The Wisdom of Vulnerability: Sermon for the 15th Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 18B)

A group of rabbis gathered one day after a long day of studying the Book of Bereshit, which we call the Book of Genesis. The question that was before them was this one: Why had God waited until the sixth day of creation to create human beings?

Rabbi Rivkah said, “God wanted to make sure the universe was well ordered and operating smoothly, so that we could make use of creation, made for our benefit.” Several of her companions nodded in agreement. Certainly the marvels of the universe had been made for the use of human beings, who had been given dominion over all things on Earth.

Rabbi Chaim said, “Perhaps, perhaps. But God started with animals so that God could learn from God’s earlier attempts. God waited to make humans so that God wouldn’t make the mistakes God made with the various animals and their weaknesses.” Other rabbis nodded in agreement with him. Surely human beings were the crowning achievement of creation, with the ability to talk, and to think, unlike stupid animals!

Rabbi Susan, known for her humility a well as her wisdom, arrived a few moments into the meeting, apologizing profusely. She was running late because she had been engaged in prayers before the sun set. She asked what they were debating about so intently. “We are discussing why God waited until the sixth day to create human beings,” Rabbi Akiva told her. They repeated the two premises put forward by Rabbi Rivkah and Rabbi Chaim.

Rabbi Susan thought for a moment. A dog whined outside in the street, and a mosquito whined past the ear of one of the other rabbis, and he swatted at it forcefully. “I wonder if the answer is more simple. I think it was so that when we were filled with pride, we would remember that even a lowly dog and the annoying mosquito were awarded priority in the grand scheme of the Divine Creator.” And all the other rabbis took what she said, and pondered it for the rest of their lives.

Our readings today focus on two qualities: humility, and wisdom. We begin with a brief collection of verses from the Book of Proverbs. The backstory behind this collection of sayings was that they were written by King Solomon himself. As you know, Solomon was crowned with power and honor: he had hundreds of wives and concubines; he lived in a magnificent palace, and he was the son of the great King David.

Yet, if you remember three weeks ago, when he ascended to the throne, Solomon prayed to God for help in governing God’s people. In a dream God appeared to Solomon and told Solomon to ask God for what he wanted God to grant to him. Solomon could have asked for untold wealth, or military power, or an exceptionally long life and reign. Instead, the new king humbly compared himself to a little child, not up to the task of leading so great a people. Solomon therefore asked for wisdom, so that he could be a good king to protect the people and lead them. God was pleased not just by the thoughtfulness of the answer, but by its humility. Solomon didn’t ask for things for himself, but for a gift that would benefit his people. So God granted Solomon wisdom, and his sage judgment was famous far and wide. Solomon’s humility, his openness to admitting his lack of perception and knowledge, was the beginning of his wisdom.

The proverbs before us are likewise focused on wisdom and humility themselves. Specifically, they depict the wisdom of being generous, just, and hospitable in one’s relationships with others. The wisdom of being open to each other. In the social system of the early Mediterranean world, social division and status was very important—much like our society today. Just like now, there were many ways to close oneself off from those considered lowly or unclean. All these centuries later, we too have the same many ways to separate ourselves from each other—by race, class, ethnicity, ability or disability, wealth and poverty. Those who are considered to be “less-than,” like the poor or immigrants, become invisible—if they are lucky. If they are not lucky enough to be invisible they become objects of scorn, exploitation, and scapegoating.

You’ve seen and heard this done over and over by people around you—some even claiming to be leaders. Businesses that pay starvation wages complain that they can’t find workers, and so smear all of them as lazy rather than consider that the wages they pay do not allow for a person to make even a modest living and pay all of their bills. Lately there’s even been the claim that the $300 a week jobless benefits are actually rewards for laziness. There are public school districts ending breakfast programs because they claim it will make children dependent on handouts for the rest of their lives. The reasons stated for this decision runs like this I guess: Better for seven-year-olds to suffer from the pain and distraction of hunger right now than to expect that the wealthiest country in the world owes them anything. 

I’ve always appreciated the humility and wisdom of leaders who actually try to walk a mile in the shoes of those at the bottom of the income scale—like when members of Congress try to eat for a week only on the benefits given through food stamps, or try to find an apartment for 25% of the income of a minimum wage job. I hope that, on this Labor Day weekend, as we all enjoy our time off, we remember a prayer often said in the Compline service, and humbly pray that we honor the labor of workers, no matter how humble, who make our common lives together possible.

Thus we hear the author reminding us that whether we are rich or poor, we are all children of God, created in God’s image. We are told not to exploit the poor or take advantage of them, or for those who sit at the gate—which is where people would plead for justice if they had been treated unfairly or unjustly. Applied to our own time, one in which so many people are behaving without regard for anything, but loudly proclaim their own grievances, their own rights to do as they please, regardless of the harm to others, our proverbs remind us to remain humble as the foundation of our relationships with each other and as a reflection of our relationship with God.

Likewise our psalm urges us to another set of characteristics that are the basis of wisdom and generosity: trust and honesty. Once again, gifts that seem to be in short supply these days. Our psalm reminds us that the ability to trust and be trustworthy is a sign of strength, not weakness. The letter of James urges us to treat every person with honor—not based on what they can do for us, but based on the love we are called to bear for each and every person, which includes taking care of those who have needs as much as we are able—and we often have more ability to do this than we might like to admit.

Look, it’s easy for us to forget sometimes that we have the power to make the lives of those around us better or worse, often by the simplest recognition that here, around me are other people all beloved of God and beloved of their families and friends. All precious.

Even Jesus has to be reminded of this sometimes. In our gospel reading today, we have two stories of healing. One is of a man unable to hear—Jesus commands his hearing and his speech to be “opened.” There is Jesus, the miracle worker using his divine power to help someone on the margins of society toward full healing and restoration. But if you look carefully, the story before it informs this command to be open. In the story before this healing, Jesus himself had to be goaded into being open to another. We just for a second get a glimpse of Jesus as a human being—prone to all the weariness and challenges we all face.

Jesus has entered Gentile territory to the north hoping for a little R and R, his own version of Labor Day. Maybe if he goes up into Tyre and Sidon, no one will recognize him, and he can move about anonymously for a while until his batteries recharge. Yet no sooner does he get there, and settles into a house to cocoon for a bit, than some woman approaches him and bows down at his feet, cringing like a dog. And so, frustrated and exhausted, he looks on this woman from a wealthy region coming to dare ask him, an impoverished Jew, for healing, and he calls her just that. He calls her a dog, and declares her outside his mission to God’s chosen people. The bounty of his mercy is reserved for his own people, who have hard enough lives as it is. For a moment, his tiredness gets the best of him, and he claims that there’s not enough to go around. There’s not enough of Jesus to go around. And here this woman is, a cross between a mosquito and a dog, annoying Jesus with her request and her refusal to be shaken off.

Here it is the woman who displays humility and wisdom. Even as he tries to belittle her, to cast her as an outsider and unworthy, still she presses on. Maybe because she is not asking out of need for herself, but need for her beloved daughter. Still bowed down at his feet, she responds immediately: Yes, I may be a dog-- but even dogs get to eat the scraps that fall from the table. And that image of a table is a reminder of the abundance and mercy that Jesus has been proclaiming and enacting just so people won’t miss the point that God’s generosity and love for us is unlimited and life-giving. She reminds Jesus of the same thing our proverbs did: that we are called to be open, and generous with each other, rather than try to draw lines around who is worthy and who is not.

Even the wisest people lose sight of what is important from time to time—it’s part of being human. Jesus was fully human too—we are going to say that again in just a few moments in the creed. If Jesus can benefit from a reminder to be more open with others, there’s good news there for us all, as fallible and prone to pride as we can be. Through the woman’s humility, Jesus is reminded that God truly does mean that the table will be wide enough to hold everyone, and that all are not just worthy but are beloved—as beloved when they are in the wrong as when they are in the right. God’s table is open to all, to be accepted, valued, and cared for. And when people feels accepted and valued, they feel secure. And from that security, we can feel brave enough to treat each other with mercy and compassion. This is the purpose God displayed in sending Jesus to us, and in reminding Jesus and us of the wisdom that relationship is woven into the very fabric of our existence. Jesus is opened to that reminder by the woman, and that gift of understanding, of connection, of caring for each other in generosity, grace, and compassion.

And that is the beginning of wisdom.




Preached at the 10:30 am Eucharist, held online and in person, at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville.


Readings:
Proverbs 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23
Psalm 125
James 2:1-10, [11-13], 14-17
Mark 7:24-37

Worthless as a Slave; Faithful as a Disciple: Sermon for Proper 28A

I had a relative who had lost everything in a bank failure in the Great Depression. He emerged with a lifelong hatred of banks. Instead, he placed his money all around his house, and out in the barn,  in the most unlikely of places. This served him well, since he lived most of his life in a time before credit cards, in a small town where people knew his quirks—especially the bank president, who stayed out of his way. 

And then he passed away. Thankfully, his relatives who were left to clean out his house KNEW the old man’s system—although they did not know his actual hidey-holes. Therefore, every single thing that was going to be given away or sold was examined before it was given up.

And they found cash in the CRAZIEST of places. In an envelope taped to the back of drawers. In between the pages of his favorite books—even the Bible. In his rolled up old tattered socks. In his pillowcases. In plastic bags frozen into blocks of ice in the stand alone freezer in the garage, among all the filets of catfish. The tale was that he has even buried hordes of coins in jars in his backyard. The problem was, his backyard was over two acres, and he hadn’t left a map. Needless to say, the mailman delivered several metal detectors to his kin ordered from the Sears catalogue in the weeks after his death.

Burying your money is generally frowned upon as an investment strategy—but to Uncle’s mind, it also meant that he knew exactly where his money was, and “wasn’t no low-down SOB banker gonna take it and lose it lending it to some damn fool,” as he put it.

Today, we are confronted with a puzzling parable that also involves the strategy of burying one’s treasure rather than investing it—and that is how it is usually read. But I want to suggest a different angle today. We're going to engage in an act of imagination-- which is of course what all the gospel writers were doing in order to adapt the teaching of Jesus to the needs of their own communities.

I want us to try to hear this parable as Jesus’s followers did—to try to understand this parable through the lens of the economic systems that dominated 1st century Palestine. It was a system in which extremely wealthy absentee landowners sucked every bit of profit they could out of the poor that were on the land, especially by lending them tiny sums of money at huge rates of interest --between 60 and 400% annually --until eventually the poor lost their land and the landowner, who already was fabulously wealthy beyond the imagination of 99% of the people around him, would swoop in and take it in payment of the debt. Historically this is similar to the system of sharecropping that developed in especially the American South in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries. More recently, it is also similar to the system of payday loans which bedevil the poor, even to this day. (1)

Jesus is telling this parable to those who were listed as blessed in the Beatitudes—those who were driven to the brink by people like the landowner. What if we view this parable from their standpoint? The characters in the parable would then be interpreted this way: the wealthy landowner is exactly that—an incredibly wealthy landowner who makes his money off the backs of the poor by charging them sky high interest. He could do this because there were no banks; and the system was set up for the lender to take their debtors’ possessions- their land, usually-- when they can't pay. The three servants to which he gives his talents –a single talent was equivalent to 20 years’ wages --are his middlemen or agents, much like the tax collectors who collaborated with the Roman Empire.

As we saw in the Parable of the Unjust Steward (Luke 16:1-13), the servant acting as agent was allowed to try to extract as much or as little money to settle the debt as he wanted --it was all a part of managing the master's affairs, business as usual, the art of the deal. In that parable, what we saw was that, knowing he was about to be fired, in order to both get some of the money back and to curry favor with the people who were going to be his neighbors once he lost his job, the unjust steward cut the amount of money owed. He was then praised for his boldness—and his shrewdness. What was more common in the time of Jesus, however, was that the agent for the wealthy lender would claim that the debtor owed even more than they actually did, and would pocket the difference for himself.

Here's how the system worked: the agents of the wealthy elite or of the Empire were allowed to make a little something on the side for themselves if they could get away with it. That's one of the reasons why tax collectors were so hated as we see in scripture--they were allowed to engage in practices which we would consider to be corrupt with our nice neat understandings of bureaucracy and tendency to see graft as a crime. They would claim a sum larger than what was owed—and keep the difference for themselves, kind of like collection agencies do when they buy up debt.

So say that a tenant, in desperation, had borrowed two days wages-- 2 denarii. That's a huge sum of money to a poor person, especially -- but worse is the interest rates that he would be charged. In no time at all this desperately poor tenant farmer owes the landlord 8 denarii-- in other words 8 days’ wages. But it was common for the agent to take advantage of the fact that the poor often had no way of knowing how to calculate interest, and then claim that the debtor actually owed 10 denarii. The agent would then keep two of the denarii for his own pocket. And often, the debtor would pay it off only by borrowing from others.

This system was accepted even by the wealthy elite --who didn't mind what we would consider to be corruption, as long as the money kept rolling in for themselves.

Tax collectors would do the same thing, as much as they could get away with. And always, always it was the poor who ended up having every little bit of value sucked out of their lives-- staying enslaved by debt that they could never escape, being paid wage is so pitiful they could barely keep body and soul together, and often failed. They were basically enslaved to their creditors for their entire lives. Their lives were nasty, brutish, and short, as Thomas Hobbes once remarked. And, sure, the sums of money being extracted from each individual family was small -- but given how vast a number of people were poor, great sums of wealth were nonetheless being extracted based on economies of scale.

So let's turn back to our parable. It's at this point I want to ask you if you can to get out your Bibles and turn to Matthew 25.

Looking at this parable from the context of the economic system in Jesus’s time, what if Jesus is actually condemning the landowner and the first two servants? The landowner and the first two servants once again are extracting wealth from the backs of the poor, regardless of the consequences and devastation left in their wake. Those talents --huge sums of money already --double as the result of probably hundreds or even thousands of transactions with impoverished families. Those profits—a 100% return on investment!-- represent the destruction of thousands of families’ lives—the loss of their land, and their utter fall from bare subsistence to the uncertain future of day labor that we have seen elsewhere in Jesus’s parables this year. (2)

The third servant now becomes a conscientious objector to this system of wealth extraction from the most vulnerable when he buries his talent in the ground. He refuses to participate in the oppression of people living on the very edge of maintaining their lives. And yet he makes sure he doesn't lose the Master’s money, knowing that he is a cruel and heartless man. Of course he is a cruel and heartless man—he’s a loan shark, and they’re not known for being cuddly and forgiving. No profit in that in his line of work.

Therefore, the Master comes to the third servant expecting to see the immense profit he saw with the first two --but instead sees only that his money has been sitting there in a hole in the ground, not getting any bigger, sure, but not getting any smaller. Technically, he hasn't lost anything --but too much is never enough for people like this. Therefore he throws the third servant out into the darkness, where he can live among the very poor from whom he up until this point has extracted the lifeblood of their living. He can share their fate. The third servant is thrown out where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth --in the midst of the most desperate poor --but at least he has begun to regain his integrity and has denounced the corrupt merry-go-round of oppression that governed Jesus’s time. That third servant has refused to play—but has regained his rightful concern for the effect his actions have on others, rather than merely on his own profit.

Wait a minute, you might say. Up until this point the phrase “outer darkness where there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth” has been used five times in Matthew to be understood as those who are cast out of God's Kingdom. What justification do we have to turn that understanding upside down now?

This is where getting out your Bible might be helpful. What is the very next story that comes immediately adjacent to this difficult, confusing one? Let's read on. Right on the heels of the words “wailing and gnashing of teeth” comes the section entitled “The Judgment of the Nations,” and it's a familiar passage-- but one we do not often set up against our parable for today. When we do that the results are interesting. Please follow along with me in your Bibles:

‘When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left. 

Then the king will say to those at his right hand, “Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.” Then the righteous will answer him, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?” And the king will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family,* you did it to me.” 

Then he will say to those at his left hand, “You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.” Then they also will answer, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?” Then he will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.” 

Wow. What if the third servant is a representative of the values of the sheep in the passage that immediately follows our parable today? What if we understand him as refusing to participate in the death-dealing economy-- one that exists as much today and it did then, and all over the world-- that seeks to keep the poor as helpless as possible in order to keep them as captive, cheap labor for the enrichment of those who already have more than they know what to do with?

Instead of viewing the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the criminal, the homeless as being a sign of the system working as it should, producing a very few winners and a very large multitude of losers in order to get people to cooperate because they have no choice, the third servant instead throws a wrench into the works. He doesn't lose his master anything. But he also doesn't enrich him, either, by destroying the lives of hundreds or even thousands of people.

What are we to make of this as being instructive for ourselves, living in our time in context? Perhaps we're being asked to re-examine our acceptance of systems that create so much suffering and poverty in the world. That sounds like a very “Jesus-y” thing to do, especially in light of the judgment that follows this parable for accepting things the way they are while believing that your own personal salvation should be enough to get you across the finish line with Jesus.

Living in our time and place, we have to be careful about the interpretation of the last two verses in our parable especially. The ones that saw that those who have will get more and those that have nothing will never get anything. In my childhood, I have heard these verses twisted into a support for the oppression of the poor, claiming that somehow they have done something to deserve their poverty and that therefore being poor—and being rich—is merely a judgment of God. Nothing could fly more in the face of Jesus’s life and work and choice of companions than that.

It is important to remember that Jesus is not only talking money or political power. He’s talking about living in a way that is free from using fear and might as a weapon against the weak. He’s talking about using the tools of the world for the glory and growth of God’s kingdom here on earth for everybody. He is also talking about the slaves’ stewardship of something they did not earn, something they were given without merit. Some have used these verses in a straightforward materialistic way, condoning the idea that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer because that is what they each deserve. Instead, to put it simply: We need to pay attention to what we do with what we’ve got, and use what we’ve got to do the greatest good we can.

The word “economics” is funny. It originates in the Greek word oikonomos, which means “the management of the home.” The word was NEVER meant to be divorced from the values of love, compassion, and generosity that Christ urges us to live by. When it comes to economics as we understand it today, though, we are being led to recover that original meaning—and to see our household as including everyone around us—that is, after all, what an economy is all about nowadays.

Jesus is calling us as Christians to get our houses in order. To take care of our family’s needs, absolutely, and save for the future if we can—and hopefully to do that by investing in things that benefit us all—and also putting our blessings to work for a greater cause than mere material comfort.

I wonder if what Jesus is suggesting here is that our society’s tendency to view wealth as an insulator, rather than as a great and grave responsibility, as a plaything to be admired rather than as a tool to benefit everyone within the economy, although perhaps by carrying degrees, is part of our modern obstacle to completely turning our hearts over to the kingdom values Jesus keep throwing in front of us, again and again and challenging us to live by.

What we treasure can either help us or hinder us. It can help us if our treasures and our talents are put to the use of creating security and hope for all. Our treasures can hinder us if they become not just a means to a living, but a thing we worship in place of God. What we do with our money and what we invested in can have great benefit or great harm. This is an acknowledged fact behind the drive over the last few decades toward ethical investing--of investing in companies for instance that work on solutions to pollution, or clean energy, or cures for orphan diseases that normally would not get attention. of divesting from industries that support war or create products that cause cancer or other illnesses.

The question at the heart of this parable is “What is my responsibility as a faithful disciple living faithfully for Jesus? What is demanded of me as a Christian?” This parable implies that it is not as simple as knocking on doors and pressing pamphlets into often unwelcoming hands. The answer lies in HOW we live in every aspect of our lives and making that our greatest testimony. The answer lies in taking the gifts we have been given, and using them not to assuage our own fears, but to support the mission of God in reconciling all the world to Godself. And the first gift is the gift and challenge of living by love and putting what we have to work for love.

Amen.

Preached at the 10:30 online worship at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, broadcast on FaceBook Live, in time of rising COVID19 cases.

Readings:

Judges 4:1-7
Psalm 123 
1 Thessalonians 5:1-11
Matthew 25:14-30

Sources:

1) I am indebted to Debie Thomas for her essay on our gospel today, "The Good Kind of Worthless," at Journey with Jesus, and for reminding me of the work of William Herzog, whom I studied in seminary.

2) See William Herzog, “The Vulnerability of the Whistleblower: The Parable of the Talents,” chapter 9 in Parables as Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed, pp. 187-208.

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

Prayer 2181

Holy One,
we bow the knee of our hearts,
and give you thanks for your mercy and grace,
the foundation of our lives.

Lord, we confess to you our sins and offenses,
that we may repent
and honor the dignity of all
and live in the Way of Love.

May we examine the source of our comforts
and the extent that they come
at the expense and exploitation of others.

May we rebuke and resist the powers of empire
that use poverty and want
as a tool to divide and conquer.

May we proclaim Christ's gospel of healing
and embody the wisdom of compassion
in all our ways.

Let us joyfully proclaim God's abundant mercy
in our words and deeds,
and testify to the glories of your love, O Savior.

Manifest your presence to all who cry to you,
and rest your protecting hand upon all for whom we pray.

Amen.