Sep 6: “The Quail: Desire and Slavery”

by Rev. Sandra Nixon, Coordinating Minister

Scripture: Exodus 16: 1-5, 9-15

The reflection today is the last in our five-part sermon series on “Birds of the Bible”, which is based on the book by St. Paul, Minnesota pastor Debbie Blue’s book “Consider the Birds; A Provocative Guide to Birds of the Bible.”

As we’ve been discovering over the last few weeks, Birds of the Bible is not as weird a topic for a sermon series as you might think. Increasingly we are being called to focus our attention on our environment; not just on saving it, but on noticing it. On noticing, as one of my favourite hymns goes, “‘each blade of grass, every wing that soars’ as part of the ‘circle of God’. (Each Blade of Grass, MV 37)

Debbie Blue writes, “…there is something about the sort of consciousness necessary for birding that is very much like the practice of faith. It comes and it goes. It requires waiting. You must use both your body and your mind. Attention is paramount…” (Debbie Blue, Consider the Birds, p.xii)

As I pondered this series it seemed like the closer I honed in on a bird, the deeper I was drawn into an intimate awareness of the creatureliness of the whole world around me. Somehow, the interconnectedness of the universe is highlighted, isn’t it, through the effort of focusing on, and really observing one creature, one specific part of the sacred community of belonging and becoming of which we are all a part.

So back to the book, the primary source material and inspiration for this sermon series: The book title, as I mentioned, is: Consider the Birds: A Provocative Guide to Birds of the Bible”.

Well what if I told you Debbie’s chapter on this week’s “bird of the bible”, The Quail – is titled: “The Quail: Desire and Slavery”. Sounds pretty provocative!

So, let’s dive in…

As I “considered the quail”, I was able to make two personal connections.

First - with apologies to the vegetarians and vegans - I recall trying to make a gourmet dinner with quails once, many years ago. My husband and I and some friends had a tradition of getting together for New year’s Eve and roasting something exotic – or at least, what seemed exotic to us: pheasant, Cornish game hen, duck, and one year, it was quail. Fancier than turkey, easier than duck. I think we ended up going with a balsamic glaze and mashed potato gratin.

In recent years, I have come to associate quails with Naramata. Oh that I could have gotten a photo like this, of the quail I saw at Naramata Centre when I was on retreat there this past spring. But alas, the intriguing little things would never stay still long enough for me to capture a decent picture.

It’s not uncommon to see the little things with the funny cow-lick scurrying about the village of Naramata, like they’re late for an appointment and trying to ignore someone they recognize along the way. There is something very endearing about them – maybe they remind me of myself – almost always in a hurry scurry.

In the book of Exodus, the Israelites are six weeks into their 40 year wander through the desert and their complaining has already reached a fevered pitch. “It would have been better,” they say, “if we had stayed in Egypt. At least there we got regular meals – meat and bread.” Never mind that their nostalgia for the good old days has minimized the truth that they were slaves, that they worked day and night for barely enough sustenance.

Suddenly, a few weeks out, freedom has a bitter taste and they’re ready to return to captivity. God hears their complaining and sends them quails in the evening and manna in the morning. Enough, God promises, to keep them going for the day. But, we know they don’t trust God’s promise – and they gather more than they need. We might say they super-consume, grasping at more and hoarding it away. And so, the bread/food goes rotten. And God gets mad. God has responded to their cries, has promised enough for the day, and the quails have given their all. But it’s not enough.

In Blue’s book she writes that the quails of the Middle East migrate. They don’t have the capacity to go long distances, and so they wait for the wind to be in their favour before they start out. But they didn’t always make it – there were stories of so many quails in mid-flight over water and ending up landing on a ship that the vessel sank.

Very often quail would drop to the land and die or fall into the water and sink. And so there they are, these hapless creatures, only able to go a short distance before having to hold up and wait for a wind, wait for the breath of God to carry them where they needed to go.

Then once up and away, sometimes – as in this Exodus story – sometimes literally falling from the sky, falling and dying and in their dying - bringing life to God’s other creatures, these Israelites - equally falling and failing in the desert.

They have a lot in common these quails and the desert wanderers – although there is no record of the quails complaining.

Now, there’s a second story in the bible involving quails.

In their second appearance, they are not quite the benign and tasty creatures we might imagine. In the book of Numbers we catch up with those same Israelites – who are still in the desert, still wandering with no end in sight and are still tired, hungry, complaining and yearning for the good old days.

Once again they are remembering their slavery as a blessed time, a time of great security and lots of food.

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In chapter 11 of the Book of Numbers, we hear:

4 The Israelites had a strong craving and also wept again and said, “If only we had meat to eat!5 We remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic,6 but now our strength is dried up, and there is nothing at all but this manna to look at.” (Numbers 11: 4-6)

Now we can’t really blame them for that, can we? It’s not as if we’d fare any better. I’ve been trying to eat healthy – and I am so tired of chicken and fish. They’re like manna, too much of the same thing and there’s no taste anymore. So the other day I ordered one of my favourite fast food meals: an A&W teen burger, onion rings and a root beer.

God says to the Israelites, ‘You want meat, I’ll give you meat. I’ll give you so much meat it’ll be coming out your nose!!”

Actually, what God says to Moses is:

18 … say to the people, ‘Consecrate yourselves for tomorrow, and you shall eat meat, for you have wailed in the hearing of the Lord, saying, “If only we had meat to eat! Surely it was better for us in Egypt.” Therefore the Lord will give you meat, and you shall eat.

19 You shall eat not only one day, or two days, or five days, or ten days, or twenty days, 20 but for a whole month, until it comes out of your nostrils and becomes loathsome to you—because you have rejected the Lord who is among you and have wailed before him, saying, “Why did we ever leave Egypt?” ’ ” 

Moses, for some reason, decides it’s a good idea to challenge God on this, and replies:

“The people I am with number six hundred thousand on foot, and you say, ‘I will give them meat, that they may eat for a whole month’! 22 Are there enough flocks and herds to slaughter for them? Are there enough fish in the sea to catch for them?” 

23 The Lord said to Moses, “Is the Lord’s power limited? Now you shall see whether my word will come true for you or not.”

Then, the story continues: 31“… a wind went out from the Lord, and it brought quails from the sea and let them fall beside the camp, about a day’s journey on this side and a day’s journey on the other side, all around the camp, about two cubits deep on the ground. 32 So the people worked all that day and night and all the next day gathering the quails; the least anyone gathered was ten homers, and they spread them out for themselves all around the camp. 

33 But while the meat was still between their teeth, before it was consumed, the anger of the Lord was kindled against the people, and the Lord struck the people with a very great plague.”

After I ate that A&W I felt sick for two days.

Turns out what I used to enjoy is just not good for me any more.

And here’s where we learn, as Debbie Blue writes, that the quails and manna and teen burgers and onion rings are not just about protein and carbs.

The people were freed from slavery in Egypt, but now they are hungry for assurance that everything is going to be OK. “Will God feed and care for them now? Was it God’s love that led them to freedom and wandering, or is it that God hates them and brought them out to the desert to die?

…They demand food and water, but what they really seem to need is the confidence that God is truly with them.” (Blue, p.30) And in their insecurity they seek the assurance of things they used to know, things that made them feel safe, and comforted – even if those things held them in captivity or risk killing them through clogged arteries.

We too quite regularly yearn for the good old days, the way things used to be. In the church, full pews and bursting Sunday schools made us feel as though God was with us.

And in recent decades, in our post-Christendom era when the church does not enjoy the place of privilege or the cultural significance it once had in NA society, it can at times be difficult to trust that God is still with us, still faithful to us.

In a way, we’ve been led into the wilderness of societal indifference, the wilderness of experimentation and adaptation. And, at times, even here at TGUC, there’s been a weariness, and the temptation to be nostalgic for the way things were even though there’s also been a growing intuition that the wilderness has been good for the church, helping it to reclaim its authenticity as a Jesus-centered movement, and to awaken to new opportunities to meet the spiritual needs of the times we’re living in.

Debbie writes, “It makes sense that people whose imaginations have been confined …might need a time of wandering in the wilderness to get free. Maybe the problem with the wanderers is not that they desire too much, but that… (sometimes) their desire lacks imagination….At times they revert to Egypt instead of growing into” (Blue, 60-61) the new identity and form that God is leading them towards.

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Like a renewed sense of the interconnectedness of things that comes with considering the birds, each in their uniqueness, perhaps we just need to discover what God is calling us to pay attention to – large and small, about the way we are – and are becoming church right now: the people, practices, ideas, and moments – and that noticing can help us sense, if not see outright – help us sense the big picture, the whole – the kindom whole - that God is even now creating in our midst and calling us to be part of here in the Fraserview neighbourhood of East Van.

So – this week, as we consider not birds but the fall season opening up before us, I invite you – me – all of us, to consider: what are we being called to notice about TG? And what can we learn in the noticing? And how do we sense God-with-us?

Perhaps, like the quail, we need to let the winds of God carry us to where we need to go.

May it be so. Amen.