September 21, 2008

Exodus 16: 2-15, Psalm 105: 1-6, 37-45,

Philippians 1: 21-30, Matthew 21: 1-16

God takes common sense and turns it upside down.  Our God is awesome, generous in spirit, slow to anger, compassionate and gracious, abounding in love and faithfulness.

         The Hebrew reading and the Gospel reading reflect God’s love and generosity for people. 

When the Apostle Paul reflects on the experience of the people of God down through the centuries his instructions are very simple, he says: "Do not grumble. Do not complain. Do not murmur. Do not fill your life with grumbling against God."

When he said this he was reflecting on the account of the exodus experience. Reflecting on event after event after event where the Israelites experience in the wilderness their need for God—their dependence upon God—but respond to their circumstances with what is called, in some versions, murmuring or complaining or grumbling. Here is an example in Exodus 16.

The whole Israelite community set out from Elim and came to the Desert, which is between Elim and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month after they had come out of Egypt. In the desert the whole community grumbled against Moses and Aaron. The Israelites said to them, "If only we had died by the Lord's hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death." (Exodus 16:1-3)

Grumbling. If we had only died in Egypt where we had everything we had ever wanted, but you, Moses, brought us out into this desert to starve us to death.  The Apostle says, "Do not grumble.”

The first month and a half out of Egypt, the wilderness wanderers end up between Shur, Sin and Sinai.  They are thirsty, hungry, afraid, and are beginning to wonder if they made a mistake to follow a God who leaves them to die of thirst and hunger.  They grumble and they murmur saying that we may have been slaves in Egypt but we had pots of meat and our fill of bread.

God, once again, hearing their cries tells Moses that bread will rain from heaven for the morning and in the evening quails came up and covered the camp providing them with meat.

The hardship the Hebrews faced in the wilderness was the result of struggling to find food and water in an unfamiliar place. However, the wilderness was also a place of experiencing God’s abundance and a time of self-discovery. This wandering time reoriented the Hebrews from life in Egypt to life with God. God was present with them in captivity, in freedom, and in the wilderness.

Jesus’ story in Matthew 20:1–16 is about the wilderness of unemployment.  This is a parable that can get quickly get under our skin, offending what we often have come to know as ideas of fairness. What experiences does it bring up for you? How may those experiences uncover new ways of understanding trust in God’s abundance?

The parables of Jesus have long been revered as earthly stories with heavenly meanings.  Today’s parable is not any different.  Through the parables Jesus proclaims the nearness of the reign of God and communicates the spiritual truths and moral insights related to its advent. (William Herzog III “Parables as Subversive Speech:  Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed”, Westminster/John Knox Press, 1994)

In Jesus’ context a denarius was a normal day’s wage.  The landowner hires at 6a.m., 9, 12, 3 p.m. and 5.  It is normal for those who are seeking work to look for it at a crossroads or a market.  At that time while the wage is unspecified it was thought of as just.  Just before sundown around 5 in the late afternoon, the landowner went out again and found others standing around.  Asking them why they had not been working all day they tell him because no one hired us.  They wanted to work rather than sit idle

At the end of the day when it is time to be paid the landowner told his manager to pay those who came last first.  Those who had been there first when seeing what the last were receiving thought they would receive substantially more.  However, everyone received the same wage.

It's easy to understand the feelings of the laborers in today's Gospel story who had worked all day in the vineyard under the hot sun. They had, of course, agreed to work for the usual daily wage. But when they saw those who had worked for an hour or two receiving that amount, they were so sure that they would be rewarded more generously. They had worked 12 hours! Was it fair that they received the same amount of pay as those who had worked one hour?

Then we have the landowner who says to them; “Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?  Or are you envious because I am generous?”

When have we who live in a country where we have such bounty been exactly like the landowner?

In The Good Book: “Reading The Bible With Mind And Heart”, Peter Gomes wrote that what makes the Bible so compelling is the company of characters who, like ourselves, are so often both confused and confusing and yet play their part in the drama of the human relationship with God.  The stories of such characters, he added, are not true because they are “in the Bible;” rather, the stories are in the Bible because they are true to the experience of men and women with this God.

This morning’s Gospel reading is a really tough one.  What the landowner decides to do to the laborers particularly those who worked all day, I imagine, in the hot sun is unjust.  This allegory in Matthew, and only in the Gospel of Matthew, does not speak well of God’s image when we look at it from an earthly point of view.  The unfair treatment of the workers in regard to a fair wage for a day’s work reminded me of the injustice that happens in Employer/employee relations every day in every part of the world.  I recalled the young boys that I saw in Guatemala working in the sugar cane fields wielding huge knives and cutting down the tall stalks of sugar cane.  In my mind’s eye I could see the gathering of Mexican people in a field across the road from the hotel my husband and I were staying in when we vacationed in Mexico.  We watched one morning as the managers in suits and ties came out from the hotel and crossed the street to the field where the people who sold trinkets to tourists had congregated.  With their hands out looking for the money owed them so that the salespeople could stand on the beaches behind the hotel in the hot sun for hours on end attempting to sell their items.  Or the hotel workers who were behind the desk in the lobby in the early morning hours when we left and were still there in the late evening when we returned.

I can still see the airport workers in the Dominican Republic who had to carry each peace of luggage down into the holding area because the conveyor belt was not working that day or those who guide the airplanes into their respect docks and they didn’t have the protective gear for their ears.

I am left wondering in what way I contribute to the injustices that so many workers in our world face. 

The parable told by Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel this morning is a parable that offends our sense of fairness; an ethical humanist would be unable to justify such bizarre labor practices.  But if we step away from our earthly view for a moment and look at it in the context of spiritually I ask you then what does it say to us.  I believe we receive the opportunity to glimpse a God who loves each one of us equally.  The parable conveys a truth about God that almost goes too deep for words.

When we look at this allegory from a spiritual point of view what we have then is what the late Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel called “the arduous compassion” of God. We have a God whose desire for goodness and mercy extends to us, even when we are confused, confusing, skeptical, half hearted, or unfathomably wicked. This is the truth of the phrase, “God is Love:”  God’s faithfulness far outweighs any thing we can think up, God’s desire for goodness subverts any evil we conspire to do, and God’s economy of justice means so much more than we can possibly imagine.  I encourage you to become aware of the injustices you unknowingly support.  Move instead towards God’s reign, embrace with wild abandonment God, who is awesome, generous in spirit, slow to anger, compassionate and gracious, abounding in love and faithfulness. Amen.