September 21, 2014
St. Christopher’s Episcopal Church, Springfield, VA

Year A, Season after Pentecost, Proper 20, Matthew 20:1:16

            The more I preach (which is maybe in the double digits now), the more I really just want to tell people how much we are loved, how relentlessly we are pursued by a God who wants nothing more than for us to know God’s love, and to tell people how much God desires relationship with us. I want to preach this, I think, because it’s a message I constantly need reminding of. This is a message that is so very hard to hold onto in our culture, or really hard to hold onto in any culture, because we love one another so very imperfectly.

            We are unkind and ungenerous and exclusive, and hurt one another again and again because rather than focusing on who we truly are—on our true identity and purpose as God’s beloved children called to live out that love—rather than focus on that, we instead believe that we have to somehow earn God’s love, and that others do as well. And so we lose sight, and as a result, we buy into the messages of the world around us. That our worth and that of others is measured by how hard we work, or which political party we support, or what kind of education we have, or how much we earn, or what we buy. None of that, of course, has anything at all to do with God’s love for us, and that, of course, is the only thing that really matters in the end.

            The thing is, as you already know, that there is of course nothing to earn, nothing that we can do or say or believe or not believe to merit God’s love since it is already given. It is ours. God’s generosity is so big, so overflowing, in fact that it belongs also to those we would discount, those we think beyond any hope of redemption.

            This is inherent in today’s gospel lesson and it’s important that we understand God’s generosity since in understanding it, we can live it, and in living it, we can experience eternal, that is, true, life in the here and now.

            In our lesson, we have Jesus on the way to Jerusalem with the disciples preaching and healing and and teaching in parables and among those is the Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard, as it’s come to be called. And these laborers would have been familiar to the disciples. These were the folks on one of the lowest rungs of Greco-Roman society, very poor men, who would have just been looking for a day’s wage to feed their families and who perhaps would not have eaten on this particular day if not for the landowner who goes out to hire them. And we have a landowner who is exceedingly generous because not only does he go out early in the morning to hire, but he goes out four more times to hire men to work, the last time just an hour before the usual quitting time.

            What a wonderful story of God’s generosity and God’s pursuit of us this is. How nice it would be if the parable ended there. How great it would be for Jesus to just stop there and let us all rest in the knowledge that no matter how late we show up to the party, no matter how idle we have been, not only is there space for us in the vineyard but that we are sought after. And that is of course all true.

            But, that’s not the end of the story. Jesus, as he is wont to do, makes things a little bit uncomfortable for us. Jesus, as he is wont to do, turns everything upside down and forces us to look a little bit harder. Challenges us, to see differently in fact. Challenges us to see as God sees.

            So imagine it: you are a hard worker. You get up early, get dressed, have the great good fortune of a landowner himself finding you and hiring you. You are very happy and grateful to do a day’s work for a day’s wage and are thankful that you will be able to feed yourself and your family on this evening. All day the sun is beating down on you, but you continue to work and work and there’s plenty of work so you do not begrudge the others when they show up in the field to help and hopefully make at least something for themselves before the day’s over. You are a little disappointed at the end of the day when you’re told to get in line and that you’ll be paid last. You’ve been working really hard all day and you just want to get home and eat and get some sleep so you can hopefully earn enough to eat tomorrow. But then as you’re standing there in the back of the line, you see that the guys who arrived last are getting a full day’s wage. This is wonderful, you think. You’re mind races with the thoughts of how much you’ll earn and with the knowledge that maybe you can get some sleep tonight without the worry of whether you’ll eat tomorrow. There will be enough to last maybe even a week. But then you see that those who arrived around 3 also got a full-day’s wage as did those who arrived around noon. You become angry and resentful and wonder at the injustice.

            This story that Jesus tells is in no way fair. And it’s made even less fair by the fact that those who got there earliest are made to wait in line for their pay, for the exact same amount as those who worked only an hour. This landowner is not only unfair but verges on sadistic. Is this really how God operates?

            Thankfully, yes. “Are you envious because I am generous?” the landowner asks the workers who arrived first. Rendered more faithfully to the Greek, the landowner asks, “Is your eye evil because I am good?” (John Donahue, The Gospel as Parable, 82). For Matthew, the eye is the lamp of the body (Matt 6:22, Donahue 82), and as John Donahue notes, “these servants allow their attitude to ‘darken’ their whole way of viewing the world. What began as an act of goodness to them and unfolded as an act of generosity to others blinded them to the goodness of the owner and the good fortune of others” (Donahue, 83).

            How often and in what ways are we likewise blinded? It’s a question the parable calls us to wrestle with. The landowner could have made life much easier on himself and just paid everybody in the reverse order. And as I said, Jesus could have made things much easier on the disciples and on us and ended the parable before the laborers get their pay. But neither action adequately illustrates the radical nature of God generous love to us and neither action calls us into that generosity.

            Now, let me be very clear. There is nothing that you or I can do or not do or believe or not believe to separate us from the love of God. St. Paul tells us as much in Romans 8. But experiencing that love is an entirely different matter. And the way to experience God’s love fully is to follow Jesus into these very difficult places, and to embrace God’s freely given love, that is God’s grace, rather than oppose it.

            Our tendency, or maybe it’s just my tendency, but I think our universal human tendency is to oppose this overabundant love of God. This opposition to grace is what Karl Barth, the great 20^th century German theologian, called sin. We sin when we, like the grumbling workers, begrudge God’s generosity. We sin when we, to paraphrase Donahue, create categories of worth and value that separate ourselves from others (Donahue, 85). Because none of us is more or less deserving of God’s love. We all just are loved. As we are.

            But when we put human limits on God’s goodness and mercy, when we determine who is in or who is out, when we actually believe that there are people Jesus actually would not sit down and break bread with. When we put these limits on God’s generous love, we limit our ability to live into, to experience fully, God’s goodness and mercy so very freely and generously granted to us (Donahue, 85). When we limit God, it’s really hard to experience God’s love. Not because God doesn’t allow us or somehow prevents us or is punishing us or doesn’t want us to experience that love, but instead, it’s just that our own attitudes blind us.

            It is true that God loves us without measure, without bound, generously and unequivocally. But it is also true that Jesus forces us out of our comfort zones and challenges us to take a long, hard look at where we set limits on this love, on the ways in which we re-make God in our own image to adhere to our ideas of fairness and justice.

Jesus challenges us to think seriously about those places where we begrudged generosity given to others and to open our hearts to those we would rather not, so that we may experience more and more the expansiveness of God’s love.

Amen.