5PENTECOST 1514

It was a little hard to prepare this sermon for ‘Back-to-Church Sunday’ without any idea of whether we would have a dozen guests, a half-dozen people who haven’t been here in a while and did come back this week, or nobody at all but us regulars. But it was nice to see that, no matter what the outcome of the event would be, the scriptures we have to work with today could hardly be improved on for their ‘fit’ to this theme. The story of God’s giving his people bread in the wilderness is one of the foundations of our concentration on hospitality, welcoming people in to share in the bounty that the Lord has provided us in this place. (The fact that this happens as a result of Israel’s complaining about their being liberated from Egypt just adds that little touch of reality so important in any discussions about the church. We wouldn’t want any visitors to think that this outfit is a bunch of plaster saints, after all…..) The invitation is, in the words of our hymn, ‘All who hunger, gather gladly’. Whatever you’re hungering for in the realm of relationship to God or other people, God offers freely, abundantly, without your having to work for it. It’s so important, you can see, in the story about the manna, that it be understood as a gift, not something the people had to plant or harvest – it just appeared in their hour of need, and all they had to do was gather it up.

Basic procedures of the Christian community are also implied in the manna story. God orders them strictly to take only enough of the bread for their needs. They aren’t to skimp – there’s plenty for all – but they also aren't supposed to take more than they need. If they do, the stuff rots and can’t be used by anybody. This is what we call a ‘teaching moment’ for Israel and for us: in the instructions about the manna we hear the germ of the whole Law, which means to insure that people in the holy community all do have enough – nobody goes hungry; nobody hoards things up. Imagine if we applied that principle to our own nation’s economic activities! (This is what we ought to be asking our candidates in this election year: what do they plan to do to see that nobody in their consti- tuency has too little and nobody has too much? But I do wonder if they could even understand the question….)

So we set the stage for the rest of Israel’s history with this wonderful story of how ‘the Lord provides’. That phrase is something of a mantra for us here at Holy Cross – we have seen it in action for so long that we’re getting used to it now. Believe it or not, the story Jesus tells in today’s Gospel lesson is another variation on the same theme. In it we see once more the same God Matthew has been telling us about for all this time – a God who longs for sinners to turn back from their wickedness, so he can forgive them, a God who welcomes even the creeps and the savages into his great love. And this is the same God who isn't above teasing his followers when their ideas about who’s ‘in’ aren't as generous as his own. So Jesus tells us a little story with a maddening plot and a punchline that doesn’t match the events, and it turns out, rather chillingly, to be about the evil eye.

It wouldn’t have had to be that kind of story, of course: it could have been the nice story that’s hidden inside this one, simply about a landlord’s generosity. It’s set in a vineyard at harvest-time, when all hands are needed, and the endemic unemployment of Jesus’s world lets up for a while, just as it does around here at this time of year. The landowner goes out to collect people to get the harvest in, and he’ll take anybody, just to get those grapes off those vines. He pays them a penny a day, because that’s what people like this get – just enough, as I've said so often before, to keep a family from starvation. It won’t give anyone enough, of course, but you won’t absolutely die on the bread you can get for a penny a day. They have no choice about what their wages will be – as always, the folks with the money already are the ones who decide what the folks without it will get for their work, or if they will get any work at all. (The last statistic I read about this in our time is that for every job available in our own economy, there are 3 people who need it.) It’s a grim picture. (I always think when I read this story how, when women are forced to sell their bodies for money, we call their trade obscene: but isn’t it equally obscene when men who also have nothing but their bodies to sell, do the same thing?)

In any case our land-owner gets his workers, and he could pay them off so that the story was about his generosity – simply by paying the first ones first and getting them out of there, and then giving the last ones just as much. The ‘injustice’ would be in giving the ones who didn’t work very long ‘too much’, a full day’s wage – just like the God we know, who is in the business of giving people what they need, not what they deserve. (The children of those last- hired workers need some bread for supper just as much as the children of those lucky enough to get a whole day’s work, after all.) But that’s not the story Jesus tells: the last-hired get paid first, the ones that worked the longest are practically invited to get mad about that – and the story’s focus is shifted from the lord’s generosity onto the anger of the long-term workers – the grumblers about God’s generosity just like Israel in the wilderness. The workers got what they contracted for – they have no right to be angry about that – but they think they have a right to be angry about others’ getting it too. ‘Is your eye evil because I am good?’ asks the landlord, and the short answer is ‘You bet!’ Natural, maybe; evil, for sure. Why is he telling us this?

Look at the story’s context: it’s the last minute for Jesus with his followers; a time as urgent as the harvest. He has been teaching them about how to be the church, how to be faithful to him after he is gone; and he meets contro- versy and opposition from the outside and the usual blind incomprehension from his pals. At this point he's preaching to the choir, trying desperately to convert the converted, to educate them about the costs of discipleship – one of which is going to have to be the disciples’ enduring sense of entitlement to the rewards of the Kingdom, without a corresponding sense of the sacrifices it demands. The topics are those important to the church: what must be endured, what must be given up in making the mercy of God available to the world. Often enough it’s the mercy that has to be endured, and our ideas of justice that have to be given up; that’s the challenge of these stories to our ‘natural’ ways of doing things.

The evil eye is the eye of envy – a kind of curse, a wishing of evil on someone who has something good because it seems unjust to us that they should have it. Are we envious? Here we sit, those of us who have been here forever, and those who are here for the first time, late-comers who haven’t borne the heat of the day or the burdens of church membership as long as the rest of us – just starting out at the last hour before the jig is up….. Envy of such people will attach itself not to their possessions or power or position, but of their chances here in the Kingdom – and maybe added to it will be the fear of what their presence among us might do to ‘the way we've always done it’. Does the thought that they get to come into this group with all the rights and privileges that we might imagine that we've earned make the rest of us a little uneasy? Is our eye evil because God is good?

Jesus has one word for the evil eye – pluck it out! – because it’s utterly corrosive to the fellowship of the Kingdom. We can’t pray ‘give us today our daily bread’ – the prayer of millions around the world waiting for someone to give them work so they too can get fed – and imagine we have some right to turn someone away from the supper of the Lamb around this altar. We can’t pray ‘your Kingdom come’, and try to import into this fellowship the standards and values of the kingdom of the world outside of it, in which the rules are made by and for those who already have too much, to allow them to hoard up even more. We can’t pray ‘your will be done’, and keep hanging onto the devices and desires of our will to be first, best, richest….

It’s all totally counter-cultural, counter to a culture that gives people neither what they need nor what they deserve, but simply whatever they can grab and hang on to. The very rich do it all the time – why should we be surprised to find the poor doing it when they think they can get away with it? We call it ‘looting’ when the poor do it, when there’s the kind of disruption to good order that we see as black people keep getting murdered by white guys with guns (which seemed to happen about once a day this week, according to Yahoo News) – but it goes on on a much larger scale every day, as our common heritage is sold out to the highest bidder, and those who have too much already continue to get more and more and more, while those who have little get less and less and less. Our culture, in this place we call church is, like our God, about giving people what they need. In this place the guests who have never been here before are as good as the seasoned veterans of 60 or 80 years; the smallest kid is as much a part of us as the oldest of the old-timers; the deathbed convert is as welcome as the lifetime-laborer. It’s a queer system, you have to admit, but what other kind could you expect from a God who finds the likes of us suitable material for sainthood, and chooses his friends from a bunch of grumblers who can hardly stand to share his mercy with anybody else? As we welcome our new fellow-workers today or any day, let us make sure that they know how glad we are to have them – and how glad we are to be here in this cockeyed vineyard at all, working like mad to get the harvest in.