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St Paul's
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Our parish is a community that seeks God and the fullness of creation by finding ourselves in relation to others. Our giving to the common, to the other, our sharing of ourselves is our commitment to this endeavour. |
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Proper 20 (25) 21 September 2008 Vanderbilt Divinity Library Lectionary Proper 20A/Ordinary 25A/Pentecost +19 Textweek Exodus 16:2-15; Psalm 105:1-6, 37-45; Philippians 1:21-30; Matthew 20:1-16 In the name of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen The Exodus reading tells of the people complaining in the wildness and the reading from Matthew tells of the people grumbling against the landowner. Doesn’t seem to matter where they are, there is always complaining. Is that the human condition, is that just how we are? It doesn’t seem to matter where we are or who we are there is complaining. So let’s look to the Bible, because as a generalisation the Bible does provide a reflection of and for the human condition. But its value is that it provides that reflection in a divine context; it asks us to pause and look at the human condition, to look at ourselves in relation to the Divine. So if we bring the Exodus reading into the present day, what we find is the whole congregation of the Anglican Church complaining in the wilderness: but who or what do we complain about, and where is our wilderness. It was a sobering exercise for me to list out all that we complain against. Politicians, the media, institutions, authorities, political parties, service providers, the government, the USA, fundamentalists, developers, interest rates, banks, industrialists, mining companies…… it rolls off! There’s also another whole range of non-specific complaints, generally against differences – social background, race, gender, religion, sexuality, nationality….. Closer to home we have all of those complaints that are against those who we know and love – our family and our communities: we complain about those who want change and those who want no change; those who hold different views and different priorities… And that doesn’t even include football codes - the list almost becomes endless. It’s a sobering exercise and yet at the same time, I wonder as we list them out whether we get some perspective and some reference points to where we are. If we actually sit and be still and start to list the things you complain against, and picture placing them around you, they start to describe a landscape that you inhabit. As we acknowledge our complaints, we plot a map or create a shape that speaks of where we are. We get a sense of our wilderness and in turn, that can help us to identify our hunger. There’s an important distinction that’s made in verse 7. As the story starts out with the complaints looking as if they’re being made to Moses and Aaron, we find in verse 7, ‘the LORD has heard your complaining against the LORD’. It’s an enlightening shift and it gives us another opportunity for reflection. The landscape in the wilderness that our list of complaints describes might look quite different if we make a list of the complaints that we have against God. What are the complaints that I have against God? And maybe that’s the list that will enable us to identify our true hunger. What is it that is not being fed? What is the food that I need to satisfy my hunger? Most of us at some point or another, many of us every day, some of us many times a day will have prayed ‘Give us this day our daily bread. What is it that we’re asking for in that prayer? If we look around us for the food that the divine provides, are we going to be like the Israelites and be unable to see it or even when it stands out, when the mist is lifted and the divine food covers the earth and is there before our eyes, will we just go, ‘Oh, what is it?’ What is the bread that the Lord has given us to eat? What is the bread that will satisfy our hunger and be food for the journey that takes us from the wilderness, that takes us into the wholeness of the Promised Land? I think these very questions and the establishment of the reference points that enable us to see our inner landscape are the very same issues that Paul wrestled with and having wrestled with that he seeks to assist others with through letters to the churches. Paul comments in verse 30, ‘since you are having the same struggle that you saw I had and now hear that I still have….’ and then he goes on. Paul’s struggle is our struggle. It’s actually quite good to get that, because we can then take Paul off that saintly pedestal and sit him next to us in the pew. It’s good to know that we actually walk the path of saints; we walk the journey that Paul walked. In verse 27 he gives us a rule of thumb, another clue to life’s path: ‘Only, live your life in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ.’ Paul often seems to come up with a phrase like that. In Ephesians he asks us to live a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called - the worthiness of our life, its worth. The gospel gives us an unusual spin on notions of worthiness. It’s a great story. When you first read the story, it’s so easy to picture these workers lining up, being given work and then at the end of the day, they come to receive their pay, and when you first read it through, don’t you think there’s a rightness about their grumbling? It feels like I can understand what they’re saying - one worked all day and gets given the money, another works for an hour and gets given the same. It’s easy to imagine. Imagine how that narrative would unfold if we then introduced the trade union movement – be a completely different story, there would be blood at the end of it. You could actually put identities and faces in it, you could put Kevin Reynolds and Len Buckridge in there and just watch them go: you’d need another book to contain the outcome. So there is a rightness in the complaining. It speaks of the daily notions we have of equality and fairness. Most of us would say, ‘I’m fair or I seek to be fair and I would like to think that I try to treat others equally’, but it doesn’t take a lot of reflecting to see that that’s not true; it’s a cultural image that we seek to fit in with; there is very little truth in it, and the evidence of the world around us would say that fairness and equality are not characteristics or have not been outcomes of the way we live. But what if we follow the gospel thread and what if we leave the call to equality and embrace rather the reflection on generosity? For in the gospel narrative today, that’s the divine activity; the divine activity is not about creating or being seen to be equal, the divine activity is centred and based on generosity. Maybe there is a divine inequality that's born out of abundance and that’s born out of abundant generosity, a divine inequality that whereby the last will be first. The Lord be with you. Peter Humphris
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