both stories. God did not chastise his grumbling and ungrateful people. He gave them manna, the bread of heaven to sustain them! Why? Because God rescued his people out of Egypt to bring God glory and to use them to help God bring his healing love to the rest of sinful humanity, not to destroy them. Israel would try God’s patience repeatedly and their rebellion did bring them punishment and exile. But through it all, God remained (and remains) faithful to his people.

And as the message of Jesus’ parable makes clear, God is outrageously generous to his people. He is not generous to us because we deserve it. In fact, the only thing any of us deserve from God is condemnation and death. But God did not create us for that and so he dealt with the problem of our sin and the alienation it causes by becoming human and for us so that we would not be separated from him forever. This is the breathtaking generosity and grace of God. As Jesus reminds us in today’s parable, God gives to us, not because some of us are more deserving of his gifts and love than others, but because he is generous beyond our wildest hopes and imaginings. We see the very heart of God illustrated in Jesus’ parable.

So what can we learn from all this? First, it is OK to grumble because we still live in a broken world and there are real problems and suffering that inevitably afflict us. But we must be mindful of whywe grumble. We have no reason or right to think we know better than God or that he is not capable of taking care of us. When it hits the fan in our lives, we must have a deep and abiding faith in God’s love and goodness toward us. But this doesn’t happen automatically. We have to do the things in our control that will allow the Spirit living in us to help us grow in our faith. This means we read and study God’s word regularly to be reminded that God is sovereign and faithful. We have the freedom to push God away but he will not abandon or reject us in any circumstance. For example, if we were to continue to read the story from Exodus today, we would learn that the Israelites discovered that despite their grumbling, God gave them exactly what they needed, no more, no less. God provides for his people. Scripture makes that consistently clear and we need to make that story our own so that we can recall it when we are tempted to grumble. When, by God’s grace, we learn this, we are on our way in using our faith to overcome a major source of our grumbling—human pride.

We see this dynamic illustrated in Paul’s letter to the Philippians when he talks about preferring death so that he could be with his Lord. This isn’t some kind of morbid death wish that results from psychopathology. No, it was a statement of great faith. Paul wrote Philippians from prison and death was a real possibility. But he didn’t care. He had Jesus! And as the context of today’s passage makes clear, Paul wrote this letter to encourage the Philippians in their trials and sufferings. Paul was essentially telling the Philippians not to let nasty things like death or his unjust imprisonment or other trials for Jesus’ sake get them down. They were in God’s care and their future was assured.

Paul seems to be saying to us, “You still live in the wilderness. But live as people of hope because Jesus is with you and will never abandon you. Look to his cross and resurrection regularly to remind yourselves that God is powerful enough to overcome even death. Nothing is too big for God.” This isn’t easy to do, especially in our darkest hours. That is why we also need to love and care for each other so that we can have tangible and consistent reminders of God’s love for us and power to deliver us. As with any habit, the more we put on Christ, the more we can depend on his power to help us live faithfully in the wilderness.

Last, we need to take a cue from the Israelites feeding on the manna in the desert. God has delivered us from sin and death through the cross of Jesus. As we await our promised destiny of being with Jesus in the New Creation, we are to feed on Jesus’ body and blood each week that we remain here in the wilderness so that he can sustain and strengthen us in yet another real and tangible way. The day you stop believing that you no longer need the sacraments of holy communion is the day you are in real trouble because your pride is deluding you into thinking you do not need to rely on God’s gracious generosity to live or are somehow deserving of it, just as some of the workers in Jesus’ parable were.

Grumbling is a fact of life. But let us all resolve to engage in godly grumbling where we groan to God about our weakness and confess to him our utter dependence on him to sustain us as we walk in the wilderness. Let us do the things on a regular basis that will increase our faith, things like learning God’s rescue story in Scripture, feeding on him each week by coming to his Table, and developing a real fellowship with each other. When we do these things, we will discover that we are maturing as Christians and when that happens we will also discover that our grumbling subsides proportionately. Yes, we walk in the desert, but we are not alone. We have the Spirit living in and among us, and we have a glorious future awaiting us, all because we have a God who is sovereign and who is outrageously generous with us. All this reminds us that we really do have Good News, here in the wilderness and for all eternity.

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.