For Feb 8

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Sermon Notes: Dayenu: It Would Have Been Enough

Intro: Today is Super Bowl Sunday. Two teams of highly skilled players, led by elite coaches with years of experience, who have trained and worked hard for months to post the best records in their divisions, will lead their teams competing to see who will be the best. As complex as this game can be, though, I’ve never understood how, despite the head coaches’ many years of experience and expertise, chosen for their proven ability, having studied hours of film on their opponents, announcers, who have never coached pro football, or made the Football Hall of Fame as players, can constantly interject during the game what a coach should call, or should have called, explaining from their distant booths what they would have done. And yet we, like them, may also be guilty of that in our prayers when we tell Almighty God what we think He should do, as if we knew better. Advising the God who created the universe, who already knows our past, present, and future.

 

I. There Is No God Like Our God

A. But today we’ve come to praise and honor our eternal Head Coach, our great God, who is not only our Creator, but the One who knows us like no one else can. Our opening hymn praised Him, singing How Great Thou Art. Our Call to Worship recognized His greatness, the only God who does miracles among us, displays his power, and leads us on paths or righteousness. None of us can even come close to God’s holiness or perfection. Those who truly love God recognize all He has already done for us. Those who humbly understand that all we have is because of God’s Grace, His undeserved favor, and not because we earned or deserved it.

B. In a Communion scene in The Chosen series, Jesus and His disciples are at the Passover Meal, and Jesus asks John to begin The Dayenu, which I later learned translates “it would have been enough". The Dayenu is a traditional song from the Passover litany Haggadah, primarily recounting the Exodus narrative as a litany of Passover events, like leaving Egypt, and crossing the Red Sea. Dayenu’s 15 stanzas represent 15 gifts God bestowed. The first five involve Israel’s liberation from Egyptian slavery; the next five describe the miracles in the desert; and the last five are for the closeness to God He gave them: leading them to Mt Sinai, giving them Torah, the Promised Land, Shabbat, and the Temple. Each stanza is then followed by Dayenu "it would have been enough", It would have been like, If He had only brought us out from Egypt, and hadn’t carried out judgments against them, Dayenu, or It would have been enough. Or, “If He had only parted the Red Sea for us to cross through, and not imposed judgement on the pursuing Egyptians, Dayenu, It would have been enough. It’s expressing that, if God only given one of those gifts, it would have been enough, thereby implying appreciation for all His gifts.

C. I was surprised to learn the Dayenu was a traditional Hebrew song that had been sung for over 1,000 years from the Passover Haggadah, much like The Chosen had portrayed it, and that The Dayenu was an important part of the Passover observance. I was even surprised to learn that it’s still part of the Passover observance in the Jewish faith today. The Passover is a joyous celebration of liberation from Egyptian slavery, and the Dayenu is sung as a hand clapping, joyous song, with impromptu verses of “it would have been enough to... (then naming a current event), followed by a refrain of repeating Dayenus, that sounds much like the song God is So Good that many of us may be familiar with.

D. So, since Communion is an extension of the Passover, celebrating our liberation from sin’s slavery through the sacrifice of the Perfect Lamb, Jesus, I thought it would be interesting to apply the concept of Dayenu to our Communion service today, because, like the Jewish Dayenu, it would reflect that even without all His miracles, Jesus’ just liberating us from sin would be worth singing about. But a key word of such celebration would be Grace, our undeserved favor of the Father who gave us Son, Jesus, to liberate us from sin’s eternal death. So, like the Jewish Dayenu expressing that it would have been enough for God to lead Israel out of Egyptian slavery, our Christian Dayenu would express that it would have been enough for the Father to send His Son Jesus to be Crucified for our sins, and Resurrected from the dead to lead us to salvation. It would have been enough, but Jesus is so much more. Since Jesus is the second person of our Triune God, we use Jesus and God interchangeably. God’s Grace was evident even before Jesus’ incarnation.

 

II. Matthew 20:1-15

A. Our Gospel Lesson addresses the Grace of our God in Jesus’ parable of the Workers in the Vineyard. In this parable, the landowner symbolizes the Father, and the workers symbolize those who are called to work in His service. At 6 AM, the beginning of the workday, the owner hires a number of workers he sees looking for work, to work in his vineyard. He agrees to pay each worker a denarius, a fair day’s wage at that time. When the owner comes to the marketplace at nine, then noon, and again at three, he sees men still unemployed and hires them all to work in his vineyard for a fair wage.

B. Now, the owner doesn’t look to his vineyard to see how many workers are already there and what still needs to be done. He seems to only see men who need work and by his grace, hires them all. He even goes back to the marketplace at five, as work for the day is finishing, and seeing more unemployed workers, hires all of them to work in his vineyard. Not just who might have been needed, but all of them. Does this seem to be an owner concerned about his vineyard, or someone more concerned with the workers? 

C. The problem comes at the end of the day, when the owner has his foreman pay the five o’clock hires first, giving them the full day’s fair wage of one denarius. By the time the 6 AM workers who were hired first are paid, they’re expecting more than the agreed upon full day’s wage, and complain, That’s not fair!  After all, they’d worked longer hours in the hot sun. But the owner disagrees. He had paid them the fair wage they agreed on, and they had the assurance of being employed and receiving a denarius at the end of the day. Didn’t the owner have the right to be as generous as he chose to be with his own money?  So, the five PM hires saw the owner as fair, while the 6 AM workers saw him as unfair. Instead of being grateful for what they had been given, they found it unfair that others had been given the same wage for less work. If the first hires had taken a Dayenu perspective, they would have seen their wages as “it would have been enough” that they had had the assurance of work at a fair wage. But they expected more. They were looking beyond the owner’s grace and telling him what they thought the owner should do with his vineyard. But without the owner’s grace, perhaps not even all those who had been hired at 6 AM would have been hired, and the rest would have been left on their own. But still, they saw the owner’s grace as unfair.

E. But that’s what Dayenu is all about. The early hires should have been grateful for the owner meeting their daily need as “it would have been enough”, rather than seeing what they received by grace was not enough based on what grace was given to others. But God’s Grace is not earned, but given from His generous nature.

 

III. II Corinthians 12:2-10

A. In his second epistle to the Corinthian Church, Paul talks about God’s working in his life. He talks about a man who had been caught up to the third heaven, which is where God would have resided. The first heaven would be the sky we see above us. The second heaven would be what we call outer space, where the sun, moon, and stars are located. And the third heaven would be God’s heaven.

B. The man Paul was referring to seems to have been taken to heaven, like the Apostle John in the Book of Revelation. Paul wasn’t sure if, like John, it was a bodily or spiritual experience. Paul would boast about that man’s awesome experience, but he would not boast about his own experiences, which he could have truthfully done. Paul had many amazing encounters through the Holy Spirit, and even Jesus Himself. But Paul didn’t want to be thought of from the perspective of those events, lest he be thought of as conceited. Since they were given from God’s grace, He couldn’t boast about them without becoming conceited about having deserved such grace. He wanted to be seen for his own weaknesses, so that anything he might have accomplished would have been seen as the strength of Christ. He refers to being given a thorn in His flesh to hinder him.

C. There’s been much debate about what that thorn in His flesh was. Some suggest epilepsy; others suggest poor eyesight resulting from the temporary blindness from his first encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus. Some feel it was a speech impediment, like a lisp, or stuttering. But whatever that thorn was, wasn’t as important as its effect on him. It prevented him from becoming conceited and feeling powerful by his own merits, or seen that way from other people’s perspective. He even pleaded with the Lord three times to have it removed, but the Lord’s answer was “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.

D. This answer is reminiscent of John the Baptist saying at Jesus’ baptism that he must then decrease, so Jesus could increase. John was seen as a powerful man of God. Even Herod Antipas feared him, imprisoning him to silence him rather than kill him, until Herodias forced his hand. But John’s decrease meant Jesus would be seen as the Messiah as John’s prominence faded, his mission fulfilled. From that perspective, rather than Paul being seen for his power, his weakness would have allowed him to be seen as a servant of Jesus, and that it was Christ’s power working through Paul. So, Paul says it’s why he delighted in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecution, and difficulties. So that, in his own weakness, his strength would be seen as coming through Christ. So, Paul’s Dayenu was that it would have been enough for him to have known the surpassing power of Christ, but he was grateful to have been called to suffer for Christ, as a witness of His power.

E. At the beginning of this message, I used the football announcer analogy to raise the question of whether our prayers might be telling God what He should do, or how He should run His Kingdom. Are we like the hired workers, overlooking His Grace, telling God how to manage His kingdom and expecting more?  Or, are we like Paul, willing to accept God’s grace in our lives as sufficient to meet His, and our needs?

F. In Communion, we find our own expressions of Dayenu. It would have been enough if Jesus had died to pay the penalty for our sins, but in Communion He shows us His love in laying down His life for us. This is my body, broken for you, my blood of the new covenant for the forgiveness of sin. It would have been enough that He had risen from the dead, but He appeared to His disciples and loved ones to reassure them of all He had told them, and what the prophets had foretold, was Truth.

 

Conclusion: It would have been enough for each of us to know Jesus, but He gives life to His Church so we can gather, study His Word, share in His love, and encourage each other on our way to His Kingdom. All by His grace. His sufficient Grace. Amen.