Tabernacles

Passage: Leviticus 23:33-44

For eight of the first nine years of my married life I was a student. My wife and I lived on part-time salaries and paid tuition bills. Our reality was one of austerity.
Lean times and hard times teach us lessons. Lessons about how to survive; lessons about how to trust; lessons about how to find abundant joy in the absence of abundance. When times of abundance return, it pays to hold on to reminders. Reminders of the lean times and the lessons learned therein.

The defining era in the life of God’s people is their journey from Egypt to the Promised Land. A lean time to end all lean times. During this journey the Israelites travel without extra provisions in a dry and inhospitable wilderness. The stuff of sustenance is scarce. They are fed bread that literally falls from heaven; water that is squeezed from stones by the hand of God. The relief of emerging into a land of lush greenery, of lakes and streams, is unfathomable.

And yet who can fathom the wonder of seeing one’s daily bread appear on the ground every morning; water burst forth from the rock at just the moment when it seems all is lost? The very presence of God rendered in fire and cloud? What would you give up to experience these miracles?

God gives his people the gift of the wilderness. And then, lest they forget, God gives them an annual reminder. A festival. For one week every year God’s people return to the tents that sheltered them all those cold nights in the desert. For that week they sleep on the hard ground. They offer up to God the bounty of their land: grain and livestock, fruit and foliage. For that week they remember their precious journey out of slavery into freedom. Out of hunger and into satiety. In the Festival of Tabernacles – tents – they once again celebrate the sustaining generosity and abundance not of their new land, but of the God who brought them there. The God who protects and provides for his people in every time and every place, throughout every moment of their journeys.