TWENTIETH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

Isaiah 25:1-9

Psalm 23

Philippians 4:1-9

Matthew 22:1-14

Prayer of the Day: Beloved God, from you come all things that are good. Lead us by the inspiration of your Spirit to know those things that are right, and by your merciful guidance, help us to do them, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord.

“Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”  Philippians 4:8.

Truth, honor, justice, purity and delight in these things are in short supply-or so it seems if your focus is on news media of just about every kind. This week brings yet another story of a congress member indicted for corruption. Senator Bob Menendez joins a growing rogue gallery of leaders like Donald Trump, George Santos and Chris Collins-among others. In a world of “alternative facts,” a person who steadfastly lies with impunity in the face of clear and indisputable evidence is praised for “being strong.” Grown men and women in the House of Representatives are behaving like a nursery a school kid threatening to smash all the toys in the room unless he can have them all to himself. Sometimes it seems as though there is nothing left by which to orient our moral compass-if your focus is on what most media consider news.

But Saint Paul’s admonition suggests that perhaps our focus should be elsewhere. Our attention would better be directed away from what makes the news and toward people and events that witness to God’s inbreaking reign. Paul would have us pay attention to examples of truthful speech, honorable actions and lives lived with integrity. Such examples abound. Our spiritual ancestor, Saint Stephen, the first to die for his witness to Jesus, prayed for the very people who were killing him. Irena Sendler, a Polish Catholic nurse risked certain death at the hands of the Nazis when she smuggled approximately 2,500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto before its destruction. We look for inspiration to Kyla Mueller who dedicated her life to serving vulnerable populations in impoverished and war-torn areas of the world, and who ultimately was murdered by ISIS fighters while she was assisting a hospital caring for Syrian refugees from Aleppo. We can turn to the example of Archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero who spoke out against social injustice and violence amid the escalating conflict between the military government of San Salvador and left-wing insurgents that led ultimately to civil war. Romero was shot by an assassin in 1980 while celebrating mass.  

Often, you don’t have to look far for examples of honor, truth, justice and purity. They frequently occur quietly and without fanfare or media coverage. One day my Dad was walking past the home of a neighbor who lived a couple of blocks away. It was a week or so before Christmas, but our neighbor was already taking down his Christmas lights. “Why?” asked Dad. The neighbor pointed to the house next door.

“Mel says he doesn’t like them. Says they keep him awake. He even said he’d call the police on me if I didn’t take them down.”

“He can’t do that!” said Dad. “It’s your house and it’s your right to decorate it for Christmas.”

“True,” said our neighbor. “But I decided that, before doing anything else, I’d go over and talk to Mel. You know, try to figure out what his problem is. I mean, I never had any trouble with him before. So I did. Talked to him, I mean. And did you know he was in a Nazi concentration camp? Still has one of those tattoos on his arm. The rest of his family, they didn’t make it out. Can you imagine? Anyway, those lights shining in his room, for some reason they bring back awful memories. They make him shaky and scared. It’s so bad he can’t sleep. So I decided to take them down. No big deal. I mean what the heck. Christmas isn’t about making people miserable, is it?”

Of course, our neighbor could have insisted on keeping his lights up. If the police had been called, they would surely have sided with him against Mel. It was his right to celebrate his holiday. A lot of so called Christians would say that it was his duty to stand up for his right to express his faith, that he had an obligation to preserve our nation’s “Chistian heritage” against the efforts of unbelievers to “silence us.” We have come to the point where the language of “rights” is the only tongue in which we know how to speak. Every dispute we have comes down to a matter of whose rights control. That is why so many of our disputes never get resolved amicably. Rights can only define what we are entitled to do. They cannot instruct us in what we should do. Only love can do that. Sometimes love compels us to forego the exercise of our rights for the wellbeing of our neighbors. My neighbor, whose name I can no longer recall, was a model of a justice grounded in something greater than rights. It was a justice that was true, honorable and pure.

Whether enshrined in historical narratives or hidden under the routines of everyday living, truth, honor, justice and purity are all around us. It is important for us to recognize them, acknowledge them and reflect on them. What occupies our hearts and minds and imaginations forms the lens through which we view the world and the building blocks of our character. Saint Paul understood, as should we, that focusing on what we are against only transforms us into the mirror image of our foes. It is all well and good to be antiracist, antifacist, against patriarchy and homophobia. But Paul would remind us that we cannot be defined merely by all that we are against. He would challenge us to contemplate the reign of God and long for the mind of Christ to be formed in us that we might learn to live under it. Focusing on what is true, beautiful and good supplies the Holy Spirit with the tools required to form in us the mind of Christ.

Here is a poem about beauty, joy and purity thriving in an unlikely place.

Roses in the Subway

The ground beneath us rumbles

As the crowded cars roll by.

The old bag lady mumbles.

A cranky baby cries.

The weeping of a saxophone

Cuts through the stagnant air.

A million soulless drones head home

Their faces worn with care.

None stops to drop a dime

Into the frail musicians case.

Everyone is pressed for time

And loath to break the pace.

This cavern deep beneath the ground,

Which knows no night or day,

Is where the wretched folk are found

Who have no place to stay.

Yet in these very bowls of hell

She hums a merry tune.

The fragrance of her wares dispel

The stench with scents of June.

Her smiles chase the blues away,

Her laughter mocks the gloom.

She sells roses in the subway,

Places flowers on the tomb.

Source: Anonymous

SEVENTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

Jonah 3:10-4:11

Psalm 145:1-8

Philippians 1:21-30

Matthew 20:1-16

Prayer of the Day: Almighty and eternal God, you show perpetual lovingkindness to us your servants. Because we cannot rely on our own abilities, grant us your merciful judgment, and train us to embody the generosity of your Son, Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord.

As I write these lines, the United Auto Workers union is commencing an unprecedented strike against automakers General Motors, Ford and Stellantis. This is one of many labor disputes leading to strikes throughout the country including those threatened or in progress against UPS, Hollywood producers, Hormel and Kaiser Permanente. The growing shortage of workers in nearly all sectors resulting from numerous demographic shifts has strengthened unions and the workers they represent, giving them an upper hand they have not experienced in decades. The tables appear to have turned. I see evidence of that in the “Help Wanted” signs hanging in the windows of businesses from my own little town of twenty-seven thousand to the large metropolitan centers like Boston. Gone are the days when employers sneered at their employees seeking a living wage and minimal benefits with the words, “Be glad you have a job!” “You can be replaced,” and “You’re a dime a dozen.” Workers and their labor, due largely to their current shortage, are finally gaining recognition for their true value that has been lacking for a very long time.

Such was not the case for the workers in Jesus’ parable found in Sunday’s gospel. Clearly, there was a labor surplus such that day workers filled the market place hoping to be hired early for a full day’s wage. Still, they were desperate enough to work wherever, for whoever and for as long as they had the opportunity for whatever they might get paid. They were in no position to strike. This is as it should be according to the American religion of capitalism. Value is measured strictly in monetary terms. The market determines the value of everything from apples to human beings. If you are too sick, too weak, too old or too crippled to do a day’s work in the vineyard, well, the market has spoken. You lack sufficient value to be kept alive. Doing so would not be cost effective-and that, after all, is what capitalism is all about. The moral perversity of all this is made painfully clear in a terse but poignant paragraph from John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath:

“There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And the children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from the orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates-died of malnutrition-because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.”

The story Jesus tells follows what must have been a well understood and predictable pattern. The owner of the vineyard hires what must have been the best, strongest and most promising workers in the early hours of the day. Later, he comes back to hire others who are promised only that they will be paid “whatever is right.” That, of course, will be determined by the owner of the vineyard. Jesus’ audience likely uttered a collective groan at this point. Clearly, the owner is taking advantage of the workers’ desperation. He knows they need to work and that with each passing hour their anxiety is growing. He knows he can get their labor on the cheap. The last group of workers to be approached is asked, perhaps with a note of sarcasm and condescension, “why do you stand idle all day?” The only answer they can give is the same answer every unemployed person gives when asked why they are not at work. “No one has hired us.” These, too, are sent into the vineyard with the same seemingly vacuous promise.

But then, Jesus’ parable takes a remarkable turn. The owner of the vineyard not only pays first those who worked last and least. He pays them a full day’s wage. He breaks the cardinal rule of capitalism by paying his employees more than their labor is worth. Maybe he is just a poor businessman. Or perhaps he understands that the workers are more than the sum of their capacity for increasing profit. Perhaps the owner of the vineyard understands what we Americans, brainwashed as we are by the religion of capitalism, fail to comprehend. That a living wage is not a privilege. It is a human entitlement. Simply by being human one is entitled to eat, to be sheltered, to receive medical care, to be treated with dignity and respect. The United States Constitution may not say that. Jesus, however, makes clear in the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew’s gospel that the nations are to be judged, not by how economically efficient they have been, but by how well or poorly they treated the most vulnerable among them. At the court of final judgment, appeals to constitutional law will not avail. A higher law controls.

Understand that I am not advocating “socialism” over “capitalism” or “command economies” over “market economies.” Truth is, I distrust anything that has an “ist” or an “ism” at the end of it. I am not opposed to “markets” or “business” or “free enterprise” per se. What I do oppose, as does Jesus, Moses and the Hebrew prophets, is raising the “Market” to the level of a deity that can be trusted to produce a just society; business designed to produce profit at the expense of the public good, the environment and the most vulnerable among us; and unrestrained greed and accumulation of the earth’s good gifts in the hands of a few. What God demands of us is an economy that works for everyone. While I am glad to see the growing strength of the labor movement in our nation, I am grieved that workers must strike for what their employers ought to recognize is their just entitlement. I am grieved that employers’ hearts have grown so cold and hard that hitting them in the pocket book is the only way they can be moved. I am grieved that so many of us still harbor such mean spirited resentment and contempt for those unable earn a living wage who must depend upon our compassion and generosity to make ends meet.

The only material good for which Jesus ever taught his disciples to pray was for “this day’s bread.” That, along with clothing and shelter, should make us content. I Timothy 6:8. Our problem is that we crave a great deal more. We imagine that our efforts and accomplishments entitle us to more. We have bought into the American cultural lie that one has a right to accumulate as much as one is able to amass without breaking the law. Therefore, in a world where God’s will is done, where all are entitled to their daily bread-and no more, those of us who have become accustomed to “more” cry foul. We imagine that our “rights” are being violated by the loss of what we were never intended to have in the first place and the resulting equitable treatment of our neighbors. When it becomes clear that God would have all people enjoy daily bread, regardless their earning potential, degree of work or accomplishment, the daily bread God has freely given us looks paltry and poor in our hands. Rather than giving thanks, we grumble at the seeming unfairness of it all. The coming of God’s kingdom looks more like a threat to us than the wonderful promise and gift that it is.

Here is a poem that playfully explores the great wealth to be had in having everything while owning nothing.

Net Worth

I own the golden sunlight
breaking over the pines.
I own my neighbor’s pansies
growing neatly in spaced lines.
I own the orange harvest moon
that hangs above the hills.
I own the sparrows that come to feed
at the seed troughs on my sills.
I own the pathway through the woods
that leads down to the river.
I own the song the waters sing,
the pebbles they deliver
as on their journey to the sea
they run their endless course.
They haven’t time for worry,
nor the patience for remorse.
I own the nighttime sky
and every star on its dark vale.
I own the mighty ocean
where the ocean liners sail.
Someday I will be through
with checkbooks, funds and property.
I’m sure that once I’m broke
the world will have no use for me.
Creditors will seize my goods,
the tax man take my home.
And once they have these trifles,
then they’ll leave me on my own.
With all distractions gone
and not one penny in my plate,
at last I’ll have the leisure
to enjoy my vast estate!

Source: Anonymous

FIFTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

Ezekiel 33:7-11

Psalm 119:33-40

Romans 13:8-14

Matthew 18:15-20

Prayer of the Day: O Lord God, enliven and preserve your church with your perpetual mercy. Without your help, we mortals will fail; remove far from us everything that is harmful, and lead us toward all that gives life and salvation, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord.

“Teach me, O Lord, the way of your statutes,
   and I will observe it to the end.
Give me understanding, that I may keep your law
   and observe it with my whole heart.
Lead me in the path of your commandments,
   for I delight in it.” Psalm 119:33-35.

Those who have the patience to read this 176 verse Psalm from beginning to end know that it is an extended prayer for deeper understanding of Torah. The entire Psalm revolves constantly around the Torah experienced by the psalmist as reliable guide, faithful companion, relentless judge, purifying fire and source of endless joy. It weaves together the life experiences of friendship and betrayal, triumph and tragedy, grief and joy, fear and faith, the challenges of youth and the approach of old age. The psalm paints a magnificent portrait of life woven into and shaped by Torah and the psalmist’s desire for an ever deeper understanding of it.  

Much is lost in translation through the rendering of “Torah” as “law” in our English bibles. Torah is far more than a dry set of laws, statutes and ordinances. For Israel, Torah is the shape of the covenant; “the mode of God’s life giving presence.” Brueggemann, Walter, The Message of the Psalms, Augsburg Old Testament Studies (c. 1984 by Augsburg Publishing House), p. 40. It is “a launching pad form which to mount an ongoing conversation with God through daily experience.” Ibid. p. 41. Still, “[i]t is Yahweh who is the portion of the speaker (v. 57), not the Torah nor one’s keeping of the Torah.” Ibid. The psalm affirms Torah as the medium through which prayer is made possible. As a rabbi friend once remarked, “Torah is the rope in an extended tug-of-war. We continue to pull on it because we firmly believe there is One on the other end with whom we are in constant tension.”

The psalmist’s understanding of spiritual maturation through engagement with Torah runs counter to our American modernist aversion to rules, regulations and “formal ritual” as antithetical to true spirituality. “I’m spiritual, not religious,” a visitor to my church once told me-and she was hardy the first or only one I have met expressing that sentiment. Of course, that statement makes no rational sense on its face. If you are talking about spirit or spirituality, that is inescapably religions. So, too, what is religion about if not spirituality? I understand, of course, that many people seeking spiritual engagement have not been able to find it in the church. I also agree that faith and spiritual growth involve more than mere ascent to creedal and doctrinal formulae, rote recitation of liturgies and going through the actions of worship. You cannot swim in an Olympic sized rectangular depression if it doesn’t hold any water. On the other hand, 660,430 gallons of water dumped randomly on the ground is not likely to materialize as a working pool. If you are going to swim, you need both water and something to hold it, give it form, depth and direction.

This is where religious practices and disciplines come in. They are not, to be sure, ends in themselves. Think of them rather as well worn paths which generations have followed faithfully. They are maps revealing the lay of the land and giving us a sense of where we are. They are the means by which the “highways to Zion” are engraved upon our hearts through the recitation of liturgies, the singing of hymns, the reading of scriptures and faithful preaching. These practices are not static, remaining unchaged throughout history. Like a snowball rolling downhill, they accumulate richer and deeper meanings as they are contemplated and re-interpreted by each succeeding generation. Religious practices unite us with past generations and current members of our faith communities. They give us a language with which we can share, discuss, question and explore this ultimately inexplicable mystery we worship. When we engage in religious practices with our whole selves, they form in us the “mind of Christ” so that the “body of Christ” can become visible to the world.

The God we worship is as complex as the world God created. A lifetime is not long enough even to scratch the surface of that mystery we call God. For this reason, I am not particularly concerned that my congregation’s worship might not be intelligible to someone unfamiliar with our faith or that they might not be able “to relate to it” after attending one of our Sunday Eucharists. I would not expect such a person to understand us after little more than an hour. Our scriptures, creeds and liturgy are deep, layered and complex. Like everything else worth learning, becoming fluent in the language of faith takes time, patience and commitment. I don’t apologize for that. Physicists do not apologize for the complexity of the universe. Why should we apologize for the complexity of the One who made it? Language teachers do not apologize to their students because conjugating verbs and declining nouns is difficult and boring. Why should we apologize because understanding the language of faith requires the learning of narrative, poetry, song, symbol and ritual? If Christianity were something I could pick up after sitting through a single worship service, I wouldn’t be interested in it. Any faith that can be distilled on a bumper sticker isn’t worth giving up a peaceful Sunday morning with a good bagel, cup of coffee and the New York Times.

Here is a poem by Howard Nemerov about learning, the creative tension between study and experience that might reflect in some measure our psalmists dance with the Torah.

Learning the Trees
 
Before you can learn the trees, you have to learn
The language of the trees. That’s done indoors,
Out of a book, which now you think of it
Is one of the transformations of a tree.

The words themselves are a delight to learn,
You might be in a foreign land of terms
Like samara, capsule, drupe, legume and pome,
Where bark is papery, plated, warty or smooth.

But best of all are the words that shape the leaves—
Orbicular, cordate, cleft and reniform—
And their venation—palmate and parallel—
And tips—acute, truncate, auriculate.

Sufficiently provided, you may now
Go forth to the forests and the shady streets
To see how the chaos of experience
Answers to catalogue and category.

Confusedly. The leaves of a single tree
May differ among themselves more than they do
From other species, so you have to find,
All blandly says the book, “an average leaf.”

Example, the catalpa in the book
Sprays out its leaves in whorls of three
Around the stem; the one in front of you
But rarely does, or somewhat, or almost;

Maybe it’s not catalpa? Dreadful doubt.
It may be weeks before you see an elm
Fanlike in form, a spruce that pyramids,
A sweetgum spiring up in steeple shape.

Still, pedetemtim as Lucretius says,
Little by little, you do start to learn;
And learn as well, maybe, what language does
And how it does it, cutting across the world

Not always at the joints, competing with
Experience while cooperating with
Experience, and keeping an obstinate
Intransigence, uncanny, of its own.

Think finally about the secret will
Pretending obedience to Nature, but
Invidiously distinguishing everywhere,
Dividing up the world to conquer it,

And think also how funny knowledge is:
You may succeed in learning many trees
And calling off their names as you go by,
But their comprehensive silence stays the same.

Source:  The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov (c. 1977 by Howard Nemerov, pub. by The University of Chicago Press). Howard Nemerov (1920-1991) was an American poet. He was twice Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, from 1963 to 1964 and again from 1988 to 1990. He also won the National Book Award for Poetry, Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and Bollingen Prize. Nemerov was raised in New York City where he attended the Society for Ethical Culture’s Fieldston School. He later commenced studies at Harvard University where he earned his BA. During World War II he served as a pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force as well as the United State Air Force. He was honorably discharged with the rank of Lieutenant and thereafter returned to New York to resume his writing career. Nemerov began teaching, first at Hamilton College and subsequently at Bennington College and Brandeis University. He ended his teaching career at Washington University in St. Louis, where he was elevated to Edward Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor of English and Distinguished Poet in Residence from 1969 until his death in 1991. Nemerov’s poems demonstrated a consistent emphasis on thought, the process of thinking and on ideas themselves. Nonetheless, his work always displayed the full range of human emotion and experience. You can find out more about Howard Nemerov and sample more of his poetry at the Poetry Foundation website.