Competition or Communion: A Sermon for Labor Day, Proper 17 C (Twelfth Sunday After Pentecost)

What is our motivation for accepting generosity, or for ourselves being generous or hospitable? Jesus warns against socializing with or providing hospitality to only those from whom we can expect to get something in return. It can be hard to put aside considerations of self-interest. 

This reminded me of one of my favorite TV shows back in the 90s—Friends. Friends was a show about a group of friends in the mid-twenties orginally trying to make it in New York, struggling to get by, to find love. A couple of years ago when my baby sister Becky had surgery, she asked if I would come and take care of her, for ten days until she could move around on her own, and of course I said I would—and during those ten days we watched almost every single episode of Friends ever made. 

One of our favorites was called “The One Where Phoebe Hates PBS.” One of the characters, Joey, is a dim witted hunk struggling to make it as an actor. In his desperation for exposure, Joey’s agent tells him he has gotten a gig cohosting a PBS telethon—only to find out that really, he is just one of the volunteers answering the phone. 

Joey takes great pride in the fact that he is doing a good deed—and getting something for himself. His sweet, innocent friend Phoebe is shocked. The central part of the story is revolves around Joey telling Phoebe, the hippy flower child, that there is no such thing as a selfless good deed. Phoebe has just finished helping her brother and his wife by being a surrogate for their triplets, and so she disagrees. Did you feel good helping your brother? asks Joey, and Phoebe says yes. “See? That makes you selfish. There is no such thing as a selfless good deed,” Joey smirks. “I’m gonna find a selfless good deed,” Phoebe declares—and the contest is on. 

Phoebe keeps trying to do a truly selfless good deed—but always ends up feeling good about it—or it ends up not really being a good deed. She rakes her elderly neighbor’s leaves—but he catches her and giver her cider and cookies, which makes her happy. She allows a bee to sting her so that “he will look tough in front of his bee friends,” she says—but Joey points out that the bee probably died afterward. 

Finally, she decides to call into the telethon and pledge $200—which is selfless because Phoebe is a struggling masseuse, and also because she hates PBS, even though she acknowledges it helps other people. She assures Joey that she hates doing it, because she had plans for that money, so voila—a selfless good deed. 

When Joey turns in the pledge paperwork, Phoebe’s pledge ends up being the one that breaks the previous year’s pledge total. Joey gets featured on TV—exactly what he had hoped for. Phoebe begins to cheer that Joey is being featured. Oh yay! It was HER pledge that got Joey featured! She exclaims, “That makes me so... OH NO!” and the episode ends (1). 

Unlike the show’s writers, I think it’s great if we feel good about doing something selfless. But the thing that Jesus was urging his followers to do in sharing their table with the most outcast definitely falls within this question of motive and of giving to others. As we see repeatedly, who you ate and drank with in Jesus’s time wasn’t just a casual question, but one of order and respect for the entire community. 

That’s why some of Jesus’s critics were irate that he ate with tax collectors and women whose honor had been considered to be besmirched. Jesus wasn’t excluding the people that “decent people” excluded. Worse, Jesus seemed to keep throwing his lack of discrimination in the faces of the powers that be. His repeated urging of radical welcome and honor of all, when viewed from the outside, besmirched his own standing in the community. 

Meals at that time were a sign of one’s social status and honor as well as a time of celebration. And of course, our Christian worship as Anglicans is centered around a sacrificial meal of praise and thanksgiving that draws us into “communion” with each other and with God. But it does seem like an awful lot of time in the gospels is spent talking about eating and drinking. 

 But think about this. It’s not only that there were hundreds of rules in the Torah about what good Jews should eat or drink or touch. The very first story told about humans as individuals in the Bible talks about food, as theologian Alexander Schmemann points out. At the very end of chapter 1 in Genesis, God pronounces that God has given humankind every herb and fruit of trees to us as are good for our food. Schmemann puts it this way: 

Man must eat in order to live; he must take the world into his body and transform it into himself, into flesh and blood. He is indeed that which he eats, and the whole world is presented as one all-embracing banquet table for man. And this image of the banquet remains, throughout the whole Bible, the central image of life. "(2)

In other words, humanity is created hungry, and hunger has two dimensions. There is physical hunger, and despite the proliferation of packaged food and our distance from the sources of its production, nonetheless in most cases our food is a reminder of our ties to, dependence upon, and union with all of creation, of this beautiful, fragile Earth. Second, as we remember every weekend, there is the spiritual hunger that has brought us here, around this altar, despite our differences, to sit down at this table together and put aside all privileges of wealth or rank, all of us in communion rather than competition with each other. 

 And we all know that Schmemann’s quoting of Genesis 1:29 also left something out. In a few more verses, God put an asterisk on that offering of “every” herb and plant. And the second God did that, that became the thing we hungered for most of all. 

 Are we any different today? I don’t think so. Even non-religious people know what the phrase “forbidden fruit” means. When humans had the arrogance, or hubris, to be persuaded that they should be equal to God as depicted in that story, that’s when everything went sideways—and all the rest of the world bears the scars of that giving in to that temptation. Our reading from Jeremiah warns us about this too: rejecting God the living water so that we could dig our own cracked cisterns gets us into catastrophe every time.

Our greatest struggle as humans is to both live into the amazing gift of being made in the image of God, and at the same time to avoid letting that go to our heads and think that makes us able to do whatever we want. To restrain ourselves from arrogance and division by claiming the best place rather than simply rejoicing at everyone being invited to the banquet. Because we have been programmed to believe that there will never be enough for everyone, we then try to make sure we snatch and grab everything we can get before someone else does. But that’s not at all what Jesus advocates. 

Jesus points out that you can either have communion, or you can have competition. But not both. You can either serve yourself, or serve others. This meal in Jesus’s parable is a vehicle for Jesus to explain about how we should not have distinctions among each other, and be humble within the community. 

I think it’s marvelous that we are thinking about this on this particular weekend, which is, after all, Labor Day weekend. This is the one day of all the days in the year when we are called to be grateful for all that labor has done to create the world in which we live. 

I am a working class kid, the daughter of a union aircraft mechanic, the graddaughter of oilfield workers and sharecroppers, the great-granddaughter of farmers and homesteaders and Native Americans. I come from a long line of people who worked hard, every day, back-breaking labor that helped build this country and make it prosper. I still remember the scars on my grandmother's fingers that she bore to the end of her life, scars from picking cotton in the hot sun with her two twin babies strapped to her body.

It is vitally important that we honor, rather than look down on, the working people who now more than ever are just struggling to get by. And talking about meals brings us back to that idea for several reasons. After all, food does not appear out of a vacuum. It takes people, laborers, farmers to plant and tend and grow and harvest that food in its raw form. It takes other workers to process that food, to grind the wheat and butcher the hogs, and press and ferment the grapes and can the vegetables. 

What better time to hear Jesus talks about what honoring true community means, regardless of what we do for a living? What better time to be called to remember to give thanks for the benefits the labor movement have given to all of us, whether we work with our hands or not—things like the 8 hour day and the 5 day workweek and sick leave and workmen’s compensation and vacation and especially Mondays off from work. 

This egalitarian idea was a radical one, then and now. In Jesus’s time, normally good Jews did not share table fellowship with the poor and the disabled, but Jesus urges his followers to buck the conventions of the time in order to act with righteousness. This kind of meal together is truly communal, and reflects the “heavenly banquet” we anticipate in the kingdom of God, or in heaven, where we are welcomed to sit alongside the angels and the saints and the sinners. 

Jesus reminds us that it is better to humbly accept a lowly position than get above ourselves and be rebuked for putting on airs. Arrogance is destructive to community and breeds resentment. Arrogance is also corrosive to our understanding of ourselves as being interdependent upon each other. Another way of putting it is this: “The first must be last.” This paradoxical command, repeated throughout the gospels, reminds us how far our priorities are from those of the kingdom of God—then or now, when being first is so ingrained in our heads. 

The highly hierarchical world of Palestine in the first century CE is not how the kingdom of God is supposed to be—and a supposedly wealthy country isn’t very wealthy if one in five of its children go to bed poorly nourished. 

In our time, we are not so much concerned with where someone sits at a table. We Americans believe we are too egalitarian for such nonsense. A place at the table, though, that’s different. 

It wasn’t that long ago that black folk and white folk could not sit down to eat even in the same establishment, much less at the same table in a huge swath of the United States. We live in an economy today, however, in which just having a place at the table is nearly impossible for too many. It’s actually not very accurate to refer to a single economy in this country. 

When the wealthiest parts of Saint Louis County and Missouri still have a minimum of 22% of its children qualifying for free and reduced lunch, it is clear that this strong economy is not strong for everyone (3). 

When we hear stories of children who do not qualify for free and reduced lunch, who are nonetheless shamed for having an overdue lunch bill by having their hot meal taken from 
them in some schools, thrown into the trash right in front of them and everyone else in line, and then given a cold lunch of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich until their parents erase their family’s debt(4), we know the benefits of this economy are not reaching everyone. 

When a small town of 50,000 like Enid, Oklahoma has an outstanding student lunch debt of $60,000—which inspires the local Episcopal church to offer $500 to at least try to make a dent in that obligation for some of the families in their community, we know we are not sharing our tables with everyone, especially those who are struggling (5). When one in five children in this state, and even out in the suburbs, are hungry without the means to assuage that hunger, a condition which now goes by the label “food insecure,” we know there is need a there that demands our attention and our will to solve it. 

When those who are lucky enough to qualify for SNAP benefits receive $126 per month to be used for 90 meals during that same month, it’s easy to see that that averages out to about $1.40 per meal. The last time I got a meal for $1.40, it was in junior high, and gas was a dollar a gallon and I couldn’t even drive. 

Think about that a little longer, and you will see why growing food in our parish garden and collecting dry goods every month for Circle of Concern is vital. And we have to realize that part of the problem is that the overall economy is not doing a good enough job of balancing the needs of workers to make a living wage and the needs of other people to make a profit—both of which are necessary, but neither of which can be an either/or proposition. 

Any country flourishes only when everyone has access to wages that can pay their bills—more money then gets circulated through more hands. Trust me, as I scrimped and saved and worked starting when I was eight and fought for a music scholarship to be the first person in my family to attend college, I can assure you that 100% of the money working class people earn goes right back into the economy as spending on necessities. 

Yet at the same time, I was helped by the fact that my father, in 1982, earned the same salary in actual dollars that mechanics at his company do today—and that is without accounting for inflation. Tuition at my alma mater has meanwhile increased from $4000 to $41000 dollars a year. I would no longer be able to afford to eat at that table as a working-class kid. That kind of debt would be too terrifying to contemplate. 

When Jesus urges us to invite everyone to the table, regardless of whether we get anything out of it, instead of seeing this as a burden, what if we saw it as a continuation of Jesus’s offering to us of freedom that we heard last week? What if we heard that call to eat and celebrate with everyone, especially those who are often overlooked or scorned, as offering US the freedom from running on the hamster wheel until we are ready to collapse? 

As we take this day off this week, may we be grateful for the blessing of getting off that wheel once and a while—of taking seriously the equality we all are called to share at meals or at leisure. May we honor the workers who have made our lives possible. And may we all sit down together at one table of brotherhood. May we seek to live in communion, not competition. 

Amen.


Preached at the 505 on August 31 and at 8:00 and 10:30 am on September 1, 2019, at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO.

Readings:
Jeremiah 2:4-13
Psalm 81:1, 10-16
Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16
Luke 14:1, 7-14

References:
1) "A Selfless Good Deed," highlights from Season 5, Episode 4 of Friends, "The One Were Phoebe Hates PBS," originally shown on October 15, 1998, found on YouTube.

2) Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy, p. 10.
3) Anne Cafer, Darren Chapman, Kathlee Freeman, and Sandy Rakoon, Missouri Hunger Atlas 2016, from the Interdisciplinary Center for Food Security, University of Missouri, 2016. Please read the entire report-- it is a devastating indictment of hunger in Missouri. You can find a .pdf of the report here: http://foodsecurity.missouri.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/20160708_New-Missouri-Hunger-Atlas-2016-text-final_3_full-doc-w-county-profiles.pdf
4) Vanessa Romo, "After Backlash, Rhode Island School District Rolls Back Lunch Shaming Policy," May 10, 2019, at NPR.org, https://www.npr.org/2019/05/10/722259141/after-backlash-rhode-island-school-district-rolls-back-lunch-shaming-policy
5) Mitchell Willets, "Local Church Pays off Emerson Middle School's Student Lunch Debt," at the Enid News & Eagle, August 29, 2019,  located at https://www.enidnews.com/oklahoma/news/local-church-pays-off-emerson-middle-school-s-student-lunch/article_5ae5d66c-75d2-5e5d-861f-7531ad9fe94e.html?fbclid=IwAR0Fbly1jjRcWpo_hIy2FDRXBX0nwSV_rWfjytg--LyNH_I9V8-xqL15lV4