Well, it has been quite a week has it not?  The experience of having no electrical power at the church for most of the week, and at home until late yesterday – has been challenging.  I have to say that it was truly surprising to me how absolutely disorienting it was.  And how exhausting it was to have this interruption in the normal routines of life.  The grocery store wasn’t working right – the stop lights weren’t working right – the coffee pot would not make coffee – the coffee shops were not open – getting gasoline, and ice, and finding something to eat every day took so much more thought and effort and energy than it typically does.  At the end of every day I was exhausted.  And when yesterday noon came and there still was no power at home, if I had been able to locate the Moses of AEP (American Electric Power), I would have been grumbling, and mumbling, and murmuring like the Israelites.

I’m guessing that if you were without power, or you’re still without power, that you found, as I did, that doing everything differently is disorienting.  About Thursday I began to realize that I had compassion for people who resist change.  I really could understand these Israelites.  I began to understand that it’s not just a conscious decision to resist change – it is that change is really truly difficult for human life.

A change in routine literally confuses your body.  We have muscle memory.  Now if you do not know what muscle memory is, I’ll tell you.  It’s what made you flip the light switch when you went through the door even though you knew the light wasn’t going to come on.  Any of you do that?  More than once?  Every time you went into the room?  My head knew that light switch was not going to produce light.  But my muscle memory was so trained that when I walked through the doorway of the bedroom or the bathroom or the kitchen – I just reached for that switch and then I would go “Ugh!” No light! When I was hungry I opened the refrigerator although I personally had taken everything out of it.

I did my fair share of murmuring this week – both to myself and anyone else who would listen.  And my experience is nothing – our experience is nothing – compared to so many on the Gulf Coast.  For so many of those folks, normal is a long, long way off.

When I finally got to a friends’ home yesterday, and could spend some time on the computer, I looked at the New York Times on-line.  I read about what some folks in Galveston and Houston are facing, and I felt fortunate.

But you know, perhaps those Israelites maybe weren’t just ungrateful and difficult to please.  Maybe they really were struggling with the difficulty of having life the way they had known it come to an end.

The electricity began to come on, of course for us, gradually as the week went on.  The street lights came on and then the stop lights began to work and it was a little more familiar driving up and down High Street.  And by late on Thursday most of the stores on High Street had some sort of electricity.  The church had part of our power on Thursday and all of it finally on Friday.  Except it took till today for the internet and phone to start working properly.  But as Thursday came, and Friday came, and power was restored all around me, I saw that the map that AEP published said that I could expect power at my house on Saturday.  Friday afternoon, I worked at the church.  I was not able to do everything I wanted to do here, but was at least able to work on the computer a little bit, and to print some things, and I could charge my cell phone – there were things I could really do.

Then, I headed home, and as I went up High Street I noted that two more stop lights were now working, and as I turned the corner onto my street I saw that Overbrook Presbyterian Church had a light on.  They’re on my street! I was excited – I’m going to have power early – a whole day early.  And I drove a little farther down the street and I saw that the houses on the left across the street from me had some lights on outside above their garages.  And I thought – YES we have power.  So I pushed the garage door button – and nothing happened.  And I thought, well, maybe it’s just the garage.  And so I got out of the car and unlocked the door and went in the house and flipped on the kitchen light and nothing happened – nothing.

Well, our power came on exactly when it was promised it would come on – it came on sometime late yesterday.  We weren’t home when it came on.  But the truth is, we got our power restored on the very day we had been promised all along we would get it.  And yet, like the vineyard workers who received the promised wage for a full days work, I found myself mumbling discontent that around me others had gotten their lights turned on earlier than promised, and I had not.

We humans are in general prone to discontent; it’s kind of a default setting for us.  We like to mumble, and grumble.  We’ll even compare stories to see who had it the worst.  We want what we used to have – or we want what we don’t have yet – or we want what our neighbors have – or we may even resent it when we got what we were promised but someone else got something different.

Whenever our tendency to make comparisons leaves us feeling we have come up short, our default setting is discontent.  When our value judgment is that we have lost something, our default setting is discontent.

Moses very nearly had a rebellion on his hands with the discontented Israelites.  Discouraged by the difficulties of moving forward toward the Promised Land they began to compare their present circumstances with those of the past.  And even a past marked by slavery and cruel treatment began to look favorable, preferable, to an uncertain future.  “At least,” they said to Moses, “we might have died at the hands of the Egyptians but we would not have died hungry.” They murmured.  They murmured all along the way.  This is not the only murmuring story in the Hebrew bible.

But as I said, I began to empathize with these Israelites who were struggling to learn a new way of being.  And I began to empathize as well with the vineyard workers who discovered that those who had worked fewer hours than them had received the same pay.  That story that Jesus tells in Matthew’s gospel just assaults our sensibilities.  We are used to the value of our work matching the value of our compensation.  In our economic world, that’s what’s considered fair.  But the truth is, the workers who worked all day long got a fair day’s wage – exactly what they were promised.  What caused their discontent was comparing themselves with others.

But these stories are not about just our discontent.  They’re about God.  The Israelites, discontented as they were, had been led into the wilderness by the hand of God.  God had made a promise to bring them to the Promised Land, and yet, they were murmuring.

We prefer the limits and the security of known reality – the past – more than we prefer the insecurity of divine promise and possibility.  And we prefer systems based on merit and perceived privilege more than we prefer God’s economy of abundant grace.  Our discontent arises when we misunderstand our preferences for God’s provision.

We like to win.  We like to be first.  And we like for things to be convenient for us.  And here is how I noticed that this week when I did find a coffee shop that was open for my cup of coffee.  One morning I overheard a conversation between some folks who said that AEP workers ( who by the way were working 18 hour shifts) had come in someplace to get a cup of coffee had had things thrown at them by people.  And then I heard that we’re not very nice to our football team when they lose a game.  I heard that yesterday when Todd Boeckman came out on the field, people booed him.

Oh my, we are a mumbling, grumbling group of people are we not?  But you know, God allows mumbling.  It may not always be polite and it may not always be the right thing to do – but God heard the mumbling and the grumbling of the Israelites.  In fact, God responds to the lament of the people and their hunger.  There is a long tradition in the Hebrew Bible of people complaining to God.  Now that should tell us what we need to know about God.  God is a God who hears and responds to our laments.  God is a compassionate God, and all along in the journey of the Hebrew people, God works in the concrete reality of the specific circumstances in which God’s people find themselves to provide for them.  And in today’s text we learn that God provides faithfully and daily.  The manna came every day, every day.  And for that reason there was no reason to hoard it, it was not to be hoarded.

In this kind of radical dependence on God, the Israelites learn – and we are invited to learn along with them – that God is daily, faithfully, compassionate and reliable.

The workers in Jesus’ parable all needed to earn a fair wage.  And the vineyard owner provided a fair wage to everyone without taking away anything from anyone who had arrived earlier and worked longer.  It cost these grumbling workers nothing for all of them to be adequately provided for.  The cost was to the vineyard owner.

What Jesus was modeling in this story is that aspect of the character of God that takes as much care for those who come last as it does for those who come first.  So we need not work so hard and relentlessly to secure first place in the world, or mumble and grumble when we don’t get it, because God is mindful of those who are in last place.  In fact, more than once Jesus says, for God, the last are first.

This was a scary week.  At 5 o’clock last Sunday night, I took off in an airplane from Port Columbus.  Do you know how hard the wind was blowing at 5 o’clock?  I look back and I cannot believe I got on that plane.  We were safe, although it was a little bit of an anxious takeoff.  But that meant that Monday and most of Tuesday, I was out of town.  I was at a meeting in Nashville and so I was away from what was happening here in Columbus.  It began to appear to me as I thought about it, that I was sitting in this hotel in these meetings just carrying on as if everything was fine in the world, when in fact, the world was falling apart all around.  It wasn’t just that there was no power at the church, and no power at home, and no power in most of your homes here in Ohio.  It was also that the news coming out of Wall Street was horrible and unprecedented and unnerving – and that was before it got worse.  I was anxious to get home, and be in my home, and be here in the church, and check in with the staff, and make sure all of you were alright.  I really did feel like everything was falling apart.

So, if the Israelites felt they had left the only security they ever new, I think we know how they felt.  We do face serious problems in our world and we are anxious.  We are anxious.  We are anxious about our money and our economic security.  We are anxious because the infrastructure that supports our daily lives seems more fragile.  And the institutions upon which we have relied are fragile.  And we are disoriented because it is different.

It is just at this place that we need to take the greatest care to guard against the mumbling and grumbling that can turn us back toward the past.

Our temptation at such a time as this is not unlike that of the Israelites.  We are tempted to choose false illusions about security and easy platitudes in the face of complex problems.  What we are invited to do, is to trust daily that there is a God, who in the present circumstances of our lives, is working to bring us into the future.

God is not a God who is content to leave us in the past, and God is not a God who is able to leave us in the present.  God is a God who uses the memory of the past and the resources of the present to create possibilities for a hopeful, just, and trustworthy future.  And furthermore, God is not a God who respects earned privilege and power.  That’s part of the lesson of the vineyard story.  So as we create our new future with God, as we stay steady in our reliance on God’s daily provision, we may need to listen.  Not just to the wisdom of tried-and-true experience, but to those who came at 5 o’clock.  To the young who have less of an attachment to the past.

There is an antidote to the murmuring that went on in the wilderness and the grumbling that went on in the vineyard.  There is an antidote to the murmuring and the grumbling that goes on among us.  There is an antidote to our discontent with the present that wants to pull us back to the past.  And that antidote is this: memory in conversation with gratitude.

The proper place for the past is in memory – and over and over again in Israel’s history they will use the power of the memory of the past to remind them what God has already done for them so that in the present they can hope for what God will do for them.

When we remember what God has done, and we are grateful for what God is doing today, we can trust what God will do.

I struggled with gratitude this week.  I caught myself up short.  You know, somewhere late in the week I really needed an attitude adjustment.  I was tired.  I was tired of the inconvenience.  I was tired of having to think about everything differently.  But I forced myself to be grateful.  I had a roof over my head.  It was neither too warm nor too cold outside for comfort.  I had flashlights and batteries, and the hardware store was open, without electricity, so we could get what we needed.

Many of us have talked about our gratitude for neighbors who helped us, or checked on us, or called us on the phone to see if we were OK.  I had a hard-working and caring staff here at the church.  I could hardly grumble about no coffee in the morning when there were people who didn’t have power for breathing machines, and oxygen, and feeding tubes.

The antidote to our fear about the future is trust in God.  God, who hears our complaints, who honors our fears, who remembers the past with us – but relentlessly, faithfully, daily, provides for our present so that we can trust God for the future.

I’m anxious.  You’re anxious.  The world isn’t the way it used to be.  But God, has been there before, is there today, and will be there tomorrow.  It is a daily, daily, daily, practice to trust God.  We are invited into that practice: memory and gratitude.

Amen.