Mustn’t Grumble; or: Being Indebted to Kindness

Exodus 16.2-15

²The whole congregation of the Israelites complained against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. ³The 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; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.’

4 Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘I am going to rain bread from heaven for you, and each day the people shall go out and gather enough for that day. In that way I will test them, whether they will follow my instruction or not. ⁵On the sixth day, when they prepare what they bring in, it will be twice as much as they gather on other days.’ ⁶So Moses and Aaron said to all the Israelites, ‘In the evening you shall know that it was the Lord who brought you out of the land of Egypt, ⁷and in the morning you shall see the glory of the Lord, because he has heard your complaining against the Lord. For what are we, that you complain against us?’ ⁸And Moses said, ‘When the Lord gives you meat to eat in the evening and your fill of bread in the morning, because the Lord has heard the complaining that you utter against him—what are we? Your complaining is not against us but against the Lord.’

9 Then Moses said to Aaron, ‘Say to the whole congregation of the Israelites, “Draw near to the Lord, for he has heard your complaining.” ’¹⁰And as Aaron spoke to the whole congregation of the Israelites, they looked towards the wilderness, and the glory of the Lord appeared in the cloud. ¹¹The Lord spoke to Moses and said, ¹²‘I have heard the complaining of the Israelites; say to them, “At twilight you shall eat meat, and in the morning you shall have your fill of bread; then you shall know that I am the Lord your God.” ’

13 In the evening quails came up and covered the camp; and in the morning there was a layer of dew around the camp. ¹⁴When the layer of dew lifted, there on the surface of the wilderness was a fine flaky substance, as fine as frost on the ground. ¹⁵When the Israelites saw it, they said to one another, ‘What is it?’^* For they did not know what it was. Moses said to them, ‘It is the bread that the Lord has given you to eat.

Matthew 20.1-16

 ‘For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire labourers for his vineyard. ²After agreeing with the labourers for the usual daily wage,^* he sent them into his vineyard. ³When he went out about nine o’clock, he saw others standing idle in the market-place; ⁴and he said to them, “You also go into the vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.” So they went. ⁵When he went out again about noon and about three o’clock, he did the same.⁶And about five o’clock he went out and found others standing around; and he said to them, “Why are you standing here idle all day?” ⁷They said to him, “Because no one has hired us.” He said to them, “You also go into the vineyard.” ⁸When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, “Call the labourers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first.” ⁹When those hired about five o’clock came, each of them received the usual daily wage.^*10Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each of them also received the usual daily wage.^* 11And when they received it, they grumbled against the landowner, ¹²saying, “These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.” ¹³But he replied to one of them, “Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage?^* 14Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. ¹⁵Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?”^* 16So the last will be first, and the first will be last.

 

Many years ago, the American travel writer, Bill Bryson, made a wonderful TV program about the English, based on his book: Notes From a Small Island. For me, the most touching part was when he interviewed two elderly women from the north of England. They lived in a smoky, sooty town dedicated to declining industries; cotton maybe, or coal. They and their husbands were often out of work. They lived in back to back housing, which is to say that they had adjoining neighbors on one or both sides and also at the front or the back. Bryson had these old dears reminisce about sending their fathers and brothers and boyfriends to fight against Hitler, about the rationing of food and clothing, about their varicose veins. Their only bathroom was at the end of the yard, ideal on a cold December at 2am, when they woke up and had to go. It was a hard life. Finally, one game old girl said to another, in a rather endearing north of England sort of way: ‘Still, dear, mustn’t grumble’. All the more touching because, of course, they had been grumbling, though in a stoical, humorous, accepting sort of way.

Moses’s Hebrews, 2300 years before, were also grumbling. In this case, however, the humor was in the storyteller’s way of telling the story, not in the characters themselves. They were far from accepting their situation and soldiering on. Admittedly, it was bad. They were in the desert, hot by day, cold at night, short of food and water, and still far from a land flowing with milk and honey. The whole bunch of them were Olympic gold medal grumblers. They could easily be mistaken for teenage girls: ‘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; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.’ In other words: it’s not fair! God isn’t doing right by us. A wonderful memory loss there, eh? What about laboring dawn to dusk to construct Pharaoh’s slave cities? What about the attempt to kill off first-born Hebrew boy-babies, which had almost spelled the end of Moses’s career before it began?

If, for just a moment, they’d climbed out of the pool of self-pity that they wallowed in, they’d have found God in a mood to be nice. As they grumbled, he was preparing to do this neat little trick of producing manna from heaven each day for them. Except for the weekend, when he took a day off but provided extra to cover. Good stuff, too. It tasted like wafers flavored with honey. You might say: more like croissants and bacon dripping with butter, than plain matzah. But the people continued to grumble and be suspicious of God’s motives. Many gathered up too much manna, even though God told them they’d no need to: there’d be constant deliveries and, anyway, it had a short shelf life. There’s a wonderfully wry, Jewish self-mockery in the telling of the tale. Oy vey: can we ever trust the boss to be: well, as Jesus would later say, father-like, tender and caring?

It’s hard to take God’s kindness on trust. Much easier to look at the past and the present with one eye shut, and to grumble that things aren’t idealistically perfect.

The gospel reading set for today’s lectionary, which I was going to avoid talking about and then found that I couldn’t, is that extraordinary parable in which God is compared to the owner of a vineyard who hires workers at dawn, noon and dusk to pick grapes, and then gives all of them the same wage. ‘It’s not fair’, cry out the workers who’ve been there the whole or at least a large part of the day. ‘Who’s talking fairness’, says the owner. ‘It’s my money. I can do what I damned well like with it’.

There’s a place for justice and fairness in human relations. Of course there is. A large place. But that’s not really what either story is about. Whether it’s Hebrews grumbling in the desert about the injustice of their sad plight, or the 7am shift moaning about fair pay for a day’s work: the major issue isn’t about whether God is just. It’s about why God is supremely, endlessly, joyfully, unreasonably: kind.

The American poet T.S. Eliot, much improved by living in England, told us that humankind cannot bear too much reality. We don’t like truth very much, when it gets in the way of our strongly held opinions. And, oddly, and even worse, many of us don’t like being indebted to kindness. Especially that’s true of religious people. We don’t like to believe the truth that God has no favorites: that his love is for all. And, when she’s been nice to us, we often resent it, because it makes it difficult for us to moan about her goodness to undeserving others.

American religion is extraordinarily divers and complex. But the religious people who most capture attention are the nasties who make God in their own unkind image. We get all sorts of important debates spitefully skewed, so that religion and God seem to be grouchy and mean-spirited at best, or even vindictive and cruel.

For example: when I arrived in the USA in 2001, I was taken aback by this American religious obsession with abortion. Especially as most religions discussed and settled its basic outlines (usually in favor of the mother) centuries ago. Of course, only a fool could think that abortion is a good thing. But, in the name of God, what’s wrong with those who would deny a raped sixteen-year old girl control over her violated body. How is making her carry the fruit of that violation, a witness to a compassionate and generous God? God bless her if she chooses to, of course. But: if God provides wafers in the wilderness or, more important, forgiveness and hope and meaning to a disordered life, how come he gets tough with a wounded young girl in the biggest mess of her life? Why would he not be kind? And, as to the fetus: well, if God’s truly God and able to bring forth life and healing and hope, surely nothing is truly lost.

And why do such religious people often think that God’s the boss of the bedroom police? When, at the age of seventeen, I started taking an interested in the things of faith, the pastor to whom I spoke said nothing of ethical stances towards the cold war, or Vietnam, or the civil rights movement, or even how to be nice to grandma and the cat. He told me to keep myself pure for my wedding day. The fact that I stayed in the church suggests that the age of miracles isn’t yet dead. Or that I’m as much of a fool as he was. Or that I’ve always had a highly developed sense of the ridiculous, and a sort of weary compassion for human foolishness and foibles.

Why are people suspicious of a good and kind God? I don’t understand the psychology of those who prefer to make God in their own ornery image rather than bathe in everlasting grace. There are many biblical explanations for this human perversity. But I don’t want to go there.

To me, a much more interesting and important issue is: how do we discover and enjoy God’s inclusive kindness in a world where many of his self-identifying spokespeople are excessively unkind and exclusive?

Well, by looking at things with a wry humor, for a start. Whether it’s the stoicism of Edith and Ethel, up north in England, refusing to take their situation so seriously that they give in to its grimness and indignities. Whether it’s the Jewish storyteller of Moses’s life and times, commenting on his people’s faithlessness and foibles.  Whether it’s you and me, looking at our own lives and wondering what went wrong, refusing to blame others and soldiering on.

We could, of course, blame God. I myself have every intention of making full use of the complaints box when I get to St. Peter’s pearly gates. But often our complaints are self-serving whines. We look at the mystery of human suffering (wars, famine, natural disasters, all that sort of thing) and then, to give a very recent example: I drop my keys in Priscos store at the end of a difficult day and then sit in an immoveable car, fuming at life, the universe, the vegetable section, family, friends, bosses at work, and God. Everyone, except that dumb old klutz: me. And then, when a very nice young man comes out of the store bearing said keys, I startle him by saying: ‘Thank you, God’. Without, of course, wondering why God would take time out from cholera in Haiti, genocide in Syria, and hell on earth in North Korea, in order to scoop up my keys for me in Aurora, Illinois.

A sense of humor gives us a sense of proportion. We aren’t the center of the world’s attention, entitled to whatever we want, whenever we want it. And yet, sometimes, we hear an echo of Jesus’s humorous observation that every hair on our head is counted by God and think: ‘Is it so? Does God care? Even for me?’ Will he sometimes meet my needs, not out of a quantifiable sense of justice or fair play, but simply because he’s kind.

Preachers don’t talk much of kindness. They use, maybe overuse and abuse, the big words: love, justice, grace, sin – those sort of words. Me?: I’m OK with kindness. And, if God can be extraordinarily kind, it seems clear to me that we glimpse her in the kindness of others. In a town in Pakistan one day, I got thoroughly lost. Two young Muslim lads smiled at me, beckoned me over, put me on the back of their bullock cart, and the bullocks slowly and gravely took me to my hotel. It was out of the boys’ way, and they took no money for it. Not knowing that I knew their language, they did, however, tell standers-by along our route that I was an absent-minded old whitie whom my wife would do well never to let out of her sight. It was the time of the first Gulf War, so God had little time left over to deal with the consequences of my inability to read maps. Yet, when the boys dropped me at my hotel, hugged me and left my life for good, I felt: touched by holiness, immeasurably indebted to undeserved kindness.

Hang on there: how does momentary kindness sit alongside, say, the fact of cancer? So, here’s my cop out: we can sort out the philosophical and theological entail of these ruminations another day.

For the moment, I just want to tell you a sure fact. Many of the parables of Jesus, echoing biblical stories, picture God rather as a much later hymn writer did, when he wrote: ‘the heart of the Eternal, is most wonderfully kind’. And so, as an inference from that fact, we shall find glimpses of God, not necessarily among his voluble spokespersons, but more often in unlikely places – from illiterate, impolite, poor and excessively kind young Muslim boys, for example.

Pat Robertson, you may have heard, has graced us with another of his keen, compassionate insights. We can divorce our spouses with Alzheimer’s, in order to take up with another partner, so long as we provide them with suitable medical care. They are, after all, so he tells us, for all practical purposes: dead. This pastoral gem joins a string of others that have delighted our lives over many years. My personal favorite is his comment, in the wake of his failure to close a deal between his own bank and the Bank of Scotland, that: ‘Scotland is a dark land, overrun with homosexuals’. That caused me to phone many of my Scottish friends, asking why they had kept this from me.

Well, maybe Pat should try being kind. You never know: God might touch his life, thereby.

When you find God to be unreasonably kind, don’t grumble. And don’t take it for granted. And don’t resent her kindness to others. Just have the joy of it.

Advertisement