Author: George Glazier

The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost; October 11, 2026

Proper 23:  Exodus 32: 1-14, Psalm 106: 1-6, 19-23, Philippians 4: 1-9, Matthew 22: 1-14

Certainty 

Let’s pause to consider the level of uncertainty that accompanied the people of Israel. Since they left Egypt it has been one thing after another.  Will Pharoah’s army catch up to us and slaughter us?  Moses says:  Wait God will act.  He lifts his staff and, as the army is nipping at their heels, the waters part and they waltz through to the other side. They watch the waters recede and Pharoah’s army is overcome. Overcome by God through the words and actions of Moses!

But days roll on in the desert.  Little water even less food.  And then Moses tells us to wait until the next day and there is manna on the ground which can be made into bread. Saved once more!  Again, despairing of water, Moses raises his staff and strikes a rock in this unforgiving desert and there water bubbles up.  Moses is THE man!

Then comes the covenant assembly.  Will the people live their lives in a certain way (in response to the Ten Commandments) in thanks to the God who brought them up out of the land of Egypt? YES, the people respond.

Then Moses goes up on the mountain to work out the details.  But he is gone a long time.  Fear grows.  Moses has been gone a long time.  Is he coming back?  More important, Moses is not present to deal with the uncertainty.  So the people turn to Aaron to step into Moses’ sandals. Aaron asks them to give him the gold rings on the ears of their wives and children.  Aaron molds the gold with fire into a molten calf.  (He will later tell Moses that he just flung the gold into the fire and out came a calf.  Golden bulls or calves were often used to depict the seat of a deity in the Near East).  More disturbingly, Aaron said:  “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought up up from the land of Egypt.”  god with a S.  gods!  

Despite all the saving works of the ONE God, the people of Israel, in a time of uncertainty, are willing to turn to other gods because their leader Moses is gone.  And these gods, creations of fire and metal and human creativity are here.

Uncertainty and idolatry are closely related.  Every biblical literalist knows the uncertainty that will descend if even one word of scripture is not what it is supposed to be.

Kudzu

1876 World’s Fair introduced an ornamental vine from Southeast Asia to the American public.  It was Japanese arrowroot, a climbing vine in the “pea” family.  It can grow up to one foot per day up to 100 feet.  It became known as kudzu.  

It was not until the 1935 that kudzu became a project of the newly created Soil Conservation Service.  Think of the dust bowl stories.  Congress declared war on soil erosion and kudzu was the savior.  Channing Cope, a radio broadcaster in the Atlanta area, was an evangelist of the remarkable qualities of the plant:  It will make southern farms “live again.”  Southern land was “waiting for the touch of the healing vines.”

70 million kudzu seedlings were grown in nurseries.  To overcome the fears of farmers, the service offered to pay as much as $8 an acre for farmers to plant kudzu.  By the late 1940’s, farmers had found no real use for it and plowed it up by the roots or overgrazed it.  

But for those who designed and developed railroads and highways kudzu had a great use.  The steep grades were perfect for this kind of plant.  It was hardy and needed no care.  Yet, once introduced it took over and resisted eradication. Animals could eat it but were not going to graze next to highways and railroad tracks.

So, as a result of a climate disaster in the western prairies, an aggressive nationwide marketing campaign, some fervent evangelists like Channing Cope, and the uncertainty of the Great Depression and kudzu (a not so golden calf but a green one) was embraced and in the opinion of many southern writers the result was that kudzu ATE THE SOUTH.

Without the marketing and fervor and the fear, kudzu probably would have remained an ornamental plant on people’s porches.  Yet it is still with us, more in the South than here, where it rapidly climbsover trees and shrubs, it blocks sunlight, smothers other plants and alters local soil chemistry.  Uncertainty, like that of the Depression and the Dust Bowl, calls forth certainty – even when we sense we are grasping at straws.

The Wedding

Jesus spends a lot of time telling us that the kingdom is near, the kingdom is in us.  We are saved and should, like those attending a wedding banquet, celebrate.  The shepherd who finds the lost sheep, the woman whose bread is enriched by yeast to large proportions, the woman sweeping her house who finds the lost coin, the merchant who sells all he has to buy one pearl that is beyond price.

We hear these kingdom stories but the uncertainty of life seems more real to us.  Maybe on a Sunday or some other times we trust, have faith, that celebration is what we should embrace.  Will we, when we attend the great wedding banquet in heaven, or the various other banquets that take place here on earth, grab the beautiful wedding garment and adorn ourselves for the feast?  Or, will we, delay donning that garment because we have been disappointed so often or we can’t believe that God is going to give us what is beyond our imagining?  We will wait and see if it is all really true.

The uncertainty that is just a part of our lives works against embracing the gift of the kingdom. In Exodus uncertainty leads to idolatry. With kudzu uncertainty leads to quick certainty that turns out to be wrong.  The uncertainty inherent in being a human being leads us to postpone participation in today’s celebration, whatever they may be.  Fear is always stoking uncertainty in our lives.  

And Jesus is always challenging us to choose faith!  Accumulating money, ignoring climate change, putting our trust that those in power will do the right thing – these are not ways out of uncertainty.  Trust in God is our way, the truth, our life. Uncertainty is not erased.  It remains but we, in line with what Paul writes in Philippians, stand firm!

The Rev. Dr. George Glazier

Vicar, Trinity Church, London

Jesus is speaking to us, his disciples:

Consider for a few minutes, how much anxiety you have in your life.  What you eat?  What you will drink?  Will this add to your waistline?  Will that be good nutrition for my body? What do other people eat and drink?

Then consider – the birds of the air.  They do not even plant fields or gather crops but our Heavenly Father provides for them.  Are we not of more value than they are?

Life is more than food and drink!

Consider how we worry about clothing. Is this attractive? Is this style of clothing still in fashion?

Look at this view! See the green grass rolling to the lake.  Watch the wind move across it.  Are we not healed as we spend some time basking in the beauty of God’s creation?

Meditate on the truth that grasses and plants that sprang up in the early part of this year are headed to a compost pile or to rot on the land come winter.

If God so clothes the grasses of the field, alive today and dead tomorrow will not God also clothe us?

Life is more than clothing!

AND:  

Can any us by our worry add a single hour to our lives?

SO:  

Strive to have no worries . . . 

about what you will eat or what you will wear.  

God knows you need all these things – and more!

RATHER: 

strive first for God’s kingdom and God’s justice 

and all these things will be given to you

Finally REMEMBER:  

Today’s trouble is enough for today.

For God’s sake don’t worry about tomorrow …

for tomorrow will arrive with worries of its own.

Live right NOW … in this moment.  

In fact, with the words of St. Clare’s blessing that we hear on many Sundays … we can live without fear for our Creator has made us holy, has given us a world to sustain us and delight us and heal us and renew us. Our Creator loves us as a mother.  The blessing of the One God:  Source, Word and Spirit is upon us.

The Rev. Dr. George Glazier

Vicar, Trinity Church, London

 

The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost; September 27, 2026

Proper 21: Exodus 17: 1-7; Psalm 78: 1-4, 12-16; Philippians 2: 1-13; Matthew 21: 23-32

Not “My Three Sons”

I have made this comment before.  I think we would like Jesus’ parable in today’s gospel to be about three sons, not two.  Three children, not two.  What we specifically are looking for is a child who says YES to the parent and then follows through in addition to a child who says YES but does not follow through or who says NO but then repents and follows through.

The Exodus lesson today shows the people of Israel in pretty full rebellion about what they had to endure in the wilderness.  In essence they are saying they wished they had just given lip service to God when they were in Egypt and not followed Moses at all. Staying slaves in a place with food and water seems like a better idea now. They wish they were the “son” who said yes but did not go.  They are becoming the “son” who said NO but then repents and follows the will of God.  The pattern from the wilderness on, with some exceptions, is NO to the will of God; REPENTING when challenged for their opposition, and then FOLLOWING God.

There is a way to look at this parable of Jesus and see our relationship with the earth as stewards.

The prayer of Chingachgook

At the beginning of the 1992 movie, The Last of the Mohicans, it is 1757.  Hawkeye and Chingachgook, and his son, Uncas, are out hunting animals.  They come upon the trail of an elk and follow it until Hawkeye slings his musket into place and shoots the animal as it is running.  Over the body of the dead elk,  Chingachgook, prays:  “We’re sorry to kill you, Brother.  Forgive us.  We do honor to your courage and speed, your strength.” (1)

We don’t see what exactly follows but it becomes clear that they are hunting the animal for its hide, not for food.  They show up at a village where they can trade their hides for money. They are, like it or not, part of a global trade network.  They are killing animals – especially beavers – for their hides or fur.  Beaver hats were prized in Europe by the rich.  And as I said in last week’s sermon, those who study the rich today find that their wealth is a disconnection drug.  It was probably not any different in the mid-1700’s.  The rich wanted beaver hats and hides from the new world which, from reports they had, was teeming with animals and good land and great water.

So Hawkeye, Uncas and Chingachgook are caught up in work that is their way of making a living.  My sense is Chingachgook recognizes that killing an animal for its hide only – probably leaving all the meat and other valuable part of the animal in the forest – is wasteful.

But what can they do?  This is the way things are in their time.  They are the “sons” who do not want to go into the forest to benefit the greed of men beyond the ocean but they go anyway.

The Last of the Mohicans is fiction.  Whether it is the book or one of the movies, it is at its source written by a white colonist who knows a lot about colonists and less about native Americans.  But it does give a clear perspective on the greed that was underneath the founding of America.  The stories about religious freedom or about wanting democracy are true; but also true is that it was the greed of kings and queens in Europe and the capitalists in England who funded “companies” to settle areas.  At first they looked for gold but settled for tobacco, crops and the parts of animals that could be turned into gold on the global market.

In the story of America there is no third son who comes to our shores seeking only to do the will of God.  The motives are more mixed and our concept of the stewardship of this land is likewise mixed to this day.

Take your pick

When Jesus tells his parable in today’s gospel it is told to the chief priest and elders of the people.  They are IN authority.  Jesus is willing to reveal his authority but only if they answer his question about John the Baptist.  They reveal that they are afraid to answer it truthfully because the crowds loved John and they want to avoid the anger of the crowds.  And everyone knows they avoided being baptized by John.  This makes them better politicians than religious leaders.  This says nothing about Judaism but about religious leadership.  It is then that he tells this parable.  There are two kinds of children in this world, Jesus says.  The children to which God says:  Do justice, love your neighbor, walk gently on the earth, and so on. These children say:  Absolutely … but they don’t actually do it.  There is the other kind of child to whom God says:  Do justice, love your neighbor, walk gently on the earth and so on.  This child replies No, this is my land.  How I take care of it is my business not God’s.   But then later, they repent of their words and their attitude and try to love the neighbor and care for the earth.

Jesus’s point is that this latter group – the people he encountered who were among the tax collectors and prostitutes and others – these people were entering the kingdom of God through him.  In response to Jesus and his teaching, his insistence that God is good and generous to all, they were turning/repenting and therefore entering the kingdom by doing God’s will.  They are following through and he confronts the religious leaders with this truth.

Not “My Three Sons”

Where do we see ourselves – the first child or the second child – because Jesus does not include a child who hears God’s word and just does it? If that is who we think we are then we are mistaken.  There aren’t any children like this.  Well, there was ONE.  (See today’s epistle)

Repentance is the key, turning to God in a way that leads to doing what is right in relationship with the earth and all its creatures.  The prayer of Chingachgook is the beginning. As we never totally lose the image of God, despite our sins, so the earth and its creatures continue to disclose the image of God, even when they are marred by our sin.  This should call us to turn to God daily, to cease to impose our worst actions on the earth, and renew in us the image of God.

As our relationship with God renews in repentance, in turning to him, so does our relationship with the earth and its creatures. (2)

1. The words “forgive us” are not in the movie but in the original screenplay.
2. Philokala, pp. 36 ff

The Rev. Dr. George Glazier

Vicar, Trinity Church, London

The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost; September 20, 2026

Proper 20:  Exodus 16: 2-15; Psalm 105: 1-6, 37-45; Philippians 1: 21-30; Matthew 20: 1-16

Rebuttal

Hearing today’s gospel, I think many would want to interrupt this sermon for a rebuttal.  So, here is one:  Jesus, let me tell you is how things really are:  Yes, a landowner went out early to hire laborers to harvest his crop.  You have that much right.  But from there on you are divorced from reality.   When that landowners arrived at the market place, he began by berating the workers assembled for not have full-time jobs. To his way of thinking they were simply lazy.  He then began to negotiate with them for the lowest wage and then sent them into his vineyard.

Hearing from his foreman that there were too few workers to actually harvest the crop, the landowner really had no clear idea how many workers it took bring in the harvest, he just wanted to spend as little as possible, he went back to the market place.  Seeing workers standing idle, he berated them for their sloth.  Again he negotiated the lowest wage, lower than that for the first workers, and sent them into the vineyard.  This cemented in his mind the idea that the unemployed were so indolent that he needed to keep coming back to the market place to see who was there.  He came back at noon and 3 o’clock and hired more workers.  Then he took a siesta after the 3 o’clock hiring and then went back at 5 o’clock and what do you know there were more lazy workers.  He hired them them too.

As the sun was going down, he told his foreman to pay the first hired their wage, minus deductions for water consumed or use of a toilet in the fields.  If they had fainted from the heat, the amount of time they were incapacitated was withheld.  Each group of workers got paid less and less.  [What was their recourse?  Who could they tell?]

The last group of workers hired at 5 o’clock got nothing.  The landowner addressed them himself:  You could have shown up at the market place earlier if you really wanted to work.  If you are there early tomorrow I will think about hiring you again and then I will pay you for your work today.  Right now, I’m not paying you a dime. When they grumbled, the landowner said:  “Am I not allowed to do as I wish with my land? I will pay you what I think is right and you will take it or go elsewhere and work.

And all the laborers who worked in the field went home wondering how they could get food or provide for their families with either little or nothing to show for a day’s work.

And the landowner went home, added up what he had saved by shrewd negotiation, and sipped wine on his terrace.

The first will be first – this is way things are and ever shall be.  And the last will be last because this is the way the rich see it.  And today the rich, in evermore successful churches, find ways to justify their behavior.

The rich see the world differently

This is the conclusion of an author who studies the actions and thoughts of people with great wealth: “Wealth is a disconnection drug that keeps people apart and keeps them from building authentic connections and real community.  They tend toward ‘trusting their own kind.’ The ultra rich build compounds, live their personal lives out of sight of the regular folk.” “The wealthiest 20 Americans increased their net worth from 1.3 trillion to 3 trillion in the last 5 years.”

This is more than most of us can wrap our minds around.  I still revert to thinking of business people I have known that concentrate on making a good product or providing a necessary service and in return make a decent profit.  There are people like this left in our economy but the predatory, the super rich, the Epstein-class folks control more and more and as our “landowners” they are changing the bottom line for everyone.  For people of faith their success, their self perpetuating prosperity gospel, their absolute dominance over the economy and politics through their money make the economics of Jesus looks more and more far fetched.

Before we conclude that this has nothing to do with the integrity of God’s creation, we need to recognize that many of the greatest challenges to our environment come from the concentration of wealth as in agri-business, solar panels on farm land and data centers that need both large amounts of land and water.  The greed of the rich that wealth breeds often ends up assaulting the environmental in some way.  

What IS Jesus saying?

First, it is necessary to note that Jesus is speaking in a parable not necessarily a real story.  Second, it is a parable of God’s kingdom.  God’s kingdom is like THIS!  Third, it is easy to get bogged down in the details of hiring and payment. Standing a bit back from it the point is: BE GENEROUS AS YOUR GOD IS GENEROUS.  This is not the first time Jesus has taught this.  (See the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5: 42)

God, the owner of all that exists in our world, is generous with what is his.  His world exists to support everyone with a decent living or as Jesus puts it: give us today our daily bread. God’s truth will eventually triumph – those who seek to make themselves first in the world are doomed to be last in the kingdom.  Those who are seen as last in the world are valued and are first in the kingdom.  I don’t think the uber-rich are threatened very much by this truth.

Can we be generous like God?  This is the question.  We can seek to be and even in failing to be as generous as God we will accomplish much in the trying.  The New Zealand Prayer Book paraphrases 2 Corinthians 9: 6-7 this way:  “If we are generous, bountiful will be the harvest … when we help others, we will not just meet their needs, we will unleash a flood of gratitude to God.  Many will glory to God for our loyalty to the gospel and for our generosity.  God loves a cheerful giver. 

Today with so much that is predatory in our economy, not to mention the scams and the frauds, the landowner/business person who stays focused on being generous is a true saint.  The stockholders who forego another 1% increase in their profits to reinvest it for the benefit of their workers are exemplary. 

I wonder, how did things get this way?  Susan Neiman in a book, Call It Evil, writes “when self-interest becomes the basis of reason, evil no longer needs to justify itself.  It’s already mistaken for rationality.”  Maximizing self-interest is what Jesus’ landowner does not do. In today’s lingo that makes him a “sucker.”  When did self-interest become a legitimate substitute for the Golden Rule:  Do unto others as you would have them do unto you?”

The Rev. Dr. George Glazier

Vicar, Trinity Church, London