18th Sunday after Pentecost – Proper 20 (Year A, RCL)
September 18, 2005
Mark Lloyd Taylor
I was raised in the Church of the Nazarene – a small Protestant denomination that prized above all palpable, life-transforming experiences of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. Lots of singing and tears and fervent prayers. Little attention to the sacraments or to the classic shape of Christian liturgy. No lectionary. Every once in a great while, a Nazarene pastor would announce from the pulpit: “I intended to preach on such-and-such this morning, but now the Spirit of God is laying something else on my heart instead.” Then, with dramatic flourish, the preacher would toss his or her notes – yes, Nazarenes have been ordaining women since the late 19th century – toss his or her notes for the prepared sermon to the floor and embark extemporaneously on a new and different sermonic journey.
Don’t worry, my days as a Nazarene lie almost twenty-five years in the past. I stand here a happy, settled Episcopalian in the Anglo-Catholic tradition. A written sermon sits in front of me and I have no intention of casting these sheets of paper aside. However, I do need to tell you about the sermon I originally thought I was going to preach today. Upon my first reading of them two months ago, our lesson from Exodus (16:2-15), the story of the bread in the wilderness, and our gospel from Matthew (20:1-16), Jesus’ parable of the vineyard owner and workers, spoke a clear message to me – one that reduced to a single word: generosity. God’s generosity in providing for the Israelites – life-saving generosity. God’s generosity portrayed in the vineyard owner paying workers who clocked in an hour before quitting time the same as those who put in a twelve hour day – “So the last will be first, and the first will be last” (20:16) – disturbing generosity that turns our familiar social and economic arrangements upside down and inside out.
But then along came Hurricane Katrina, sweeping that tidy little sermon – and so much else of greater significance – away. The pictures of desperate, dying people trapped in New Orleans opened my eyes to the deeper human reality of our lesson from Exodus, while they also made the apparent message of that story harder to embrace without some protest. Where was the bread from heaven – the food and clean water and medicine – for those people? Why was their exodus so tragically delayed? The poor, black face of suffering in New Orleans made the social conditions out of which Jesus told his parable come vividly alive for me, even as it revealed how far our nation is from the kingdom of heaven, that is, the reign of God, Jesus preached. The least and lowliest of New Orleans were not the first, but truly the very last.
Consider the settings of our two lessons again: the wilderness and the marketplace. The one, a hostile physical environment lacking the most basic resources to support human life. Sure enough, the Israelites are starving in the wilderness. The other setting is the central place in a city for the exchange of goods and services – a social environment where the necessities of human life should be available. However, in the parable, workers or day laborers, find themselves idle in the marketplace and so risk being unable to feed, cloth, and shelter themselves and their families. How shocking in the wake of Katrina to see an American city, a vast marketplace, made into a wilderness. Or did the hurricane simply expose how this nation’s cities have long represented social and economic wilderness for some – so that the very survival of the poorest of the poor was threatened when the public structures of electricity, water, transportation, and health care were disrupted? And might the sudden exodus of people from the Gulf Coast – many of who are already saying they will not return home – push the most vulnerable day laborers in the marketplaces of Houston or Atlanta or Pierce County out into the wilderness of idle desperation?
So, Hurricane Katrina required of me a second and deeper reading of the story of the bread in the wilderness and Jesus’ parable of the vineyard owner and workers. I have arrived at a different sermon centered around a different word: gratitude. Today’s story and parable certainly do not call into question God’s generosity, but neither do they seek to explain or justify it. They simply assume the reality of God’s generosity. Our lessons move in a different direction – focusing attention on our human response to God’s generosity. They name our proper response gratitude and warn us against failing to receive God’s generous gifts gratefully.
Three thoughts concerning gratitude.
First. While the Bible is full of stories of abundance – huge catches of fish, great wedding banquets, and so on – today’s lessons are about survival, about just enough resources for people to live, just enough for each and every person to survive.
For the Israelites, even when God hears their desperate cry for food, the wilderness hardly becomes a place of abundance. It is not the land of Canaan, flowing with milk and honey and producing bunches of grapes so big they required two men with a staff to carry them. No, God provides “a fine flaky substance, as fine as frost on the ground” after the morning dew has lifted (Exodus 16:19). The Israelites gave this “bread from heaven,” this alien substance, the name “manna” – which means, “What is this?” or, “What on earth is this stuff?” For forty years the entire Hebrew people subsisted on this one staple food, this manna – either baking it in loaves or boiling it – no variety, no herbs or spices, no wine, no dessert. But there was enough, just enough, and enough for the whole community. Listen to these words from the continuation of Exodus 16: through Moses, God commands the Israelites to “‘gather as much of it,’” the manna, “‘as each of you needs, an omer,’” about 2 quarts, “’to a person according to the number of persons, all providing for those in their tents.’ The Israelites did so, some gathering more, some less. But when they measured it with an omer, those who gathered much had nothing over, and those who gathered little had no shortage” (16-18).
The key phrase in Jesus’ parable is “the usual daily wage” paid by the generous landowner to each worker regardless of how many hours they had spent in the vineyard. Many of Jesus’ parables involve money. Sometimes colossal sums – such as the man in last week’s gospel who owed a king 10,000 talents – roughly 1.5 billion dollars in our reckoning. Sometimes the tiniest sums – such as the widow who puts into the Temple treasury one copper coin worth two pennies – some 30 cents. The Greek term in today’s parable is a “denarius,” the usual daily wage for an agricultural laborer, a migrant farm worker we might say. Let’s translate that into our own monetary system. The federal minimum wage is $5.15 an hour, times the mythical 8 hour day gives us a $40 wage for a day’s work, or $200 a week, $800 a month, and $10,000 a year. Not abundance for sure – just enough to survive, maybe? The generosity of the vineyard owner is shown by the fact that all his laborers receive just enough, even those who came late to the vineyard.
And here is the point. I’m sure we might manage to be grateful for extravagant gifts – diamonds, or a car, or a vacation home. But do we know how to be truly grateful for more basic gifts – a hug from another human being, a kind word, a smile – to say nothing of light and warmth and air and sound? Yet those are the natural and social gifts we most need to survive. Today’s lessons challenge us above all to receive with gratitude the just enough gifts, the just enough for everyone gifts, and thereby come to see life itself as the primary gift of our generous God.
Second. Today’s lessons also name two stances that make gratitude impossible: hoarding and entitlement. You may recall from the story of the Israelites’ life in the wilderness that only one day’s supply of manna could be gathered and used each day. When some tried to stock up more than one day’s worth (except on the sixth day – before the Sabbath), the manna “bred worms and became foul” (Exodus 16:20). Instead of gratitude for God’s gift of just enough, don’t we also often seek to secure our own sense of worth by hoarding things and accomplishments and even the attention of others?
Similarly, the vineyard owner in Jesus’ parable confronts the sense of entitlement that leads the all-day workers to resent the one-hour workers, even though both groups receive equally just enough to survive – the usual daily wage. Don’t we also often have difficulty recognizing and celebrating the giftedness, the worthiness, of other people – especially those who fail to meet the expectations of “success” under which we operate.
True gratitude for God’s generous gifts is itself a gift of God’s grace – it means freedom from bondage to myself as the one around whom the world revolves.
Third. While gratitude may be a gift received from God’s generosity, gratitude should not be confused with passivity. The manna had to be gathered anew each day. It had to be gathered early in the morning – the sun we are told, very soon would come and cause it to melt away. Likewise, the workers of Jesus’ parable did have to go into the vineyard and work for the usual daily wage. Whether for one our or twelve, their active response to the vineyard owner’s generosity was required. For us, too, gratitude must be embodied in outward action, not merely secreted away in inner thought. The challenge, I believe, is for my gratitude for God’s generous gifts to me to more and more take on the likeness of God’s generosity as I relate to you and other people.
Twenty-five years ago, Nazarenes, along with some other Protestants, celebrated the Lord’s Supper only three or four times a year. One of the great Catholic gifts we share as Episcopalians is our weekly eucharistic assembly. Eucharist means thanksgiving – or, might we say, gratitude. When we speak of the Eucharist, we do not refer primarily to the elements of bread and wine but to the whole dramatic tapestry of words and gestures whereby we give thanks to God using bread and wine. I invite you to savor all the many sensory and spiritual dimensions of the meal we will share in a few minutes. Experience this Eucharist as the St. Paul’s community both living out gratitude here and now and training around this table to practice gratitude in every moment of our lives beyond the walls of this church.
We will soon offer gifts to God – gifts we have to offer only because we first received them from a generous God through the generous labor of human hands and hearts. And we will call upon God’s Spirit to make of our partial and imperfect gifts and selves fit offerings of praise and thanksgiving to God. Finally, we will share together the gifts of the body and blood of Jesus Christ offered back to us.
There will be enough and enough for all. No hoarding. No entitlement. No passivity. Just gratitude.
Amen.
