Philippians 1:21-30. It is my eager expectation and hope that I will not be put to shame in any way.
Matthew 20:1-16. Take what belongs to you and go.
O God of grace, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.
Hello! Welcome into this time and space and community that is Emmanuel Church gathered. Some are gathered in this physical place, and many more are gathered in places around New England and in various other time zones, to pray together and to worship God. Welcome into the future of God’s beloved community, as we figure out ways to adapt to challenging circumstances. I often hear people remark, when I tell them that I serve as rector of Emmanuel Church in Boston, that Emmanuel has such a great history. And I’m quick to respond, “yes! And a great present and future too!” Our vision of the future is foggier, perhaps, more treacherous perhaps, but we are sticking together. This first Sunday of the cantata season is “welcome forward Sunday. Come with us into the future, Sunday.”
Our “collect for the day,” that is, our gathering prayer appointed for this morning has never been more apt: “Grant us, O Love, not to be anxious about earthly things but to love things heavenly, and even now, while we are placed among things that are passing away, to hold fast to those that shall endure.” What are things heavenly? They are things like beauty and truth (maybe you have seen the saying making its way around social media: You cannot have truth without Ruth, and she gave us a long life-time of beauty and truth). What are those things that shall endure? Compassion, kindness, and generosity.
We have before us, the parable of the workers in the vineyard. People tend to like or dislike this parable depending on how long and how hard we have worked in comparison to others. It’s a parable that is often used to scold complainers. Take what is yours and go away is another version of “quit your belly-aching” or as my youngest daughter used to declare when treats were getting distributed, “you get what you get and you don’t get upset.” (It didn’t work.)
I understand the temptation to try to get people to stop grumbling about perceived inequity – especially when it comes to my own children. But I have to tell you that the line, “take what is yours and go” is in direct conflict with the essence of Jesus’ teaching in Matthew. There are things that just don’t seem right about what the landowner says, in addition to that). I’ve always been annoyed at the response that begins with “friend.” It sounds condescending to me. You know, when you’re mad at someone who has some authority over you and you voice your complaint and the person puts a hand on your shoulder and starts with “friend” it’s not going to go well. I want to shout, “you are not my friend.” And to the question, “Are you envious because I am generous?” I want to respond that one denarius (which is what gets translated ‘the usual daily wage’) is not generous. It’s a subsistence wage that allows someone to eat for one day with nothing left over for tomorrow – no cushion at all. It’s the wage of poverty. So if the landowner is not really a friend and the generosity is not at all generous, what might be going on here?
To begin with, Matthew says, “for the kingdom of heaven is like….” And then there is a perplexing story. Matthew has already had Jesus likening the realm of God to the opposite of common sense, of popular wisdom. The realm of God is like a scrubby mustard weed (as opposed to being like the tall cedars of Lebanon). The realm of God is like putrid lump of leaven (as opposed to the pureness of unleavened bread). The realm of God is a mixed-up jumble of good and bad fish, of wheat and tares, of old and new treasures. Jesus has already announced that the realm of heaven includes the desirables and the undesirables. The realm of heaven, according to Jesus, is “subversive, unstoppable, invasive, a nuisance, urgent, shocking, and abundant. It requires action and commitment and inspires extreme behavior.” In the realm of heaven, the last will be first and the first will be last.
According to Matthew, Jesus’ teaching about the realm of heaven has gotten him run out of town just about everywhere he’s gone. But I’ve always suspected that Jesus’ teachings about the realm of heaven made his followers laugh. I’ve always suspected that Jesus’ stories were hilarious to people who had little left to lose. I wonder if there’s something funny here that would get Jesus and his followers in trouble, even though Matthew seems to be using the parable to teach his community how to get along in the second and third generation after Jesus’ death.
You may know that Judaism has hundreds of parables which have to do with varieties and qualities and quantities of work and rates of pay. [2] There is a similar parable told by Rabbi Abba bar Kahana, a third century rabbi, that goes like this: A king hired laborers, and brought them into his garden. He hid and did not reveal what was the reward of working in the garden so that they might not neglect that part of the work for which the reward was small, and go and do only that part for which the reward was great. In the evening he summoned them all, and said, “under which tree did you work?” The first answered, “under this one.” The king said, “That is a pepper tree; its reward is one gold piece.” He said to the next, “under which tree did you work? He said, “under that one.” The king said, “it is a white flower tree; its reward is half a gold piece” He asked a third, “under which tree did you work?” He said, “under this one.” The king replied, “That is an olive tree; its reward is 200 zuzim.” The laborers said to him, “ought you not to have told us the tree under which the reward was greatest?” The king replied, “If I had done that, how could all of my garden have been tilled?”[3]
In that story, it’s clear (to me anyway) that the only way that all of the laborers can all benefit is to share their rewards just as they have shared in the work. I realize how difficult it might be, though, to get the one who got paid the whole gold piece to agree with me. That one probably started out feeling really lucky and then maybe began to feel that it must have worked out just as God intended for him to have worked under the pepper tree. Or maybe, looking back on it, he feels that it was his good instincts that led him to work under that tree in the first place, and that he gained the whole gold piece as a consequence of his innate intelligence.
Did you see Oxfam International’s recent report about the obscene profits being raked in due to the covid pandemic? The report gives this example: if Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos were to have given every one of his 876,000 employees a $105,000 bonus, he would have been left with the amount of wealth that he had in mid-March at the start of the pandemic in the US. To let that sink in, I’m going to repeat those numbers: every one of his 876,000 employees a $105,000 bonus. That’s $92 billion in six months. This matters because, according to Oxfam, 500 million people around the world are expected to be pushed into poverty by the economic fallout from the pandemic, while the top 100 stock market winners have extracted more than $3 trillion from the earth, from workers, and from communities without fair payment or regard for the devastation they are leaving behind, to add to their market value since the pandemic earlier this year! [4]
More and more people are waiting for recognition of their full humanity. They are waiting to be hired, waiting to be re-settled, waiting to be documented, waiting for reliable and nutritious food, waiting for healthcare, waiting for dignified shelter, waiting for adequate education. In downtown Boston, on Newbury Street, people are waiting for water to drink and to wash, for access to toilets and access to electricity. We who have access to resources, must increase what we share and what we give away. This is the message of Jesus in this parable and we know this because right before this parable Jesus told the rich young man, sell what you have, give the money to the poor and come. What Jesus has been saying is give away what was really never yours to start with, whether you worked hard or hardly worked, and come along to do what God invites you to do: to care for one another with generosity, kindness, and compassion!
This parable is teaching something about grace in the midst of well-ordered plans. Listen, Jesus says, the realm of God is like dandelions that a gardener planted on an immaculately sodded lawn. The realm of God is like a woman frying a delicious vegetarian dish in pure lard. The realm of God is like someone who purchased center orchestra seats, not knowing that the best part of the show would take place in the back aisles. Maybe the realm of God – at least sometimes if we’re lucky – is like Emmanuel Church!
What I see is the grace in the invitation more than in the reward system. God’s grace is in the invitation to everyone – the calling is for everyone, no matter what the hour. Wherever you have been, however long you have been there, whatever you have done or failed to do, you are invited in to experience working in the realm of God, where there is no shame and no resentment. Imagine being invited to live for a time without shame and without resentment even at the eleventh hour. “Impossible!” you grumble. Jesus says, “no – not impossible. That’s what the realm of God is like. So don’t go away. Don’t take what is yours. Give what belongs to Love. Let what you have been given flow freely in and out of you. “Love things heavenly, and even now, while we are placed among things that are passing away, to hold fast to those that shall endure.”