Today we gather once again to obey the command: “Do this in remembrance of me,” but scattered, separated from one another, missing and grieving what life once was. But the Eucharist has always been this way. Every Sunday of the past when we gathered for worship in our various churches, we were only ever a fraction of a church. Every single one of Dom Dix’s “hundred thousand successive Sundays” has been marked by absence and grief. From the very first time that Jesus’ disciples gathered after his death down to the present day, every Sunday’s congregation has been incomplete. Every Sunday, even in ordinary times, some of us were carrying the memories of departed spouses and parents and friends.

Jesus’ message today isn’t a riddle. It’s not an obscure historical reference. It doesn’t need to be unwrapped, or clarified, or revealed. It’s simple: Love God with all you have. Love your neighbor as yourself. But “simple,” I’m sorry to say, isn’t the same as “easy.”

Right now we’re experiencing one of those brief windows that rolls around in our national political life everyone once in a while in ordinary times, when religion and politics collide, and politicians and pundits try to figure out how to use the Bible to best bash their opponents into giving way. I call it “Render Unto Caesar Season.”

And now, just a few days later, it’s like a ’90s teenage comedy: Father Moses goes away for the weekend and takes too long coming back, and the kids throw a house party. Uncle Aaron, Moses’ own brother, is left in charge, and he’s kind of a pushover. Moses has been gone, communing with God for forty days and forty nights, and the people are over it. “We don’t know what happened to Moses and his ‘God,’” they seem to say. “But—you can make us a god!” And Aaron, inexplicably, does.

I’m sure you all know the name Nobel, as in “Nobel Peace Prize”; you may even know that the prize is named after Alfred Nobel. But most people don’t know very much about Alfred Nobel, so forgive me if you do. Alfred Nobel of Peace-Prize fame was an arms manufacturer, an industrialist and innovator who transformed his steel company into a major producer of cannons and industrial and military explosives.

You may not think you’ve heard this kind of call, or experienced this kind of gentle “repentance.” Too often in the Church we limit the meaning “vocation” to “ordination.” You might not the things that you do in your everyday life as a ministry. Maybe you’ve always thought of your life in separate slices: work, family, hobbies, church. But if you follow the logic of the parable, it becomes clear that it doesn’t matter whether our work in the vineyard happens through the Church or outside the Church, whether we think of the ways we love and care for one another as a Christian ministry or simple humanity. We don’t need to form a committee; we don’t even need the Rector’s approval! Because it doesn’t really matter, in the end, what we say about our work or how we talk about it. What matter is whether we do it.

If you’re listening to this sermon right now, there’s a pretty good chance that you’re a “first-hour” kind of person. If you’re willing to log on to the twenty-eighth week of online church or to sit on a folding chair outside, you’re probably a pretty committed person in general. Some of you have kept the church functioning during a long, hard interim period. Some of you have been the linchpin of the office, coordinating everything while people are working from home...Even if you’re not quite so diligent as these early birds—maybe you’re a third- or a sixth-hour person—I’m guessing that you’ve all had experiences of those eleventh-hour workers.