October 4, 2020: May God’s words be spoken, may God’s words be heard. Amen.
The last two Sundays we were together, we considered the story from Exodus of the Jewish people, enslaved in Egypt, brought out of their oppression by God through Moses, and entering into their long desert journey. And today, God sends Moses to them with some rules – what we commonly call the Ten Commandments…that is if we can even remember what they are.
There was a national survey a few years back that revealed that apparently 80% of folks in the US knew the Big Mac had two all-beef patties, while just over 50 percent knew “Thou shalt not kill” was a commandment. Only 14 percent knew all 10 of these rules from on high, but far more knew the rest of a Big Mac’s ingredients: special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, on a sesame seed bun! Which is a lesson to God for next time that setting something to music sung by somebody in a commercial rather than on stone brought down by an old guy off the mountain is not only easier to carry, but likely will be better remembered. Yet is memorizing them even the point?
Now most of you know I was raised Baptist, and when I was young, you could earn little badges in Sunday School for attendance, and for memorizing things like the Ten Commandments or the books of the bible…[start off]. So, whenever I hear the passage from Exodus today (or it’s sister version in the book of Deuteronomy) I am reminded of the day when I was in our elementary school playground at recess. I was in about the 4th grade. Debbie (I will not say her last name, even though I remember that too), was near me with other girls playing jump rope, when for some reason or other, she put her hands to her face and said “Oh my God!”
I just about jumped out of my sneakers. I thought for SURE something was gonna happen right then and there to Debby. I had never heard anyone use God’s name like that, and I knew my big Ten.
I waited, and…nothing happened!
I couldn’t believe it. Not one thing happened – no lightning bolt or big voice from the sky condemning her – nothing, nada, zip. This moment stuck with me to this day. It needed to. It needed to because I had it all wrong. Worse, I had God all wrong (no fault of my Baptist upbringing to be sure).
Now, in fairness, there is nothing at all wrong with teaching the fundamentals of our faith to children. In fact, it is a life giving formational part of growing up in a faith community, and I will be forever grateful for it. The thing is though, we do this less because children need it, though that whole “honor your mom & dad” stuff is good – it’s the biblical equivalent of the “Elf on the Shelf” for parents. Still, we teach these things because adults need it – after all, not many children are going to be coveting their neighbor’s spouse or donkey, much less committing adultery (despite one little kid’s first confession that he had committed adultery…because he had been mean to adults).
But more than that, these Big Ten are not about donkey’s, or saying “OMG,” or driving to the mall on a Sunday. The truth is – these rules for living we hear about in the passage from Exodus (and plastered on all sorts of stuff) aren’t about the particulars themselves, though important, but about what they are trying to tell us about who we are, who God is., and what it means to be a part of God’s larger community.
To really understand what is going on, we need to go back a bit in the Exodus story, and why the commandments were issued in the first place.
The Jewish people had been oppressed, and God led them out of slavery into freedom on a journey to a promised land that would be their new home. Along the way, God realized that with freedom comes responsibility. A people who are free must understand that their freedom is not solely a right to do as one pleases, but a responsibility to others lest freedom becomes tyranny. Or, to put it more practically, as the old adage says, “your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.” So, God created this set of responsibilities for all to follow, which teach the people then, and us now, how to live in relationship with one another and with God.
These rules for a free people are about one thing – love. It’s is all about love, and nothing more or nothing less. It’s really easy to see if you look carefully. The ten commandments can be separated into two groups: directions for loving God, and directions for loving one another. The first 4 tell us how to love God: have no other gods, no idols, don’t abuse the name of God, and honor the sabbath – though that last one could easily be argued as a way to also love oneself. The rest are about loving each other: honor parents, don’t murder, commit adultery, steal or lie, and don’t envy what others have. These are the rules by which a free community can thrive. It isn’t necessarily about the specifics, though not stealing or murdering are good things to avoid. It is about modeling the love of God, and returning that love too.
That is what is important – that is what we need to have instilled in our hearts more than inscribed in stone, because it isn’t about obeying them blindly, and without concern for our actions, or inactions as a result. Remember that Jesus broke one of these very commandments! He worked on the sabbath. He did that to heal a person in need. He also broke other rules found in our sacred scriptures – including eating with defiled hands (which, as I have noted before, is a good rule…wash your hands even if you are the Christ. He did these things because he knew that what God hoped for was never about the specifics of the rules, well, not entirely, but about the love that was the very cornerstone of them. Love for any part of God’s creation is the very way we show our love to God! Love is how we become the good stewards of God’s creation we are born to be. Love is the only way for us to live in community with one another.
And here’s the thing, when we do not love, when we fail to love God and neighbor, we become the proverbial tenant farmers of Jesus’ parable from the gospel we just heard.
So before we go any further, a bit of a recap on the gospel from this morning. It is the first of three parables we will hear in the coming weeks in which Jesus confronts the leaders of the faithful of his own community, (Jesus being a good Jew after all). He is, in his usual not-so-subtle way, reminding them that they have not been doing what they were called to do for God. The story is basically this, but I will paraphrase, you know – like I do:
A winery owner in Napa had a beautiful vineyard, but wanted to head to France for a bit, so she left some folks there to care for the vines. At the harvest, she sent some employees to those left in charge to collect the wine, but they abused and killed them because they wanted to keep the harvest for themselves. The owner sent others, they also were abused and killed. Finally, the owner sent her own daughter, who was home from a break in her studies for her degree in viticulture (the study of wine making), to collect the proceeds of the harvest, and they killed her too. Needless to say, the owner was NOT happy. Neither were the temple leaders listening to Jesus that day either…because they knew that the people in the story – the folks left in charge who were killing everybody, including the Domino’s delivery guy – were really them. Jesus was accusing them. But of what?
Breaking the law of God by their murderous acts? Yes, but not in the way we might think. And here’s the thing…this story, this very parable of Jesus, it is happening right now, right in our own communities!
We are the tenants – every one of us – and we are called to be the stewards of the gifts God has entrusted to our care. We fail God in this trust when we forget that we are but stewards here – that all that we have is God’s, not ours. We fail God and one another when we begin to live in fear, rather than in love.
That is when we truly begin to break the heart of the commandments, because when we fail in our tasks as caretakers of one another, and of all of creation, we kill that very creation spiritually and emotionally and even sometimes physically. And what we do to our neighbors, we do to God’s own son – to Jesus – as those in the parable did.
We kill Jesus when in a pandemic we refuse to wear a mask and keep a safe distance, spreading our germs to others who may not survive, or who may give it to the more vulnerable, or who may end up with debilitating diseases.
We kill Jesus when we talk about “all lives matter” without realizing that it can never be true that we value all lives until we can say that “black lives matter,” and until we can say that, and until we can denounce and work to defeat horrific hate groups like white supremacists – more black people will die – physically, emotionally, and spiritually from our indifference and hate.
We kill Jesus when we abuse LGBTQ+ people, when we marginalize women, when we abuse people of other faiths, when we oppress the immigrant, when we silence the imprisoned, sick, & addicted, when we neglect the poor & the homeless.
We kill Jesus when we abuse creation by our greed, our indifference, and our neglect, while the creatures of God’s own making suffer.
And when we kill Jesus in this way – physically, spiritually, or emotionally – we are the very tenant farmers in Jesus’ parable – as we show that we care only for what we want, and forget who we are, and what we are called to do in this world. When we do this, we break the heart of the commandments…and God’s heart too.
God commanded us to love one another – everyone. We honor and love God in return, not by toting bibles and quoting commandments, but by living them in our thoughts, our words, and our deeds – loving the least, the last, the lonely, and the lost – for they are Christ himself.
The gospel, the commandments, the entirety of our sacred texts are about one thing – God’s love for us, and our responsibility to model that love with one another, including ourselves – to be good stewards of all of God’s creation – the earth and all that dwells on it.
This is how we return the harvest of God’s love.
This is how we honor our God.
God’s hope for us is that we might live into who we were called to be – good stewards of Her creation – and offered to us a roadmap for how to do that – the commandments and the prophets – teaching us to love God and neighbor. When we failed, God sent Jesus, His son, who again told us – I give you a new commandment, love one another as I have loved you, but we killed him too. Yet God never stops trying to help us be who we could and should be in this world – stewards of God’s creation, and those efforts abound all around us, even now.
Today, we celebrate the founding of our church on October 4th 1858. October 4th is also the feast of St. Francis (though it will be transferred as it landed on a Sunday this year) and as I did yesterday, I will bless the animals that are our companions in our lives following this service. And we are in the midst of our annual Stewardship Season, in which we ask everyone to support the mission & ministry of this parish. All of these are perfectly timed for the messages today – because all of them are about loving God and loving neighbor – and that, THAT, is what stewardship is all about!
We were entrusted by prior generations with the stewardship of this parish – this vineyard we call Christ Church – not because the stones and wood are important, but because the mission & ministry that pours out from the people who worship here is how we love God and love our neighbor. We love God by offering our gifts of the harvest in our pledge, and in our estate plans, so that future generations will be able to know a place where all are truly welcome – just as they are – and that they too may share far and wide the gospel of God’s all inclusive love and grace.
God entrusted us with the vineyard of all of creation – from the birds of the air to the fish of the sea, from the mountains to the valleys. We bless our animals as a reminder that we are not better than they, but are God’s stewards, called to care for them and their habitat, and honor God by our nurturing relationship with them.
Usually in our Stewardship Season, I would give to you a gift blessed at the altar to remind you of the way in which God is at work in your lives, that it may help you to consider how you might respond to that love. Today, as we cannot be together, I cannot give you something directly, but I ask you to find this gift yourself. This week, go into the world and discover a way each day to love God with your care of this large vineyard we call Earth. What might that look like for you?
Think about that…where might you be called to be an agent of God’s love right here, right now? Where might God be calling forth the harvest of your gifts?
By these acts, you will continue to be the good steward of God’s vineyard – tending to what has been entrusted to you, as you love your neighbor, as you love God.
By these acts, you love and honor God’s commandments.
By these acts, the true secret of the commandments and the gospel of Jesus will be revealed…
…that love itself is the summation of all that God hopes for us, all that God commanded of us, all that God entrusted to us, because God is love unbound.
And that, my friends, is worth a whole bunch of “OMGs!!!!” because that, THAT, is the greatest gift of all – the knowledge that you are deeply and unconditionally loved – just as you are, and that, made in God’s image, you have an amazing capacity to share that love in acts great and small, forever changing the world, and bringing us all one step closer to the very dream of God.
Oh what a harvest for God that will one day be!
Amen.
For the audio from the 10:30am service, click below, or subscribe to our iTunes Sermon Podcast by clicking here:
The Rev. Diana L. Wilcox
Christ Church in Bloomfield & Glen Ridge
October 4, 2020
Eighteenth Sunday After Pentecost – In A Time Of Separation
1st Reading – Exodus 20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20
Psalm 19
2nd Reading – Philippians 3:4b-14
Gospel – Matthew 21:33-46
