Come and See, take 2: The Economy of Grace
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.
There is a brutally honest Hebrew phrase right there in the middle of our reading from Exodus: manhu, or manna.
The dew had evaporated off the desert floor, leaving behind a fine, flaky crust. The newly freed community wandered out of their tents, stared down at the dirt, blinked, and said to one another, "Manhu?" which translates quite literally to: "What on earth is that?"
They did not recognize it because it looked nothing like the food of the empire they had just escaped. For generations, their survival had arrived via imperial bureaucracy. In Egypt, you made your quota of bricks, the overseers distributed your ration, and you went to sleep with calloused hands, aching backs, and an exhausted spirit. It was violent, it was extractive, and it was deeply dehumanizing—but it was predictable. It arrived on a schedule in regular, known containers.
Now, they are in the desert, completely unmoored from the old structures they had back in Egypt, and their stomachs are beginning to rumble.
When hunger sets in, an insidious thing happens to human memory: nostalgia sets in. They look at Moses and Aaron and cry out that they miss the flesh-pots of Egypt. They romanticize their own enslavement because, at least in chains, they knew where their next meal was coming from.
"When you spend your whole life under a system that treats your body like a unit of production, you begin to believe that love and sustenance are things you have to earn, bargain for, and hoard."
This comes out of the psychological understanding that we know now as the hierarchy of needs: you need security, shelter, and sustenance. When you don't have those three basic needs met, your brain becomes more instinctual; it doesn't work nearly as well. They didn't have any of those things, and yet they looked back at Egypt and said, "Maybe we had that there."
When you spend your whole life under a system that treats your body like a unit of production—like a cog in a big machine—you begin to believe that love, sustenance, security, and shelter are things you have to earn, things you have to bargain for, and things you have to stockpile and hoard.
But then God steps in. God steps in and shatters this entire reality.
God doesn't drop a warehouse from heaven in front of them. God doesn't create a supply chain so that the Israelites can hoard provisions, stock up, and feel securely in control. No—God gives them something delicate, daily, and communal: morning dew that hardens into bread, and evening quail that cover the camp.
With that manna comes something very specific: countercultural instructions. Gather only what you need for yourself and your family that day—nothing more, nothing for tomorrow—because you have to trust that God will continue to provide.
Inevitably—because human beings in our world are anxious and traumatized overall—some people start trying to hoard the food. They sneak a little extra here and there into their tents, thinking, "I better stash this away just in case God doesn't show up tomorrow. Maybe God will get busy; maybe God will forget."
The text tells us that the stockpile of manna rots and breeds worms by the very next morning.
God is actively working to break them from the mythology of scarcity they had lived in their entire lives—the fear that there just won’t be enough for the next day. God is deprogramming them by teaching them that the Divine does not work in a transactional way. God is not in a hustle.
"God has an economy of trust where tomorrow's grace meets you tomorrow, and where everyone gathers according to their need."
God has an economy of trust where tomorrow's grace meets you tomorrow, and where everyone gathers according to their need—so that those who gathered much had nothing left over, and those who gathered little did not lack anything.
Yet, even while it lies thick upon the ground, they don't really come up with a name for it. They just name it after their own bewilderment: manna, "What is it?"
It feels disorienting. They're not supposed to store it in baskets or bins, and they don't even know what it is they are eating (which is something I have done in many restaurants). But it feels disorienting, and maybe we understand that disorientation a little bit more than we'd like to admit.
When life forces a pivot, when our plans get rained out, when the rhythm of a season shifts, when the systems we rely on day in and day out break down, or when we simply walk into an unfamiliar place after months or years away, our first instinct seems to be suspicion. We stare at the ground and ask: "Can life actually sustain us here? Is there enough here for us?"
God's response to the crowd is simply: gather, eat today, wake up tomorrow, and do the same.
To me, that is experiential faith. It requires bending down, getting dirt under your fingernails, and receiving the gift before you have any intellectual knowledge of what it is.
I think that is the same spirit behind the phrase we’ve used for this new season: Come and see. When people approached Jesus in the Gospels—hungry for meaning, tired of the rigid religious and political machinery of their daily lives—Jesus didn't ask them to submit to doctrine or take a test. He didn't ask them how their morals were. He said, "Come and see. Put your feet down on the ground. Feel the earth. Come to the table. Taste the grace. See what it actually feels like to exist in a space where your value is not tied to your productivity at all."
We look to the lesson from Matthew today, where a landowner goes out to the marketplace five different times across twelve hours, hiring workers at 6:00, 9:00, noon, 3:00, and finally 5:00. When pay time arrives, he pays them all exactly the same.
From the vantage point of Wall Street, this is terrible economics, and the workers who bore the heat of the day are furious. From that Wall Street perspective, you can understand why. They are evaluating the vineyard through Pharaoh’s ledger: more hours, more output, more merit, more money.
"Jesus blows that logic wide open. This isn't about paying for units of labor; the landowner is providing a living wage so that every single family has bread on the table."
Jesus blows that logic wide open. This isn't about paying for units of labor. The landowner is providing a living wage so that every single family has bread on the table that night. He is providing manna. He refuses to let the 5:00 p.m. crowd—folks who were overlooked, left behind, and chosen last—starve simply because nobody noticed them earlier.
All of this could be called the scandal of grace.
Which brings us to where we are today. In our world, there is an unspoken anxiety that keeps people away from church—especially a church they may have been absent from for a while. We tell ourselves stories: "I've been away too long. I don't know the people anymore. I don't know if I believe half of what's in the prayer book, much less the Bible. I don't have my life put together."
Yet, that is not the world God has for us. Even if you walk in at the eleventh hour, or after a decade away, the way is exactly the same, the bread is the same, and you do not need to earn your way back into the love of God—because you never fell out of it.
In his letter to the church in Philippi, Paul wrote from a jail cell, urging the church to “live in a manner worthy of the gospel.” Living in a manner worthy of the gospel does not mean having the sleekest operation, the highest attendance, or the fanciest building. It means embodying that nontransactional, scandalous economy of Jesus, where we make room at the table for everyone—for those who arrived early in the morning and for those who came late. Everyone has room at the table, and we all sit staring at the manna asking, "What is it?" That is the mystery of Christ.
Today during the announcements, we are going to do a backpack blessing—or a briefcase blessing, tote bag blessing, medical bag blessing, toolkit blessing, or diaper bag blessing—whatever you carry day-to-day. If you brought those items, bring them up; if they are at home, bless them in your heart.
These bags are often heavy, messy, and demanding tools full of obligations and chores. When you pick them up after church and head out into this coming week, remember: you do not carry that load alone. Jesus is there, your church is there, your friends and family are there, and the load does not define you.
God has dropped bread on the ground right in front of us. Let us breathe, bend down, taste, and ask: "What in the world is it?"
Amen.
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