September 20, 2020
The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 20A
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This is the final week of your 2-week trial of free weekly preaching resources from the Living Church. To continue to receive this free resource after today, click below.
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Themes for the week:
work, complaining, fairness, God’s mercy, death,
suffering for Christ, reward
This Sunday’s Readings: Ex. 16:2-15 or Jonah 3:10-4:11 • Ps. 105:1-6, 37-45 or Ps. 145:1-8 • Phil. 1:21-30 • Matt. 20:1-16
“In virtually every parish you can find at least one parishioner — typically a lifelong, faithful, dedicated, and hardworking church member — who freely admits to finding today’s Gospel deeply scandalous and disturbing. This person openly identifies with and endorses the complaint made by the laborers hired at the beginning of the day, who ‘grumbled at the householder, and said, “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.”’” Read it all.
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Preaching Today
Anna Matthews: Front of the Queue
(A Sermon)
“Look around. There are people here who’ve served God faithfully for decades. And there are people who’ve come to faith very recently. They’re loved the same. There are people who give to the church sacrificially in terms of time or money or gifts, and there are those who just occasionally come for a service. They’re loved the same. There are some people who’ve lived lives of faithful integrity, and some who’ve really screwed things up. They’re loved the same.”
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Classic Texts
Edward Pusey: God Calls Us at All Times
“He bids us, ‘Go work in My vineyard, and whatever is right I will give you.’ He promises not to us, as to those first laborers, a certain hire. Even while he would wholly restore us to His mercy, he would keep us in the humility of penitents… This is our true hope and trust and gladness in our toil, that we do not labor with any calculating spirit, or to set up for ourselves any claim with God; the rewards of desert were finite; the reward of grace infinite, even himself, who has said, ‘I am your exceeding great reward.’”
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Articles on This Sunday's Texts
Elizabeth Baumann: Manna
“We’d like to believe that if we had only seen these great acts of God first-hand, we would never doubt him. Here’s the thing: God’s deliverance is never enough for us, any more than it was for the Israelites. We forget God’s faithfulness, no matter how powerfully we have experienced it, as soon as we’re hungry or thirsty or tired. We are fragile: without sleep, we die. Without water, we die. Without food, we die.”
Brandt Montgomery: Christ’s Presence in Suffering
“Sadly, the ultimate healing that God gives, the passage from this mortal life to eternal life with him, is a healing we do not get to see; what we see is the death of our loved ones. And so we experience conflicted emotions, rejoicing in healing and the promise of resurrection to new life, but weeping because we are not yet able to see it visibly.”
Robert Fruewirth: Julian for the Whole of Our Lives
“But if we sit with ‘all shall be well’ and the promise of unconditional love for any period of time, something else comes to the fore. We discover in ourselves an opposition to God’s way of loving, and even to God’s promise of making all things well. We discover that we don’t love and don’t want to love as broadly and unconditionally as God loves — and we don’t want God to love that way either.”
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