Have we not seen miracles enough? Exodus 16:4-15

I love the Old Testament  and tonight's reading from Exodus illustrates one of the reasons. I noticed the other week or so in the Guardian an article lamenting the performance of Sir Keir Starmer as leader of the Labour Party. Now such a lament is to be expected from the Telegraph but since this was in the Labour Party’s house journal I sat up to take notice. After all, it was not so long ago that the same paper had so high an opinion of Sir Keir that they daily polished his reputation. What had happened? Well it does not really matter because I want to return to the Israelites. Only in the chapter before our reading we hear the song of Miriam:

“I will sing to the Lord for he is highly exalted
Both horse and driver he has hurled into the sea
The Lord is my strength and my defense
He has become my salvation
He is my God and I will praise HIm 
My father’s God and I will exalt him.”

But at the beginning of our chapter the Israelites are grumbling: “Why have you brought us into this desert, we should never have come, at least in Egypt we sat around pots of meat and had all the food we wanted, but you, you have brought us to this wilderness to starve us to death.”

It is the same you see, “Kier at least under Corbyn we knew where we were, now we are lost straddling fences shy of attacking this horrid government “ or anyway something like that.

And I love that the people of the Old Testament are as real, as human and as fickle as we are. For then it is easy to get inside the story. The Israelites were unhappy as slaves of Pharaoh, they watched the various plagues sent, they saw the parting of the Red Sea, the defeat of their enemies and now on the 15th day of the second month, so a mere 45 days after the Passover they are unreasonably cross with Moses and Aaron. Had they not seen miracles enough?  But yet they complain. The Lord hears them, has compassion upon them and sends quails in the evening and so much manna in the morning that it seems like frost on the ground. 

Which is why I am optimistic about the environment. Have we not seen miracles enough? God gave us the miracle of this planet and all its abundant life and I am certainly not saying that we should continue abusing it in the ways we have been nor that we should not amend our ways but I am confident that we were given miracles in the past and that there are miracles we do not yet know about and that there are more to come.

Amen