Monday, July 28, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Cake
How much is enough? During Passover, Jewish families chant a fifteen-stanza reminder that God is enough, and everything else is icing. It’s called the Dayenu, and you can listen to a traditional rendition in The Chosen, Season 5, Episode 4 from Jesus and his disciples at their Last Passover Supper together, and also another created by the community of women in Jesus’ life, which they shared with him privately.
The Dayenu begins … “If he had brought us out of Egypt and not carried out judgments against the Egyptians … it would have been enough. If he had carried out judgments against them and not executed justice upon their gods … it would have been enough.”
Never forget! So much has happened, and is happening now, and will happen – and it will be easy to forget. But do not!
Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good. Repeat and repeat and repeat.
As Moses and Joshua came down from Mt. Sinai and drew near the camp of the Israelites, he saw their golden calf and their worship of the calf, and he threw the tablets down and broke them on the base of the mountain.
The people had exchanged their glory for the image of a grass-eating bull. They forgot the God who had saved them. Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good.
If God is enough, then it’s my faith that might not be. One kind of faith ebbs and flows with circumstance, hormones, getting enough sleep, food and water. Another kind of faith rises up when challenged as Paul’s did in 2 Corinthians 4 (I am struck down, but not destroyed …). I want only the second kind of faith but must confess the first.
I don’t think Jesus will turn me away, however. I think he waits with me while my weak faith runs its course and God’s strong faith inside me comes alive again.
Jesus mentioned a mustard seed, comparing it to God’s faith inside me (and inside you, too).
The Kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed
that a person took and sowed in a field.
It is the smallest of all the seeds,
yet when full-grown it is the largest of plants.
It becomes a large bush,
and the birds of the sky come and dwell in its branches.
Please, David, don’t get cocky and think it’s your self-made faith he’s talking about, because he is not. Jesus is talking about the faith that comes when I fall on my face and cry out God’s name, and then wait and wait and wait. Of course I doubt if he’ll come and lift me up. Of course I’m sick of lying flat on my face and hearing people either laugh or admonish or wax eloquent about what it’s like to be standing up. Try it, they say! And of course I want to.
Then down on the ground where I’m lying on my face, there is this faint whisper of God-sound. I hear it, just barely, but in the end it sounds much more true.
So I don’t settle for anything other than the Cake. And I can’t taste the Cake with any fingers other than my own. It’s God’s cake, it’s my birth-day, it’s just between God and me.
And God isn’t going anywhere.
The Father willed to give us birth
By the word of truth
That we may be a kind of firstfruits
Of his creatures.
Alleluia!
(Exodus 32, Psalm 106, James 1, Matthew 13)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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