Desert Leeks

Reflections on the Lectionary for September 29th

Photo by Mohamad Sameh on Unsplash

I remember, a few years ago, the phrase “first world problem” was trending on social media. A “first world problem” is an inconvenience—a troublesome or even genuinely distressing event or circumstance—that is nevertheless not very serious when put in the context of the whole world. Maybe your car’s air conditioning stopped working, or your phone only connects through wifi and not on the cellular network. Having your favorite shoes wear out and needing to wear your second-favorite pair is a “first world problem,” as is the grocery store being out of your preferred brand of cereal or your job requiring you to work from the office two days a week. Those are frustrating things to have happen to you, to be sure, but when compared to the struggles of other people, they are trivial. A “first world problem,” the social media buzz said, was the kind of thing you wanted to complain about but felt bad complaining about. What is social media for, if not complaining? But then again, it’s a bad look to complain about having to use your second-choice brand of sour cream when millions of people face starvation. The phrase “first world problem” captures that tension pretty well, I think, even if the framing of “first world” is already problematic. A “first world problem” is when you’re used to having everything, and suddenly you have slightly less than everything. Calling something a “first world problem” is a way of pointing to its irritating place in your life while also acknowledging that even being irritated by it is a sign of privilege.

In the passage from Numbers 11 in the lectionary for September 29^th, something similar to a “first world problem” happens. The scene is the wilderness. Israel has been wandering in the Sinai, between Egypt and the Jordan River, and God has been providing sustenance to them in the form of manna—the mysterious bread-like substance that falls from the heavens every night. The Israelites had plenty to eat, according to Numbers, but “the camp followers with them had a strong craving,” the text says. That’s relatable! We’ve all probably had the experience of having a house full of groceries and craving something different. In the case of the Israelites in the wilderness, it started with meat. After so much manna, the people really just wanted some meat to eat. But from there it cascaded, as they started talking about food and playing out all the things they no longer had. “We remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for nothing,” they said, and then they really got going: “the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic.” That does sound good, actually. The problem was that manna offered sustenance but not much variety, and that part of the vitality of the people came from the small joy of choosing which good things they wanted to eat. “But now our strength is dried up,” they complained, “and there is nothing at all but this manna to look at.” This is a “first world problem” of a sort, even though the phrase obviously doesn’t apply to a story that might have taken place 3,000 years ago. Having enough to eat and yet craving something different is a luxury.

Here, the biblical text is playing with a powerful metaphor. The people are talking about food, but they are really talking about much more than food. They are describing all the things they used to eat in Egypt, all the variety and the flavor. But they are describing those things as a way to express frustration at their circumstance. Israel was in an in-between place, stuck between one home and the next, wandering somewhat aimlessly with only a weird bread-like substance to eat. They were complaining about food, but really they were complaining about their lack of direction, their lack of progress, and the distance they had fallen away from the place they had been.

I hear this kind of conversation all the time these days. My professional life takes place mostly in two realms: in churches, and in theological education. Both the church world (especially Mainline Protestantism) and the world of theological education are in an in-between place, stuck between one home and the next, wandering a little bit. In the church I currently know best, attendance has dropped well over 50% in the 17+ years I’ve been involved. Participation in the youth group that I run is down about 75%. The budget is harder and harder each year, and the tensions ratchet up every time we talk about renting out another space or ask what it might mean to divest of the building altogether. Churches are closing outright at an alarming pace, and the same is true for theological education (and higher education in general). The so-called “demographic cliff” and tough economic conditions and the decline of churches has meant that enrollment at most seminaries and divinity schools is down sharply, especially in the degree programs that used to be those schools’ bread and butter. There is a constant drumbeat of news about closures and mergers and downsizing. And there is also a lot of talk that sounds an awful lot like the stuff in Numbers 11:4-6. Remember when we had enough of everything? Remember when things were easy? Like the memory of past plenty among the Israelites (who after all were comparing their circumstances to being enslaved in Egypt), the memory of the good times might be a little rosy in hindsight. But there’s no denying that things are not as good as they once were.

The most interesting part of this passage from Numbers, for me, is the reaction of Moses. He hears them complaining and speaks to God about it. God is angry, Numbers tells us, but Moses mostly seems exasperated. “I am not able to carry all this people alone, for they are too heavy for me.” Sound familiar?

Leadership is hard in the best of times, and most churches (and theological schools) are not living through the best of times. If you think about it, Moses had done a remarkably successful thing: he had found a way to feed a whole lot of people in the middle of a desert. Sure, God sent the manna, but Moses deserves a lot of credit for not having thousands of people starve on his watch. By any measure, his leadership has been a success, easily beating the baseline expectations for liberating enslaved people from a powerful empire and leading a mass migration through an area with no food sources. Hearing well-fed people complain about the variety of their food probably sent Moses over the edge. What more could they possibly ask him to do? Survival itself was a remarkable achievement.

That’s where a lot of churches are these days: surviving, which is a remarkable achievement in itself. But many churches are used to having everything, and suddenly they have less than everything. They have long traditions, committed communities, useful facilities, and maybe even some money in the bank. But they don’t have as many people as they used to, they don’t have the robust programs and outreach that they used to, and nothing feels easy anymore. Maybe they can’t afford as much staff as they used to have, or maybe they can’t afford to fix the leaky roof. The problem for many churches isn’t that they are going out of existence (though some of them are), it’s that yesterday was better, with more resources and just more energy to go around. Just like the Israelites in the desert remembering the tastes of leeks and cucumbers, we spend a lot of time grieving the decline from where things used to stand—the decline from the standard of a generation or two ago. It’s not that we have nothing, it’s that the things we do still have pale in comparison to the things we used to know. There’s a form of grief attached to recognizing that you’re living through a decline.

This kind of grief is, I think, completely legitimate. It’s a hard thing to navigate. I feel it myself pretty frequently. And as a sometime leader in those declining systems, I especially feel something like what Moses seems to be feeling in this passage. Maybe you do too, as a leader in your organization or congregation. It takes a lot of work to maintain a subsistence level in the middle of a desert; it takes a lot of hustle to move a lot of people through a wilderness. But it’s often thankless work. Lay leaders and clergy know this through experience: these days, sometimes doing your job really well means that your church shrinks by 50% instead of 80%. In the world of theological education, most of the things people are throwing at the wall don’t stick, and even if some of them do, it’s easier to look at the pile of failed experiments on the floor and be pessimistic. It’s already really hard work. And it’s work that isn’t necessarily made any easier by comparing the present to the past. Moses probably wanted some garlic and some melons too, but a desert is a desert, the wilderness is the wilderness, and you have to work with what you’ve got. Sometimes survival is a remarkable achievement.

I think it’s really interesting that the solution to this problem in Numbers is a form of collaborative leadership. In 11:16, in response to Moses’ exasperation and exhaustion, God tells Moses to go find seventy elders and authorize them to take leadership in the community. Instead of Moses feeling like he has to be solely responsible for everyone’s well-being, as he had expressed earlier, Moses is given a whole new cadre of co-leaders to share the burden. Someone even saw two of the seventy men showing some of the signs of leadership (prophesying, in this case) and ran to tell Moses about it, assuming that Moses would be jealous that someone else was taking the lead. Moses’ response is spot-on, I think: “Are you jealous for my sake? Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets and that the LORD would put his spirit on them!” Moses isn’t threatened that someone else is taking the lead, he’s relieved. Sound familiar?

This passage from Numbers points out a few different traps we can fall in. Like the Israelites, we too tend to get trapped in the way of thinking that assumes that one person can save us—that one pastor, one moderator, one bishop, one dean, one donor, one president can change everything. Like the Israelites, we get trapped in comparing the present to the past (real or imagined), and wishing we could go back to a time of mythical plenty. We trap ourselves in jealousy, real or feared. And we trap ourselves by second-guessing what we do have—we trap ourselves in “first world problems”—reacting to having slightly less than everything, because we’re used to having it all.

The way out of these traps, in this passage from Numbers, is not to seek magical solutions that will restore some lost glory. In this story, God doesn’t help Moses conjure leeks out of the desert sands. Instead, God suggests a shared model of leadership in which a broader part of the community takes responsibility for itself. It’s no longer up to Moses to be the singular charismatic leader, pulling the people into the future by sheer force of will. Where there had been one person doing a lot of the work, now there are seventy-one. As an old proverb puts it, “many hands make light work,” and collaboration in leadership beats a Lone-Ranger model any day.

The core tension of this story is that you really can’t go back to Egypt, no matter how much you might want to. The past is the past, and while we can be nostalgic for it, we can’t return there—and even if we did, we probably wouldn’t like it there as much as we think. It’s ok to remember fondly the fish and the cucumbers and the onions, but it’s also important to remember the journey and the movement through time. It’s rarely the case that we can get where we’re going by traveling backwards. Nostalgia is of limited value. And having everything you need and still desiring more is a “first world problem,” the kind of thing that makes sense but also smacks of privilege.

So if you find yourself trapped in circular conversations about a lost mythical time of plenty, it might be useful to reframe the questions. Instead of asking what we once had that we no longer have, ask how what we have now might be enough. Instead of looking to a single leader to make it all ok again, ask how the community itself might lead. Instead of looking backward to where we used to be, try looking forward to where we want to go. You might just realize that you have everything you need—all the sustenance and leadership and energy you require—to get there.