Rules of Belonging

Exodus 20:1-20; Philippians 3:4b-14

How many of you have heard of “the Ten Commandments”?

What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you hear that phrase?

 

(Every commentator I read this week mentioned Charlton Heston and courthouse walls)

 

The “Ten Commandments” – known in some traditions as the Ten Words, or Ten Utterances – have a place in our culture, a claim on our collective mind.

Sometimes, that place in our minds is a shape – an image of two arched tablets, with a numbered list of short, strong, Dos and Don’ts

 

But…when we look in the Bible, at the twentieth chapter of Exodus (which we read this morning, and where these words, these commandments, are first introduced) or at the fifth chapter of Deuteronomy (where these commanding words are reiterated), it doesn’t look all that much like a tablet-friendly list. 

 

In fact, there’s rather a fluid texture to many of these words, as God tells Moses on the mountain, and the ancient people of Israel, and us now, both who God is, and what we are to do about it. And there are at least three mainstream traditions about how to divide this fluidity into ten points.

 

In the original text, God’s direction for our actions is embedded in a lot of context about God’s nature, history, and personality, and God’s relationship to the people who first heard these words from a mountain of awe in the middle of a wilderness. 

 

Our ten commandments – God’s ten words – do not start out as a list of dos and don’ts meant for general guidance in good living.

These are – at their root – a way of being that is laid out for a particular people, in a particular time, to build a community unlike any other.

 

These ten words [310 words in the New Revised Standard English translation which we read today; these ten “utterances”] are spoken to a motley mob of refugees, uprooted from the life and places they know, coming out of a situation of trauma.
A collection of not-quite-lost folks who are wandering in a wilderness of uncertainty, not sure what’s just happened to them, or what’s going to happen next. Who are facing a whole new bunch of challenges they probably have no idea how to even start managing.

 

That might sound a little familiar to many of us – either from individual experience, or from shared experiences in the last few years.

Then – and now, too – God is speaking to a group of people who need to become a people, a community with a shared identity, a shared sense of who we are, and how we are. 

 

So God starts with belonging.

I am the Eternal, your God, who brought you out of Egypt.

In some accounts, that right there is a commandment, the first one. I am your God. We belong to each other.

You will have no other gods besides me.

When Episcopalians count, that’s where we draw the “first” command – a mutual, primary, and exclusive belonging. We root our identity, and our obedience, in belonging, first and foremost, to God. 

 

The next several sentences (and two or three commandments) are more detail about how that belonging works – about staying focused on the particularity of this relationship, being careful with the power (the Name of God) in the relationship – and then on a way we mark ourselves as belonging to God, by being like God in the observance of Sabbath. By preserving pause, and rest, for others, as well as in our own work.

 

Starting there – in the way we relate to one another in Sabbath, as well as to God – the focus of the rest of these words is on our relationship with one another, the shape of our community, all rooted in this particular relationship with God. 

 

We do not take life, or property, or relationships, or truth away from one another. We respect one another, with particular attention to some relationships. We belong to a community that does not harm one another – and doesn’t even dream of harming one another. 

Because we belong together. 

We belong to one another, because we belong to God.

And God to us.

 

And that’s something we really need to know – when we’re coming out of pain and trauma, when we’re wandering in uncertainty, when we’re facing new challenges – exploring new opportunities – we’re not even sure how to start to manage.  

When some or all of those things are true for us, as individuals, it really matters to be part of, to belong to, a community, to a unity of people who know who we are, and what we do, together.  

When some or all of that trauma, uncertainty, and challenge are true for us as a community, too, we need to know – not just know in our heads, but in our hearts, souls, and bodies – know that we belong – to one another, and to God, and God to us.

 

That’s the context God is speaking to, in these commandments, these words of belonging. That’s maybe why God is staking this claim on us, and on how we live together.

 

Sometimes, we may not know we need or want this community, this belonging to God. That’s why – at the mountain in the wilderness, and in our lives – God usually moves first to establish that belonging. We heard Paul tell his friends in Philippi this morning that he owes his desire to belong to Jesus to the fact that Jesus has already laid claim to him; he wants to belong because he knows he already belongs to Jesus.

 

God lays that claim on us, too. On you and me.

What Moses tells his mob of motley refugees, recorded in tradition and scripture, is a story of belonging through an escape from slavery and genocide, through God’s work in creation and invitation to us to be like God, through the promise of home. Belonging initiated by God, belonging that causes our desire to belong to God, causes our care with God’s image and power, causes our care to live peaceably, honestly, and generously with one another. 

 

In our own context, millennia later, we tell a similar story in the Eucharistic Prayer, as we bless the bread and wine to be our shared meal of Christ’s Body and Blood. A story of belonging through inheriting that freedom and promise and teaching, through God becoming like us, through the promise of abundant life in the home of God. 

Belonging initiated by God, God placing a claim on us that makes it possible for us to long to belong to God, to the community that shares Christ’s Body and Blood and follows his teachings, to love one another as God loves us and we love God. 

 

Belonging that carries us from our losses, pain, or trauma, individually or together. Belonging that carries us through the uncertainties we wander in, carries us to new challenges, and belonging that is where we begin to find the answers to those challenges, begin to find joys in new opportunities. 

And always, the answer to who we are.

And most of all, whose we are.

 

Not by the dos and don’ts we follow, but by the claim God puts on us: that we belong to God, that God belongs with us, and we with one another.

 

That’s more than ten words.

But it’s the word we need.

That we belong.

 

God's Labor Practices

Matthew 20:1-16; Exodus 16:2-15

Would you accept work under these conditions?

·      When the job offer comes with no clear wage offer, just a broad “we’ll pay you what’s right when you’re done”?

·      When the job offer comes without any wage agreement, just a “well, go start work” directive?

·      When the employer makes it very obvious on day one that people coming in late and doing less work than you get paid the same?

 

In some cases, given the realities of our cultural and employment systems, some of us and our neighbors have worked under conditions like those.

But many of us wouldn’t. Maybe we all shouldn’t.
These are all unfair labor practices.

 

And all of them happen in Jesus’ story this morning.

A story about what the kingdom of heaven is like.

A story you and I are trained to think is about how God treats us. Treats people in general and you and me in particular.

 

This story Jesus is telling is rife with unfairness. With inequity.

 

The story may get a bit more comfortable if we treat it as an allegory, a story explaining that God gives full salvation and love to people who get involved with God late – on their deathbed, maybe – or people who didn’t really work to earn God’s love and salvation.

We still know it’s not fair, but that interpretation may make it an unfairness we can be okay with. An unfairness we can be glad of, when we remember that none of us work at salvation as hard as Paul, or Peter, or Francis, or a bunch of other “saints”. And that even saints can’t earn salvation and love. 

 

We don’t hear anything about being glad in the story as Jesus tells it, though.

We hear the controversy.

 

The way this story is structured, the way Matthew frames it with a repetition of Jesus’ frequent teaching that the first will be last, and the last, first, may be meant to focus our attention on that moment when the first-hired workers are set up to witness the unfair generosity of the employer.
The first in the field are literally last at the pay table, a set up that probably reverses what was usual for the context, and actively forces the early workers to notice that the latecomers are being paid a full day’s wage.

 

This employer isn’t just being generous with his own resources. He’s making sure everyone notices.
And – if one assumes a common sense knowledge of human nature – he’s setting up for trouble, for resentment from the early workers about how unfair the distribution of reward is, and he gets it. Gets direct criticism and complaint from the all-day workers.

The employer makes an equally direct point that the original labor contract and early workers’ personal payment is just and righteous – a standard day’s pay for a standard day’s work. And says it’s none of their business what anyone else gets paid. 

But he’s made a point of making those early laborers notice.  

And so, I think you and I are also supposed to notice.  
We’re supposed to get our sense of fairness twinged (or slammed). But I don’t think that’s where we’re supposed to stop responding to this story.

 

Jesus and Matthew give the last word to the employer: I can do what I want with what I have; accept what you have, and don’t envy generosity that benefits someone else. So I think they might want us to conclude that being mad at the unfairness is not the right way for the early workers to leave, or the important thing for you and I to take from this story. We’re supposed to go on from there, embrace what happens.

 

Which still leaves us with the question of just how this uncomfortable generous unfairness is like the kingdom of heaven.

And I’m wondering if that answer lies in the story before the controversy. And maybe after the equal but unfair payday.

I wonder if the experience of the kingdom of heaven is one where we do – where we honestly can – take up work without a contract. Take up fruitful work without any understanding of how our effort will pay us back. Take up holy work knowing perfectly well that other people get a shinier and more generous reward for less effort. 

 

And that we can do that because we’ve already seen the end of the day – the end of the day when you, and I, and everyone else, no matter when they showed up, leave with enough. With a righteous reward of labor. 

 

Because while those labor practices are certainly unfair in auto plants or architect’s offices, geology labs or grocery stores – or Episcopal Church staffing, for that matter – those are labor practices of trust in the country of God. 

 

In the kingdom of heaven, the promised land, the overlay of God’s heart on the world here and now, however you define and experience the country of God – every one of us gets enough. Every one of us can trust that we get what we need – whether that feels like too little, too much, or just right. 

 

That’s one of the points of the story of the manna that we heard today. Fresh out of rescue from slavery, on their way to the land of promise, God’s people find themselves stuck in a wilderness with no food, and their provisions are running out. There’s a real danger here. 

They go grumbling and complaining to Moses, and God hears them.  

An odd, honey-wafer sort of carb coats their whole camp in the morning, and quails appear in the evening.
And when they go out to gather food, everyone gets enough – whether they spend all day on it or a few minutes. 

Everyone gets enough - just enough for need, however hungry you are or feel – and never too much (anything you try to keep as leftovers goes bad). 

[It’s an important detail in the story, too, that God provides enough in a way that enables God’s people to follow God’s commandments, to keep Sabbath. It’s enough in a way that enables us to be cared for by God in our rest.]

 

So the first hearers of Jesus’ story would already know that God feeds the effortful and lazy or careless alike – at least when they have to depend on God to be fed.  

Some commenters suggest that this wilderness manna is a practice run for how you need to live in the land of promise, in God’s country – knowing that our enough comes from God. Not from Pharoah, not Moses, not the boss, not our own efforts. So we can work and rest, and live and love, more freely, not having to worry about whether we get a fair reward. If what we get will be enough. 

 

One of the truths of the land of promise, of the kingdom of heaven, is that God can be trusted to provide what we need. Provide for our real needs, if maybe not all our wants. Provide enough.

And it’s a truth that what seems insufficient – because we worked harder than “enough”, because others got more – what seems insufficient, is enough in the country of God. And what seemed like too much – when we saw others get it, or when we get more than we worked for ourselves – is in fact, just the enough we need, and no more. 

 

What seems insufficient – not enough work, not enough pay, not enough bread, enough fairness, enough workers, in these stories;

not enough budget for all we need for our household, our church, our business;

not enough workers for the job, volunteers for the project, not enough time to accomplish all that’s asked of us, today;

is, in fact, enough.

(Although enough – or even abundance – may look different than the way we wanted it to.)

 

And the miracle here, if you ask me, isn’t entirely that God provides, that God makes absolutely sure that you have enough of what you need from God, and so do I.
The miracle, the real distinguishing feature of the country of God, is when you and I and others deeply and confidently trust that God provides.
(Getting to that trust out of basic human nature may actually be a lot more difficult than making birds appear in a barren, rocky wilderness exactly at hunting-for-meals time.)

 

And maybe – just maybe as the vineyard workers, and God’s people in the wilderness, and you and I here and now practice living daily in that miracle of trust in God, that trust may even lead us to the place where we’re like the householder in Jesus’ story, delighting in spending God’s abundance unfairly, for everyone’s enough.

 

Conflict Resolution?

Matthew 18:15-20

I feel a bit like we’ve fallen into a management or self-help book this morning:

If someone in your organization is causing a problem, address it directly, one-on-one. 

This is pretty standard advice for a starting point, whether you are getting it from an organizational dynamics guru or Jesus the Messiah.

If that doesn’t work, bring in a small group of trustworthy folks and work toward resolution together; 

use public accountability to the whole group, or to the highest authority, if necessary…. 

What we hear Jesus say two thousand years ago and half a world away is not all that different from advice we might hear now in our workplaces, families, schools, and of course, churches. 

 

And, as conflict-resolution advice, I hear what’s good about it, and it makes me tired and anxious. 

Because – I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, or if it’s just my experience – but multi-stage, healthy, responsible, smart conflict resolution is so much more work than venting to a friend, or just avoiding the problem.

(At least for a while.)

 

And there’s something about the particular method Jesus is describing that looks like it could be used to protect abuses – keeping “offenses” private as long as possible, trying to make sure the offender stays in community – this is all stuff that has made it easy for sexual predators, emotional bullies, and other dangerous types to keep their position in the church particularly, and a lot of other organizations generally. 

And I am NOT here for processes that protect abusers.

 

When I take even a tiny step back to look at the context of Jesus’ teaching, though, I can be very confident that Jesus and Matthew are NOT trying to describe a process that protects bullies and abusers. The opposite, in fact.

This little snippet of teaching we read today comes on the heels of Jesus teaching his community that care for “the little ones” – meaning the folks most vulnerable and least honored, which includes children – is much more important than business as usual. So important it’s worth losing your own life.

 

So I suspect that this process of prioritizing direct and quiet resolution is really aimed more at ensuring the vulnerable don’t get lost than at protecting the reputations of the powerful.  

And more than that, I think this isn’t so much meant to be a teaching about “conflict resolution” – about how to manage differences of opinion, or individuals causing trouble in the congregation – than it is about keeping the church focused on Jesus’ core mission: to redeem the whole world. Not just the people who are good at doing church. Or good at “being good citizens”. To redeem the problem-children, too. (Especially?)

 

Jesus’ priority was never conflict resolution. He causes plenty of religious and social conflict himself. His priority is saving lives. Ensuring no one is cut off from the love of God and the kingdom of heaven that starts here and now. 

 

The community-management advice we’re reading today is predicated on the truth that God wants every single human to be part of the holy community. 

That, in fact, we need everyone to be part of the holy community. 

And Jesus tells us we do that not by ignoring the faults, offenses, and irritants of our siblings, but by addressing the faults, getting offenders to justly repair their offenses, healing, and working out the irritants, to keep the holy community whole. 

 

A recent article in The Atlantic magazine reported that when people separate from the church they – we! – get more divided. When the church loses people – when people lose the church – those people are taking some of the values we learned in church, and become politically rigid and divided around those values when we leave. That’s true across both major US parties and all types of Christian church. Becoming disconnected from the church community means more and more of us are unable to find – or even look for – common ground to build the common good.  

 

It turns out reconciliation within the church has positive consequences for the life of the world, even in our lightly-Christianized, mostly-secular context here and now. 

 

We do need each other. Even the irritating others.

We do need to be together. To stay together. 

We need to jointly, together, hold the bullies accountable in a way that makes it impossible to bully anyone among us, encourage and strengthen the folks whose “sin” is finding it easier to follow money, or public opinion, than to follow Jesus. 

(I mean, it is easier.)
We need the strength of holding together to be strong enough to stay with Jesus. 

 

Staying together in the church as God’s chosen family, holding together in the church as the interconnected Body of Christ, is how we are each and all part of the kingdom of heaven, of making God’s love, justice, healing, and glory a here-and-now reality for everyone. 

 

I think that’s part of what Jesus is saying when he tells the “church” – the community of his faithful followers – that “what you bind (or release) on earth is bound (or released) in heaven”.  

And I know that I don’t want heaven – now or ever, off-earth or on-earth – to be a place as divided and inflexible as this decade’s US politics. 

 

I want heaven – now, on earth, as well as wherever and whenever else – to be a lot more like the last thing we heard Jesus say to us this morning: “When two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”
I want heaven to be that assurance of God’s presence. 

I want us to go ahead and help God shape a world where the love and care and inspiration of God are constantly near us, with us, in us.

 

Perhaps it’s an accident of Matthew’s editing – or of the editing of the folks who choose what scripture readings we hear this week. Perhaps it’s the heart of Jesus’ teaching shining through. Perhaps it’s neither of those things.
But there’s definitely some commentary on prayer attached to the comments on how to manage “offenses”.  That prayer-teaching is how we get reminded, today, of Jesus’ assurance that God will be with us when we are together.

And that makes me think that the teaching about community conflict resolution may also be teaching on prayer. On the practice of the presence of God. 

 

Because if any time two or three of us – two or three of the followers of Jesus connected to one another in the church – are together, Jesus is there, well, then going to talk to the “member of the church” (the sibling) who is troubling you or the community means that two are gathered, and, so: Jesus is there.  

Same for the next step: Two or three others of the community gather with the troubled and troubling. So Jesus is present. 

 

And prayer is, at its heart, every way – any way – that we invoke and enter the presence of Christ, of God.

 

What if, in fact, every honest engagement with someone else in the faithful community is a form of prayer?
What if every time we come together to manage a trouble – trouble between one another, or trouble that comes to the whole community together – guaranteed the listening, loving, all-knowing presence of God in our midst?

What if every time we came together to support someone else doing a difficult task we experienced the presence of Jesus?

We could expect the unmistakable assurance that Jesus is guiding, strengthening, correcting, encouraging, leading us, every time we take our courage in our hands for a hard conversation. 

We could expect the tangible assurance that God is with us, every time we come together to do something difficult

 

What if we expect the reality of God among us every time we come together, period?

 

I’m not sure, of course. But I think that doing hard things – any hard things – might feel much more possible. Might become attractive and exciting.  I think that conflict-resolution might feel more graceful and energizing than exhausting and anxious. 

Might even become just what we do – instead of ignoring trouble, we get close to the trouble,  to heal it – just like Jesus told us to do.

 

And that “doing” may just be the everyday, here and now, practice of experiencing, even shaping heaven.