Here we are again! at the start of a new fall season.
There is a sense of energy in the air
in anticipation about what this year will hold for us:
parents rejoicing in the start of the school year,
kids excited about what they will learn at school
but more probably they are excited about seeing old friends,
starting class another year older
as they rush eagerly towards more independence
and getting to do more big kid things than last year.
Today we bless their backpacks,
symbols of education for our young people,
and I hope each of us older ones
can imagine our own symbolic book bags
also presented before the altar to be blest,
that each of us in our individual spiritual practice and devotion
might continue to grow in love and serve and knowledge of the Lord.
And this morning we also have the great, good pleasure of a baptism,
presenting us with the sacramental image of new beginnings.
We have Lucy and Tony Vedrich’s little grandson, Elijah,
to demonstrate this for us
and to remind us, as we pledge ourselves to do all in our power
to support Elijah in his life in Christ,
that we have also said these words in promise
for each of our other children in the congregation.
And so, as we have commended them
to Christian education and spiritual formation,
let us lead by example, and practice what we preach,
that is, let us attend to the scripture lessons presented to us today
and how they get us started on our new fall schedule.
First the collect for today addresses
our immediate anxiety about current circumstances.
Attention is called to
the things that are passing away and those that shall endure –
the temporal and the eternal.
When we set our attention on the things that are passing away,
we are seeing things from a limited perspective
and when attention is draw to that which endures
that limited perspective is expanded until we are seeing things
from God’s perspective.
Another way of saying this is: “It’s bigger than me.”
In part the reason why we come here may be just that thing –
to be moved out of our limited perspective
and to catch the vision of the eternal,
to have our awareness expanded
and be brought into the Presence of God.
So let’s see how the readings can expand our awareness.
I believe there is a good connection between the story from Exodus
and the parable Jesus told about the owner of the vineyard and the laborers.
In Exodus the situation is this:
The Israelites had just escaped crushing slavery in Egypt.
They were on their way
off into the unknown
with a hope for a promised land flowing with milk and honey.
But where they were now was in the middle of a desert,
a huge expanse of inhospitable geography that dwarfed their numbers,
a threatening environment with no respite.
How did the Children of Israel react? They complained.
That word, complained, is used 7 times in this passage.
They weren’t thankful for being saved from bondage as slaves.
They weren’t even faithfully down on their knees
asking the God who had saved them once
to help them now in this time of need.
They were complaining.
But it didn’t matter.
They were going to get fed.
That was the plan,
for they were a chosen people,
chosen to become a people who would be a light to the nations,
an example of God’s redemptive grace.
an example to show what God could do.
The test was how they would respond to the current situation.
Their reactions showed their current spiritual condition,
that is, a limited perspective concerned with things passing away.
But God’s grace would intervene.
Then we have the Parable of the owner of the vineyard:
As usual Jesus tells a story with a twist on the expected,
and this time he presents the Kingdom of Heaven
as a landowner who employs an economic policy
that is entirely contrary to common sense
and the economic system we know and live in.
Jesus messes with the economic values
and moral sensibility of human culture.
It appears he has the owner take advantage of the hard working laborers and then reward those who contributed little.
There was no recognition of the great disparity in labor.
When we hear this parable we may say with the workers hired first,
“It’s not fair!”
In the parable, who were those hired at the beginning of the day?
the best workers:
those known to be able to work the hardest,
to bring in the most bushels of grapes per hour,
those who would give an honest day’s work
for an honest day’s wage.
But…
those hired at the end of the day were likely to be those who were known for
taking long coffee breaks
eating as many grapes as went into the baskets
those who were slow, harvested less per hour
and were late showing up for work in the morning
To pay the workers hired at 5 minutes before quitting time
the same as those hired at 8:00 AM
was taken as an insult to the quality and quantity of work of those hired first.
Our world is hard wired to the pragmatic way of looking at things that says
it’s all about working to get paid what you’ve earned.
The least the owner of the vineyard should have done
if he was going to pay those hired last the same full day’s wage
would have been to give those hired first merit raises!
It’s not fair!
But this parable is not about the workers, but about grace.
This parable is very radical,
breaking cultural and social expectations and mores
not only in Jesus’ time
but ours here just as much.
Jesus does not say that the Kingdom of Heaven is like the workers
but like the owner of the vineyard.
The Kingdom of God has different values:
it is inclusive.
The last get the same as the first.
We think those who work more should get more.
But Jesus says everyone needs the daily wage, that is, their daily bread.
He says, give everybody a full day’s wage to meet their needs…
Everyone has the same basic needs.
The landowner included them for that reason,
not in return for their labor,
but out of compassion and generosity
and from his own apparently limitless abundance.
To cry, “No fair!” is to speak out of the limited perspective of things temporal.
It’s like God providing the manna and the quails
to all those complaining Israelites.
The compassion and generosity is not conditioned by our limited perspective.
It’s the things eternal – compassion and generosity.
May we each be able to recognize the gift of daily bread,
that which we think we have earned that provides for us,
that supplies our literal, physical needs,
AND that which provides us with our very life breath
day by day and hour by hour and minute by minute,
that which sustains us body and spirit.
May we each be able to recognize
how we have been called by a compassionate Savior
and baptized into the Kingdom of God, into the very Body of Christ.
“Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things,
but to love things heavenly;
and even now, while we are placed among things that are passing away,
to hold fast to those that shall endure…”
Let this be the way to start the fall:
our consideration of why we are drawn here,
our consideration of our own economic system and world view
in contrast with the absurd abundance of Kingdom of Heaven economics.
Let’s not get hung up on the temporal, limited perspective,
but hold fast to the unlimited expansiveness of eternal grace,
compassionate, loving beyond what we ever could earn, absurdly abundant.
