Reminder: I never stick completely to my written sermon. This isn’t a transcript, but the written sermon I was using when I preached.
Friends, listen for a word from God in the Book of Numbers, the 11th chapter verses 16-17 and 24-30.
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. I will come down and speak with you there, and I will take some of the spirit that is on you and put it on them, and they shall bear the burden of the people along with you so that you will not bear it all by yourself.
So, Moses went out and told the people the words of the Lord, and he gathered seventy of the 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, 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!” And Moses and the elders of Israel returned to the camp.
This is the word of God for the people of God.
At the beginning of Numbers 11, several verses before we started reading tonight, the Hebrew people are complaining to Moses and Moses is complaining to God. In fact, Moses says to God, “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.”
To be clear, I don’t think Moses is suicidal and I don’t think he really wants to die, but he’s frustrated and, like some of us, his frustration is manifesting as drama. This is one of his cries for attention and God, ever patient particularly with Moses, dismisses the drama, but gives Moses a command which will help his situation. That’s where our passage picks up tonight.
God tells Moses to gather seventy elders, bring them to the tent of meeting, and God will come down to meet with them. God says they’ll take some of their Spirit which is on Moses and place it on the heads of each of the elders. The elders will then carry the weight of the people with Moses.
Before we move on, I want to pause on this part of the story. First, seventy elders is a strange number for the Hebrews. They were traveling in groups delineated by their 12 tribes. Assembling a group of seventy elders poses a mathematical and political problem for Moses. If he chooses five men per tribe, he’ll be short ten, but if he chooses 6 per tribe, he’ll be two over. If he chooses six from ten tribes and five from the remaining two tribes, those tribes will be upset with him. The text doesn’t tell us how Moses arrived at the seventy, but the Talmud, a collection of rabbinic commentary on the Torah, proposes a solution to the problem and to why Eldad and Medad remain in the camp and don’t go to the tent of meeting. Sanhedrin 17, one section of the Talmud, says that Moses chose 72 elders, six from each tribe. He then had them draw slips of paper from a box. Seventy of the slips read “elder” and two were blank. According to the Talmud, Moses reasoned that the outcome would be divinely willed and who was he or the two excluded men to disagree with divine will? So Eldad and Medad end up with the blank slips, and the other 70 men follow Moses to the tent of meeting. We’ll come back to this point in a moment.
Second, we need to avoid thinking that the Spirit falls on people or indwells them in certain amounts. We’re reminded in 1 Corinthians 12 that there are many gifts of the Spirit, but that they’re activated by the same Spirit. There is but one Holy Spirit and the Spirit falls on people equally. What God’s promising Moses in Numbers 11 is that the responsibility for the people is going to be taken from Moses alone and distributed on the seventy elders. Moses remains in charge and his chosen assistants remain in their positions, but God is visibly authorizing these elders to serve with Moses and direct the people.
Moses does as God commands him and for a moment he can breathe, but as any leader knows situations involving people are hardly ever that tidy.
Even though Moses’s solution to choosing 70 elders excluded Eldad and Medad, it seems God chose them as elders anyway and the Spirit found them in the camp. Right where Moses had left them, in the middle of the cook fires and the complaining and the leftover manna, they started to prophesy.
Notice that the text never tells us what they said or what they did. We get no oracle, no vision, no sermon. We’re told who the Spirit landed on and where it landed, and that’s all. The story isn’t asking us to care about the content. It’s asking us to care about the location. The Spirit went where the people were.
That matters for us, because we love to wait for the Spirit where we’ve arranged for the Spirit to appear. We love to do church in the prescribed place, under the right order of worship. With the right person at the microphone. And nothing’s objectively wrong with any of that. Tents are good. Chapels and churches are good. But if we decide the Spirit only works inside our arrangements, we’ll keep sending runners to report what God’s doing in the camp. We’ll keep gatekeeping ourselves and others about where the Spirit can work and where God can appear.
For the people in this passage, the tent of meeting is the sanctioned place. It’s part of the structure that keeps the camp from chaos, and in the wilderness, structure keeps people alive. The story tells us that God honors that structure. It also tells us that God refuses to be held by it.
Everybody’s on the List
Let’s talk about prophecy because it can conjure up all kinds of images, some of them helpful and others not. If you’re thinking about a crystal ball or tarot cards, you can abandon those images for now. The kinds of prophets who appear in the Bible are those who the Spirit has handed a word from God, to be spoken into a particular time and place. Mostly it’s about the present. What’s broken here. What God sees. What God’s dreaming instead. A prophet tells the truth about the world as it is and points toward the kin-dom that’s coming.
Now look at who receives the Spirit in this story. Not one person; but seventy-two. God’s answer to Moses’s burnout is distribution. Prophecy isn’t a solo job for the exceptional. It’s a weight meant to be shared.
And Moses says aloud what God’s been doing all along. When Joshua demands he shut down Eldad and Medad, Moses says, “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets.” Every single one. Moses isn’t complaining or just observing. He’s praying.
Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets.
Centuries later, the prophet Joel hears it too. God says the Spirit will be poured out on all flesh. Children will prophesy. Old folks will dream, young folks will see visions, and the Spirit will fall on everyone evenly. Then Pentecost comes, and Peter stands up in a crowd, this is what Joel promised. Moses’s wish, granted. Not only for the ones at the tent. For everyone.
Which means you’re on the list too. Whether you’ve ever made it to the tent or not.
Given the choice, many of us would likely say, “Who? Me? I’m no prophet. Don’t give me that title!” We’ve been told that prophets are a special class of people. We’ve decided for ourselves that prophets are a special breed. Prophets are like the saints. We tell ourselves and we tell each other that they are the great ones, the famous ones, the ones with statues and special days.
But remember what we said about the saints last week. The saints aren’t just those people who are acknowledged by the church or the heroes of our religious stories. We are the saints too. The saints in glory aren’t judging us from a far. The saints are waiting for us to act with them.
The Spirit doesn’t wait for a résumé. The Spirit doesn’t just approach those of us with pretty titles and tons of letters after our names. Remember the Christian adage that God doesn’t call the qualified, God qualifies those they call. A prophetic life can look pretty ordinary from the outside.
Prophecy often looks like telling the truth about what’s in front of you. It looks like refusing to pretend that everything’s all right when it’s not. It looks like staying beside someone the world has dismissed, even when it’s politically or socially disadvantageous for us. It looks like setting a table for people who were told there’s no seat. It looks like living as if God’s kin-dom is already being built in our midst.
Stop Them
A young man runs to Moses. Eldad and Medad are prophesying in the camp. People have noticed that these men are active and they want it handled. They want to restore the proper order where Moses is the divinely appointed leader and messenger. In fact, upon hearing what’s going, Moses assistant and one of the chief leaders of the group, Joshua, says, “My lord Moses, stop them!”
The name “Joshua” is fairly common in the Bible in various forms because it means “God brings salvation.” Jesus’ name in Hebrew was “Yeshua” that is “Joshua.” So, whenever the name Joshua appears we should sit up and take notice. This Joshua will be the one to lead the Hebrews into the promised land.
He’s very close to Moses. He’s watched Moses nearly break several times. He’s loyal, and he loves the order and structure that’s kept the group alive. Everything in him says there’s a process and order. Eldad and Medad hadn’t been selected as elders. They weren’t at the tent. They didn’t receive the blessing and commissioning from God. How dare they prophesy in the camp.
His anger is understandable, but he’s also mistaken.
He’s wrong because the Spirit already fell on the people it was supposed to fall on. God has authorized something which no person, Moses included, could authorize.
And Moses answers. “Are you jealous for my sake?” Moses sees how Joshua’s opposition comes dressed as loyalty. It’s love for the leader, love for the structure, love for how things have always been. Real love. Pointed the wrong way at the wrong moment.
That’s the hardest opposition to face. It doesn’t come from villains. It doesn’t come from internet trolls with nothing better to do. It doesn’t arrive from the mouths of people who we’ll won’t remember in a day or two.
No, it comes from people who care about us and are scared. Jesus says it plainly in Luke 4:24: “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in his hometown.” Prophets are discouraged and get stopped by the people who know them best.
The words are the same for people who have new ideas. Innovators, artists, writers, and, yes, prophets. We know the sound of the discouragement. Slow down. Don’t act like that. Don’t rock the boat. You’ll hurt your reputation. You’ll hurt the community. You’ll hurt yourself. We need to be nice and compromise. Every word of it said with tenderness. Stop them.
Then there’s the other kind of objection. At Pentecost, when the Spirit fills the disciples with her power and they begin speaking every language, some in the crowd sneer, “They’re full of new wine” or in other words “They’re drunk.” These are strangers. They don’t know the disciples. They probably don’t care to know them. They’ve decided who these people are before one sentence lands. Same Spirit, same result. Somebody tries to stop it by mocking it, by shrinking it, by turning it into a joke.
When I was at the TFAM Midwest gathering in October, we had a moment of blessing and prayer over our bishop-elect. As the praying and blessing increased people began to shake and others began to speak in tongues. I’m still a baby Pentecostal and I admit my mind went back to the ordered liturgies of my Catholic, Episcopal, and Reformed background (by the way, some of the former Baptists around me were having similar thoughts). We would never deny the religious experience that was happening, but a part of us nevertheless clung to the order and decorum we used to know.
We do it to ourselves all the time, particularly in church. There’s a bit of religious calculus that goes on in my mind when I’m moved to put a hand in the air during a song. We say, if only to ourselves, “make them stop,” even when the “them” is us.
An Old Slogan About Living
They haven’t been in the news for a while, but most of us remember when Westboro Baptist Church was routinely in the news for protesting funerals. They’d carry horrible signs and shout even worse vitriol at people trying to mourn. A slogan and rallying cry came out of those protests: “Live your life in such a way that Westboro Baptist Church protests your funeral.” During the height of the Civil Rights Movement a similar reminder was that if someone’s shooting at you then you must be doing something right. And the LGBTQIA+ leader Harvey Milk famously said, “If a bullet should enter my brain let that bullet destroy every closet door.”
We shouldn’t so brazenly invite danger on ourselves, but this is the kind of audacity that a prophetic life should embody. The loudest cries of “stop them!” might come from our friends and families or it might come people who have never met us. But we should strive to be angelic troublemakers like Bayard Rustin called for in every town and city. We’ve got to ask ourselves honestly. When the Spirit shows up, are we the ones prophesying or are we the ones running to report it?
Back to the Camp
So where is God calling Blue Ocean Columbus and all of us in this season? That’s the question we’re asking right now.
We’re small. We’re in uncertain days, and every sensible voice wants to tell us what sensible looks like. Stay small. Stay quiet. Stay safe. Protect what we’ve got. The wilderness is real. Moneys tight. The mood around us shifts week to week. Some folks would be perfectly happy if people like us lowered our voices.
Hear this. God’s answer to a weary group was never a bigger group. God’s answer has always been a Spirit spread so wide it landed on two people who didn’t who weren’t even invited to the appointed place. The Spirit didn’t wait for a crowd. It never has. Small isn’t a verdict. Seventy doesn’t sound like a lot and two or three has been us some weeks, yet this whole story turns on those numbers.
Maybe God isn’t calling us to innovate a new program. Maybe God’s calling us to a new posture. We already carry the weight together, but perhaps we need to adjust the load. We need new people to run, walk, and crawl with us and stand up to take some of the load.
This is a working church. To keep a church like this going we need everyone invested and involved. That doesn’t mean get lost if you can’t coordinate an event or sit on the board. It means that we all have talents and gifts and Blue Ocean Columbus lives by the totality of those gifts. With those gifts engaged and people invested in the life of this congregation, this family, we can prophesy in this space, which is our tent. We can prophesy in our lives and our communities, which are our camps.
Forget what you learned before about prophesy and testimony in evangelical and Catholic churches. We have to prophesy. We have to testify. We can’t just say it here, we have to live it. God’s far from done with Blue Ocean Columbus. I can feel it. I hope you can too.