Grasshoppers & Giants

Fruitfulness, Part 5:

Grasshoppers & Giants

May 19, 2024

Day of Pentecost

Pocatello’s 1st Anniversary as a Reconciling Church

Pastor Mike

Numbers 13 & 14 (selections)

We are entering the second phase of our adventure through the biblical theme of fruitfulness. The Apostle Paul prayed that the Church of every age would “bear fruit in every good work,” and we have seen how this is possible for us because of God’s own fruitful nature, God’s continual self-emptying and self-giving, most perfectly expressed in the life and death of Christ. We are created and redeemed by grace so that we participate in God’s fruitful life of sacrificial love. That’s the big picture.

Today, we shift our focus to some of the practical questions and daily challenges that come up as we seek to live a fruitful life. And there are many. The call to be fruitful is essentially a call to yield to God’s will, God’s timing, God’s way of measuring success. As the Anglican theologian Rowan Williams once put it, we have to be “unmade to be remade,”[1] implying a long process of change and transformation, which can be terribly hard and frightening. To start naming what stands in the way of our own ripening, we turn to a story about the fear that the Israelite leaders felt, and surrendered to, as they stood on the edge of their promised home.

Imagine it. You have witnessed God decimate the most powerful nation in your living memory, Egypt, with plague after plague, in order to free you from slavery. You have fled in the night with your people, protected by a pillar of living flame, and led by a stuttering exile named Moses, whom God has transformed into a mighty prophet. You have passed through the Red Sea, its great waters parted and held at bay to let you cross on dry ground, and you turned back to watch those waters crash down on the army that pursued you. During your first days as a liberated person, journeying through the desert, you drank water that gushed from a dry rock, gathered bread which appeared like dew drops upon the earth, ate quail blown in on the wind. You stood quivering at the base of Mount Sinai, as the dark thundercloud of God’s presence descended upon it, and you watched Moses walk up into that cloud and speak with the God. You have heard God’s promises to be with you and to bless you and to carry you into a good land that you could call home.

Every divine word and miraculous act has been for your sake, and the time has finally come to leave the desert and enter into the promised place. You are a leader, a representative of your people, and you have been chosen to go and scout out that land of promise, to bring back a sign of all the abundance, all the fruitfulness, that awaits you and your people there.

You go, and you return, and now you stand before your people – people who have seen God do the impossible – and you hold before them a cluster of ripe grapes so large that two men had to haul it back from Canaan on a wooden frame. You look your friends, your children, your elders in the eyes and you say, “It’s as good as God says it is, however…”

And with that however, everything begins to fall apart.

However – the cities are fortified with tall, thick walls.

However – the people living in the land are giants.

However – we got there, and we looked so small to ourselves.

Here is the fruit – however – we cannot go in and enjoy it.

Friends, this is the first fear that lashes out at the call to be fruitful. Sometimes we are afraid that God’s promises cannot be ours, because, in our eyes, we seem so small compared to all that stands in the way.

Have you ever believed in the lie of your smallness? Have you ever felt called to a creative work or a commitment, a vocation or a relationship; have you ever felt stirred to go into a place of promised fruitfulness, whether it require a dramatic public change or a secret daily re-organization of priorities, only to be overwhelmed by your own inadequacies, your own limitations, your own past failures and present uncertainties?

Usually we are hardest on ourselves when the fruit is so near at hand, when there is already evidence that it exists. We can seem smallest to ourselves when we come to a moment of necessary and important decision.  I want to emphasize that it was the leaders of the people who capitulated to that fear. This is a fear that grows the more that mature in our faith, because, as Jesus said, “to him who has, more will be given” (Matt. 13:11). And we sure can struggle to believe that we are capable of, worthy of, more. It is not a fear to be ashamed of, but a fear to deal with properly – and the Israelites did not deal with it properly. “We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes,” they say, “and we looked the same to them.” 

I ask again, Have you ever believed in the lie of your smallness? Now, of course we are finite creatures. We have limitations. We have wounds. We live, each of us, in a constant flux of change, and our lives are irreducibly particular and infinitely complicated. Those are truths, not lies. But the lie creeps in when we forget about Jesus. God’s Word entered into a human life, the life of Jesus of Nazareth. And his life was, like ours, finite, limited, opposed, tempted, particular, and complicated. It was through the humblest vessel, the vessel of a single, small, ragged human life, that God brought salvation to the world.

So, it is not so much a lie that we are small. Rather, the lie is that our smallness is an obstacle, rather than a channel, for the power and purposes of God. The pattern of the fruitful life is the rejected, crucified Christ reconciling the world to God. As Paul says, God’s strength is made perfect in weakness, and God’s wisdom manifests as foolishness.

Here is where the Israelite leaders went wrong. They had this picture in their head, right, this picture of themselves as grasshoppers standing before giants, and they thought that it was the wrong picture to have. Certainly it should have felt different. Certainly it should have looked different. They rejected that fundamental situation when they ought to have embraced it. They had always been grasshoppers standing before giants, and that had never mattered to what God had done for them and through them. Didn’t the hours of forced labor seem to stretch endlessly on? Didn’t Pharoah and his chariots seem gigantic as they loomed in hot pursuit of the people? Didn’t the sea rear up high overhead? Didn’t the desert seem to swallow them whole?

Now, ruled by fear, they spread a bad report about the land, giving into their fear collectively. God bars them from experiencing the promise, stalling for forty years while the fearful generation dies. God will bring a new, wilderness-born generation, into the land.

It is never explicitly stated in the story, but I’ve been thinking about how children would have been there, standing in the congregation of Israel, when the scouts returned. Can’t you see the children running to greet the scouts, firing off their thousand questions, craning their necks to glimpse the grapes? Children would have hung on every word that these twelve men spoke. What would they see God do next? When would they get to go home?

You see, this was not just a moment of irreversible decision for the adults; it was also a profound teaching moment, as all our moments of decision are. And the unfortunate  children got the message: We must be too small to be who God wants us to be. God must not be greater than our fear. And they had to share in the punishment of their elders, wandering for forty years in the desert, wondering if they would ever get to see those grapes again.

There are consequences not only for ourselves when we fail to embrace our weakness as the conduit of God’s strength, but also for those who already possess the faith of the child, who already know the secret pleasure of being a grasshopper in a world of giants, and who can so easily be thrown off course by the rest of us.

But let us remember Caleb. Caleb who, alone among the scouts, encouraged the people to go and receive what God had promised to give them. Caleb was permitted to enter the land as an old man, because he had “a different spirit” from the others, and he followed God “fully.” Perhaps some of the children never forgot Caleb’s opposition to the rest of the leaders, his lone voice of faith, his radically different, confident spirit. Perhaps a few of them, as grown adults, followed him into the promised place many decades later. God remembers Caleb, and rewards him. Always grasshoppers standing before giants; always grasshoppers standing before giants.

It is not the exception but the rule. It is not a sign that some possibility is rotten but that it might just be ripe. What should matter in moments like that is not the proportions we see in our heads between ourselves and the journey, but the promises that God has made to us and the evidence of that the fruits are there.

In a wonderful, old interpretation of this passage, a Jewish teacher imagines God reacting to the Israelite leaders with these words: “I take no objection to your saying: we looked like grasshoppers to ourselves but I take offense when you say so we must have looked to them. How do you know how I made you look to them? Perhaps you appeared to them as angels.”[2]

 As Paul puts it, “We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body” (2 Cor. 4:10). To carry that death and reveal that life is what it means to have a different spirit and to follow fully. God’s way of seeing and our way of seeing are not the same, but they can line up in moments of trusting faith.

It is like the Magi, bowing down to worship the Christ-child in Mary’s arms.

It is like the scholars in the Temple, marveling at the boy Jesus as he talks with them about spiritual things.

It is like the Centurion, standing under Christ’s cross and declaring, “Surely this man was God’s son.”

\It is like the elders and teachers of the law confronting Peter and John in the days following Pentecost: “When they saw [their] courage … and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished, and they took note that these men had been with Jesus” (Acts 4:13).

Brothers and sisters, on this holy remembrance of Pentecost, and on this first anniversary of our choice to go into the land and lay hold of the fruit of reconciliation, may God bless each of you with the different spirit of Caleb, which is the Holy Spirit. May you feel your frailty, your limits, your brokenness, and even your fear as the very places where Christ is present to you, working through you, and accomplishing more than you could ever ask or imagine. If the Lord is pleased with you, as we know he is, he will bring you into the fruitful place.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

[1] Rowan Wiliams, The Wound of Knowledge: Christian Spirituality from the New Testament to Saint John of the Cross (Lanham, Maryland: Cowley Publications, 1990), 18.

[2] Quoted in The JPS Torah Commentary: Numbers, ed. Jacob Milgrom (Philadelphia & New York: The Jewish Publication Society, 1990), 107.