You see, sometimes it’s not such a bad thing to be put in your place. For many of us, the orbits of our lives have gotten so much smaller over the past months. We feel so much less in control of what we can do and where we can go. Our hurts and our flaws seem to surface more quickly and stand out more starkly on the small stages of our coronavirus lives. It all takes its toll. But grace doesn’t work by giving us greater control over our lives and our world or by making our sins and anxieties and unhelpful habits just go away. No, sometimes grace goes to work on us by locating us. By saying, “You are small, and you are broken, but you are here. In all this beautiful vastness that belongs ultimately only to God, all of who you are is part of all this too.”
Intercessory prayer changes us as much as it does the person or persons for whom we are praying. As we lift up each name before God, we are somehow lifted up to God as well. We carry the messiness and the murkiness of our own lives, and our hope for ourselves and others in the midst of that messiness and murkiness into the life and light of God. And God listens. And God cares. And God acts. And often, God weeps.
Friends, we are still tripping and falling over the inverted, impossible logic of the cross, and it is breaking us to pieces, just as Jesus said it would. We tell ourselves we’re on the side of justice, when mercy was and is God’s way by which things are set straight. Because mercy was knit deeply by God into the way things are.
The story of Exodus is a story about how hard it is for anyone to be set free from Pharaoh. How does one stop serving the gods of greed and accumulation and begin to trust the God who feeds everyone only enough for each day? How do you unlearn the habits of domination and subjugation, to learn the sort of independence that entails mutual, community-wide thriving? How can we begin to trust the kindness and mercy of God… and maybe just as importantly, become people of kindness and mercy?
We learn the ways of the kingdom of heaven as we practice the art of receiving and the art of letting go. So that maybe one day, to the vineyard owner’s question, “Are you envious because I am generous?” a eucharistic people will come to answer, “Yes. But we are starved for another way of being. Deliver us from our obsessions with fairness and status and anything but grace. Teach us to receive our lives from your hand, so we can turn back to your beloved vineyard and let what we’ve been given go. We’ve at least begun to see that your kingdom will not come to us any other way.”