Laboring in the Vineyard: August 2010 Lectionary
The beginning of August is a special time. The pace is slow, the offices quiet, the schoolyards deserted. For those of us who are able to take the summer off, the early weeks of August may be the only time when we have a chance to get some distance from whatever is keeping us busy during the year. Minds and bodies finally relax because for a while they have not been disciplined through alarm clocks and tight schedules. How odd that the readings for this month compel us to think about work!
Preaching about work asks us to take special account of the diversity of human experiences. Consider the wide range of “working people”: a student studying for her finals, a mother attending to a newborn, a thirty-year old struggling to make it in the corporate world, another thirty-year-old working for social justice in a nonprofit organization, elderly people on a part-time job, and elderly people who live with the memories of a lifetime of work. The list can be continued endlessly.
And of course, preaching, too, is work. Despite all the support we get from the Spirit, I believe there are few preachers who do not know how it feels when Sunday morning comes close and it becomes clear that one will work until late at night to finish the sermon. Preaching can involve back pain because of long hours at a desk and stinging eyes from hour after hour of looking at a computer screen. Wouldn’t it be worthwhile to attend to this side of the calling?
Preaching about work asks us to develop a theological perspective on something that is often separated from the spiritual part of people’s lives. Of course, we know about the old thesis according to which the “work ethic” drivers humans to work frantically so as to accumulate wealth. But if we do not want to interpret the amount of our work’s success as a measure of God’s love for us, how do we interpret our work theologically? If we listen closely to the voices that speak to us out of the biblical tradition we find a rich variety of ways to understand the meaning of work.
Proper 13 (18)
August 1, 2010
Eccl 1:2, 12-14; 2: 18-23
Colossians 3: 1-11
Luke 12: 13-21
The rich man in Jesus’ parable seems almost like a caricature from our own time. On the wave of success he makes plans to secure his gains so that sometime in the future he may be able to relax and enjoy himself. The local radio station to which I listen features a recurrent joke, “how many days until retirement?” On a more serious note, among my pastor friends (who are not to be retired any time soon) there seems to exist a new phenomenon. After years of passionately engaging in full-time ministry several of them have taken a “time out.” After saving enough money, they are able to survive without income and live as they please. The reasons behind these decisions are often spiritual. They need a time out in order to escape spiritual burnout, in order to find nourishment for the soul. After working in a parish they need time for themselves, time to travel, time to listen to God’s voice, time to figure out where God is leading them. I admire those friends. Yet in light of Jesus’ parable I wonder if the decision to save money and take time off is not comparable to what the rich man planned when he wanted to build large barns and store his gains so that afterward he would be able to relax. Jesus’ comment on such plans is clear enough: “You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?”
The write of Ecclesiastes seems to have been hit by the full force of this question. He may die soon and unflinchingly thinks through this possibility. “Vanity!” he concludes. Utterly senseless, absurd, and incomprehensible are all our endeavors considering that we have to leave the fruit of our work to others. What we find expressed in this ancient text is the voice of the older generation that is about to step back, not knowing if others with take up the cause. Those of us who have been active in the women’s movement probably know these sentiments very well. Women who have worked hard for gender equality may sometimes feel as desperate as Kohelet when they suspect that the next generation does not know or care about their struggles. All those hard won accomplishments! “Whose will they be?” Utterly senseless, absurd, incomprehensible they seem if they cannot be passed on.
Proper 14 (19)
August 8, 2010
Gen 15: 1-6
Luke 12: 32-40
Abraham is another figure of the Hebrew Bible who feels immense frustration at not having a successor to carry on his work. Abraham – or Abram, as he is still called in Genesis 15, is childless. He seems to have accepted the fact, but his is bitter about it. Even the notion of God’s reward is meaningless for him, because he will not be able to share the reward with children of his own. At this point it may be important to explicitly widen our concept of work. The produce of our work is more than the house or the money that we leave. The product of our work can our legacy, that which makes up our identity and our passion. Our legacy can include social achievements, values that we stand for, books that we love, as well as the many other small things that surround us and belong to us. Childlessness includes the uncertainty of what will happen to all this. Who will look at the family albums that we so diligently created? Who will pass on the tales that we told again and again explaining the twists and turns of our life? How can one face the possibility that all of this may be irrecoverably lost and forgotten? The millions of starts in the sky are God’s promise to Abram that his legacy will not be lost.
Passing on one’s legacy, the fruit of one’s work and lifetime of thought can be an empowering act. Abraham is empowered the moment he looks into the sky and has faith in God’s promise of biological descendents. Similarly, we are empowered when we have faith in God’s assurance that our life is valued and will leave traces, if not through children of our own (children are not automatically happy recipients of legacies!), then through other human relationships.
Jesus, on the other hand, does not seem to have patience with the human desire to pass on one’s legacy. In the gospel reading for this week, Jesus asks his listeners to let go of the things they own. “Sell you possessions, and give alms.” Jesus is driven by the urgency of the sociopolitical situation in which he finds himself. Everything is about to change. Whoever clings to his or her possessions may not be ready for what is about to happen.
I believe that today’s readings from Genesis and Luke speak of two radically different attitudes toward human life and human work, both of them valid. There are times that allow us to settle down, to fill our rooms with belongings, to care about the continuity of legacies. There are times when we have to make a long-term strategic plan in order to develop something sustainable. There are times when we should decide, “not now but maybe in ten years.” And then there are times that unsettle us. Something unexpected breaks in and takes over our well-planned biography. Political developments can do this to us. An illness can change everything. And sometimes everything changes because of a spiritual calling that no one else hears. When this happens we need to be flexible and emotionally open. We need to be able to sell our furniture, to quit our job, or to change our lives in some other way without worrying about legacies.
Perhaps the challenge is to know in what kind of time we live.
Proper 15 (20)
August 15, 2010
Isa. 5: 1-7
Luke 12: 49-56
For Jesus, the signs of his time are more than obvious. Only hypocrites can pretend they have not noticed that everything is about to change. The reading from Luke is among the harshest ones in the New Testament. The idea that Jesus brings division instead of peace to earth does not fit well with what we usually associate with Jesus and his message. One way to look at the reading is from a sociohistorical perspective. Part of the urgency of Jesus’ message derives from the situation of the Jewish people living under Roman oppression. The angry passion that we hear in many of his sermons and parables in directed at those who are complacent vis-à-vis the suffering of poor people terrorized and exploited by Roman imperial power.
When normalcy collapses human relationships are at risk. Social and political crises can bring friction among friends and families. Jesus has no romantic notions of the consequences of his words and actions. He knows that he puts stress on people. And he is stressed himself. What I find remarkable about this reading from Luke is that it offers us a glimpse of the way Jesus eels about his work. “I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled.” This can be read as the sigh of a human being who is about to engage in an enormous task and who nervously anticipates the labor that lies ahead. We are invited to look at Jesus as a person who works hard in response to a catastrophic situation, and who feels the emotional cost of his actions.
One other reading for week can add to our biblical understanding of work. In Isaiah 5, God is compared to a man who lovingly builds a vineyard. He does everything in his power to ensure that the vineyard will yield grapes. But he fails. The vineyard produces only wild grapes.
Instead of quickly moving to the point of this parable, God’s disappointment with Israel, we may find it worthwhile to focus on the image itself. Isaiah 5 begins as a love song. The man who builds the vineyard in not a businessman who simply expects profit from his agricultural possession. The lines from Isaiah conjure up the image of a man who day by day stands in front of his vines, touches them, attends to them, and anxiously watches them grow. The disappointment that follows derives not only from the economic loss: the man is disappointed also because of all the love and care that he put into his vineyard. What we find in Isaiah 5 is a deeply touching account of one of the most difficult human experiences: a project that has absorbed all our energy yet ultimately fails; a relationship that has received all of love and care breaks apart. How do we respond? How many of us, having worked hard and facing defeat, blame ourselves? How many of us respond as did the owner of the vineyard, with anger and destructiveness?
The readings from Isaiah and Luke remind us of two strong emotions that humans can experience in their work: angry disappointment and stress. The fact that these emotions are linked to God and Jesus can be understood as a sign that we should seriously attend to them as preachers. This is what work we can do to us. Disappointment and stress can overwhelm us, and in situations like these we need spiritual empowerment.
Proper 16 (21)
August 22, 2010
Jer. 1: 4-10
The reading from Jeremiah offers a spiritual answer to some of the difficult “work tales” we have encountered this month. Jeremiah’s response to his calling belongs to a classic biblical trope. “I am only a boy,” he protests, just as Moses, Jonah, and Mary protest after learning what God wants from them. “I am only a boy” is a plea that many of us may know all too well when faced with an overwhelming task.
God’s promises God’s support and God’s presence. After reflection on the variety of biblical accounts surround the theme of work, this promise sounds trustworthy to me. God knows all about work and what it does to humans. God understood Abraham’s desire to be able to pass on a lifetime of work; God knows how it feels when a project fails that has kept us busy day and night. God became human in Jesus Christ and knows how unnerving it is to respond to a social crisis and to unsettle people’s lives. And finally, God is aware of the kind of reasoning that makes us work frantically so that someday we may be able to relax. Regardless of what kind of challenge we face in the working part of our lives, God will be with us.
Proper 17 (22)
August 29, 2010
Jeremiah 2: 4-13
Luke 14:1, 7-14
Both Jeremiah and Luke readings focus on trusting and obeying God with humility required on the part of the believer. Do not take your work too seriously. In the end we trust in God and wait to be invited to be honored without asserting our own importance.
Our work is to be patiently and humbly done.
The promise is timely. By now most of us will have returned from vacations and summer projects. Some will start a new job, attend a new school, and begin a new task. God says to every one of us, “Do not be afraid.”
