Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost, 20A, September 21, 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.

Good morning! Welcome into this magnificent sanctuary of time and space and parish that is Emmanuel Church. Welcome to you who are here for the very first time. Welcome to you who are returning here, having been away for a short time or a long time. Welcome to you who were here much of yesterday or the day before, or every day this last week. Welcome to you who have been here more times than you could ever count! Welcome into the future of God’s beloved community gathered in this place. You know, it’s our future that I’m most excited about. While I was traveling this summer, someone said to me, “Wow, Emmanuel Church in Boston has such a great history.” I said, “Yes! And a great future too!” I hope you’ll be able to stay for a while after our service to hear about the amazing progress on our north-wall restoration project. And I hope you’ll stay a while in the months and years to come to challenge and change us as we become more and more of who God is calling us to be. This is not welcome back Sunday; it is welcome forward Sunday!

It’s funny to me to have lectionary readings about complaining on a Sunday concerned with welcoming. In the Exodus story, the people have survived the plagues; they have experienced the Passover; they have walked through the sea on dry land and then watched a pursuing powerful army almost catch them and then perish. They’ve escaped slavery – they’re free. And they’re in the desert. Womp. Womp. (as my daughters like to say). They’re parched and hungry. It starts seeming like maybe slavery wasn’t that bad – at least there was enough to eat. A note in my Torah commentary says that “In Egypt, the baking of bread was a fine art; it is reported that there were 57 different kinds of bread.” [1] And so Moses heard the whisper of the Holy One, Who had heard the resentments of the people, the grumbling of stomachs.  Moses discerned that bread and meat would be provided – so that by evening, in other words, so that at the end of the day, the community would know that it was the Holy One WHO had brought them out of slavery.

That’s so interesting to me – it’s as if they didn’t know or remember that they were free because of grace. It’s as if they’d forgotten that they had gotten as far as they had because of the grace of God. Imagine that. People who had lived through plagues and pestilence, who had gotten to the other side of all kinds of obstacles, didn’t attribute it to the strong hand of the Divine. Perhaps, as one of my colleagues notes, “The lack of discernment of God’s presence in the ordinary leads to a denial of God’s activity in the extraordinary.” [2] So, the Exodus wilderness story goes, God heard their complaining and God gave them something to eat, although it apparently wasn’t immediately recognizable as food. They had to be told – this is bread that God has given you to eat. As you might guess, the complaining continued.

The complaining that Paul is addressing in his letter to the Philippians is implicit, rather than explicit. In the verses just before our reading from today, Paul writes, “some proclaim the redeeming urge of God – the Christ – out of love, …others proclaim it out of selfish ambition, not sincerely but intending to increase my suffering in my imprisonment. What does it matter? Just this, that the Christ is proclaimed in every way, whether out of false motive or true; and in that I rejoice.” He’s addressing grumbling about rivalry and motives saying, whatever your reason, it makes no difference if you live your life in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ – that is, in a manner worthy of the good news of the wideness of God’s mercy.

And then there’s the grumbling in the Gospel portion for today. I wonder how many of you really don’t like this parable. You don’t have to raise your hands. It’s made me cranky too, from time to time. I do suspect that one’s reaction kind of depends on where one perceives herself or himself in the scheme of things – whether you are usually the kind of person who’s there from the beginning of a lot of work, or more often the kind of person coming in at the middle or near the end. I wondered this week whether reactions to this parable can be correlated to birth order in our families of origin! (I’m an oldest child of an oldest child!)

A few people (who I guess to be middle children) in the Bible study conversations of this past Tuesday morning and evening, noted that there would have been no grumbling at all if the vineyard owner had just paid the earliest hired workers first instead of last – then nobody would have known! Maybe. Though, since the wage that the story mentions is a denarius, that translates to enough to eat for one day – enough to feed one’s family for one day only, my guess is that the others would have noticed that those who had come at the eleventh hour were not begging for food at the end of the day.

Just about six weeks ago, at the beginning of August, a group of us were scrambling to finalize the worship booklet for the consecration of our new bishop, a glorious service attended by about 4,000 people Saturday a week ago. The names of people on the consecration committee were to be listed in the back of the bulletin by way of acknowledgement and thanks. That seems like an easy enough task, right? But three people on the consecration committee had been named and had gotten to work more than a year ago. Others had come on in March. As the need for help ballooned, more and more people were getting recruited to come to the weekly working meetings to figure out how to turn a university hockey arena into a church for a day. The bulletin needed to be sent to the printer a month before the event. Whose names would get to be listed? Some people had only come to one meeting. A few hadn’t even shown up at all yet. Some had been there since the beginning. Some people had not worked very hard or had made a mess of what they had done. Others had been laboring long hours in the scorching heat of strong and differing opinions about liturgy and protocol! Was there a minimum amount of work that had to have already been done to qualify for having one’s name listed for credit and thanks? Should the names be listed alphabetically or be ranked by entrance date or total hours or liters of sweat or number of anxiety dreams?

Then I remembered my experience of being an illiterate and unskilled laborer during a week-long trip to a tiny village in the mountains east of Tegucigalpa, Honduras. There, I stood (or sat) each day in the shade, waiting for assignments, sometimes for hours, and when I was given work to do, I messed up nearly everything I touched. I didn’t understand the directions; I lacked the strength or the skills required; and in my repeated attempts to be helpful, I unintentionally wasted precious materials that weren’t easily replaced. It was really embarrassing. I actually tried less and less as the days went on, because of my humiliation. And yet. And yet, I was treated with compassion. At the end of each day, I was given enough to eat, just like the others who had been so much more productive. I honestly don’t think it occurred to anyone that I shouldn’t be allowed to eat at the end of the day – but if it did, they didn’t let me know it! I honestly don’t think it occurred to anyone that the food that we had to eat at the end of the day wasn’t a gift from God.

At the end of the day, the opportunity to work and the ability to eat are rights and not privileges, and we have a corporate responsibility, a sacred vow, to respect the dignity of every human being. At the end of the day we shall know that freedom from oppression and sufficient food and drink are gifts from God that we are obliged to extend to all, because at the end of the day, it’s all about and only about how well we will Love. Welcome forward, Emmanuel.

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