From the Desert
Moses said to the people:
“Remember how for forty years now the LORD, your God,
has directed all your journeying in the desert,
so as to test you by affliction
and find out whether or not it was your intention
to keep his commandments.
He therefore let you be afflicted with hunger,
and then fed you with manna,
a food unknown to you and your fathers,
in order to show you that not by bread alone does one live,
but by every word that comes forth from the mouth of the LORD.
“Do not forget the LORD, your God,
who brought you out of the land of Egypt,
that place of slavery;
who guided you through the vast and terrible desert
with its saraph serpents and scorpions,
its parched and waterless ground;
who brought forth water for you from the flinty rock
and fed you in the desert with manna,
a food unknown to your fathers.”
–Deuteronomy 8:2-3, 14-16
The Empire is Always Willing to Name Your Suffering
The empire will tell you the desert is a punishment.
The empire will dress the suffering of marginalized and oppressed peoples in the language of shame and call it theology. The empire will point at the hunger of marginalized and oppressed peoples and say you brought this on yourself. The empire will point at the thirst of marginalized and oppressed peoples and say if you had only been more compliant…more grateful…more productive as if gratitude were a currency the powerful invented specifically to collect from those they have already taken everything from. The empire will take the rawest…most unbearable facts of the lives of marginalized and oppressed peoples and arrange them into a moral indictment of their character, because the one thing the empire cannot afford is for marginalized and oppressed peoples to understand that their suffering has a cause…that cause has a name…that name is not theirs.
The empire is the enemy.
Remember the Desert
Moses is standing at the edge of everything. He is an old man looking across a river he will never cross, speaking to a marginalized and oppressed people on the threshold of what was always promised and never given. His final word…the thing he needs burned into their memory before they walk into the life they were made for…is not a law. It is not a liturgy. It is not even, strictly speaking, a blessing.
It is a demand to remember.
Remember the desert. Not…transcend it. Not…be grateful it’s over. Not…let us move forward and not dwell. Moses says: remember how for forty years the LORD your God directed all your journeying in the desert. Every cracked lip. Every scorpion under every stone. Every morning marginalized and oppressed peoples looked at the horizon and tried to decide if that silence was abandonment or presence. Every night the question hung unanswered: is God still here…did God stop at the border?
Remember all of it…because every bit of it was on purpose.
The Empire Controls the Imagination
The empire will tell you that God’s provision comes through proper channels.
The empire will tell marginalized and oppressed peoples that bread is the reward for submission, that shelter is the prize for compliance, that the good life is what you earn when you finally learn to make yourself useful to the system that has been extracting from marginalized and oppressed peoples since before they were born. The empire has a whole theology built around this…centuries of it…libraries of it…seminaries full of it…the idea that the hierarchy of provision is the hierarchy of God, that those at the top have what they have because God willed it and marginalized and oppressed peoples are at the bottom because God willed that too, and the task assigned to them is not to question the arrangement but to work hard enough within it that they might, one day, move up.
The empire is the enemy.
The Desert Is a Test of Imagination
Here is what Moses knows that the empire does not want marginalized and oppressed peoples to know: Egypt had done something to these people that went deeper than the body. It had colonized the imagination.
Paulo Freire called it internalized oppression…the moment the logic of the master becomes the logic of the self, when marginalized and oppressed peoples begin to organize their desires around what the captor permits, when survival inside the system starts to feel like the only conceivable life. Four hundred years is a long time. Four hundred years and Pharaoh’s answer to the question who provides becomes the answer of marginalized and oppressed peoples too. Pharaoh feeds you. Pharaoh protects you. Pharaoh is the mediating presence between marginalized and oppressed peoples and death. Remove Pharaoh and there is only the void.
The desert is where God methodically…deliberately…sometimes painfully dismantles that lie.
The affliction is real. The hunger is not metaphorical. The serpents are not symbolic. God is not pretending any of this is easy or fair or without cost. But underneath all of it God is pressing one question into the chest of every marginalized and oppressed person in that wilderness…one question that four hundred years of slavery made almost impossible to answer:
Can you imagine a world where your bread does not come from the hand of the one who owns you?
That is the test. Not a test of endurance. Not a test of piety. A test of imagination. Whether, after four centuries of captivity, marginalized and oppressed peoples can still conceive of a God whose provision does not require their dehumanization as its delivery mechanism.
The Empire Cannot Survive those Who Survive the Desert
The empire will tell marginalized and oppressed peoples there is no other way to eat.
The empire will tell marginalized and oppressed peoples that scarcity is natural, that hierarchy is inevitable, that someone has always had to be on the bottom and better they learn to make peace with where they are. The empire will build its granaries high…its walls higher…and call the whole arrangement order…because the one word the empire fears more than any other is not revolution. It is enough. The empire cannot survive marginalized and oppressed peoples who believe that enough is possible. The empire runs on the manufacture of insufficiency, on keeping marginalized and oppressed peoples just desperate enough to keep showing up…just hungry enough to keep accepting whatever terms are offered.
The empire is the enemy.
Manna Is a Manifesto in the Desert
Here is what God does with manna: God does not just solve a food problem. God dismantles an entire economic theology.
To understand what God is doing in the wilderness you have to understand what Pharaoh was doing with the grain. The storage economy of Egypt was the architecture of empire. Joseph’s own story…as theologically complicated as it is…ends with Pharaoh owning every body and every acre in Egypt because Pharaoh controlled the granary during famine. Managed scarcity, administered from above, is how empire reproduces itself generation after generation across the backs of marginalized and oppressed peoples. The hungry come to you and you extract…their land…their labor…their autonomy…eventually their children. You give just enough to keep marginalized and oppressed bodies working and never enough to make marginalized and oppressed bodies free. That is the bread of Egypt. It keeps marginalized and oppressed peoples alive in exactly the way that a tool is kept functional.
Manna will not cooperate with this system.
You cannot store manna. You cannot corner the market on manna. You try to hoard it and it breeds worms. It will only function within what Walter Brueggemann calls the liturgy of abundance…the daily…ungovernable…empire-resistant gift of enough. Each household gathers what it needs. The one who gathered much had no surplus. The one who gathered little had no shortage. Exodus 16 is almost aggressive about this arithmetic: the economy of manna does not permit accumulation. The economy of manna does not permit a class of people who eat because marginalized and oppressed peoples cannot. The economy of manna does not permit Pharaoh.
In the desert, with no land…no infrastructure…no state apparatus…no market, God gives marginalized and oppressed peoples a different way to be…a way of organizing common life around sufficiency rather than surplus…a way of receiving provision that the empire cannot tax…cannot ration…cannot weaponize…a way of eating that does not require the subjugation of marginalized and oppressed peoples.
This is the bread of liberation. The church has been trying to spiritualize it into harmlessness ever since.
The Empire Preaches Half a Verse
The empire will tell marginalized and oppressed peoples that not by bread alone means they should want less.
The empire will build entire denominational structures on this half-verse. It will tell marginalized and oppressed peoples that what they really need is transcendence. It will hand the dispossessed a hymnbook in place of a meal and call it ministry. It will construct a theology in which the suffering of marginalized and oppressed peoples is a spiritual curriculum designed by God for their edification…the comfort of the comfortable is a spiritual reward designed by God for their faithfulness…the job of marginalized and oppressed peoples…their Christian job…is to accept their position in this arrangement with gratitude and grace and a generous tithe.
The empire is the enemy.
The Word That Feeds You
But read the line where Moses actually puts it. Read it in the throat of a man who has watched marginalized and oppressed peoples starve and be beaten and cry out to a God who seemed not to answer for four hundred years. Read it in the mouth of someone who knows what it costs for marginalized and oppressed peoples to walk away from the only source of bread they have ever known, out into a desert where nothing is guaranteed.
Not by bread alone does one live, but by every word that comes forth from the mouth of the LORD.
Moses is not saying material bread is insufficient. Moses is saying: the bread that comes from Pharaoh’s hand is not real bread. The provision that requires the dehumanization of marginalized and oppressed peoples as its delivery mechanism is not provision…it is a chain with a meal attached. What looks like feeding is social control. What looks like care is manufactured dependency. The word that comes from God’s mouth is itself bread because it tells marginalized and oppressed peoples the truth about who they are…the truth about who marginalized and oppressed peoples are is the one thing the empire has spent everything it has to suppress.
You are not property. You are not a productive unit whose worth is set by the market. Marginalized and oppressed peoples are not problems to be managed by the state…not bodies to be disciplined by the carceral system…not votes to be suppressed…not neighborhoods to be surveilled…not communities to be warehoused. Marginalized and oppressed peoples are the beloved of the living God, wandering in the wilderness, and God has been following them with water struck from flint and food falling from a sky the empire told them was empty.
Not one bit of that requires Pharaoh’s permission.
Do Not Become the New Pharaoh
So here is what Moses is carrying across forty years and a river he will never cross:
The desert was not a detour. It was a seminary.
Everything the wilderness stripped from marginalized and oppressed peoples…every false comfort…every slave’s dependency…every promise the empire made that turned out to be a lease they could never afford to break…they were better off without it. Everything found there…that God moves in the places empire declares barren…that sufficiency survives where accumulation is impossible…that the beloved community can be formed in the wilderness precisely because the wilderness exposes every lie about who is really in charge…that is the inheritance marginalized and oppressed peoples carry into the promised land.
And when you get there. When you build houses and fill them. When you plant vineyards and drink from them. When the land starts to feel like it was always yours…
Do not forget.
Do not forget what the empire did to the bodies of marginalized and oppressed peoples. Do not forget what the wilderness did to the theology of marginalized and oppressed peoples. Do not forget that God provided in a place where nothing was supposed to grow, that the economy of enough survived in a desert the empire had written off, that liberation is not a destination marginalized and oppressed peoples arrive at once…it is a practice returned to every morning, like gathering manna, before the sun gets too hot and it melts away.
Because if you forget…and Moses knows you might forget, which is why he is standing here at the river saying remember…remember…remember…
If you forget, you will not simply lose your way.
You will build granaries.
You will manage scarcity.
You will tell marginalized and oppressed peoples in the desert that their suffering has a cause and that cause is their own failure.
You will become Pharaoh.
The empire will tell you that’s just how things work.
The empire is the enemy.
There is always…always someone in the desert…always marginalized and oppressed peoples in the wilderness…who need to know that God can provide and the empire will always be bankrupt.
Amen.
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