The Seventeenth Sunday After Pentecost - The Rev. Tom White
As I prepared to consider with you today’s Gospel reading, I thought of the verse from Isaiah, where God speaks and declares: “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” Our first thought as we hear Jesus’ story of the workers in the vineyard is: those poor laborers first hired, who, indeed, bore the burden of a whole day of hard work in the sweltering heat, they were certainly treated unfairly that their pay was no more than the workers who had labored only six, three, or good golly!, only a single hour! It’s blatantly unfair!
But, let’s put ourselves in the place of the workers who were called to the vineyard last, who worked only that one hour. They had given up all hope of getting work that day. They would have to return home with nothing to provide for their family’s very survival. For these weren’t folks looking to earn a little pocket change. They desperately needed to work every day and all day to earn that single denarius, even that barely enough to feed and support their family for another day. So imagine their delight and gratitude when, almost at the work day’s end, they are given a job. An hour’s work will only earn them a pittance, but that’s better than nothing. Then their glee and delight surges when, completely unexpected and generously beyond imagining, they are paid for a full day of work! I imagine even the laborers who had worked all day were happy for their good fortune.
The glee turns to grumbling, though, when the all-day-workers, who were certain they would logically now receive much more than a day’s pay, only received the same amount, despite the fact they had worked ten times longer. Resentment, not gratitude, grabs hold of them. So, the owner of the vineyard reminds them that he has treated them with complete fairness, paying them the full day’s wage they agreed to. The landowner then asks them two piercing questions, questions that go to the heart of the parable’s meaning: “Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?” Or, as the English Standard Version, translates the original Greek, and my preference: “Do you begrudge my generosity?” This parable’s single focus and teaching is the incredible, unimaginable, irrational, and extraordinary generosity of God!
That generosity first came to us when God’s grace cascaded over our heads in the waters filled with the Holy Spirit at our baptism, when the almighty God became our Father and Christ our brother and we joined God’s family, the Church. That grace comes, also, every time God’s holy Word is read and preached and the comfort, peace, and hope that is God fills us with the assurance that God loves us always and forever, no matter what we are coping with in our life. And God’s indescribably generous grace will shortly enter bread and wine, entering our very mouths that, incredibly, we might eat and drink and swallow God’s love and forgiveness in Christ’s Body and Blood! Oh yes, the unfathomable generosity of God!
Thankfully, and happily for us, God doesn’t give us what we deserve. Sunday after Sunday we fall to our knees and confess to God that we have failed God’s will and God’s way, “by what we have done, and by what we have left undone.” Yet, rather than hitting us over our heads with wrath and judgment, God gifts us with mercy; though we deserve hell, God blesses us with heaven! Thanks be to God that God’s grace is generously lavish beyond our deserving, beyond reason, and exceedingly beyond the ways of the world!
Now, when Jesus teaches that the first will be last and the last first, I hear him saying that as recipients of his grace we are all equal. A bishop or priest doesn’t receive less grace than did St. Peter and the Virgin Mary and the other apostles, and laypeople don’t receive less grace than priests and bishops; grace comes equally to all! I think of that thief on the cross, who in the last minutes of his life, looked to Jesus in faith and prayer: “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom!” That thief entered Paradise with Jesus that very day; only by grace, 100%!
Did any of you get to attend the awesome production of “Les Miserables” during its recent run at the Savannah Theater? It tells the story of Jean Valjean who is imprisoned 19 years with hard labor for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister’s starving child. Finally he is paroled, but cannot find work, when a bishop comes to his rescue and offers him shelter by opening his home to Valjean, whereupon Valjean steals the bishop’s silver. Valjean is apprehended, but the bishop saves him by assuring the police inspector that he had given the silver to Valjean as a gift, and then tells Valjean that he had forgotten to take the silver candlesticks he had given him also! Well, this act by the bishop of undeserved and unmerited grace transforms Valjean’s life. He becomes a factory owner, mayor of his town, and then raises the daughter, Colette, of a worker in his factory when she dies. This musical is about Valjean’s choice to respond to hatred and evil with kindness and mercy, all the result of that bishop’s redemptive act of grace for him.
God’s grace transforms us! We can’t work for or earn it because you can’t buy something that is a gift. All we can do is respond to this divine and lavishly generous gift of grace with lives dedicated completely to Christ’s service. So, I have an assignment for you, if you wish to accept it. In the week before us, let’s look for ways that God’s lavishly generous gift of grace is transforming our lives? Look for words we speak and deeds done that demonstrate how God’s love and mercy are alive in us and busy in our lives, transforming them, and transforming, also, the lives of our neighbors through us. How is God’s grace within us making our us more Christ-like? Do those around us know we are Christians by our love, the love of Christ?
Jesus’ parable teaches us that God’s kingdom operates on radical and generous grace, not on human calculations of fairness and earned merit. For as God says: “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” I say, “Thank you, Lord God, thank you!”
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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