Proper 20 Year A 2026

 Last June, my head was in a constant state of fog. Nothing I did would make the fog lift. I tried everything. The internet suggested an ice cold shower, which I tried despite my preferred shower temperature being so hot that my husband likes to say we could put some pasta in there with me and have dinner when I get out. Nothing worked. On top of the constant fogginess, I was having debilitating panic attacks, even in the middle of the night. I would look back on my Fitbit the next morning and you could see on the heart rate monitor where it jumped to 120 from a dead sleep. When I brought it up to my therapist, I felt like a failure. People have been existing forever in much higher stress situations than mine. Why couldn’t I fix this myself? No matter how many times I say “we’re not meant to do this alone”, I expected myself to do it alone. When I went to the doctor, I described my symptoms and he immediately had a plan. He said, “if there was something wrong with your leg, we’d fix it. Let’s fix this.” By Thanksgiving, when we went around the table and said things we were thankful for, one of mine was Lexapro. Because I felt like myself again. I was sleeping better. I had more patience with my kids. And every slight bump didn’t cause my adrenaline to skyrocket. All because I had asked for help.

But my feelings of anxiety are nothing new. They are named in the Collect, where we asked for relief from anxiety about earthly things, and elaborated upon in all of our lessons today. This collect, a prayer that collects our theological thoughts surrounding a particular day or event, reflects the tumultuous times of the barbarian invasions. It is from the oldest surviving liturgical book of the Roman Rite, where it was used as a collect for use on Ascension Day. Our translation is from William Bright’s Ancient Collects, and was not in the Book of Common Prayer until 1979 - our current Prayer Book. While our lessons cycle every three years, our collects don’t. So every year on Proper 20 - The Sunday closest to September 21 - we pray this same collect of the day.

But the answer isn’t as simple as our collect makes it seem to be: set our minds on things heavenly. I couldn’t pray away my body’s physical reaction to what I was feeling, no matter how hard I tried. There are plenty of times when prayer is part of a holistic approach to whatever is going on in our lives. Because prayer is not about throwing out our wishes and hoping God magically grants them. And as magical as the results seem to be in our Exodus reading, the people still had a part to play. The people throughout the exodus are highly anxious presences, no matter what God gives them. In the chapter before today’s reading, they walked across the Red Sea on dry land, and then sang a song of thanksgiving to God for bringing them out of slavery and delivering them from their pursuers. Then they didn’t have water and God helped them find clean, or “sweet” as the text says, water. And right after those miracles of God protecting and providing for them, they’re back to their “this wilderness sucks, I’m hungry, remember how great it was to be enslaved” nonsense. And as much as they complained, rather than chastise them, the Lord granted them manna - which literally means “what is it” - and quail. They were instructed to have trust in the Lord and gather only the amount needed for the day - two days, if the next day is the sabbath. We were discussing this text during Holy Curiosity on Thursday and looked up how big a quail is and they’re only about half a pound. My mom told me four quail fit in a 9-inch square baking dish. So it would be easy to collect just the right amount of quail for your family as opposed to something bigger like a chicken. The consequence of not trusting and gathering too much resulted in rotten bread and quail.

We are met with anxiety in our Gospel lesson as well. The day laborers who were hired first saw that the day laborers who were hired last were getting a full day’s wages, and therefore decided they were due more than the originally agreed-upon amount. We feel that kind of anxiety today all the time: the anxiety of feeling like someone is getting one over on you. That you’re being made a fool of by being short changed. But none of these people were being cheated. Everyone agreed on the wage. There is nothing in the text to suggest the owner of the field was  not paying a fair day’s wage - to the contrary, the text calls it “the usual day’s wage”. So what’s really going on here? The owner of the vineyard hits it right on the nose at the end of the story: “are you envious because I am generous?”

Envy is anxiety’s first cousin. During Covid, I remember receiving criticism that a livestream being run from a single camera thanks to the senior warden’s film student son lacked the production quality of what was coming out of Washington National Cathedral. Instead of the person focusing on the gift of staying connected during extremely difficult circumstances, instead of looking at our ability to use the budget, staffing, and talent we had available at our parish (which was much smaller than that available at WNC), they focused on grumbling about what we didn’t have without offering any positive contribution to make it better.

This is one of the most anxiety-ridden times of the church year for me: stewardship. Where there’s the world’s tiniest needle that must be threaded. One must talk about money enough to raise enough money to keep the lights on and the staff paid for another year, but not too much or it becomes tacky and distasteful because “all they talk about is money”. How much is too much? Who knows. 

One of my favorite exercises to do at Vestry retreats is a pie-in-the-sky dreaming exercise. It starts with “someone has given us 2 million dollars. What do we want to do?” It’s a large enough sum that it’s basically the equivalent of asking “if we had more than enough to calm our budgetary anxiety, what would we do?” It’s so much fun because people loosen up and dream big. You can see their shoulders relax. How much of what we want to do costs money? Certainly a big share. It takes money to supply the staff and volunteers with the necessary physical means to achieve what we feel we are called to do. 

We would serve ourselves well (like the Israelites did when they remembered in psalms of thanksgiving and praise) to remember that we worship a God of abundance. A God who encourages us to dream. One of the psalms appointed for noonday prayer begins, “When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion / then were we like those who dream. / Then was our mouth filled with laughter, / and our tongue with shouts of joy. / Then they said among the nations, “The Lord has done great things for them” / The Lord has done great things for us, / and we are glad indeed.” (Psalm 126)

We are called to love things heavenly. To not cling too tightly to things that pass away but to hold on to things that endure. What does it look like to loosen our grasp? And I don’t just mean the grasp on our pocketbooks. What does it look like to cling less tightly to our schedules? To be less busy and less overwhelmed? To cling less tightly to an old grudge? To cling less tightly to the way things have been done in the past? What does it look like to hold fast to the things that endure? To spend more time with the ones we love? To play a game with our kids? To have coffee with an old friend? To set aside time for prayer? As our psalm today says, “Search for the Lord and his strength; / continually seek his face”. To live as though we are continually seeking the Lord is how we set our hearts in a way to love those heavenly things that will endure. Amen.