Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost, 22A, October 5, 2014; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O God of grace, may we have the wisdom, the strength, and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth – come when it may and cost what it will.

In our first lesson this morning we heard one of the most famous passages of scripture in the whole Bible. You don’t have to be Jewish or Christian to have heard of what are commonly known as “The Ten Commandments.” In our church tradition, this passage is called the Decalogue – literally “ten words” from God because of references in Deuteronomy to the ten words or ten things that were written in stone on Sinai – ten things that Moses reported hearing from the Source of all being on the Holy Mountain.

Here is the oldest example in our scripture of instructions for how to live long and well in community. The passage begins by telling us that God the Author spoke all these words, reminding the people first that it was God Who brought the people out of the house of slavery. It was God Who brought the people out of the narrow places – mitzrayim – between rocks and hard places – also called Egypt in the Hebrew Bible. This moment marks their new beginning – a fresh starting point for the community – another chance to live in an entirely new way. And God is expressing God’s will – God’s desire for God’s people. “Listen,” God is saying, “I have moved you out from a place of dishonor and disrespect. You are free. You are no longer trapped. You are not enslaved. I have redeemed you. You are valuable. You are precious to me. And here’s how you, my beloved, will behave when you have no other gods more important than me. Here’s how it will be when you know deep in your hearts that you are my people.”

These are rules for living well in community, but they are not regulations. There actually aren’t any provisions for what happens when they are not listened to (there are terrible consequences, but not specified punishments). These words of the Holy One are absolute proclamations. The sense of the Hebrew scripture is more of a teaching, and a description of a hoped for future. With the exception of two, which I will get to in a minute, the verbs in these proclamations are all imperfect tense in Hebrew, indicating ongoing or incomplete action. Grammatically, they’re not in a command form. And by the way, there are not ten in the way they get depicted without doing some very fancy editing work. You don’t have to read Biblical Hebrew to figure out that Jews, Catholics and Protestants have different lists of “ten,” for example. Our lists all have the same source and don’t match up!

The sense of these proclamations is something like this. God is saying, “When you have no other gods before me, here’s how it will look; here’s how you will behave.” Just listen to how different it sounds, “You shall not commit adultery.” versus “When you have no other gods more important than me, you will not commit adultery – you will not violate your primary commitments in relationship”. Or “When you have no other gods before me, you will not steal – indeed you will not even desire to steal. You won’t covet. You’re getting a fresh start – and here’s how I want it to be for you from now on. I want you to remember that you are beloved and free. Here’s how I want it to be with you so that you can live well from now on.” These words from God are about a vision of shalom in the future.

The two exceptions, where the verbs are in more of a command form, are remember as in remember the seventh day to be holy [infinitive absolute verb form]. And honor as in honor your father and your mother [command]. Of all these words that Moses heard from the Holy One, only two proclamations are in command form. I’ve often wondered if they are in command form because they are the most difficult of the whole list to accomplish – perhaps they require our best attention. I’m going to start with the second one first. “Honor your father and your mother so that you can live long in the land God is giving you.” Honor is not the same as submission – it’s much more sublime than that. It has to do with dignity and integrity and respect. The word means “weigh heavily.” In other words, don’t take your father and your mother lightly. They gave you your life.

Remember to keep the seventh day holy. This is the most challenging of all – a day per week is nearly 15% of your waking hours to refrain from work. That might be the most foolishly extravagant thing ever commanded (to people without enormous wealth) in the history of the world – and the most necessary. Sabbath-keeping is not so much about a long list of dos and don’ts – it’s about what Walter Brueggeman calls a “disciplined and regular disengagement from the systems of productivity whereby the world uses people up to exhaustion.” The primary purpose of Sabbath is to experience God’s pleasure in creation – to feel refreshment and reverence and joy. Sabbath is the best antidote to resentment. Don’t we have such a deep thirst for refreshment and reverence and joy?

Although our English translation renders the ancient Hebrew, “I the Lord your God am a jealous God” a better translation is “I the Lord your God am an impassioned God.” The Lord our God is a fervent, zealous, joyfully passionate lover, inviting us, urging us to become fervent, zealous, joyfully passionate lovers in response. I hear this scripture challenging us to remember that at the core of our beings, we delight in the law of the One who has freed us and who longs for us to live as if it is true. Hear this as an invitation – a call to forsake whatever idols have us bowing down, to examine what other gods we have made more important than the Holy One.

So if the vision of the future Shalom – of all shall be well — is being proclaimed in our Torah portion from Exodus, we can understand from our Gospel reading from Matthew, that all is not well yet. I must start with the end of our Gospel portion and say that chief priests (or Sadducees) and Pharisees (or proto-rabbis) were two separate and distinct “parties” within first century Judaism, often with different methods of practicing faith. A contemporary iteration might be: “When the leaders of the Catholics and the Protestants heard Jesus’ parables, they realized that he was speaking about them. They wanted to arrest him but they feared the crowds because the crowds regarded Jesus as a prophet.” In other words, Jesus’ teaching was troubling across a wide range of religious leaders. I can’t say often enough that if we fail to understand this or any other mention of religious folks as a critique of ourselves and our own leadership, our own fruit production, we do violence to the text, and to Jesus himself.

You may know that in Jesus’ time, parables were teaching tools intended not to give answers but to extend invitations to “inspire and humble, challenge and comfort.” [1] And if Gospel means good news, where is the good news in this disturbing story of an absent and naïve landowner and the violent tenants, a disturbing story of escalating anger and violence that has compromised the harvest of good fruit? What is this story telling us about how to figure out what really matters in the communal quest for abundant life?

The Good News in this parable is that the vineyard is going to be given over to tenant farmers who will produce and deliver the harvest – the fruits of the kingdom or realm of God. According to Matthew, it matters how people behave – how people produce and deliver the harvest. What are the fruits of the realm of God, also known as the fruits of the Spirit, in Biblical terms? You know them – these are fruits that good tenant farmers are to be planting, growing and harvesting. The Apostle Paul listed them in his letter to the Galatians. He was not inventing this list – he was remembering and reciting the fruits of the realm of God. The fruits are:

1. Love – that is benevolence;
2. Joy – which can be defined as grace recognized;
3. Peace – which is much more than the absence of noise or even the absence of war – it has to do with wholeness and integrity and justice;
4. forbearance or endurance;
5. Kindness – meaning compassion and consideration;
6. Goodness – which has to do with moral excellence;
7. Fidelity or loyalty;
8. Gentleness – which is the opposite of arrogance or entitlement; and
9. Self-control – mastery over one’s own behavior.

While my hunch is that many of us blanch at the question, “What would Jesus do?” as being at once overly simplistic and impossible to know, in every conflicted and even violent situation that I can think of we can ask and usually answer helpful questions like: How can we sow love in the midst of this hatred? Where do we recognize ever-present grace in this situation? What would increase the well-being of the participants in this conflict? Can we bear with the hard work a little longer? What would be the kindest response? Where is the most morally excellent path? What will help us grow fidelity and gentleness at the same time? How can we reduce our own reckless behaviors? As we struggle to figure out the next right thing to do, we can ask ourselves, what is the loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, good, faithful, gentle, self-controlled thing to do next? And then we can pray again for the wisdom, the strength and the courage to do it.

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