Fairhaven UMC

United Methodist Church

2415 Saw Mill Run Blvd.
Pittsburgh, PA 15234
Sunday 9:30am Worship

    • Sermon Shorts 10-1-2023

      Preaching the Same Old Sermon

      He was a guest speaker. He knows his other position was professor of evangelism. Then in chapel he preached the same thing. And then at our baccalaureate graduation service, he preached the same thing.

       And whenever I heard him do that at what is arguably the richest, the most influential institution in the UMC, I have to say I rolled my eyes. I judged. This man for reference, Greg Jones, is a member of a United Methodist dynasty. We don’t have a lot of those.

       Probably two or three. He’s the brother of a bishop who’s now the top leader in the global Methodist Church. He is a former university president and seminary professor as well as interestingly a former Dean of Duke. He had come back at the time.

       This guy is one of the most dominating figures in the last two decades of the UMC and somehow he couldn’t even come up with two unique sermons over the course of six months. This is the best you could do and you know what else? I have his book. We had to read his book for my mission and evangelism class.

      Questioning if God is With Us

      I hear it in conversation in the church, on the street, in the grocery store. I feel it in a spirit that can seem to rest over western Pennsylvania sometime. We have kind of a thing about this. And I know the sentiment can be there at church council meetings, across the partnership from time to time.

       Whether or not it’s said out loud, is this really worth it? Is the Lord really with us or not? Wherever God is sending us right now, wherever we’re being led, we don’t really want to go. We want to go back to Egypt. If the promised land is somewhere over the desert horizon, we’d just as soon turn around thanks, because this is painful. There’s pain on the way to the promised land.

       Why would God bring us this far just to suffer? Dean Jones joked about it using a phrase that I’ve heard other preachers reference here and there. I think he said he got.

      Wanting to Go Back to Slavery

      In this miraculous intervention from God. But now as the honeymoon period of emancipation has evaporated, they’re railing against God and against Moses for leading them out of their confinement, which was familiar, into a scary and uncertain freedom. They want to go back. They’re getting thirsty and they want to go back.

       They want to go back through the Red Sea that God had split open to bust them out. They want the miracle reversed. They want to go back to Pharaoh’s oppressive clutches. They’re hungry, they’re thirsty, they have no idea where they are.

      And all they can see all around them is just this ocean of rock and sand as far as the eye can see. Egypt was terrible, yeah, but at least they knew it was coming every day. And the slave masters always kept them fed enough to keep them toiling every day. They might not have eaten well, but they were going to eat.

    • Fairhaven Sermon 10-1-2023

      Summary

      Rev. Dylan Parson reflects on how we often want to go back to the past, even when the past was difficult or oppressive. Just as the Israelites complained to Moses about leaving Egypt for the uncertainty of the desert, Christians today can be tempted to pine for the “good old days” of the church rather than embracing where God is leading. Even when the present feels like a wilderness, God provides what the people need – water, manna, Jesus Christ himself – to sustain them on the journey. Though we don’t yet see the promised land, victory has been won through the suffering and death of Jesus. Our call is to adopt his attitude of humility and service as we carry out our discipleship with fear and trembling.

      The core message is that even when the church’s situation seems bleak and uncertain, God has not abandoned us. If we trust in God’s provision and guidance, we will make it through this wilderness period. Christ’s victory gives us hope to press on, not look back. By walking in his footsteps of servanthood, we participate in the coming of God’s Kingdom.

      Transcript

      We’ve all encountered preachers, and who knows, maybe I am one, who preach pretty much a riff on the same one or two sermons over and over and over and over again their entire careers. Maybe I am one. You never really know. You don’t have that kind of self-awareness usually.

       And I’m not sure if my mind has exaggerated it in the remembering, but my last year at at Duke Divinity, I swear I heard the new dean at the time, Greg Jones, preach pretty much the very same sermon three times. First in my evangelism class, he was a guest speaker. He always– his other position was professor of evangelism. Then in chapel, he preached the same thing.

       And then at our baccalaureate graduation service, he preached the same thing. And whenever I heard him do that at what is arguably the richest, the most influential institution in the UMC. I have to say I rolled my eyes. I judged.

       This man, for reference, Greg Jones, is a member of a United Methodist dynasty. We don’t have a lot of those. Probably two or three. He’s the brother of a bishop, who’s now the top leader in the global Methodist church.

       He is a former university president and seminary professor, as well as, interestingly, a former dean of Duke. had come back at the time. This guy is one of the most dominating figures in the last two decades of the UMC. And somehow he couldn’t even come up with two unique sermons over the course of six months.

       This is the best you could do. And you know what else? I have his book. We had to read his book for my Mission and Evangelism class. And I cracked it open this week to check on something else and you know what I found in there? The same story, the same sermon.

       And as it happens, the scripture that I heard him preach on three times, four times if you count the book, was not exactly the one we read today but the book of Numbers telling of a similar moment to what we heard in Exodus. You know the Israelites spent a long time in the Sinai complaining and his sermon was on one of those moments. And so we see here in Exodus that the Israelites are trekking through the Sinai. They have been freed from slavery and Egypt in this miraculous intervention from God.

       But now as the honeymoon period of emancipation has evaporated, they’re railing against God and against Moses for leading them out of their confinement, which was familiar, into a a scary and uncertain freedom. They want to go back. They’re getting thirsty and they want to go back. They want to go back through the Red Sea that God had split open to bust them out.

       They want the miracle reversed. They want to go back to Pharaoh’s oppressive clutches. They’re hungry, they’re thirsty, they have no idea where they are. And all they can see all around them is just this ocean of rock and sand as far as the eye could see.

       Egypt was terrible, yeah, but at least they knew it was coming every day. And the slave masters always kept them fed enough to keep them toiling every day. They might not have eaten well, but they were going to eat. They were going to get their water rations.

       And so they say, don’t let us suffer and die out here if we’re not going to immediately make it to the promised land. This is not what we bargained for. us back to that misery on the Nile that’s at least familiar, we want to go back to Egypt. Don’t tell any of my seminary friends because I ripped on Greg Jones way too much, but I have to acknowledge that in hindsight I was wrong.

       And the Dean was right to preach this message over and over again because I have come to believe that it is the story of Christ’s Church in our moment, at least in the Western world. I find this last verse of our reading from Exodus especially haunting. So Moses says they pass through that desert place, they move on from Horeb to the next place. As they leave it, he names it Massah and Meribah, which means arguing and testing.

       Because there the Israelites argued with and tested the Lord, asking, Is the Lord really with us or not? Well, is he? Is the Lord really with us or not? Because we also live in very challenging times. We’re not in the desert dying of thirst, no, but we’re coming out of a pandemic where some seven million people have died. The news is dominated every day by images of the countless people in this country and in this city suffering from homelessness. Two generations of Americans now can’t afford houses that cost twice what they did ten years ago.

       Swaths of New York were underwater this week as weather gets more and more extreme. The United Methodist Church’s American membership at last count in 2023 is about half of what it was at its founding in 1968. The population of the United States is twice what it was in 1968, but our population, our membership is half. And I don’t even know if that number is before or after 5,000 congregations left.

       Is the Lord really with us or not? And I’m telling you I can see that sentiment crystal clear every time I go to annual conference. I hear it in conversation in the church, on the street, in the grocery store. I feel it in a spirit that can seem to rest over Western Pennsylvania sometime. We have kind of a thing about this.

       And I know the sentiment can be there at church council meetings across the partnership from time to time, whether or not it’s said out loud, Is this really worth it? Is the Lord really with us or not? Wherever God is sending us right now, wherever we’re being led, we don’t really want to go. We want to go back to Egypt. If the promised land is somewhere over the desert horizon, we’d just as soon turn around, thanks, because this is painful. There’s pain on the way to the promised land.

       Why would God bring us this far just to suffer? Dean Jones joked about it using a phrase that I’ve heard other preachers reference here and there. I think he said he got it from his preacher dad. Every church, every denomination, every group of Christians has an unofficial back to Egypt committee whose sole mission is to get things back to the way that they were, which is of course impossible. You know, you can’t walk the same point in a river twice.

       There were problems in the past, yes, we remember if we really think back. But you know, at least the pews were full. We understood our situation. And looking back, it was pretty okay in hindsight.

       There might have been some rough stuff here and there, but it was pretty okay. Back then, things weren’t perfect, but we knew we’d wake up tomorrow in a familiar situation, just like when the Israelites knew that they were going to get food and drink. The Israelites, as Moses guides them through the badlands of the Sinai, feel all of this deep in their bones as a hopeless rage starts to build. And Moses knows it.

       Moses is getting a little skittish and so he goes to God to plead for help knowing that he’s in way over his head. This was never what he intended to do and he’s actually fearing for his life if he can’t cool the people down. He says to God, These people, my congregation, my nation that you’ve charged me to lead, They’re about to stone me because they’re so thirsty, they’re so mad to be out here. Please help me.

       Tell me what to do with these people. Please give me a way forward. And God responds with a solution. God tells Moses to take his staff, the same staff that he turned the Nile to blood with, and he says to smack a rock, and cool, fresh drinking water would pour out of it to quench the people’s thirst.

       God said he’d be standing on that rock and whenever Moses struck it a stream would emerge. Now notice that God’s solving the immediate problem, the people are thirsty, right? But notice there are two things that God doesn’t do. First, he doesn’t give them permission to return to Egypt. That’s not in the cards, that’s just not happening.

       God has way bigger plans for his people than to allow them to check back into servitude and obscurity to run the other direction as soon as they run into hardship. God has saved this people, God has called this people for a reason, that they might become a great and holy nation. He has blessed them that through them all the nations of the earth might be blessed, might be drawn back towards God, might be saved and redeemed. But the second thing that’s not going to happen.

       God is also not just going to take them straight to the promised land. In fact, they have about 39 more years. So they can say, Are we there yet? all they want. They can grumble all they want, aching with the discomfort of the wilderness, but they’re going to be in the desert a while.

       They’re going to be humbled by it. They’re going to be purified by it. That’s a part of the plan that God makes very clear here is not going to be bypassed. As much as they’d like to bypass it, as much as they’d like to get there, the Sinai is not that wide.

       And as much as we’d like to avoid wilderness times, it’s not going to be bypassed. But in the meantime, God says He is with them. He proves that He’s with them. He ensures they have the basic needs to get through their day.

       Even if their situation is unfamiliar to what they’ve known, even if they’re not yet in the land of milk and honey, at least they’ve got some water. Soon they’ll get manna and quail. They complain about that too. But they have what they need to survive.

       And so if we’re in the wilderness, and I believe the church is, not just this church, but the church, this is the promise that we receive today. God is with us. God ensures no matter how lost and anxious and uncertain we are that he’ll crack open rock to make sure we have streams of flowing water to keep us well on the journey. God will ensure that we are adequately nourished for what lies ahead whether we believe that or not.

       Paul’s letter to the Philippians adds an extra layer to this too because Paul says not only is God providing the nourishment we need, Paul tells us that Christ has given himself as the the nourishment we need to survive. He poured himself out taking the form of a slave that is not just a human being but a human being of the lowest position. He humbled himself submitting willingly to death on a cross so that through his weakness God gave him and his people victory. So God is not just guiding us through the journey in the wilderness.

       God walks alongside us through deepest fear, through despair, as one of us, with us, alongside us. Jesus Christ walked in to hell and back for us. And because of what he has done and what he does, there is victory in weakness. The cross doesn’t look like it should be a victory, but it is.

       Christ’s victory and ours. And we might not recognize it, but even in our hardest moment Jesus is working towards victory in and through us as we carry out our own salvation with fear and trembling. The Apostles description of a life of discipleship. John Wesley loved that phrase, carrying out our discipleship with fear and trembling.

       So much like the promised land of Canaan for the Israelites stuck in the Sinai, it can feel really impossible to imagine our promised land, that we’re on the way there, that the victory of God’s reign is just beyond the horizon. That’s not really what it looks like on a day-to-day basis. But it is. Paul proclaims that everybody in heaven, on earth, and under the earth will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.

       How can that be whenever we’ve got what, 1-2% of people in this town and church on a Sunday morning, but every tongue’s going to confess every knee bow? And you would think that the larger context of this verse might be a passage from Revelation. You know, you hear about confession and and bowing and you might picture Jesus standing with a sword in battle, but that’s not the context here at all. The victory, total and eternal, will come about because Jesus has poured himself out in suffering and shame for people like us, people who are so ungrateful as to complain about being freed from slavery, people so ungrateful as to nail their Savior to a cross. And we, Paul says, in order to partake in that victory, are to adopt that same attitude that was in Christ Jesus, that same position of humility beyond all measure, of foolish humility.

       And these are two really startling images to hold together, I think. On one hand, you’ve got the people complaining in the wilderness, weary of the freedom that God gave them. They don’t even want their freedom anymore. And on the other hand, we have this image of a Lord of all creation that causes water to pour from a stone.

       That same Lord from whom water would pour from his side as he’s on the cross. Is the Lord really with us or not? Ask the Israelites as they wander in the desert. Is the Lord really with us or not? We ask in our season of wandering, of uncertainty. Moses points towards a stream gushing from a parched stone and says, Yes.

       Paul, pointing to a Savior crucified and risen, says, You have no idea. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.

    • Fairhaven’s Gala Prep: Calling for Donations and Creative Baskets!

      The Gala committe has begun to put things in order for Fairhaven’s annual fundraser, and need items for the extraordinary silent auction gift baskets. If you can donate ANYTHING that would help, it would be much appreciated! And if you are creating a basket on your own, Thank you!

      Restaurant gift cards in the amount of $20 or higher are needed for the Grub Grab.

      Below is a list of baskets we are putting together and we need items for those themes.

      Any questions, contact Cathy Speicher

      • Dog treats/snacks
      • Gardening basket
      • Cleaning basket
      • Snack basket
      • Teas/Coffee basket
      • Children’s basket
      • Christmas basket
      • Italian basket
      • Men’s basket
      • Bath and skin care
      • Golf
      • Auto Care
      • Birds
      • Chocolate basket
      • Grilling
      • Camping/Outdoor
      • Black & Gold
      • Crafts

    • Fairhaven Shorts 9-24-2023

      Learning to Trust God in Life’s Wildernesses

      Therefore, what we see happening in Exodus is our story too. And today, we now live in a wilderness, a modern day wilderness of confusion and mistrust and violence. But we, like the Israelites, are on a journey to the promised land of God’s kingdom. In our reading from Exodus, we see trust being tested.

       Increasing trust is something we all have to do from time to time. We all kind of need to explore how we feel about certain people and situations. In this case, the people of Israel, after generations of slavery and abuse, they’ve developed some issues around trust, and understandably so. And they want to know, who is this God that Moses keeps talking about? Why does God care about us? And where has God been all this time when we were slaves.

      Why God Wants to Trust Us

      We’ve often been told through our lives to trust God, and we struggle with that sometimes because God is beyond our ability to understand. But do we ever stop and think that God wants to trust us because God created us to be in relationship with God, and our relationship, that needs trust in order to thrive. Real trust going in both directions is needed for love to be present. There are lots of relationships in this world that don’t require love, relationships that we build around mutual usefulness or a mutual desire for income or for a cause.

       These things don’t necessarily require deep trust, just sort of a basic level of mutual agreement. But real love needs deep down honesty and openness. trust.

    • Fairhaven Sermon 9-24-2023

      Summary

      Rev. Peg Bowman’s sermon focuses on the importance of trust in our relationships with God and others. The scripture readings described – Psalm 105, Exodus 16, and Matthew 20 – all touch on the theme of trust. God desires to trust us, just as God is trustworthy and provides for our needs. However, living in a sinful world has broken many people’s trust. The psalm celebrates God’s faithfulness over generations. In Exodus, the Israelites question if God can be trusted to provide in the wilderness. God responds by sending manna and quail. In Matthew, Jesus’ parable challenges those grumbling about God’s generosity to latecoming workers. True kingdom living requires welcoming and sharing generously with others. We demonstrate trust in God by resisting “us vs. them” thinking, being thankful for God’s gifts to all, and celebrating our generous God. Trust is at the heart of love relationships. As we grow in trusting God, we live out God’s way through our words and actions.

      In summary, the sermon emphasizes that cultivating mutual trust is vital in our relationship with God. Scripture shows how God consistently provides for and is generous to all people. We live into God’s kingdom by showing that same trustworthiness, generosity, and care for others, overcoming divisiveness. Deepening trust in God helps us live out God’s way faithfully.

      Transcript

      I don’t know about you, but on the first hearing, today’s scriptures almost feel like a bouquet of flowers that arrives without a note. It’s like great variety, lots of beauty, but where’s the message? Where are we going with this? And so it just, it takes a little while just kind of sink into these scriptures. I think with God, there is always a message and with God ultimately the message is a message of love. But I think this morning the really common thread through the scriptures that we heard is about that that part of love that we call trust.

       It’s impossible to have a love relationship without trust. And we know this from our parents, from our siblings, from our spouses, from our friends, even mutually beneficial relationships like employer-employee require a certain amount of trust in order to thrive. And in today’s world, trustworthiness is becoming more and more important, even as it becomes less and less easy to find. And now that we’re in the next election cycle, trust is going to become even more difficult to find.

       So how do we know who we can trust? How do we define what is trustworthy? Does being trustworthy mean that a person keeps his or her word? Or does it mean that the person is consistent? Or does trustworthiness mean that we approve of what a person says or does? Does it mean that we agree with them? Does it mean that we believe what they believe? Can a person be trustworthy even if we don’t like the things they say? And then there are the people, far too many people in this world, whose trust has been broken by tragedy or by betrayal or by violence or by crime or by abuse or by silence. And then we bring God into the mix and things become even more complex because God is greater and more powerful than we are. And God does things that we can’t do. And yet God understands the need for trust.

       Both our need to trust God and God’s desire to trust us. We’ve often been told through our lives to trust God, and we struggle with that sometimes because God is beyond our ability to understand. But do we ever stop and think that God wants to trust us because God created us to be in relationship with God and our relationship that needs trust in order to thrive? Mutual trust going in both directions is needed for love to be present. There are lots of relationships in this world that don’t require love, relationships that we build around mutual usefulness or a mutual desire for income or for a cause.

       These things don’t necessarily require deep trust, just sort of a basic level of mutual agreement. But real love needs deep down honesty and openness, real trust. There’s one theologian over a hundred years ago that once said, To be trusted is a greater compliment than being loved. And I think he might be right about that.

       Trust is what our scripture readings are about today. People trusting God and God trusting people. So the psalm we spoke today that we read together is a song of God’s people singing about how trustworthy God is. And the psalms, of course, they were the hymn book of the people of Israel.

       These are the songs they sang as they worshipped in the temple. And this particular song sings about telling all the nations all the great things that God has done, everything that God has made, all of God’s miracles, all of God’s judgments, that is God’s truth telling. God is a creator God who created this universe, this planet and every person on it, and God has provided richly for all of us. So our God is a God who can be trusted.

       And I was thinking, if we were writing this song today, what would we sing about to God? What are the things that God has done in our lives that help us to trust God? We might think of the beauty of creation, especially now in the fall when everything’s turning all kinds of colors. We might think of family and loved ones. We might think about safe and healthy homes. We might think about the wisdom that God shares with us in the Bible.

       What else might we add to that list if we were going to write a song of trust for God? We can also remember that God has been faithful, not only to us, but to our parents and our siblings and our grandparents and our great-grandparents and all of our ancestors as far back as we can remember and even further. And just to give an example of this, a few decades ago, Dad and my sister and I went to Europe to dig up the family tree, find out what we could find out, and we traced Dad’s family all the way back to the 11th century, back to the time of William the Conqueror. We couldn’t go back any further because the records just didn’t exist anymore, at least not in that particular spot. But that’s a thousand years of God’s faithfulness.

       And there’s more that we don’t know about. And that’s true for every person here today. God’s faithfulness has been with each one of us, our tribes, so to speak, as far back as memory goes, and maybe further. And that’s what the psalm is singing about today.

       The people who wrote this psalm were the descendants of the people we read about in Exodus. When we go back to the time of Moses, and this now is about 475 years before the psalm was written, at this point in Israel’s history, Moses had led the people of Israel out of Egypt and was bringing them into the Promised Land. The people of Israel had been liberated from 400 years in slavery in Egypt. And if we remember that story, the history of that, the people of Israel originally had lived in Canaan, but there was a great famine and the only food to be found was in Egypt, and so they traveled down there and they were able to go there because God had sent Joseph there ahead of time.

       We remember that story from Genesis when Joseph, the son of Jacob, was sold into slavery by his brothers, and he came to the attention of Pharaoh while he was in prison and rose to command all of Egypt, including storing up food for a famine that God had said was coming. And eventually the family of Israel arrived in Egypt as refugees and they were welcomed with honor for Jacob’s sake, for Joseph’s sake. But as time passed and Joseph was forgotten, the people of Egypt began to be afraid of the Israelites, and so the Egyptians made them into slaves. And the glory that Israel had once had and the greatness of Joseph was lost in the sands of the desert until Moses came along.

       God chose Moses to lead the people of Israel to freedom, to lead them back to the promised land. That’s the same today as God was back then. The story of Israel is the foundation for our Christian faith. Without the promised land, there would be no Messiah, and without the Messiah, there would be no Christianity.

       Therefore what we see happening in Exodus is our story too. And today we now live in a wilderness, a modern day wilderness of confusion and mistrust and violence, but we, like the Israelites, are on a journey to the promised land of God’s kingdom. In our reading from Exodus, we see trust being tested. Testing trust is something we all have to do from time to time.

       We all kind of need to explore how we feel about certain people and situations. In this case, the people of Israel, after generations of slavery and abuse, they’ve developed some issues around trust, and understandably so. And they want to know, Who is this God that Moses keeps talking about? Why does God care about us? And where has God been all this time when we were slaves? So when our reading begins, Israel has been in the wilderness for a little while and the food supplies that they took from Egypt are starting to run low. And the animals they have with them, they don’t want to eat, basically because back then people, when they didn’t use money much, the animals were sort of, that was their measure of wealth, that was their currency, and they don’t want to eat their future, so to speak.

       So here they are in the middle of a desert, many days journey to civilization, and they’re They’re saying to Moses, Why couldn’t God have just left us in Egypt? At least we had food to eat there. These are the words of a people whose hearts and spirits have been broken many times over. And God knows this. God also knows that just like with physical injuries, the first step in healing injuries of the heart is wanting to be well.

       And so God wonders, Will these people, so recently rescued from slavery, will they be willing to follow the heavenly doctor’s orders? Will they trust God to begin the healing process? And God explains to Moses, Look, they’re not complaining against you, they’re complaining against me. So God provides meat and bread. First, God sends a flock of quail to eat. Everybody in the camp has enough meat that night.

       And the people, the next morning, they find this flaky substance on the ground, which God says can be eaten. And the people look at it and they say, Manna? Which in Hebrew means, What is it? And that was its name, manna. That’s what they called it. And moral of the story, God has provided and God can be trusted.

       And then there’s a second moral to the story for those of us who are reading today. Jesus and the disciple of John draws a parallel between manna and himself. During a conversation about manna, Jesus says, I am the bread of life who came down from heaven. God has provided Jesus for us to meet our needs, just like God provided the manna to meet their needs.

       This God can be trusted. And finally today we have that passage from Matthew in which Jesus tells us a parable. And the issue here is still trust. Will God’s people trust God to do what is right? And in spite of appearances, this is not primarily a story about employment and workers’ rights.

       It poses the question, What’s it like to work for the most incredibly generous boss in the universe? And the answer shines light on the kind of damage that’s been done to God’s people, both then and now, in this sinful world. The parable is about the kingdom of God and about God’s economy. People who believe in God, all people who believe in God, receive the same salvation no matter how long we’ve served, no matter what our title is. In fact, Jesus says the last will be first.

       And the people listening to Jesus back in that day would have assumed that the average work day was from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.

       and that a denarius would be a fair wage for a day’s work. In our case, in Jesus’ story, the manager did some things that were not usual. First off, he went out looking for more workers throughout the day. He went 9 a.

      m., noon, 5 p.m. 5 p.

      m.?! One hour before quitting time. And Jesus doesn’t say why, but we can assume that there must have been an awful lot of work to be done, and all hands were needed on deck. And so God got as many people as he possibly could, and this is certainly true of God’s kingdom and God’s people.

       We need all the folks we can get on deck. But at the end of the workday, Jesus’ story, there are two surprises. First off, the people who were hired last were paid first, which is a reverse of what would be normal back then. the first hired to be the first paid.

       And secondly, everyone got paid the same amount. This landowner, this boss that they’re working for– in other words, God– is wise and generous and has the right to give away his possessions as he chooses, to be as generous as he likes. But the workers aren’t happy, at least not the ones who worked all day. They are grumbling, not because they were paid unfairly, because they got the wage they agreed to, But they’re complaining that the latecomers should have received less.

       Their complaint is, You have made them equal to us. Their problem is not envy, because envy is wanting something someone else has. The problem is that they were wishing that some people didn’t have as much as they had. It’s a complaint of the privileged, in a sense.

       It’s one that we are very familiar with in our society. In this society, we believe that if you work hard, you’ll be rewarded, that you get out what you put in. In the economy of heaven, life in God’s kingdom is always a gift. It cannot be earned.

       Nothing we can do can get us there. And if we are living in the kingdom of God, it’s because God has been generous. No exceptions. The landowner in the story who represents God, his question to the people who are grumbling, and this is the literal translation, he says, Is your eye evil because I am good? In the ancient world, people believed that the eyes put out rays like light to make it possible to see.

       like almost like little flashlights. And that’s how we were able to see. That’s what they believed about the eyes. And so the problem that Jesus says, the problem that people have been working since 6 a.

      m., they said that he says that they failed to see, that their eyes aren’t working right. What should have been a we situation, all the workers working together, became an us versus them situation. Instead of saying, We are working together to accomplish something, their cry was, You’re being unfair.

       Their eyes were not seeing in a healthy way. And again, it’s all about trust. When we live God’s way in God’s kingdom, we demonstrate our trust in God. We trust that in God’s kingdom there will always be enough and more to share.

       We show our trust by welcoming others, especially those who haven’t had the privileges we have. We show our trust by standing against the us versus them thinking that is so common today. Everything has to become a debate these days. Have you noticed that? And then finally, above all, we thank God for God’s generosity to us and to others.

       We celebrate our generous, trustworthy God in song and in service. In God’s kingdom, the words You have made them equal to us is a cause for celebration. Which brings us back to where we started. In our relationship with God, it’s all about trust.

       God wants to know if we will take the wisdom that God gives us and use it for others. God who loves us more than he loves his own life, as we saw in Jesus Christ, wants to know that he can trust us, trust us to listen, and trust us to live God’s way. And we live life God’s way when we hear or read God’s Word and believe it and allow it to come alive in our lives. We live life God’s way when we look to God to be the source of our joy and inspiration.

       We live life God’s way, as Jesus says, when we share God’s blessings with others, no matter how long they’ve been with us, no matter if they’re strangers. In God’s house, there is enough and more for everyone. And when we know this, we can trust God. So let’s pray together.

       Pray with me. Lord, thank you for entrusting us with your Word and your many generous gifts. Help us to trust you more with every passing day. If we have any doubts or fears today, we bring them to you now.

       Build up in us the knowledge of your word and the trust to live it through to your honor and glory. Amen.