October 4, 2026
Bear the Burden Together
Numbers 11:10-17, 26-30; Acts 2:1-4
Don Quixote did not start out with a squire.
When Cervantes introduces him, he’s a country gentleman somewhere in La Mancha, close to fifty, who has read so many books about knights that his mind has wandered to fantasy. He scours the rust off his great-grandfather’s armor. He gives his bony old horse a grand name, Rocinante. He decides the world is full of wrongs, and that he is the one to right them. Then one summer morning before dawn, without telling a soul, he rides out alone.
It goes badly. He comes home beaten and is put to bed. The second time he sets out, he talks a neighbor into coming along, a farmer named Sancho Panza, who rides a donkey and has been promised an island to govern. Soon the two of them come over a rise and see thirty or forty windmills on the plain.
Quixote sees giants. Sancho tells him they are windmills. Quixote lowers his lance and charges anyway, and a turning sail catches the lance and throws horse and rider across the field.
“Tilting at windmills” has been the joke for four hundred years. But we laugh with a certain tenderness, because there is something lovely in him. He is deeply aware of the world’s wrongs. He believes the right thing is worth doing because it is right, whether or not it stands a chance of success. Many people in this room believe that too, and the world is better because we do.
Yet, as David LaMotte taught us this weekend, Quixote was a hero, not a movement. He had too little company. He set out to carry the wrongs of the world on his own back. One tired neighbor on a donkey beside him does not a movement make.
Most of us were raised on stories of heroes. Abraham Lincoln. Rosa Parks. Mother Teresa. Nelson Mandela. One extraordinary person sees the wrong, rides out, and sets it right. David LaMotte has been helping us think this weekend about how seldom change actually happens that way. Scripture has been telling us about this too. Even the great people of the Bible are not solo heroes upon closer inspection.
The people of Israel are a little more than a year out of Egypt. They have left Sinai behind. Every morning there is manna on the ground. And they are weeping. The text says Moses heard the people weeping, family by family, each at the entrance of their tent. A whole camp crying in public.
It started, Numbers says, with a rabble among them who got a craving. Then everyone joined in. “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.”
For nothing. The Hebrew means free, without cost. They remember Egypt as a buffet. These people were slaves. They made bricks without straw. Nothing in Egypt was free. They cried out to God in their distress. They paid for that fish with their backs and their children and their lives.
Memory is a generous liar, and we are all susceptible to it. Lately I’ve been reading a biography of Roosevelt’s leadership before and during World War II. We remember those as days when the country pulled together. But in August of 1941, four months before Pearl Harbor, the House of Representatives voted to extend the peacetime draft. It passed by one vote, 203 to 202. The nation we remember as united in common effort was badly divided until Pearl Harbor. And Roosevelt never took the unity for granted, even during the war. That’s part of why he ran for a fourth term. But we remember it differently. Every generation has its free fish in Egypt.
Our own moment is heavy too. There are more armed conflicts in the world right now than in any year since the end of the Second World War. The country is restless. We are in an election season, prices are high, people are ticked. Three chapters later in Numbers, the people say to one another, “Let us choose a captain, and go back to Egypt.” New leaders and longing for the old days. We get that.
Into that moment, Moses prays.
“Why have you treated your servant so badly? Did I conceive all these 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’? I am not able to carry all these 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.”
You can relate to the weight Moses means. Some of you are spouses or parents who feel responsible for the happiness and well-being of your children or your spouse. Some of you lead organizations and lie awake over people who depend on you. Some of you volunteer and you see the pressing need and the limited resources. Some of you love the church and you feel the weight of the church’s problems and fragility. All of us read the news and feel the world pressing on our chest.
I am not able to carry this alone. That was a turning point for Moses.
God’s answer is the heart of this passage. The text says God was angry with the people. But God hears Moses anyway, and God answers him with help.
“Gather for me seventy of the elders of Israel, whom you know to be elders and officers of the people. Bring them to the tent of meeting. I will come down and talk with you there. 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.”
Gather up seventy people so that the weight, the burden, is shared.
Notice what God does not do. God does not change the people. They go on complaining for the rest of Numbers. The wilderness lasts forty years. What God does do is build a framework for the long haul, a way to carry these hard, stiff-necked and beloved people together. The answer was already there, in the camp. God tells Moses to gather the ones whom you know. The leaders were there. They just needed to be organized and anointed. They needed to lead, not clap or complain.
Last week my clergy group spent a couple of days in Spartanburg. Our host there was Alan Dyer, the senior pastor of First Presbyterian Spartanburg, and he wanted us to see his city at its best.
In the morning we met Dr. Russell Booker of the Spartanburg Academic Movement — SAM. He retired as a school superintendent, then moved to join SAM. Under his leadership, in the last decade, more than thirty organizations across their county, foundations and nonprofits and schools and businesses and churches, have agreed to work toward the same goals for children, a shared agenda, to create a network of support from “cradle to career.” One of the pressing problems that galvanized them was that two neighborhoods in the same county, one mile apart, had a 17-year gap in life expectancy. Let that sink in.
Their goal was unified action, all the arrows of their work pointing the same direction. They did that so well, they were chosen recently by one the largest antipoverty funders in the country for a major $50 million investment, alongside Dallas and San Antonio. This is a small city in Upstate South Carolina: 44,000 people. They were chosen because thirty organizations learned to pull in one direction.
In the afternoon we met Bill Barnet, who sold a business, and then was a write-in candidate for mayor and served eight years. When his successor took office in 2010, the new mayor asked Barnet to work on improving the Northside, one of the hardest neighborhoods in the city. Bill began by recruiting some partners and listening for three years. Residents called the Northside Voyageurs formed the leadership team. The group purchased more land, and started redeveloping housing, reforming an elementary school, adding a health clinic and a community center. Last week, at 84, Bill drove us around the neighborhood with so much pride.
I was so inspired by their work, and how so many people and organizations pulled together to make a difference in the lives of their neighbors. As we talked with them, they kept pointing at each other. Each time one of our group asked, “How did this happen? What did you do?” they would point to someone else. “Ask him.” “She’s the one.” “It was really them.” Nobody would be the hero.
This the framework God blesses in Numbers.
Moses does what God asks. He gathers the seventy around the tent, and the spirit rests on them, and they prophesy. But two men named Eldad and Medad, whose names were on the list, never made it to the tent.
They stayed in the camp. The spirit rested on them anyway, outside the tent, and they prophesied right where they were.
A young man runs to tell Moses. And Joshua, Moses’ faithful assistant, says, “My lord Moses, stop them!”
Joshua is protecting Moses, and he is trying to guard the community.
Moses answers, “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!”
A few verses ago, Moses asked God to let him die. Now he is free. He is generous. Being part of a movement has done something to him. He points away from himself.
Moses’ wish that the Lord would pour out the Spirit waited a long time. But on the day of Pentecost, the disciples were all together in one place, and all of them were filled with the Holy Spirit.
Peter explained: “I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy.”
Today is World Communion Sunday. It began in 1933, at Shadyside Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh, in the hard years of the Depression, and a world that was divided. A Presbyterian pastor named Hugh Thomson Kerr thought the church should set one table and remember that it is one body in every land.
So let us remember.
This morning a friend I knew in seminary is sharing the gospel in Nepal. Another classmate is helping lead to the church in Kenya. In Madagascar, our mission partners are teaching neighbors to grow fruit and how to keep their families healthy. In Atlanta and New York, our sister congregations are feeding people this very morning and giving them shelter.
Somewhere this week, Presbyterians will sit across a table from immigrants held in detention centers and listen to their stories. This spring, fifty of us will ride a bus to Charleston to build friendship with an African American Presbyterian congregation.
None of us can do all of that. Not one. But the same Spirit that rested on seventy elders, and on Eldad and Medad in the camp, and on every head in that upper room, is resting on the church in every place this morning.
Forty years after that prayer in Numbers, Moses stands at the edge of the promised land and looks back over the whole wilderness experience. He says to the people, “The Lord your God carried you, just as one carries a child, all the way that you traveled until you reached this place.”
Do you hear the call back? He had asked God, “Am I supposed to carry them in my arms?” The answer was God carried them, through Moses, and through the seventy, and through so many more.
God does not ask us to be heroes. God carries the world. God saves the world in Christ, God remakes the world in Christ, God makes promises to the world in Christ. And God gathers us to bear witness to God’s great goodness in all the ways we can.
Come to the table. Drink deeply from the gourd. Bread is broken and passed from hand to hand. As Christians are passing it today in Nepal and Kenya and Madagascar, in New York and Charleston, and throughout these mountains.
Burdens are real. People can be hard. The world is heavy.
But God has not left us alone. Come to the table, be fed, and strengthened by grace.
Amen.
Rev. Patrick W. T. Johnson, Ph.D.
First Presbyterian Church
Asheville, North Carolina