September 18, 2005: Harvest Help
Matthew 20:1-16; Exodus 16:2-15; Psalm 105:1-6, 37-45
Eileen Parfrey, Pastor           Springwater Presbyterian Church

God's mercy can be so offensive sometimes, which is what Jesus' story is about. He starts it by saying, this is what the kingdom of heaven is like. It's a parable, which means that shocking and offending is par for the course. Parables seem innocuous, drawn as they are from common, ordinary life. But their meaning is ambiguous enough to provoke listeners to thinking. Was the owner too fair? Did the hard-working early hires have a legitimate complaint, or were they merely seeing their Gravy Train derailed? Were the late-hires lolling around taverns and feeding at the public trough until after the heat of the day?

Jesus is telling his disciples that they need to re-think the wisdom of counting on a place of honor in the coming court of Heaven's Kingdom. What we hear is not what we'd predict. While the Righteous God does not become the Easygoing God, we do hear about the outrageous justice (in God's economy of salvation), motivated not by what's "fair" but by mercy and grace. And it takes place during that narrow window of time during grape harvest for the best vintage.

Scholars have sometimes said that this story addresses the resentment of the Pharisees against Jesus' habit of including the most outrageous sinners in his in group. Other scholars have said that the story reflects the early church tensions between Jewish and Gentile Christians. Well, fine, but why bother reading this story each time it comes up in the lectionary, if it's only ancient history? I suspect the story is also directed at those of us who have trouble with other people receiving gifts. Anyone can feel a little twinge when someone else gets a windfall or gift that we'd been wishing for ourselves.

When my mother was dying, at the tender age of 59, she was struck by the irony of her situation. She had faithfully exercised, eaten healthy foods, avoided fats, and here she was-dying. Her overweight friends who lived on junk food, and whose exercise programs consisted of pointing the television remote, weren't even sick. How was this fair? It's like living a compassionate, faithful life of Christian discipline and finding out that you get into heaven at the same rate as those who live hard and wrong, but whose deathbed reconciliations get them admittance right when it's needed. Where is the fairness there? Don't the Good Ones deserve a better place in heaven than the Wild Ones who don't do the faith thing until they're nearly dead?

Kids know what's fair. If your sister gets into youth group in fifth grade, by golly you deserve to be in youth group in fifth grade. If you had to go to bed at 7:30 when you were 8, your 8-year-old brother ought to go to bed then, too. If a group works on a science project together, everyone should get the same grade. If management gets Friday afternoons off in the summer, fairness says that labor get them off, too. Things get sticky when you realize you had to be at school earlier than your brother, or two of the kids did all the science while the rest horsed around. It makes you wonder what the rest of the world thinks as they watch our TV and movies, thinking that's what life is really like in America. NYPD and The Nanny and The Apprentice aren't the way the rest of us live. But if that's the only thing people in other countries see about our lifestyle, who could blame them for wondering, "How come we don't get any?"

The parable sounds as if faith in the nick of time gets you into heaven just as easily as if you'd worked hard at righteousness all your life. What if the real world worked this way? The fairness of equal pay for equal work, an honest day's pay for an honest day's work has been institutionalized in our world. Our sense of order is justifiably incensed when this skin-of-the-teeth thing lets off the people who haven't worked as hard as we have.

We've burdened ourselves with a merit system. We think what we get is based on what we "deserve," and what we have and the rewards we earn is somehow to our credit. "Are you envious--?" the vineyard owner asks the full-day workers. Well, duh! Of course they are! While they watched the Johnny-come-latelys rake in a full day's pay for an hour of work, they were mentally conjuring the extra lamb chop they could have for supper that night. No one was denied, cheated, or oppressed. The owner's offense is in generosity to others. Fred Craddock says, "The offense of grace is not in the treatment we receive but in the observation that others are getting more than they deserve. . . . Forgiveness and generosity do not seem fair . . . That offends some of us . . . The generosity of God quite often cuts across our calculations of who deserves what."

That came to mind as I listened to Katrina victims right after the hurricane. They were mad at FEMA and everyone else. They didn't get what they deserved! They were devastated by flooding and filth because they were poor and had no way to get out. Sort of reminds me of the Israelites in the wilderness who blamed Moses and Aaron for their hunger. That Israel complained wasn't what annoyed God. That Israel was hungry didn't show a lack of faith. Hunger is legitimate, and it doesn't seem to care whether or not you are faithful. "Complaining" is not stating a need and asking God for help. It appears that Israel preferred complaining about their hunger to trusting God. Israel preferred complaining to doing the hard work of trusting God. It's much easier to point fingers and blame and complain about the rescue efforts after Katrina, than it is to say, "We didn't plan well. The storm was bigger than we anticipated. Our resources were inadequate to the need. We built below sea level, we allowed the protective wetlands to erode." That's a lot harder to say than complaining and blaming.

Sometimes I feel like I harp on "transformation." But I believe transformation is the fundamental movement of redemption. God loves us where we are, but loves us too much to leave us there. That's transformation. Holy change, as God re-orders the realities within us. If God's grace is offensive to us-if it offends us when God is generous to others, if we are afraid that if God is generous to others it means we don't get what we deserve-then that means we still need transformation. My dad used to tell us kids that we ought to be grateful we don't get what we deserve. He made it sound as if what we deserved was pretty ominous. But that's not the case in the economy of God's salvation. God is about abundance. Toward us. Not compared to others, but in terms of more-than-enough-of-what-I-need.

If we wonder what direction God's transformation might take for us, if we wonder what God might have in mind for our re-ordering, we might consider what it is that offends us about God's grace. Our mindset is scarcity. We are so competitive. We have the insane notion that what others receive is that much less available for us. That isn't how God works. God knows our needs. God knows our "enough." God doesn't make people hungry. Hunger isn't the problem. It's where people look for the satisfaction.

One of my lectionary buddies went to seminary in San Francisco in the midst of the dot com boom. She said that one of the results of the economic boom in Silicone Valley was that 20- and 30-somethings were sudden, overnight gazillionaires. Which depressed a lot of them. "Is this it?" they wondered. "Is work and then all this money and then spending it and consuming-is this the meaning of life?" For some, that question ended in hopelessness. For others, that question ended in more work for more money and then the bust. For others, that question resulted in a search for God and faith.

Redemption is about transformation. Holy change from being sinners to being citizens of God's kingdom. Holy change that helps us see that if God chooses to be gracious to people we wouldn't in a thousand years choose to be gracious to-well, that's God's prerogative. In my dad's view of the world, we all ought to be grateful we don't get what we deserve. Because what God gives us is so much more than that.