There’s this song my family used to listen to, called “So You Wanna Go Back to Egypt.” It’s by an Evangelical singer-songwriter from the early ‘80s, named Keith Green. It’s written in the voice of the Israelites as they trudge through the desert and complain at the beginning of our Old Testament reading today. They want to go back to Egypt—to eating leeks & onions by the Nile—because they’re sick of manna—the mysterious, heavenly bread that God provides to feed them, one day at a time. The song playfully catalogs all the things they made out of this miraculous but dreadfully monotonous gift: manna hotcakes, manna waffles, manna burgers, filet of manna, ba-manna bread!
The song is humorous, but it captures a sentiment that’s frustratingly familiar to anyone stuck in a long in-between, whether it’s a season of transitions in our lives and communities or the slow process of healing and growing. When we feel stuck in that transitional space between where we’ve been and where we’re going—between who we were and who we’re meant to be—we can get fed up with the uncertainty of depending on God and start to look back at the past through rose-colored glasses.
Like the Israelites: Liberated from slavery in Egypt, the Israelites have been promised milk & honey. But right now, wandering the wilderness, guided by Moses, they’re stuck with this manna—their daily bread; their dependence on God They get tired of it. And so they start to wistfully think back to their time in Egypt, when they ate cucumbers & melons, leeks, onions & garlic, and fish… for free!
Wait…for free? What about the slavery? What about the grueling labor—the blood, sweat & tears shed in service to their Egyptian overlords?
Sick of the monotony of the long in-between and the precarity of transition—sick of waiting for God’s promises, the Israelites look back over their shoulders at the certainty and security of the life they left behind. But in their wistfulness they forget the price of that surety. They forget why God called them out of that life in the first place, and why they set out on this journey towards the promised land. They start to think, “Meh, maybe slavery wasn’t that bad.”
This is the danger posed by false nostalgia as we journey towards the promises of God. We can get fed up with the drudgery of depending on God day by day and start to look back at the past with selective amnesia. Take the addict who tires of relying on God and taking it one day at a time. They might start to look back at their life pre-sobriety through those rose-colored glasses, thinking, “It wasn’t that bad.” They might remember the laughter with their drinking buddies but forget the bits about passing out drunk in the alley.
Or consider someone who’s gotten out of a codependent relationship, but grows restless from the tedious work of learning to embrace the fact their fundamental identity is as a beloved child of God. They might look back longingly at the “simpler” path of finding their identity and sense of belonging with their partner, but they forget about the manipulation that came along with that.
Like the memory of eating leeks and onions by the Nile, this kind of false nostalgia for where we’ve been might alleviate the tension of the long in-between, but it will also draw our gaze away from God’s promises and hinder our journey towards where we’re going. Remembering the leeks and onions that we left behind, we come to despise our daily bread of manna. And craning our necks to look back with nostalgia, we lose sight of God’s promises and halt our journey towards the feast yet to come.
Whenever this happens (and it will happen repeatedly over the course of our lives), God calls us to repent—to turn back around, letting go of false nostalgia and selective amnesia. Sustained by our daily dependence on God’s mercy, we are called to set our wandering eye on the heavenly treasure ahead; so that we can run to obtain those promises of God.
Sometimes that is as simple as heeding the words of a sibling in Christ, who calls us back when we wander away from Truth. Sometimes all we need is the prayer of faith and the gentle ointment of God’s healing balm on our souls. I think those ordinary corrections are part of what James is getting at in our Epistle. But other times more decisive steps are required if we want to run the path towards the promises of God. Sometimes we need to pluck out a metaphorical eye, so that we can stop looking wistfully back at the produce of Egypt and fix our other eye on the milk and honey ahead.
I’m not talking about actual amputation or bodily mutilation. Nor was Jesus. There’s a fair bit of hyperbole in our Gospel today for dramatic effect. But sometimes the only way to keep our focus on the path toward God’s future is to entirely remove whatever is pulling us back—whatever is making us look back over our shoulders. Sometimes we have to completely let go of people, places, or patterns of life which make us look back with selective amnesia and hinder us on our path towards new life in Christ. And letting those things go can be terribly painful—like a kind of spiritual amputation.
But sometimes these more dramatic steps are called for. Not because we fear eternal damnation, or even because the metaphorical leeks and onions are inherently evil. But because the things we left behind are not as good as the things still ahead. And as long as we spend our lives in the in-between looking backwards, we will never be able to run towards the fullness of life that God desires and has in store for each one of us.
Many of us gathered here are in a long in-between. Honestly, you could probably say that about our parish as a whole. Each of us is journeying towards the fullness of life that God has in store for us. God has called us out from a life mired in brokenness and promised us a life marked by wholeness and healing. And as we journey through that long in-between, God feeds and sustains us one day at a time, beckoning us to look to Christ, not back towards Egypt.
So as we turn our gaze today to our spiritual manna, the heavenly bread and spiritual drink of Christ’s Body and Blood, which God provides to sustain us day by day, I’d invite you to consider: What are the “leeks and onions” in your life? What are those things that make you turn back and crane your neck to look over your shoulder at the life you are leaving behind? And what might you need to do to leave those metaphorical leeks and onions behind? What grace might you need to humbly receive—what hindrance might you need to let go of—so that you can set your gaze on the new life ahead—so that we can run together to obtain God’s promises?