September 24, 2017 "The Importance of Murmuring"

Exodus 16:2-15 Matthew 20: 1-16 My father had a favorite joke about the ministry. “Do not let people into the, they will ruin all your plans.” Which I found far funnier, when I learned every profession tells the same story, Lesson plans at School are changed because of students; Medicine is changed because of patients… HOWEVER I would tell you that I believe the Murmuring of people is the most important part! Is it important to us that God is the Almighty Prime Creator of Heaven and Earth? Is it important that God hears people in their suffering and enters in for salvation? Is it important God cares so much about us, that Almighty God abandons all power and humbly enters into Creation, with God becoming One with us? Is it important God suffered and died at our hands for our salvation? Is it important that Death and what we have done in the past could not stop God from loving us? BUT all that is meaningless historic fact without our wrestling with what these facts mean for us. Our Murmuring together allows us to consider other realities outside what we have known. Murmuring is not gossip. Murmuring is not retelling the same stories over and over again, nursing our wounds and our anger as if righteous. Murmuring is not counting how many times we have been wronged, refusal to let go the past to live the present. Murmuring is our trying to come to a new understanding, together, when our constructs of reality, our Laws of the way things are no longer work. Murmuring is our retelling stories in order to understand meanings we never understood before. I recall in this Village when a husband beat his wife to death, and people questioned “I always believed in the Death Penalty, but this was a boy from our school system, he played hockey with my kids, I was at their wedding, I don’t know what to think.” I recall when Sept11 happened and people murmured about whether we could trust the sky was not falling, that the world was not ending, that planes were safe to fly in and we had to go through metal detectors and scanners. It is in the murmuring that we try to make sense out the facts of life. AND I am convinced that part of our human problem with forgiveness is when it comes to forgiving ourselves we do not listen to anyone else. We convince ourselves that we are hopeless, we convince ourselves of the reality of darkness and our lack of forgiveness of ourselves and we fail to listen to any voices of love, of hope, of grace. A friend describes these passages as being about our having to choose between Justice and Love. The people complained, according to the Law they should have been punished, but God acted out of relationship out of love. The Laborers who were hired first deserved to be paid more, yet God chose to pay the others for having worked. I do not believe that goes far enough, I think these are passages about EQUALITY and GRACE. That throughout civilization we have created Reality based on Laws of EQUALITY, on our Control of Fairness of RIGHT & WRONG, but miraculously God operates on LIMITLESS GRACE that is not deserved. We have a naïve way of collapsing history. Between the time of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph at the conclusion of Genesis and the birth of Moses in Exodus 700 years transpired! Try to imagine all the cultural changes, all the societal adaptations that have occurred from the time of the Revolutionary War and today, now Triple that! The people who Moses led across the Red Sea into the Wilderness, had been slaves as long as history could remember. The people had been treated as wild beasts, caged, chained, beaten, killed, bought and sold as property without identity, relationship, without feelings, as things. But slaves were given water and food. When you take away that reality, when you set an animal free, how is it going to survive? Throughout the last generation, America has been about Nation Building, but it is not enough to Cease Fighting and Stop Wars in order to create a new Nation. I recall learning Hebrew in Seminary, having to look up and translate each word. Coming to this passage, we read: And the people murmured against God and Moses, saying Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us? And God rained upon them… and our minds jumped to Sodom and Gomorrah with raining Fire and Brimstone, jumping to Massah and Maribah where the people complained and God sent snakes, but here we were surprised that God rained “Bread from Heaven.” Imagine the conversation of people, and how the murmuring changed, when God provided for them, every day, every week, for the next two generations in the wilderness. Years ago I wrote a Vacation Church School Curriculum about Moses and the Wilderness, and on a week such as this, when the temperatures exceeded 80 degrees, we scattered silver foiled Hershey Kisses over a field for the children to gather. Just as with the Manna, it sparkled in the sunlight. If you gathered too much, in the heat it would melt and be a great mess. If you ate too much it would make you sick. But there was enough for everyone. The children murmured about the joy of fields of limitless chocolate; but having to limit yourself, and sharing with others. Probably no Parable upsets people’s sense of right and wrong as this Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard. Recognize Jesus does not say this is the way things should be in Rome or Jerusalem or Galilee. This is what the Kingdom of God is, a Bizarro World, a different reality, calling attention to what is different from the reality of our control! This story could have been told with the Workers who worked all day being paid first, and everyone would go away happy. BUT the point is that the people MURMUR, the point is this is different from our sense of control of what is right and Just. Notice, the Landowner does not hire workers because the Landowner Needs, but negotiates with those who came first for what is Daily Bread, a minimum wage for the day and sends them to labor. I love the fact that in the Parable, what the Landowner and laborers agree is a Day’s Wage is a DENARIUS, because we have no exact monetary value for a DENARIUS, only hat it was worth a Day Laborer’s Wages. When the Laborer finds others, it is not that the Landowner needed more, but that Workers needed Work, so agrees to pay “WHAT IS FAIR”. To the last, “Go and work.” There is no pretense that Jesus is teaching Economic Theory or Fair Hiring Practices, or Management, the Rabbi is teaching what the Kingdom of God is. To God, everyone is needed and wanted. Everyone is of Value. Everyone has something to contribute. This Reality is not based on Payment for Services. This Reality is not based on our Control. The Kingdom of God is solely based on our being loved by God and loving God. There is no one who is beyond God’s love or forgiveness. In this reality, there is no one who is unloveable or unforgiveable…the difference is whether we can give up control, to forgive God, to forgive others, to forgive ourse