THE PROBLEM OF ELDAD AND MEDAD

May 15, 2005

Texts – Numbers 11: 24-30

John 7: 37-39

            It’s an interesting story . . . a telling (and subversive) story . . . a story repeated, replayed, and rehearsed down through the ages.  I’m talking about the story of Eldad and Medad.  Moses “gathered seventy ... of the elders of the people, and placed them round about the tent (of meeting),” it begins. 

“When the spirit rested upon them, they prophesied....  (But) two men remained in the camp, one named Eldad, and the other named Medad, and the spirit rested upon them ..., 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 the son of Nun, the minister of Moses, one of his chosen ones, said, ‘My lord Moses, forbid them.’  But Moses said to him, ‘Are you jealous for my sake?  Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, that the Lord would put his spirit upon them!’” [Numbers 11: 24-29]

            They were in the wrong place at the wrong time.  They didn’t get the memo or the Email or the message everybody else did.  When the anointing came, they were not where they ought to have been.  Eldad and Medad:  out of line ... out of step ... out of place.  Are they just a dollar short and a day late?  Maybe.  But maybe, just maybe, there’s something more going on.

             At one level, this is a story about leadership and power.  Moses has decided to broaden the leadership core of Israel.  He recruits seventy elders to be anointed with the gift of prophecy and thus share with him the responsibility for the people’s well-being.  He calls them out to a separate place (“a holy place,” the tent of meeting), but two of them stay behind in the camp.  When God’s Spirit is poured out, all prophesy.  Only these two, alone among the others, do so in public – in the camp, where the people are.  God’s gifts, the story says, are always for the whole people of God wherever they are, not just for those who follow the patterns of tradition.

            Joshua does not appear here in a favorable light.  He is portrayed as immature, feeling threatened by this break with the traditional lines of authority.  He’s already been designated as Moses’ successor.  It’s bad enough that now he must share that power with seventy elders.  The thought that two of them may operate completely outside of his control is more than he can bear.  He pleads with his mentor to stop them, but Moses refuses.  Would that all of God’s people were prophets, Moses says; would that all were gifted by the Spirit as Eldad and Medad have been gifted; then our work would be done.

            So this is a story about leadership and power, and it is one that has been played out over and over down through the ages.  The sharing of power is never an easy thing.  Those who have it want to keep it.  “Power flows out of the barrel of a gun,” Mao Zedong said nearly a century ago; the only way you get it is to take it away by violent force from those who have it.  And once you have it, he and many others have gone on to say, you must hold on to it with an iron fist. 

            Moses doesn’t go along with this.  He willingly shares, distributes, delegates his power.  Why?  Because he understands that it does not belong to him.  It comes from God, and flows through

him to the people.  If God decides to pour out that power on others, so much the better.   Rather than a closed elite, Moses prefers an engaged people. “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets,” he says; would “that the Lord would put his spirit upon them!”

            This is the understanding of power that undergirds our country’s constitutional form of government.  “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union ... do ordain and establish this Constitution,” our founders wrote.  Power belongs to “We the people,” and behind that and within that is the Judaeo-Christian conviction that power comes from God and flows into the hearts and hands of “we the people.”  It does not belong to those who have the instruments of power – be those guns or potent political positions. 

            The same, obviously, holds true in our life together as a faith community.  The premier story of this day, Pentecost Sunday, is the gifting of God’s Spirit upon the community of believers.  Not just on some, but on all.  “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there will I be in the midst of them,” he said.  It is not the font or the table or the pulpit which is the source of divine power in the faith community, any more than it was the tent of meeting in Moses’ day.  Eldad and Medad may have missed the meeting.  They were not where they were “supposed to be,” and clearly they had a hard time following directions.  But note it well – they were every bit as much endowed with the Spirit of God as the sixty eight others who gathered with Moses at the tabernacle. 

            Joshua does not like this; truth to tell, neither do many of us.  We want order and structure in our lives.  Too many cooks spoil the soup, we say.  Let’s have all the prophets over here, please!  Eldad and Medad – and particularly Joshua’s response to them – are emblematic of our propensity to place limits on God’s spirit.  Having found and accepted what we believe to be “the truth,” we are loathe to accept or even entertain any other possible version of the truth.  “The greatest enemy of any one of our truths,” William James said a long time ago, “is the collection of all of our other truths.”   

            Certainly that is true of religious truth.  We draw lines ... we set up boundaries ... and everyone outside the circle is automatically excluded.   They are not just wrong; they are subversive and threatening to our way of life.  That’s what I hear in Joshua’s voice as he pleads with Moses, and it is a great deal of what I hear coming from many of the world’s religious leaders today.

            We’ve a little sign hanging above the light switch in our bedroom at home.  It was a gift from one of Donna’s brothers a number of years ago.  It reads – “You can either agree with me or you can be wrong!”  It’s funny.  It’s childish.  It’s cute.  Alas, it is also all too reflective of the spirit which is at work in our world today.

“Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets,” Moses says in direct contradiction to our desire for uniformity; would “that the Lord would put his spirit upon them (all)!”  The problem, you see, with the story of Eldad and Medad is that they turn out to be right, and Joshua – who represents duly constituted authority and power – ends up being wrong.  God’s Spirit is not confined to “designated” places.  Those who receive and become channels for the Spirit of Truth may in fact be not just out at the tent of meeting but right here in the camp where people are going about their daily business.  Eldad and Medad could be our neighbors.  We’ve got to listen to them . . . which is to say, to borrow a phrase from our own heritage, “God may yet have more light and truth to break forth from His Holy Word than we have heretofore imagined!”  It may even mean that “God is still speaking” and that we, who would be faithful, must be ever listening.