9/18 The Anxiety of Uncertainty
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Let me tell you about the wilderness.
This past summer Barry and I had an overnight experience in the Negev desert in the south of Israel. “Sere” would be a great adjective for the Negev desert. It was so dry that everything was brown. It wasn’t the kind of desert that had sand dunes. It was just a huge expanse of gently rolling land that was all brown. It hosted very minor plant life, and even that was brown in the summer. The only bit of green was in an occasional gully—what the Bible calls a wadi—or in the very occasional oasis, where one might see some date palms.
It was vast—it was miles and miles of the same thing. Brown and dry. The only relief from the sameness of the wilderness was the occasional bunch of semi-wild camels that would cross our path.
Go to Scotland for sheep on the road. Go to Israel for camels.
And the weather was an unchanging diet of intense, hot sun during the day, cool nights, and – literally – zero percent chance of rain, day after day after day. To travel in this wilderness is to be aware for maybe the first time in your life that you really, really need water.
It’s easy to see just how vulnerable a person is in this environment. How easily one would dry out. How fast one’s food supply would be used up.
How contingent our existence is in such a place.
It’s in such a stark wilderness that the Israelites were wandering about after they left Egypt, trying for 40 years to find and then to enter the Promised Land. Given the nature of the wilderness in the south of Israel and in the Sinai Peninsula, it’s easy to understand their complaints.
They wanted to get to a civilized land again. They were tired of the uncertainty of their wandering and the monotony of the desert. They were hungry. They were thirsty. They felt abandoned. They griped to Moses about God’s not taking care of them. They were fed up.
They were experiencing for a seemingly interminable period what we might call the “Anxiety of Uncertainty.” The Anxiety of Uncertainty.
It seems to me, at least, that their needs and complaints made sense. Our story from Exodus today tells us how God answered their complaints in order show them that God is indeed in charge—and to answer their immediate physical needs, too. Scholars tell us that quails flock in huge numbers over the Sinai now and then. And they have suggested that the manna from heaven was the excretions of insects that live on the scrubby plants in the wilderness. Who knows? The point is that God provided.
But later on (in the Book of Numbers) we see that the people get really tired of the monotony of their food, which surely spoke to them of the monotonous nature of their lives, in a monotonous wilderness that seemed to offer no way out. They expressed their anxiety of uncertainty as a yearning for the Good Old Days back in good old Egypt.
Listen to their complaints to Moses in the Book of Numbers: “We remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic; but now our strength is dried up, and there is nothing at all but this manna to look at.” [Numbers 11:5]
And who can blame Moses for becoming totally exasperated with these people and wanting to quit? Everybody stuck out in that wilderness was frustrated to death.
Now, we also deal with the same kind of anxiety that those ancient Israelites felt. The anxiety of uncertainty. Our world, our lives are generally a lot less monotonous than the world of the Israelites. Our sense of direction may be a lot clearer. But still we are seized now and then by a strong anxiety that’s rooted in our lack of knowledge about the future.
What is making us anxious? Maybe it’s better to ask what isn’t making us anxious.
The stock market can’t seem to settle down, threatening our financial security. Our houses may be underwater as we may owe more to the bank than they’re worth right now on the market. The threat of terrorist activity in our country is apparently still high. The political landscape is frustrating to many people right now. The economy is still a mess. And we’re bombarded with information overload if we watch the news on TV. Wow. And that’s not to mention the details of our private lives—and everyone has a different story, and different worries. Lots of them.
Our anxiety manifests itself in any number of behaviors that may promise some temporary relief. We may numb ourselves every night watching TV. Perhaps we find temporary comfort in feeding the inner fires of hyperactive consumerism—buying or eating or drinking way too much more than we need.
Self-medication, greed, gluttony … these are just some of the behaviors that may give us a temporary “fix” and help us feel like we’re coping. But they are just that—temporary. They don’t last long. And they do us spiritual harm. They can send us deeper into a dangerous wilderness.
But I believe we know what the only permanent fix can be. It’s the understanding that only one thing can fill up the anxious cavity within us, and that is God.
What we’re talking about here is cultivating contentment based on what we know is really real: God and God’s presence in our lives. Cultivating contentment is a spiritual practice that brings health when we feel like we’re stuck in a dull, brown wilderness with no way out.
Contentment is the knowledge that what we have is enough. Who we are is enough. And our true joy is found not in the more, the bigger, the newer, the faster … but in being happy with what we have and then in reaching out to share it with those who don’t have as much.
So take a look at the Prayer of Contentment on the back page of the bulletin. I’d suggest we make it part of our practice each day. Ask for the grace to be able to be content, even in times of anxiety when we may feel as if we’re wandering around in a dry, brown, monotonous, hopeless wilderness. Follow along with me and pray it now, if you wish:
Lord, help me to be grateful for what I have,
To remember that I don’t need most of what I want,
And that joy is found in simplicity and generosity. Amen.
[Adam Hamilton, Enough: Discovering Joy through Simplicity and Generosity, Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2009, page 8.]
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