Christ Church Cathedral, Montreal
The Very Rev`d Michael J. Pitts
Exodus 16:2-15
Philippians 1:21-30
Matthew 20:1-16
A stray thought came into my mind as I started to prepare this homily and I share it with you. Although next year we celebrate the 150th Anniversary of this building, the community is much older, having its birth in 1760. This means that if we count the history of the Anglican Church in its present form to have begun in the early sixteenth century[1], we are half as old as the Anglican Church itself.
During both our Cathedral history and the history of the Church of England, a number of charitable funds have come to be associated with both entities. In the case of the Church of England there are two which are especially dear to me: one because many years ago I was helped by the charity. It was a fund which offered holidays to poor clergy and their families. The other is dear to me, not because I have been helped by it, but because its title always amused me, and in fact says a lot about the social history of our tradition. It is The Society for the Assistance of Gentle Ladies in Reduced Circumstances. I believe today the word gentle has dropped out of the title, but the society still exists.
I recalled that society when I began to try to discern a common thread in our three readings today, often a difficult task at this part of the Christian year since we are reading from the Pentateuch, from Paul and from Matthew sequentially, rather than thematically. But what I saw across these three readings was a tackling of the problem of living in difficult circumstances.
In the case of the Epistle this is a matter of Paul's personal circumstances. As he writes to the community in Philippi, he is in prison, probably in Ephesus, and probably detained by the Roman authorities. As we can see from the passage we read, even when facing the prospect of death, his greatest concern is for the welfare of the young church in Philippi. This is borne out in the rest of the short letter.
That is all I will say for the moment. You can read the whole letter for yourselves, but I wish to concentrate more on the Gospel and the reading from Hebrew Scripture. Here the difficult circumstances are not so much those of individuals as those of a community.
Interpretation of the gospels is particularly difficult, for once we have let go of the idea that the Gospels report the very word and actions of the historical Jesus, and once we begin to see them as the product of communities and writers struggling to understand what the risen Jesus is saying to them, then we have the problem of not really knowing what was the original context of a passage. There are no external sources to help us determine that. The passage we read today is part of the material which is unique to Matthew, so we do not have even the possibility of comparing it with Mark and Luke. So we have to try to fit it into what we know of the more general context of Matthew, which, in turn, we have to draw from the internal evidence of the Gospel itself.
This is the process which scholars have worked on for over two hundred years, and the outcome and conclusions of that work are constantly shifting. However the general consensus is that the evangelist is writing towards the end of the first century, probably in Syria, and out of a community of largely Jewish Christians, but with a few Gentile converts. If this is right, then we can leave aside suspicions that our passage is a critique of unions and socialism and begin to see it in the light of this mixed Christian community facing the difficult circumstances of internal squabbling. We can imagine the Jewish Christian members saying: "We and our ancestors have been worshippers of the one God for hundreds of years. How can these Gentile church members, who converted from paganism last year, possibly have the same place and the same authority as us in our church?" Hence the story of the labourers on the vineyard. Well, that fight between old members and new members, between people who share our point of view and those who don't, goes on in every Christian community. At least it has gone on in every one I have served in this past forty years. Well, let me make a slight qualification to that. The two communities which had the least internal strife were those in Moscow and Ulan Bator where I was during the Cold War. There is nothing like a little bit of external pressure to make a community cohere!
I just ask you to note the key point of the story:
I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. [2]
Think about that in relation to our Christian disputes of the present time.
Let's turn to the Hebrew Scripture reading. There is, I suppose a certain constancy in human nature, which, despite the huge difference of context and history, means that a story written perhaps three thousand years ago can speak to us sometimes so directly.
Here is Moses in the desert, with the people around him complaining of hunger and thirst. I am of an age that when I read this story I always remember Harry Seacombe, or was it Peter Sellers, in the Goon Show saying: "Here we are in the middle of the desert starving and all you can think about is food". But look at the end of the story, where the people have been given the quails and the manna. They look at it and say "What's this?" Which mother or father has not put something down on the table, and the kids look at it and say "what's this?" And likely as not you said: That's what your getting - eat it or there is nothing else. So notice what Moses says`:
It is the bread that the LORD has given you to eat. [3]
Like the Gospel this is a story of a community living through difficult circumstances, and, as often happens blaming it all on the leader. It is not an unfamiliar scenario. But I would like to concentrate, not so much on the rather amusing end of the story, but the beginning. Here I find we are dealing with another very human and very common response to living through difficult circumstances.
The whole congregation of the Israelites complained against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. The Israelites said to them, "If only we had died by the hand of the LORD in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread; [4]
They are, of course, fantasizing about the past. When they were in Egypt they had been slaves, beaten by cruel masters as they undertook back-breaking work. And now, not five years later they imaging that it was wonderful when they sat by the fleshpots and ate their fill of bread.
Fantasy is a very common human response. It is not all bad: out of fantasy can come some comfort when the pain is too great, or even bold new ways of dealing with the difficult circumstances of our lives. But too often fantasy is just a way of escaping from the reality of our actual situation, and like other ways of alcohol and substance abuse, it can be just as addictive. Fantasy can be both individual and corporate. Faced with the pain of living, we can fantasize ourselves for a while into a different time and a different place. Who has not sat in a dentist chair, and imagined themselves on the beach in Florida.
But it can also be corporate. We can be part of a group which lives out a fantasy about itself. I am convinced that this is the process which underlies the existence and success of those very conservative Christian communities, who for at least a couple of hours each week, can will themselves into a life where Darwin is wrong, where geologists and physicists are wrong, where moral choices are simple, where we are good and others are evil.
But perhaps the most dangerous type of fantasy is where the individual self fantasy of a powerful leader is translated into a group fantasy of loyal followers. This I believe happens all too often especially in religious and political life. The results can be disastrous for the individuals, for the group, and in some cases for the world.
My poetic hero may have written the much quoted:
Go, go, go, said the bird: humankind cannot bear very much reality[5] ,
But at the end of Four Quartets he writes:
A people without history Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails On a winters afternoon, in a secluded chapel History is now and in England. [6]
For me, our Christian faith, based as it is in the twin doctrines of creation and incarnation and speaking always of a God who reveals himself in history, constantly recalls us from fantasy into the reality of here and now, and begs us to face with courage the difficulties of our knowledge, our emotions, our beliefs, our politics and our world.
[1] I would normally trace the beginnings of the Anglican Church back to the Celtic tradition in England, which probably dates back to the second century.
[2] Matthew 20: 14b
[3] Exodus 16:15
[4] Exodus 16:2
[5] T.S. Eliot Four Quartets Burnt Norton I
[6] Op. cit. Little Gidding V
