The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost (RCL, Year A, Proper 20)
September 21, 2008
The Reverend Paul R. Abernathy, Rector
Listen Live!
Having trouble listening in?
If you can't see the buttons above to play the sermon, chances are you don't have Macromedia Flash installed. To download the components you need,
please visit: www.macromedia.com/downloads.
Sometimes going from one place to another is like a trek through the wilderness, far away from the familiar, far away from home. Sometimes
going from one place to another feels like dying.
So for our Hebrew forebears during their wilderness journey from Egyptian captivity to the Promised Land of Canaan. At times, they feared starvation
unto death.[1]
So for us. Whenever we by choice – or by circumstance are forced to – take a step away from what we have known, from where we have been, from
what we have been. Sometimes it can seem like a wilderness journey. Sometimes it can feel like dying.
I have known this experience through the deaths of loved ones. When presence suddenly became absence. When relationships eternally were changed.
When that last hope of working something out seemed lost forever. And grief was like a desert. I know this experience with my aged, infirm mother.
It is like wilderness. No longer is she the person I knew. No longer can she know me. Sometimes, in her ongoing care, I don’t know where I’m going
and I don’t what I’m doing. Even if I think I know how it will end, until that day I have to keep walking, struggling to figure it out day by day.
And it can feel like dying. Sometimes I wish it would end now.
Wilderness. Dying. I have heard it in the voices and stories of others. Countless people who have received a dire medical diagnosis or who have
faced major surgery when the best possible prognosis is life, but without the hope of restoration to the fullness and wholeness of health.
Wilderness. Dying. I have seen it in the faces of the poor. Here and around the world. People whose daily existence is subsistence and for whom
the wilderness, with all of its barrenness, is not a metaphorical land of hardship through which they journey, but the real place where they live.
People whose daily food is disconsolation and who know – as perhaps we all do, each in our own way – that earth has many a sorrow that heaven
cannot heal.[2]
Sometimes it – life – can seem like wilderness and feel like dying.
Reflecting on the experience of our Hebrew ancestors, there are three elements that may be instructive for us. First, longing for the past.
Second, testing our faith. Third, beholding a new discovery.
The starving Israelites longed for “the fleshpots,” the meat, and the bread of Egypt. So hungry (and angry at Moses for leading them into
the wilderness), they, apparently, for an instant, forgetting the misery of their slavery, yearned to go back to the assured provisions of food,
drink, and shelter.
Funny in an ironic way how tribulation and uncertainty can make us long for yesterday, yearning for the good ole’ days, even if, truth to tell,
they weren’t all that good. But no matter how uneven, even bad the past may have been, at least, there were no surprises, no unknowns.
Yet, once in the wilderness, the Israelites couldn’t go back, only forward into a test of faith. They were angry at Moses and God: “If
only we had died by the hand of the Lord in Egypt!” they cried. In other words, why didn’t God, our creator, just let us die then and there rather
than bring us out here to suffer? Why wasn’t God being God and sustaining us?
We know we’re in the wilderness when all that helps us make sense of life, all that upon which we rely is found wanting, empty, useless.
In such moments, we can hold fast to it, shake it, juggle it, desperately trying to make it work. Or we can accept the possibility that we had
grown comfortable, too comfortable with our own beliefs about the way things are or should be. But of course we all do it. Our philosophy
or theology, our worldview that we’ve spent a lifetime to date developing isn’t the sort of thing we easily discard, even when confronted by a
counter reality. Yet, to the extent that we are willing to let our truth be tested and to let it go, there in the pain of that essential
relinquishment we may behold a new thing.
The Israelites – in their wilderness trek, their confidence tested – found their faith in God renewed in the light of a discovery seen through
the prism of a paradox. Bread to eat, to sustain life came not from earth, but the sky. Even more, showers from heaven that normally water the
grain of the earth became the food itself: “God said to Moses, ‘I will rain bread from heaven.’” God bypassed human processes – sowing, reaping,
grinding, baking – to feed the people. And in that revelation, they discovered or rediscovered their Lord, the giver of bread, the one who made
them whole.
Whenever there is a wilderness before us, whatever it may be, will we enter? Will we risk leaving our present so, in the future, to find ourselves longing for our past? Risk stepping on shaky ground, having what we believe be challenged, facing a test of faith? Risk opening our fear clenched eyes to behold the possibility of a new truth?
I think about all of this as I reflect on this morning’s parable. Jesus tells a story, clearly not in a time of an economic meltdown, of an
insanely generous landowner who pays everyone the same regardless of the length of the labor,[3] therefore, violating
a primary business assumption that the size of the wage is directly related to the amount of the work.
In that, this is a wilderness story – challenging our notions of fairness, compelling us almost reflexively to cling defensively to our way of
seeing things, calling us to behold something new. Remember, this is Jesus talking. This story isn’t about theories of market economy or
principles of mercantilism, and much less about human ideas of common justice. This is a story about the God whose ways are not our ways. A
God whose justice is unconditional love. A love whose only limit is its capacity, which is boundless. A love that can’t be earned, for it
is not a wage, but rather, a gift, the giving of which is never based on any measure of deserving. A love, the power of which each of us,
created in God’s image, already possess. A love, in our possession of it, were we to employ, everything – our lives, our relationships,
the world – would be transformed.
When I think about caring for my mother or think about those who are sick or poor and when I am in the wilderness, when I am most forlorn and
angry, I often hear myself saying, “But she, they, I don’t deserve this! Life is so unfair!” And then, sometimes – not always – I discover or
rediscover that little in life has to do with deserving, but a lot – perhaps all – of life has to do with love.
[1] The Hebrew scripture appointed for the day is Exodus 16.2-15.
[2] A play on the words of the song, Come, ye disconsolate, which was sung during the morning’s liturgies.
[3] The gospel passage appointed for the day is Matthew 20.1-16.
