“Breaking
Through”
Matthew
20:1-16
First
Presbyterian
The
Reverend Thomas A. Sweet
September
18, 2011
A Texan was driving in the back country
of
That little story makes me think of the
parable we read today and of its typical interpretations that mostly miss what
Jesus intended by it to say. On the
surface, the parable seems unfair, unjust, and unsettling.
I’ll never forget a young man in one of our confirmation commissioning
classes announcing his verdict on the parable when first hearing it.
“That’s just ridiculous,” he said.
A lot of us agree with him when we assign it a meaning Jesus did not
intend: “It’s impractical.”
“You cannot run a business that way.”
“How am I going to motivate my employees if I pay them equal wages for
unequal work?” No other parable
has engendered more griping and grousing than this one.
But Jesus is not rolling out a business
plan or a compensation chart. This
parable comes from another realm, the one that Jesus calls the kingdom of
heaven, that “place” in our soul that finds union with God.
The context of the parable is found at the end of the preceding chapter
when Peter said to Jesus, “We (meaning
the disciples) left everything and
followed you. What do we get out of
it?” Wrong question, Peter.
The kingdom of heaven – the other gospels call it the kingdom of God
– does indeed provide benefits and riches, but not the kind the world gives
and not the kind the world values. The
kingdom of heaven is not a commodity to be bought and sold, not something to be
used to our advantage over against others. It
is a consciousness in which to live toward our full and true humanity.
It is a consciousness meant to salt the earth, to be a light for the
world. It is a consciousness to be
lived in this world that, like a pinch of leaven in dough, makes the whole loaf
rise.
The thing about the consciousness of
the world is that it wants to place a value on everyone.
One of the primary ways we determine the stature and value of a person is
by the size of his or her income. Many
of us judge ourselves that way. But
this story Jesus tells announces the good news of an alternative way of
determining ours and others’ value – not by how much we earn, not how long
we work, not by our seniority or productivity, not by our maleness or
femaleness, not by our youth or age – but simply because we are.
And “we who are” all get treated generously by God.
The parable reflects our status before
God. None of us has a claim on God
but every day God calls us to labor in his vineyard, to be a part of his life.
The agreement is that we as laborers in God’s vineyard, God sustains
our life day by day. This is
symbolized by the fact that our compensation is “the usual daily wage.”
“Give us this day our daily bread,” Jesus taught the disciples
to pray. The workers are given only
enough for each day lest they come to envision a life outside of God’s support
and support. The danger of saving
and hoarding is that we can delude ourselves into thinking that we are
self-sufficient and capable of living wisely and well outside of God’s grace
and love.
Notice that prospective laborers are
successively invited into the work of the landowner throughout the day.
Now it may be that the landowner is concerned about grapes rotting on the
vines, and he may be desperate for more workers, but that is not what the
parable says. It does not talk about
the need for harvesting. What it
does say is that the landowner is concerned about the people standing idle
outside of the vineyard – not because they are lazy, indifferent, or deadbeats
– but because they have not been hired. So
the landowner continues to say to all of the prospective workers, “Go into the
vineyard. Go into the vineyard.”
When at the end of day the all-day
workers protest to the landowner about the part-day workers getting the same pay
as they did, the landowner says to their representative, “Friend…” That in
itself is worth noting. Even though
the all-day workers were peeved with the landowner, mad, upset, angry, he still
calls them friends. Disagreement
does not mean we have to turn the dissenters into enemies.
Anyway, the landowner says to one of the protesters and, given the
context of the parable, I think it is Peter who was concerned about the bigger
payoff he thinks that he and the other disciples should get relative to others
for leaving everything to follow Jesus: “Friend,
I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage?
Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to the last one the
same as I give to you.”
Peter and the other disciples will get
the “usual daily wage” because that is what was agreed upon when Jesus
called them. Jesus had taught them
that the “usual daily wage” in the vineyards of the Lord is that as they
seek first the kingdom of heaven, what they need will be given to them.
Those of us who have been in God’s
fields must agree that it is so. It
is as the father told his elder son when he complained about the father’s
generosity to the prodigal: “All that is
mine is yours.”
That is the consciousness from which we
are invited to live, the consciousness that rests secure in the sufficiency and
abundance of God and that does not begrudge the grace given to others because,
with God and in God, there is more than enough to go around and always enough
for us if we are open to it. Toward
the end of his career, the famed Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung said that he was
not aware of a single one of his patients in the second half of their lives
whose problem could not have been solved by communion with what he called “the
Numinous,” the One whom we call God.
The parable today creates an
encompassing community in which each person is valued in the way that God values
us. Perhaps you have felt
undervalued at times by your parents or siblings, by your colleagues, by your
friends or acquaintances, even by your enemies.
This parable invites us to set aside all of those feelings and judgments
and to consider how God values us: “I decided to give to the last the same as to the first.”
We all are valued and cherished equally by God, both those whom the
world accounts first and those it deems last.
In our parable, all the workers, even
the all-day workers, were given a great gift.
At the start of the morning, all were
unemployed and in need. The
landowner met their need. So,
indeed, when the all-day workers balked at the short-timers’ equal pay, the
landowner, God, was right to say, “Am I
not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?
Or are you envious because I am generous?”
Do we not sometimes compare what we receive with what others get?
But then we are living out of a worldly consciousness that cares about
comparative status and fears not getting what we think we deserve and, even
worse, that someone else is getting it. The
parable wants us to break through into a sacred consciousness that embraces the
abundance of God’s goodness and love and that connects us, unites us, to the
endlessly expansive world of God’s Spirit which is our home.
*
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That really is the end of the sermon
but, since this is Rally Day or Homecoming Sunday as some people call it, I want
to add this concluding postscript. One
night this past week I was going through a stack of papers piled up on my desk
at home that was beginning to rival the
Ross’ words:
The
church. I’ve lived and worked so
long in the church that I could have become totally disillusioned.
But I haven’t. There are
two reasons.
First,
the people. At its best, the church
is a family and some in this family we call the church talk the hind legs off a
deacon, and some would make you apply for early cremation, and some would make
Jesus want to drink gin out of the cat dish.
But most of them most of the time make you feel, “I want to be with
you. I want to be beside you in this
place that may not be heaven, but where at times we can feel the breezes of
It’s
more. For all its failures, for all
the hurts it has done, for all the nonsense that passes for Christian theology
at times, there is something about the church the draws us inexorably on.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery, he of The Little Prince, gets close to
it:
“If you want to build a ship, don’t summon people
to buy wood, prepare tools,
distribute jobs, and
organize the work, rather
teach people to long for
the endless immensity of the
sea.”
And
often enough here in church we get it – just that glimpse of a Mystery that
draws us toward itself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest
in that endless immensity we call God.
My words:
Welcome to autumn and to the rekindling of our community life in full.
Summer is a nice respite, the vacations and the scatterings.
But the lovely and wondrous poetry of our life together makes even Mary
Oliver seem a silver medalist. May
the Spirit this year break through any fog and fear that we may see and live
with the mind and consciousness of the Christ.
Amen.