Sermons

When I graduated from high school, my parents cooked a special meal for a family celebration. After dinner, they presented me with two gifts. The first was a set of luggage. The card that went with the luggage read, “Bon voyage! Have a wonderful adventure!” And the second gift was a signet ring with our family crest engraved on it. The card that went with the ring read: “And don’t forget who you are and where you come from!”

They were really wonderful gifts, just right for someone just stepping out into the world. But I was so ready to get out there on my own, living my own life, that at the time, I didn’t really appreciate what they had done for me with those gifts. That would come later.

Over the next several years, in ways that seemed pretty dramatic at the time (but which I now recognize fall squarely in the spectrum of plain old stupid human stuff), I did my best to lose track of who I was and where I’d come from. Probably a certain amount of that is just part of growing up. But even if it is, lost is still lost.

The amount of time Jesus took to tell us about things getting lost makes me wonder if ‘getting lost’ isn’t something he knows is going to happen to all of us and probably with some regularity: we have erred and strayed like lost sheep we admit in the traditional confession. It’s certainly a major theme in the Bible: us getting lost – one way or another, and God finding us – one way or another.

The backstory to the story of the giving of the Ten Commandments is God’s people forgetting who they were and where they come from. And not through bad choices or any particular moral failing.  Mostly because this world is glorious, yes, but also one we can get lost in.

You know the backstory, I bet. It’s a story we learn in Sunday school. On the way to God keeping his promises to the Children of Israel to bless all the nations of the world through them, Jacob and his great, large sprawling family ran into hard times. There was a famine in the land, so they all packed up and headed down to Egypt where there was plenty of food. They landed on their feet and grew and prospered. In fact, they grew so much – in numbers and in wealth – that the leader of Egypt, with the title of Pharoah, who insisted that the world revolve around him, got nervous about them. He got so nervous that he eventually rounded up all the sons and daughters of Jacob, confiscated their property, took away their identity papers, and made them slaves of the empire. They became a commodity to keep the machinery of Pharoah’s economy and cult worship of him humming along smoothly. And this went on for 400 years. Four hundred years of captivity for God’s holy people, Pharaoh after Pharaoh after Pharaoh.

As time went by, year after year, generation after generation, they forgot about being God’s people with a holy calling to be the ones through whom God would bless the whole world. Eventually, as far back as anyone could remember, they had been the personal property of Pharoah, with no idea that that would ever or could ever change. Their mothers and fathers were slaves, their children were slaves, and their children’s children would be slaves, too.

God’s children got lost and forgot who there were. They forgot they belonged to God, not Pharaoh.

You don’t actually have to be enslaved by some kind of Pharoah to suffer the same sort of fate. I remember an uncle of mine saying to me once with a kind of quiet desperation, “As far as I can tell, all I am to anybody is a checkbook. That’s the way people see me… my wife, my kids, my friends. That’s all I am.” And then he said, “I’m a person too. I am,” as if he were trying to convince himself. We were nowhere near the Nile River, but Pharoah’s shadow was heavy on my uncle that day. Or, I remember a conversation with an older woman years ago who said, “Who am I? Not that anyone seems to care, but I’m the one who washes the clothes and cooks the meal and makes the bed and keeps the house clean and runs everyone else’s errands. Who am I? Is that a question I’m even allowed to answer? I’m not sure I’m allowed to be a person.”

There are lots of ways we get lost and forget who we are and there’s always a Pharoah out there ready to capitalize on that.

I ran across an old newspaper clipping the other day that I’d saved in a folder. It’s the story of a man, a convicted murderer, in prison for the rest of his life. The story describes a pilot program in the prison where stray dogs who have come to the end of their stay in a local pound are paired with inmates. The idea is that the prisoners become their trainers for a period of a few months. Their job is to try to socialize the castaway dogs and help them find good homes.

It’s a story of the redemption that comes through remembering who you are. The inmates are people who in many ways have lost the right to be persons. I suspect that they have to forget that they are people in order to survive. They belong to Pharoah.

But apparently these castaway dogs can change that. One inmate who was picked to receive a dog said, “I was worried because I thought guys would think I was soft, and I was afraid for the dog’s safety.” But when he got to his cellblock the men gathered around. They seemed afraid to get too close, to show that they cared about something. The inmate put the puppy on the ground, and she started to run and jump like puppies do. The other men instinctively laughed and reached out to touch her. When the man who was considered the coldest and most hateful one of the block dropped to the floor and rolled around, laughing, with the pup, everyone knew it was going to be OK.

The same worried inmate said, “I didn’t think I had any humanity left in me. But when I received one of the first dogs in the program, that brindle boxer pup named Brin, I fell in love as soon as they laid her in my arms.”

This man will always be a prisoner and because of his own deeds. But he was given a way to remember that he was more than a prisoner.

God knows how easily his children can forget who they are and where they come from and get lost. So, after breaking Pharaoh’s strangle hold and drawing them through the waters of the Red Sea, God gathers them at the foot of Mount Sinai, and there God gives them their identity papers. He inscribes with his own hand words to show us how to be human the way he created us to be, to be his children.

Then God spoke all these words [saying], I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, you shall have no other gods before me.

God didn’t deliver the children of Israel from bondage just to turn the tables on Pharaoh. God’s covenant with them, bound in the Ten Commandments, is for them to be something different – not just another rich and powerful kingdom. There are too many Pharaohs as it is. They and we are to be something different, God’s own peculiar treasure out of all the world through which the lost are found.

There is a technical liturgical word used to describe Christian worship. The word is anamnesis. It the opposite of amnesia. Anamnesis means remembering what you’ve forgotten about who you are.

We do not belong to Pharaoh or any of the other little gods of power or wealth or social standing or the latest fad on Tik Tok, all the Pharaoh’s who want to take God’s place in our hearts.  Sunday by Sunday we come to remember what we may have forgotten: we are children of God made in God’s image, bound to him by a sacred promise sealed by the blood of Jesus, to heal the world.  So, in this week before us, bon voyage! Have a wonderful adventure.  And don’t forget who you are or where you come from. Amen.

A Sermon for the 17th Sunday
After the Day of Pentecost/Proper 20A
St. Mary’s Episcopal Church
Goochland, Virginia
September 24th, 2023

This parable reminds me almost word for word of a hot August afternoon some years ago. I was standing with the director of the local funeral home in the churchyard at Historic Christ Church near Irvington on the Northern Neck. We were waiting for a family to arrive for a small graveside service. It was hot. We were hot and after greeting each other and catching up a little we lapsed into a comfortable silence. We just stood there side by side in the hot sun listening to a cicada screaming in the nearby woods. After a while he said, “Let me ask you something. I’ve thought about this a lot. Let’s say there’s a really bad person. I mean really bad. And he gets to the end of his life. He’s really sick, let’s say, and knows that he’s not going to make it. So, just as he’s getting ready to die, he decides to give his life to Jesus and accept him as his Lord and Savior. Does he get to go to heaven?” I said, “Of course.” And he said, “You don’t understand. He’s a really bad guy. Been a bad guy his whole life. And just when he’s getting ready to die, he decides to give his life to Jesus. I mean a really bad guy. You’re saying he gets to go to heaven?” I said, “Yes, of course, look at the scriptures.” He said, “Well, what if he’s not sincere; what if he’s just hedging his bets?” I said, “Well, that’s God’s business. How should I know.” “Because he’s a really bad guy,” he said. I said, “Look, if he gives his life to Jesus, isn’t that the point. I mean you’re a good Baptist – isn’t that the point?” We had just been staring off across the churchyard but now he turned to face me and said, “How can that possibly be fair? It’s not. It’s not fair at all and I don’t like it. Do you think it’s fair?” I said, “No, of course not, but that’s not the point.” There was a pause and then he said, “It’s not fair and I don’t think you’re right.”

So, in the world of this parable, my friend the funeral director sounded like the workers who got out into the vineyard at 6 a.m., just as the sun was coming up and worked through the day – 12 hours in the hot sun – and saw these Johnny-come-latelies waltz in to work an hour before quitting time and get paid the same amount as they did. I think most of us are probably in that camp. Because how is that fair?

It’s not. Just ask the older brother in the parable of the Prodigal Son who refuses to come to the party for his deadbeat little brother. Ask the prophet Jonah who’s mad enough to die because God showed mercy to those awful Ninevites who anyone can tell should obviously all be going to hell, lock, stock and barrel. It’s a theme that runs all through the Bible: God’s mercy and forgiveness for people who don’t deserve it. Which isn’t fair. I mean, how’re we supposed to run a world like that?

Didn’t we learn from infancy that bad behavior is punished, and good behavior is rewarded? It’s pretty important to get clear on these things as we’re growing up. But you know as well as I do that as we get older those simple rules don’t always apply. Sometimes our good deeds are either ignored or badly repaid. Sometimes things we intend for good backfire and make things worse. Like secretly paying your adult child’s rent when they were in a bind but when they find out they accuse you of treating them like a baby and vow never to talk to you again. And often our bad behavior eludes punishment. You get away with something, or it gets ‘overlooked’, or no one knows what you did. So, no harm no foul, right?

Still, fair is fair. Or should be. How’re we supposed to run a world otherwise?

But there are these little clues all through this parable that hint that ‘fair is fair’ is the wrong way to be thinking about it. And that ‘fair is fair’ will only take you so far. And as it ends up, maybe that’s not very far. So, let’s take a second look.

At daybreak, about six in the morning, the owner of a vineyard goes down to the market to hire folks to work in his vineyard. Which is odd because normally the manager of the vineyard would have done that, not the owner. Something unusual is happening. So, the owner himself, the man in charge, the big guy, the one who has the most to lose, comes and hires some folks to come work and they agree on the terms: he’ll give them a day’s pay for a day’s work. Then the owner comes back down to the market three hours later about 9 a.m. and then again at noon and at 3 and hires more workers. They don’t make an agreement about the pay. The owner just says, “I’ll pay you what’s right.” Whatever ‘right’ means, they take him at his word and decide to trust that he’ll do the right thing by them. Then at the end of the day, about 5, he goes one more time to the market for more workers. When he asks them why they’re still there, they say, “No one would have us.” “Well, I will,” the owner says and sends them off to work that last hour with no mention of pay at all. Maybe they’re fine with that because they were just glad that someone would have them.

For whatever reason, the owner wants as many people as he can get working in his vineyard, even the ones no one else wants.

Then, of course, things flip on their head when quitting time comes and we see how the owner values each of them. In one more twist, he lines them up to be paid, from the latecomers first to the working-since-dawn folks last. It’s almost like he wants the folks who worked 12 hours to see how much the others, including the ones no one else wanted, get paid. And one by one they all get paid, and they all get paid a day’s wage. They all get paid what they need to keep life and limb together. They all get what they need for life to continue. Everyone gets that. The guys who’ve worked 12 hours cry foul even though they’ve gotten what they need and what they agreed to. They want to renegotiate so they have more than the other guys. They can’t stomach that the others have as much as they do. And the owner says, “Are you envious because I am generous?” There’s no recorded answer to that question. Which makes me think the ball is in our court to answer. “Are you envious because I am generous?”

I’m afraid nine times out of 10 I’m going to react like the guys who worked from sunup to sundown. Except that this parable is not about fairness and who deserves what. That’s the hook Jesus’s story can catch us on. But it’s a hook he’d rather we not bite on.

A little exchange a few weeks ago with a parishioner, one of the saints of this community, showed me that. Again. He’s a wonderful, wonderful man, and we were just catching up after church. I asked how he was doing, and he said, great, just great, how about you? And I said, great. And then I said, about no one thing in particular, this is way beyond what I deserve. And then because I was sort of poking fun, I said, do you deserve how good this life is. All of it. He got it exactly and laughed and said, oh no are you kidding me! Do I deserve all this? Not all this. Not all of this.

What I mean by this is not that either one of us are rats getting away with something we don’t deserve. That’s not it at all. It’s the simple goodness of God that feels so undeserving. In good times and bad; in the glory of life and in the awfulness of it, too. God’s goodness abides. It’s the grace of it all, God’s grace, the grace of life, all of it – which always feels like getting so much more than you could ever earn or deserve.

It’s not that we’re such rats who’ve gotten away with something; although sometimes that’s true. It’s God’s goodness and grace that makes this feel like the guys who got to the vineyard at 6 o’clock and get way overpaid, far beyond deserving.

Is that fair? Is that any way to run a world? Maybe not. But it is the way our good and generous and God runs his vineyard. Amen.

The Rev. David May

So, today is a great day in the life of this parish. At St. Mary’s Church we call today Kick-off Sunday. It is not an official feast day in the liturgical calendar, but it might as well be. It’s a day that sort of reminds me of old cowboy movies where some old hand rings the dinner bell to call everyone in for dinner from wherever in the world they all are. So from wherever in the world we all are, we’re here now to resume the regular round of our worshiping life after a summer lull. A lull that I should say never really quite happened. All through the summer, I kept expecting the numbers of us who came on Sundays to fall off. But that never really happened. Still, today our parish as a whole is sharing a little ‘come home to Jesus’ moment of getting it together to get here for a fresh start to the fall, a fresh start to life. There are children to get up and dressed. There are older bones and joints to coax into cooperating and getting us here on time. And there’s just the simple practice of getting back into the habit of being in church on Sunday. Our world has changed so much in such a short time and there’s a whole multitude of us trying to make sense of it all.

I’ve stood at the back of this church on Sunday morning as everyone is getting their selves in here just before the organ sounds the processional hymn and thought, ‘look at all these people, Lord. Your people. All these lives going on out there. What has brought them here. What’s happening in their lives that has landed them here. I wonder, what are they looking for? Hoping for?’

I suppose there are lots of reasons why you’re here. And I also think there’s only one reason. Because the One who made you, who knew you before the foundations of the earth, has been seeking you. And somehow, some way, your soul caught wind of that. And you’re here, maybe on a wing and a prayer. Maybe you’re here with a renewed longing for God. But whatever it is, it’s enough, thanks be to God!

Though after hearing the Gospel reading just now, you might be having second thoughts about showing up here this morning. Or at least that’s what occurred to me as I read through this passage a couple of weeks ago. Reading the commentators didn’t help much. One of them headed what they wrote ‘Church Discipline’. Well, oh joy! Aren’t you glad you got here for that?! Still, to put it frankly, we human beings are just a mess. Maybe a little direction wouldn’t hurt.

One of my mentors, Michael Rowell, a very wise, hilarious, super healthy Episcopal priest told me about a vestry meeting he once led. It was a wonderful group of faithful folks who on that night had gotten into the weeds about something that didn’t matter even one little bit. But that didn’t stop some of them from getting a little crosswise with each other. Michael finally had enough and shouted out, ‘Oh the joy of living in community.’

Which are sentiments that I’m sure Jesus was familiar with in our life together with him. We are a mess. His disciples have lately been wondering aloud: I wonder which one of us is the greatest. And so he says, if someone sins against you, you go to that person and tell them. Don’t go tell some other person in the parking lot. Tell the person who hurt you. Anyone knows that just doing that, 95 times out of 100, goes a long way to fixing whatever needs fixing. But, if it doesn’t, bring two or three others to talk with the person who hurt you. Not so they can gang up on that person but so that they can affirm what each of you have said and maybe help the two parties hear each other. And if that doesn’t lead to reconciliation, then the whole community should take up the matter. And if that doesn’t work, then turn away from the offending party, which just makes formal what was probably already true.

What Jesus says tracks pretty closely with something in the Prayer Book called ‘The Disciplinary Rubrics.’ It’s on page 409. If you want, you can read there the pastoral approach a priest should take that might ultimately result in refusing to offer someone Communion. It also says that if a priest takes this step that priest had better call the bishop and let her or him know what is going on because in the church community, we are all accountable. I do want to jump in here and say that in more than 30 years, I’ve never taken such a drastic step and no one I know has either. And that’s not because there hasn’t been conflict. But mostly people talk to each other. Because there’s just too much to lose by not. Namely each other. And God’s dream for us to be a whole community.

Which is the whole point. In a community gathered in Jesus’s Name, there is just too much to lose. A community like this, gathered by the Spirit to be Christ’s Body in the world is a gift of God, something to be treated with great care.

I was reminded of this so vividly two Sundays ago when Amelia met with parents to talk about our children’s ministry. She did an exercise where the group created a little timeline of the past several years. We started the timeline back when Amelia first came and tried to name how the children’s ministry happened then and the changes that have happened. And then came 2020 and a worldwide pandemic where none of us knew our right hand from our left. And one on top of the other, people started remembering what had happened. Someone would mention something, and others would say, ‘oh, I loved that!’ or ‘I’d forgotten that. That was so great!’ One parent started talking about how much it meant when a package came in the mail from church with a project for the Church season or a note or a birthday card. All of them an outward and visible sign, a sacrament of belonging to this community in Christ. And oh, yeah, remember church outdoors and moms getting together on the terrace to talk and share ‘a beverage’? And remember the drive-thru pageant and then the pageant switched to the parking lot at the last minute and the drive-thru meals and time to connect at an open car window which was just as good as the delicious food? And remember the altar guild made scores and scores of little flower arrangements and packed up their cars with them and drove off to give a bunch to someone who was isolated and might be lonely, or to someone who just needed something beautiful, or to someone who just needed a sign that someone loves them, or because it’s what we do for each other. They talked about how much all these different things meant and how all of these things showed us how much we need to be a part of a community that’s built on the life and death and resurrection of Jesus: a life and story spacious enough and gracious enough to hold the mess we are in God’s loving hands; to be his people in the world with a sacred story to tell.

The mission of the Church, of this church, is to reconcile all things to God in Christ, and nothing less. That is happening in communities just like this one, who by grace have been given the gift to bear Christ into this world. God has given us a story to tell. Sometimes it sounds like that group of young parents reflecting on how the Spirit kept us whole when we didn’t know how to stay whole. To be a part of this community makes us accountable to one another by telling the great story of Jesus, one that is spacious enough and gracious enough for the mess we all are, and to live for his high calling to heal this world and nothing less. Amen.

The Rev. David H. May