Week 27: This Is Way Too Much (Part 1)

Scripture: Numbers 11: 10-15

Moses heard the people weeping throughout their families, all at the entrances of their tents. Then the Lord became very angry, and Moses was displeased. So Moses said to the Lord, “Why have you treated your servant so badly? Why have I not found favor in your sight, that you lay the burden of all this people on me? Did I conceive all this people? Did I give birth to them, that you should say to me, ‘Carry them in your bosom, as a nurse carries a sucking child, to the land that you promised on oath to their ancestors’? Where am I to get meat to give to all this people? For they come weeping to me and say, ‘Give us meat to eat!’ I am not able to carry all this people alone, for they are too heavy for me. If this is the way you are going to treat me, put me to death at once—if I have found favor in your sight—and do not let me see my misery.”

This is Way Too Much (Part 1)

It was the theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, who once articulated a prayer that has since been recited by many people during their path towards developing into better people. This prayer is one that almost everyone has either heard and/or recited, and that prayer is the Serenity Prayer. The prayer goes as follows:

God, grant me the Serenity

To accept the things I cannot change...

Courage to change the things I can,

And Wisdom to know the difference.

Living one day at a time,

Enjoying one moment at a time,

Accepting hardship as the pathway to peace.

Taking, as He did, this sinful world as it is,

Not as I would have it.

Trusting that He will make all things right

if I surrender to His will.

That I may be reasonably happy in this life,

And supremely happy with Him forever in the next.

Amen.

This prayer has particularly become familiar with people who are suffering from an addiction, but is a prayer that acknowledges that we have hit a wall and something has to give. This prayer calls our attention to our lives where we try to live through things that we otherwise wouldn’t want to accept. Reinhold Niebuhr realized that life has the ability to throw you some situations that you don’t want to deal with. the reality of it all is that this is something we are all faced with and will continue to face. But this prayer is often taught by someone who seemingly has it all together. Someone who knows God and has grown a stable relationship with him. But what do we do when we find ourselves in a place where the stable and strong one is the one who has hit the wall. What is our option when the one who seemingly has it all together has their entire life falling apart?

       ·    The amount of African Americans arrested across the United States, is way too much.

       ·    Antwon Rose being killed by a police officer who hasn’t been charged, is way too much.

       ·    Separating children from their immigrant parents, is way too much.

       ·    Having those same children sleeping on Aluminum blankets, is way too much.

     ·    Lesandro Guzman-Feliz being killed while people watch instead of helping is way too much.

      ·    Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain both completing suicide in one week, is way too much.

      ·    The rising number of people experiencing homelessness is way too much.

      ·    The amount of people who are arrested for an addiction that really deserves rehabilitation, is way too much.

       ·    Having no Gun Reform after yet another mass shooting is way too much.

       ·    The rising cost of tuition for Undergraduate and Graduate Degrees, is way too much.

       ·    The amount of African-Americans being murdered by Police officers is way too much.

       ·    The amount of people who are food impoverished in our country is way too much.

There may be many things going on in your personal life that has you wanting to scream that God, this is way too much. If that is you today, who has looked over their life and tells God “this is way too much”; you are in good company because that is the place in which Moses has found himself in this text. Moses was serving as the Senior Pastor of the Greater Egypt Baptist Church with 600,000 complaining members. He was hosting worship services in an invisible institution in the wilderness in preparation for their home in a Promised Land called Canaan. Pastor Moses has been faithfully serving this church even though the members have found them complaining about the place in which they have found themselves. Moses still tried to persevere like a good soldier but found himself in a place where he was ready to give up. The reality is that Moses encountered this as a result of him being faithful to God. What do you do when it is because of your faithfulness to God that you are being persecuted? What are you supposed to do at that moment? Moses joins in with his members and begins to complain.

Moses is convinced that God is treating him poorly by causing him to be in this position with these people. He begins his lament to God with a tone of sincere frustration. He doesn’t understand why he has to be left with the burden of carrying these people. These people complained more than they were willing to work through their own issues. Moses was dealing with the mindset that all of this is unfair. Moses was screaming to God that he was tired of all of this. He was tired of leading the people out of their bondage, only for Moses (who was always free) to become bound by their complaining demeanors. But the reason why this story is so significant is because it begins with further turmoil and pain. At the time of Moses’s birth, the pharaoh decided to kill every young boy in his age group. God gave his mother the wisdom to place him into a woven basket and to push him across the Nile river, only to be found by the Pharaoh’s daughter. Moses was raised and groomed in a position of power over the very people whom he was in blood relationship to. Though members of his former community were aware of his relationship to them, Moses had never encountered their sense of pain through his own experience. Moses was raised as an Overly-Privileged Man who never experienced any pain or real-life struggle, who was called by God to deliver a person out of the hands of a Trumped-Up Pharaoh, who had no regards for a people who were not like him.

This was the man who served as a Paternal figure for Moses, but somehow Moses never lost his sense of who he was. He realized that though he was in Pharaoh’s house, he still had an obligation to live under God’s will. Which led to God using Moses to lead these people, these complaining people, out of Egypt into a place where they were without the resources that their bondage had offered them. When they were suffering and in pain, they had fish, melons, leeks, onions and garlic to eat, at no expense to them. They wanted to be delivered from Egypt but wanted the wilderness to be like the Good Ole Days. They wanted to Make the Wilderness Great Again. The truth of the story is that Moses, the visionary leader who would serve as the moral compass for this group, has grown tired of dealing with these people and wanted God to deliver him from a people whom he was called to deliver. Moses was stuck between the complaints of these people and seemingly the silence of God. Moses wanted out and there was no way to convince him to stay because these people had complained to him for the last time. Let me be sure to suggest that Moses was not perfect, in any definition of the word. Moses murdered an Egyptian for fighting with an Israelite and ran to not suffer the penalty. Moses had a severe stuttering problem and had to rely on his siblings to speak. And in this text, it seems as it Moses has an anger problem, is depressed and quite possibly suicidal.

Pastor Moses is facing a situation that his siblings can’t talk him out of, nor is he in a position to throw his staff around to make it all better. What is he going to do to fix this? I don’t know about you but I can be honest and admit that throughout my Christian journey, I have been faced with some stuff where all I could do was tell God “this is way too much”. I, too, have found myself in some spaces where I felt like it wasn’t worth it to keep on going. Some spaces where prayer became more of an argument with God about why God would allow this to happen to me. Have you been there? Where you poke your chest out at God and say “I’ve been faithful to you, why me”? You’ve been praying and fasting, but can’t seem to catch a break. You’ve been tithing, but you still can make ends meet. You’ve been taking care of your body and go to the doctor to receive a bad report. God, this is all way too much. To be honest, that is not a fun place to be in and Moses is learning this first hand. But the blessing of it all for me is that Moses has not yet given up on God. He asks God for help to deal with these people, because he realizes God is still in control. No matter the depth of the silence that Moses was enduring, God was still present to aid in Moses’s misery. Don’t leave here today without the realization that the present is a gift and that God is always with us through it all. Even when it seems like we're going through too much, God is helping us carry the load by showing us that there is a light at the other end of this tunnel. That’s why both Moses and I can join in with the songwriter and say:

I've had some good days

I've had some hills to climb

I've had some weary days

And some sleepless nights

But when I look around

And I think things over

All of my good days

Out-weigh my bad days

I won't complain