Numbers 11:4-6, 10-16, 24-29
The rabble among them had a strong craving; and the Israelites also wept again, and said, "If only we had meat to eat! We remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic; but now our strength is dried up, and there is nothing at all but this manna to look at."
Moses heard the people weeping throughout their families, all at the entrances of their tents. Then the LORD became very angry, and Moses was displeased. So Moses said to the LORD, "Why have you treated your servant so badly? Why have I not found favor in your sight, that you lay the burden of all this people on me? Did I conceive all this people? Did I give birth to them, that you should say to me, 'Carry them in your bosom, as a nurse carries a sucking child,' to the land that you promised on oath to their ancestors? Where am I to get meat to give to all this people? For they come weeping to me and say, 'Give us meat to eat!' I am not able to carry all this people alone, for they are too heavy for me. If this is the way you are going to treat me, put me to death at once--if I have found favor in your sight--and do not let me see my misery."
So the LORD said to Moses, "Gather for me seventy of the elders of Israel, whom you know to be the elders of the people and officers over them; bring them to the tent of meeting, and have them take their place there with you.
So Moses went out and told the people the words of the LORD; and he gathered seventy elders of the people, and placed them all around the tent. Then the LORD came down in the cloud and spoke to him, and took some of the spirit that was on him and put it on the seventy elders; and when the spirit rested upon them, they prophesied. But they did not do so again.
Two men remained in the camp, one named Eldad, and the other named Medad, and the spirit rested on them; they were among those registered, but they had not gone out to the tent, and so they prophesied in the camp. And a young man ran and told Moses, "Eldad and Medad are prophesying in the camp." And Joshua son of Nun, the assistant of Moses, one of his chosen men, said, "My lord Moses, stop them!" But Moses said to him, "Are you jealous for my sake? Would that all the LORD's people were prophets, and that the LORD would put his spirit on them!"
Mark 9:38-40
There’s a lot of kevtching going on in our readings for today. “Kvetching,” I learned this last week, is the Yiddish word for complaining persistently and with whining.
In our reading from the Book of Numbers, the recently liberated children of Israel kvetch to Moses about what’s not on the menu in the wilderness. Moses then kvetches to God about the complaining people, telling God that they are too much to bear and that if he does not get some help, he wants God to end his life (perhaps a bit of hyperbole?) And then just as God provides Moses with some relief and we think that the kvetching will let up, out of nowhere Eldad and Medad begin unauthorized prophesying, and the kvetching begins again.
Likewise, our gospel lesson from Mark begins with John kvetching to Jesus that someone who was not one of their followers has been casting out demons in Jesus name.
Complaining, it seems, is a universal human experience. Moses had to deal with it, Jesus had to deal with it, those in the fall Foundations Class know that St. Benedict had to deal with it. And if current literature on the subject is any indication, today’s organizations have to deal with it too.
Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey, both on faculty at Harvard, spent fifteen years studying how people interact at more than 650 organizations. What they found is that complaining is a pervasive and potentially debilitating part of organizational life.
Yesterday was a good time for me to notice how I behave in that I was at a gathering of clergy here in the diocese, occasions that are sure to activate my kvetching. It was a helpful conference on clergy financial planning and it was obvious that many people worked very hard to pull it off. And all in all, I was doing pretty well not getting into my internal kvetching about how things could be improved. Then came noonday prayers, and I was hooked. The prayers, it seemed to me, were perfunctory and rushed, like a group reading of a grocery list.
“Where” my soul cried out “is the silence, is the psalm with the pause at the asterisk? Where is the bell? In short, why isn’t this liturgy of Noonday Prayers more like Evening Prayer is at St. Paul’s?
And that’s part of it, isn’t it? All of us have some idea of how things should be in our minds, and in our hearts. And life, real life, and people, real people often fail to live up to our image of how things should be, and so we complain. Kagen and Lahey, our Harvard researchers accordingly say that complaining is really all about misdirected energy. For them, what we complain about has something to do with what we value and are in fact committed to. And, as Lahey, said, “once people stop thinking of themselves as complainers—which is not an ennobling way for anyone to feel—and start thinking of themselves as people who are committed to something, that sets the stage for them to do something about their problem.”
Our readings for today add another layer to this, with both Moses and Jesus seeming to make the point that those who are complaining about the good things others are doing are in a sense out of touch with the broader and more generous action of God, probably for self-serving reasons. God, it seems, acts beyond the bounds we would put on God and through those whom we would least expect. And so Moses responds to Joshua and to the young man complaining about Eldad and Medad, with “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets and the Lord would put his spirit on them.” And Jesus tells John not to stop the man casting out demons for “whoever is not against us is for with us.”
For Benedict, the focus was different. In that Benedict focused on the individual’s spiritual life as being formed in community, he believed that both the individual and the community needed to be protected from the kind of habitual grumbling that can an insidious destroyer. And so Benedict’s rule works the issue all around: abbots, he said, needed to be sure that community life was not so difficult and burdensome that the monks would feel the need to grumble, and monks needed to work on an internal stance of contentment, responsiveness, and directness, so that the soul, free of chronic dissatisfaction and kvetching, could be open the God.
Beneath this, it seems to me, is the Benedictine idea of balance. Those living in community were not to expect that all aspects of life were going to be equally excellent. Rather, the spiritual challenge lay in accepting much in life as God-given and good enough, which strangely meant that the enjoyment of life was enhanced both for the individual and for the whole community.
Poet and writer Maya Angelou tells a story that I’ll end with about this very thing. It’s about what her grandmother taught her about complaining and either accepting the givenness of life or doing something productive to change things. Those of you who know Benedict will recognize the Benedictine idea of living with the idea of death as a constant companion.
“When my grandmother was raising me in Stamps, Arkansas, she had a particular routine when people who were known to be whiners entered her store. Whenever she saw a known complainer coming, she would call me from whatever I was doing and say…., "Sister, come inside. Come." Of course I would obey.
My grandmother would ask the customer, "How are you doing today, Brother Thomas?" And the person would reply, "Not so good." There would be a distinct whine in the voice. "Not so good today, Sister Henderson. You see, it's this summer. It's this summer heat. I just hate it. Oh, I hate it so much. It just frazzles me up and frazzles me down. I just hate the heat. It's almost killing me." Then my grandmother would stand stoically, her arms folded, and mumble, "uh-huh, uh-huh." And she would cut her eyes at me to make certain that I had heard the lamentation.
At another time, a whiner would mewl, "I hate plowing. That packed-down dirt ain't got no reasoning, and mules ain't got good sense....Sure ain't. It's killing me. I can't ever seem to get done. my feet and my hands stay sore, and I get dirt in my eyes and up my nose. I just can't stand it." And my grandmother, again stoically, with her arms folded, would say, "Uh-huh, uh-huh," and then look at me and nod.
As soon as the complainer was out of the store, my grandmother would call me to stand in front of her. And then she would say the same thing she had said at least a thousand times, it seemed to me. "Sister, did you hear what Brother So-and-So or Sister Much to Do complained about? You heard that? And I would nod. Mamma would continue, "Sister, there are people who went to sleep all over the world last night, poor and rich, and white and black, but they will never wake again. Sister, those who expected to rise did not, their beds became their cooling boards, and their blankets became their winding sheets. And those dead folks would give anything, anything at all for just five minutes of this weather or ten minutes of that plowing that person was grumbling about. So you watch yourself about complaining, Sister. What you're supposed to do when you don't like a thing is change it. If you can't change it, change the way you think about it."
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Works Cited or Consulted
Fast Company, Issue 46, April 2001, article by Cheryl Dahle
Maya Angelou quoted on http://www.csua.berkeley.edu/~sarahfsk/complain.html
