Labor

 

Charlotte Collins Reed

Christ Church Episcopal

September 6, 2020

18 Proper A 

          From the time I was a little girl, one of our family rituals was a traditional southern New Year’s Day dinner.  This meal always, always includes pork chops, black eyed peas, turnip greens, and cornbread.  When Don and I first moved to Ohio in 1989, I was shocked to find row upon row of sauerkraut on grocery store shelves at the end of the year, and nary a black-eyed pea in the county!  What we ate, and still eat, on New Year’s day is part of our identity as a southern family, with all the good and the ugly that identity and history hold.  Whether we actually like black eyed peas and turnip greens is a moot point.  This is what southerners eat on New Year’s in hopes that the year will be healthy and successful.  And yes, we did eat all of the above this past January 1 despite whatever evidence to the contrary!  Rituals are about identity, after all, not magic.

          Rituals are one of the ways we make sense of the world, ordering the world in ways that give us identity.  We hear in the reading from Exodus this morning about the ritual surrounding the Passover, a ritual rich with meaning.  The story does raises a lot of questions, though.  Are are the Egyptians not also children of God, even if they did enslave God’s chosen people and try to kill all the firstborn males?  Why did God plan to kill every Egyptian firstborn, both male and female, both human beings and animals?  And could God really not tell the Hebrew houses apart from the Egyptian houses without the blood on the door posts?

          But when I set my questions about this passage aside, what I find is the description of a ritual that will remind the Hebrew people from the time of the Exodus until now about God’s mighty act of deliverance.  The Passover ritual reminds the people of the way God delivered them out of Egypt and set the people on their journey to the promised land.  The people girded their loins and left in a hurry, with no time to leaven their bread, to make their escape before Pharaoh’s heart was hardened again.  God called the people to reenact this ritual year after year not to glorify the past, but to remember what God had done for them.  Remembering what God did for them in the past would help them see God at work in their present and trust that God would be at work in their future, whatever situation or circumstance they found themselves in.  The yearly celebration of the Passover became key to the people’s identity and to God’s identity as well, as in the Hebrew Scriptures God often says “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of bondage in the land of Egypt.”

          We are missing our familiar rituals these days, having worshipped in new ways since mid-March.   Our rituals of worship-our music, the order of our worship services, and communion itself-give us our identity as Christians who identify as Episcopalians.  Our rituals continually remind us of what God has done for us in the past so that we can see God at work in the present and trust that God will work in the future.  However, just as Moses would receive the 10 commandments after the people were liberated from Egypt and those commandments would also give the people identity as they lived in response to what God had done for them, the letter to the Romans reminds us this morning that we are called to live a certain way in response to all that God has done for us, and that way is no different from the way the Hebrew people were called to live.  Paul writes “For the one who loves another has fulfilled the commandments.”  He goes on to say that the commandments can be summed up in this word “Love your neighbor as yourself” and that love is the fulfilling of the law.  Not only do our rituals and the rituals of the Hebrew people remind us of all that God has done for us, those rituals also call us to live in response to God’s mighty work on our behalf.

          Scripture is honest, however, in admitting that all this love is not always easy.  This morning, Jesus tells the disciples what they are to do if another member of the church sins against them.  He lays out a detailed path to reconciliation, and what one is to do if the offending member refuses to listen.  If the member refuses to listen even to the church, Jesus says to let that one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.  Because this is Matthew’s gospel, and Matthew loves the weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth, we could easily think that Jesus is telling us to treat such a person as an outcast-someone who can be discarded from the fellowship of the community.  But how did Jesus treat the gentiles and the tax collectors?  He dined with them.  He called them to be his disciples.  He healed them.  So much for the outer darkness!  Jesus tells us to love our neighbor as ourselves-our gentile neighbor, our tax collector neighbor, our neighbor whose politics are different from ours, our neighbor who is a different color, faith, or gender orientation from ours. 

          Taken together, our readings this morning remind us that while the rituals of our worship ground us in what God has done for us and in God’s promise that God is acting in our lives now, we are not the passive recipients of such rituals.  We are called to live as people for whom God has acted mightily, people God has carried through the waters of death into the promise of new life.  We do that by showing the same love to others that God has shown to us, even to those who have offended us.  We do that with the labor of our lives, whatever that labor might be.  While Labor Day is a secular holiday, Labor Day is also an occasion for us to give thanks for the gift of our Labor, to commit ourselves to working for meaningful labor at a decent wage for all people, and as Christians, to use our labor to be the love of God for our neighbors and the world.  Our rituals remind us of all that God has done and continues to do for us.  Our lives are that ritual for the world. 

                                                                   Amen.