Matthew 20:1-16

Jesus said, "The kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. After agreeing with the laborers for the usual daily wage, he sent them into his vineyard. When he went out about nine o'clock, he saw others standing idle in the marketplace; and he said to them, `You also go into the vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.' So they went. When he went out again about noon and about three o'clock, he did the same. And about five o'clock he went out and found others standing around; and he said to them, `Why are you standing here idle all day?' They said to him, `Because no one has hired us.' He said to them, `You also go into the vineyard.' When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, `Call the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first.' When those hired about five o'clock came, each of them received the usual daily wage. Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each of them also received the usual daily wage. And when they received it, 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.' But he replied to one of them, `Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?' So the last will be first, and the first will be last."

I’m not proud of the way I handled the volatility in the stock market this last week. What I did was this: I did not look directly at any information about what was happening but instead would nonchalantly ask a different person each day, “How did the markets do yesterday?”

I learned this tactic of avoidance in the weeks following October 19, 1987, the day that the stock market dropped over 508 points (which in those days was over 20% of its value). Black Monday as it was called happened only a few weeks into my first year of business school, and so frightened me that I stopped watching television entirely to avoid the dire predictions about the economy in general and employment in particular.

And so I was intrigued to discover that our gospel for today, a parable of the kingdom which typically suggests or confronts us with an alternative view of reality, uses an economic world, the world of work and wages, to make its point.

The world of the parable, of course, is not the world of high-level finance that we’ve been hearing about last week. No, it takes place in the realm of day laborers—those who in our culture typically stand around each morning in a particular part of town waiting and hoping to be offered a job for the day.

 “The kingdom of heaven,” Jesus says, “is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard.”

And with this, the parable begins. It’s the story of an unusual landowner who starts in the morning hiring day laborers and then keeps hiring throughout the day, telling more and more workers to enter the vineyard. He does this so many times, in fact, that at the end of the day he has five different groups of laborers, all of whom have worked different hours and all of whom need to be paid.

And so they are paid, the last ones first. This means that those who worked the longest cannot help but know what those hired the latest and working the least are getting for their work. And, of course, we know what happens. Counter to any world we live in, the landowner decides that all will be paid the same wage, those who worked a full day and those who began their work at the end of the day.

This leads to grumbling on the part of those hired first. In response to this, the landowner maintains that generosity is his prerogative and that in the topsy-turvy world of the realm of God, the last will be first and the first will be last.

I was with a group of folks from the broader diocese yesterday, some of whom were clergy. One person serving as an interim priest in a parish, was talking about his sermon for today and how important it was that it address what happened last week in the economy. He was anxious and said “I want to say something significant to the real situation people are in. I don’t want to use this reading to get into some kind of silly religious band-aid approach to all this.” I thought to myself, “Yes, you’re right. I don’t want to do that either.”

But in looking more deeply at this passage I find it’s really not even possible to do this. For parables of the kingdom are never band-aids, never simple, quick, ways to protect ourselves from the anxieties of living. Rather they are a challenging and completely different frame of reference that brings us in touch with another reality that will typically be both bad and good news for us.

So first the bad news in this parable of the kingdom:

The bad news is that in God’s economy the world we’ve constructed about what we and others deserve is a false one. The elaborate internal structure each of us has about who belongs and who does not belong, who is entitled and who is not entitled, who deserves rewards and who does not deserve rewards—all of these, our parable suggests, count for nothing in God’s economy.

The reason this is bad news for us is that life in the kingdom means that these constructs about deserving will need to be surrendered over and over again in order for us to participate in something larger—and it is hard to do this.

• It’s hard to walk by our street people here in Queen Anne and not mentally write them off because we’ve judged they deserve to be written off.
• It’s hard not to be miffed when someone else attains something easily that we believe we deserve because we’ve worked harder for it
• It’s even hard to allow parts of ourselves that we’ve judged to be undeserving to come into being.

So that’s the bad news—the spiritual life, life lived in God’s realm, means letting go of or turning our attention away from our paradigms about who deserves what.

Which brings us to the good news or, better said, it brings us to the strange news.

In the midst of roiling markets and defaulting mortgages and day laborers, God is moving, tirelessly inviting and gathering us and all who we believe do not deserve it into God’s own realm.

• God is doing this with those of us who have been here for ever as well as with those who have only recently arrived.
• God is doing this with home owners and with street people.
• God is doing this with executives, with day laborers and with those who do not have jobs.

God is moving, tirelessly inviting, gathering us all into God’s land, God’s own home. It is a land where our identity is secured and held no matter what.

And when we—you and I—can for a moment put aside our paradigms about who deserves what, we become a little part of God’s invitation to and gathering in of others to such a land. If we can for a moment put aside our paradigms about who deserves what.

I’ll leave you with an image given to me by my brother right after October 19 in 1987. He was in Chicago and had taken me to lunch, and we were talking about the crash. The day of crash he was managing a large portfolio of institutional pension funds and so had moved significant blocks of stock on that day. As we talked, my avoidance of the event melted away and I shared with him just how frightened I was in that I was now in business school of all things, racking up debt, wondering if there would be a job on the other end.

He, a confirmed agnostic turned to me and said, “Lissa, you think about the world this way (hands in a “teepee” shape), as if it were teetering on the top of a precipice. I think about the world this way (hands held out together palms up), held firmly on a strong base.”

This image of a world held firmly, of all of us, those who deserve it and those who do not, gathered in and held firmly, is the world of our parable. The image is not a band-aid for our anxiety. It is a resting place for the soul, a center that we can return to as we touch the necessary anxieties we must touch, though we would wish to avoid them, as we engage those who need such a center, who look to us to bear witness to it.

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