Generosity

Charlotte Collins Reed
Christ Church Episcopal
September 25, 2023

20 Proper A 

          At Christ Church, we had a unique challenge in 2020.  Sure, we had the same challenges as everyone else.  We were all trying to figure out how to do ministry, offer meaningful worship, and take care of each other in the new world we found ourselves in.  You might think that our unique challenge was the total renovation of the Parish Hall that took place in the midst of the pandemic, but in some ways that was less of a challenge than it would have been with all of our various ministries and community groups meeting here.  No, our unique challenge was that our commercial coffee maker was repossessed by the coffee company.  I think we are the only church on the planet to claim that honor.  The coffee maker was a loaner based on our purchasing a certain amount of coffee, which we had just done when we had to shut down.  With no one in the building, we didn’t need to make, much less buy coffee, so the company came and repossessed our coffee maker.  No amount of complaining to the company made any difference whatsoever.  The company was not interested in a reasonable argument for this was unfair or why we needed that particular coffee maker.  In the midst of everything else going on, this was very small potatoes.  But it seemed ridiculous, unfair and like very poor customer relations.  But I can claim to be the rector of the church that had her coffee maker repossessed.

          I am reminded of this unfair and ludicrous, if trivial, situation with the coffee maker when I read all of the complaints of unfairness in our readings from Exodus and Matthew this morning.  The word “complain” occurs 7 times in the passage from Exodus.  The people complain that they are starving in the wilderness and wish for the days in Egypt when they had their fill of bread.  Apparently their complaining works, or God agrees that their situation is unfair, as God provides manna and quail for the people to eat in the wilderness.  That satisfies the people more or less until chapter 17, when we will hear next week that the people are convinced that they will die of thirst.  And again, their complaining pays off as God provides them with water.  Would God have let the people starve had they not complained?  Who knows, but complaining to God does seems to work better than complaining to the coffee maker company!

          In the reading from Matthew, we hear about a landowner who pays each worker a full day’s wage whether that person worked a full day, or a partial day, or just an hour, which hardly seems like fair labor practices or like a good use of the landowner’s money.  The landowner makes a strategic mistake when he instructs his manager to call the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first.  Those who worked all day see those who worked an hour getting the same pay they do, and they call “unfair”.  If the manager had just paid those who worked all day first, those workers would have left with their pay and the whole ugly situation could have been avoided. No amount of complaining will change the landowner’s mind and get him to give those who worked longer more or those who worked a shorter day less.  Nor does the landowner rethink his decision to pay those who worked only one hour first and make those who worked all day watch.  Clearly the landowner went to the same school of negotiation as the coffee maker company!

          If these two passages are about complaining and whether complaining to God works or not, then we are left with a draw.  But what if, rather than being a case for or against complaining, these stories are actually about the abundant generosity of God, despite annoying human behavior.  In Exodus, when the people complain that they have been brought out into the wilderness to be killed with hunger, God tells Moses that God will rain bread from heaven.  What a lovely image!  And when the people continue their complaining, God tells Moses that at twilight the people shall eat meat, and in the morning they will have their fill of bread.  And God says “Then they shall know that I am the Lord your God.”   God’s very identity is revealed in God’s abundant generosity, which is a lesson the people will have to learn over and over again in the wilderness.

          Likewise, Jesus’ parable is not about complaining or about fairness, but about God’s generosity.  God’s generosity is unconcerned about human concepts of fairness.  The landowner gave what he promised to those who worked a full day.  They were not treated unjustly.  And had they been paid first  and sent on their way, they would have learned nothing of God’s abundance.  But they learned about God’s abundance when God also gave a full day’s wage to those who hardly worked at all.  The parable is not about fair employment practices, but about God’s identity being revealed through God’s abundant generosity. 

          In the reading from Philippians, Paul commands us to “live your life in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ.”  When our lives as God’s people are defined by the generosity of  God, we can, in Paul’s words “strive side by side with one mind for the faith of the gospel” unconcerned with whether one person has received a greater share of God’s abundance that we have and very concerned that each person receives what he or she needs.  Jesus calls us to let God’s identity be revealed to the world through our lives of abundant generosity.                                                                Amen