Pentecost 14A, Proper 20
In the name
of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Amen.
This is a
difficult parable for many of us to hear: those who do the least are rewarded
the same as those who do the most.
Particularly to our American ears - so steeped in the Protestant work
ethic and the promises of meritocracy and against the dominant cultural symbol
of pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. It just doesn’t seem to add up against everything that our
culture teaches us.
It might be
particularly troubling to hear this lesson in these days of a down
economy. Prices for nearly
everything that we need to buy keep rising, but wages aren’t keeping pace. The basic structure of this parable
resonates with us: unemployment rates have remained too high for too long, so
many of us understand what it’s like to be the late laborers - looking for
work, perhaps even just enough to get by on, and too often without success. And even those of us who haven’t
experienced that anxiety directly know someone who has.
So why have
these people in the story been compensated for work that they didn’t do? Moreover, why did those poor laborers
who had been working all day get the same as those who just worked for a bit?
It’s not
fair.
And we’re not
the only ones to think so. When
those workers who had given their whole day received their pay, “they grumbled
against the landowner saying, ‘These last worked only one hour, and you have
made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching
heat.’” In essence they were
saying, “It’s not fair!”
And it’s
not. At least not the way we
usually define “fair”.
The story we
read about the Israelites’ time in the desert from the Exodus offers another
perspective.
They, too,
were grumbling against their leaders.
Times were hard, wandering through the desert. Resources were scarce.
The people were afraid, and they began to wonder if being freed from
Pharaoh’s bondage was really the best thing for them after all - slavery had
been hard, but at least they hadn’t been starving!
God heard the
people’s grumbling and said to Moses, “I am going to rain bread from heaven for
you, and each day the people shall go out and gather enough for that day.” In the evenings quail came and gave
them all the meat they needed. In
the mornings, the bread for the day was scattered across the desert floor. In this way the people of Israel were
sustained.
They were
sustained with enough for the day. Not with storehouses of food, but just with enough for the
day.
They couldn’t
rest on a one-time gift from God that brought them through the forty years of
wandering. Each day they went out
to get ‘just enough’.
In God’s
economy, the defining measurement is not fairness, but enough-ness.
We often talk
about God’s abundance, but that doesn’t mean the streets will be paved with
gold, or that our pockets will be overflowing with money. It doesn’t mean we will have resources
to waste, and certainly not that we’re guaranteed to have as much as some of
the people around us. It only
means that we will have enough.
Think about
the Lord’s Prayer - those familiar words written on all of our hearts. When Jesus taught us to pray, he said:
‘give us this day our daily bread’.
Not ‘give us this day our winning lottery numbers’. Not ‘give us this day as much as our
neighbor’. And certainly not ‘give
us this day what is fair’. (The
truth is, none of us want that.)
But no, it’s
‘give us this day our daily bread’.
Give us this day enough.
Help us get through today and we’ll think about tomorrow when it comes.
It’s a humble
prayer. And it’s how we were
taught to interact with God.
The people
who worked in the vineyard for just one hour earned enough to sustain them for
the day. So, too, did the people
who had worked all day. They
didn’t get rich; they got sustained.
They got enough.
God’s grace is not
bestowed on us according to how much we deserve it, but according to how
grace-filled God is.
It doesn’t make sense in
a capitalist system. It doesn’t
make sense to a culture that teaches and values the concept of
meritocracy. In God’s economy no
one ‘pulls themselves up by their bootstraps’.
We are all sustained, not
by our own merits, but by God’s grace - God’s overflowing and abundant, though
never wasted grace.
It’s certainly not fair.
Thank God!
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