Dove Sermons

Exodus 16:1-18 | Luke 22:1-23 (NRSVUE)

Sermon for September 20, 2026

Every one of us is walking around with a money story. For many of us, it gets handed to us in a hundred small moments; a parent’s face when the mail comes, a whispered argument through a bedroom wall, the relief or the shame in someone’s voice at the grocery store checkout. We each have a story of spending and saving that has influenced us and how we think about money in our lives.

This morning we’re starting a series about that story… yours, mine, ours as a congregation, and we’re starting with remembering. This isn’t an exercise in nostalgia, and it’s not remembering as a slideshow of the good old days. We want to do remembering as excavation. We’re going to dig down to the money story underneath our money story, and we’re going to hold it up next to God’s.

So let’s go to the wilderness.

The Israelites are six weeks out from Egypt. Six weeks removed from four hundred years of slavery. That kind of generational trauma cant just be shrugged off. There’s pain and scars from years of constant subjugation. And now, in a moment of fear, they say want to go back to Egypt. Back to their slave masters because they can’t handle the unknown they now face.

Slavery comes with a schedule. You know where your food is coming from. You know what tomorrow looks like, even if what it looks like is misery. Freedom doesn’t come with a schedule. Freedom in the wilderness comes with empty hands and an empty horizon, and the text tells us, “the whole congregation of the Israelites complained against Moses and Aaron” (Exodus 16:2). Six times in this chapter, some form of that word “complain” shows up.

And notice what they say. They don’t say, “we’re a little worried about the food supply.” They say, “If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread” (16:3). That is more than a hungry stomach talking. That’s a scared soul rewriting history.

Egypt becomes, in their memory, a banquet; conveniently forgetting the whip, the brick quota, the Hebrew midwives ordered to kill baby boys. Fear does that. Fear will edit your own past into something more comfortable than the truth, if it means you don’t have to sit in the discomfort of trusting God with what comes next.

And again, notice: God doesn’t scold them for complaining. God hears them. And God does something almost absurd in its simplicity. God makes it rain bread.

In the morning, the ground is covered with something nobody has ever seen. Thin, flaky, like frost. And the people turn to each other and ask the only question that makes sense: “man hu?” That’s the Hebrew, two small words that mean, roughly, “what is it?” It’s not a rhetorical question. Nobody has a name for this stuff yet. Turns out that question, “what is it?”, becomes the name.

Manna. The bread that fed an entire nation through forty years of wilderness is named, permanently, after the fact that nobody could explain it. Every time an Israelite mother handed her child breakfast for the next four decades, she was saying, essentially, “here’s your daily miracle we still don’t have a category for.” God’s provision doesn’t arrive labeled and tidy. It arrives strange sometimes, and we’re invited to take it anyway.

Now here’s where the text gets specific in a way that we should take note of, because it’s aimed straight at how we think about money. God gives instructions: gather only what you need for the day. Don’t hoard. And Exodus tells us what happens next. “Those who gathered much had nothing over, and those who gathered little had no shortage; they gathered as much as each needed” (16:18).

Some tried to keep the leftovers overnight anyway, and it bred worms and stank by morning. The math of God doesn’t work the way our math works. There’s no advantage to hoarding manna. There’s no interest rate on trust. Walter Brueggemann calls the alternative, the compulsion to grab more than you need out of fear there won’t be enough tomorrow, “the endless rat race for sufficiency.” God’s economy in the wilderness runs on a different rule entirely: enough, distributed, every single day, for everybody.

That’s God’s money story, where everyone is provided for. Ours tends to run on scarcity; take all you can, as fast as you can. Theirs was built on daily, repeated, inconvenient trust that the bread would be there each day for everyone.

Hold onto that, because now we’re going to walk into an upper room in Jerusalem, and we’re going to watch what happens when a human money story, a story of fear protecting itself, collides head-on with Jesus at a table.

Luke tells us the religious authorities were looking for a way to kill Jesus, “for they were afraid of the people” (22:2). Really, this whole plot against Jesus boils down to power. Power, afraid of losing its grip, will do almost anything to protect itself. That’s not a first-century Jewish problem. That’s a human problem. It’s a boardroom problem. It’s a church-committee problem. It’s a problem that lives in your chest and mine anytime we feel something we love slipping away.

Into that fear steps Judas. Luke doesn’t waste time speculating about Judas’s psychology. The text simply says, “Satan entered into Judas” (22:3), and Judas goes to the chief priests to discuss how he might betray Jesus. And what do they offer him? Money.

Silver changes hands, and a member of Jesus’ own inner circle, one of the twelve, someone who had eaten at Jesus’ table for three years, agrees to sell him for cash. Here is money doing what money has always been capable of doing in a fear-driven story: becoming the currency of betrayal.

And then, and here’s the surprise in the story, Jesus sits down at that same table and feeds Judas anyway.

Luke is precise about the order of events. Jesus takes the bread, blesses it, breaks it, gives it, “This is my body, which is given for you” (22:19). Only after that do we learn Judas is sitting right there, hand on the table, already having agreed to hand Jesus over. Jesus knew. He fed him anyway.

The same host who had spent three years eating with “the wrong kind of people”, who was mocked for the company he kept at dinner, extends that same hospitality to the one man in the room actively plotting his death. Grace, at that table, isn’t a reward for good behavior. It’s simply what Jesus does with bread.

Here’s where I think the manna and the table meet. In the wilderness, God gave bread that couldn’t be hoarded, that was, on purpose, enough for everyone: no more, no less. In the upper room, Jesus gives bread that can’t be earned, that is, on purpose, for everyone at the table… even the one whose money story was actively running on fear and betrayal that very night. Both stories tell us the same thing about who God is: God’s provision was never dependent on our having proven ourselves worthy of it first.

So what do we remember this morning?

We remember that our fear-stories about money (the ones that whisper there won’t be enough, that we’d better grab and hold and hedge and hoard) are old stories, as old as a desert full of frightened former slaves. We remember that those stories, left unexamined, can lead us to do with our resources exactly what Judas did with his hands: use them to protect ourselves, even at the cost of what we claim to love most.

And we remember that God’s answer to that fear has never once been a lecture. It’s been bread. Strange bread we don’t have a name for, falling every single morning, exactly enough. Broken bread, handed even to the betrayer, before the betrayal is finished playing out.

This is where our own money stories start to get rewritten. We do that by asking the same question the Israelites asked, standing over ground covered in something they’d never seen: What is it? What is this provision in front of me/us? And are we all truly being provided for?

What is this trust I’m being invited into, one day at a time, with no guarantee I can see past tomorrow?

You don’t have to answer that question today. You just have to be willing to ask it, and to keep showing up at the table where the provision keeps getting handed to you, whether you’ve earned it or not.

Amen.

Sermon by: Rev. Dave Wasson