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Texts: Exodus 16; Matthew 20:1-16
For the last shall be first, and the first, last.
I would like to begin today’s sermon by reading aloud the poem
printed inside the front cover of today’s bulletin,
which is in its own way a meditation on today’s Gospel:
He who would be great among you
Luci Shaw
You whose birth broke all the
social & biological rules—
son of the poor who accepted
the worship due a king—
child prodigy debating with
the Temple Th.D.s—you
were the kind who used
a new math
to multiply bread, fish, faith.
You practiced a
radical sociology:
rehabilitated con men &
call girls. You valued women
& other minority groups.
A G.P., you specialized in
heart transplants.
Creator, healer,
shepherd, innovator,
story-teller, weather-maker,
botanist, alchemist,
exorcist, iconoclast,
seeker, seer, motive-sifter;
you were always beyond,
above us. Ahead
of your time, & ours.
And we would like
to be like you. Bold
as Boanerges*, we hear ourselves
demand: “Admit us
to your avant-garde.
Grant us degree
in all the liberal arts
of heaven.”
Why our belligerence?
Why does the whiff of fame
and greatness smell so sweet?
Why must we compete
to be first?
Have we forgotten
how you took, simply, cool water
and a towel for our feet?
* Boanerges is the Aramaic for “Sons of Thunder” the name Jesus gave to the disciples James and John, who had their mother plead with Jesus
to give them privileged positions in his Kingdom.
See Matthew 3:14-19; 20:20-28.
The story of the laborers in the vineyard is a strange little parable.
Many of the ‘kingdom’ parables do seem strange to us,
but this one is even more unique.
It appears only this once, in Matthew’s gospel;
None of the other Gospel writers tell of it.
Like so many of Jesus’ parables of the kingdom,
This story depicts the kingdom of heaven as a paradoxical place (or attitude);
– the “upside down kingdom” if you will where greatest are least and last are first,
and the poorest are blessed and the meek inherit the earth.
The upside down kingdom, that turns our perspectives,
our expectations of justice and fairness, our world’s values, on their heads.
The value system and priority standards of heaven
turn our principles of rewards and consequences upside down.
This parable confronts us with what we call the “free gift” of grace.
and it makes us squirm a bit.
What was the workers’ complaint against the landowner?
Simply this: that the workers who came to the vineyard at 5:00 in the afternoon
received the same full day’s pay as the people
who started working at 6:00 in the morning.
The all-day laborers howled,
not because they thought their pay was insufficient, or unfair,
but because they couldn’t stand the thought
that others should be so generously treated
when they’d done so little to “deserve” it.
And Jesus’ point, of course, is that no one “deserves” the gift of God’s grace.
No one “earns” the right to a life, or the right to eat,
or the right to share in and enjoy the goods or the goodness of the world.
No one “merits” or “deserves” these privileges.
No, they are God’s free gifts.
We may try to hoard them, or take them away from each other,
or stake out a claim on some part of creation or salvation
as though it were our private domain --
But we are merely squatters, claiming what is not really ours to claim.
We have the right to our day’s livelihood, like everyone else. But no more.
The world is the Lord’s vineyard, and God is the landowner;
and God is free to distribute the Divine bounty however God sees fit.
This all seems to make good sense.
We can nod our head in agreement and say, “That’s right.
God can do whatever God wants with grace and blessing.”
But human beings, and particularly religious human beings,
have always cherished the principle of “reward” and “punishment”
And this parable completely violates that principle – and that offends us!
The equation has it that the good are rewarded
-- with heaven, of course, but preferably before that!
and the wicked are punished –
with hell, of course, but again, preferably before that,
But what happens when the good are not rewarded,
and those we would perceive as evil, or undeserving,
or failures, seem to be blessed and privileged?
In telling this parable, Jesus is speaking to his disciples,
but he is also addressing the charges of those who took offense
with the fact that he spent so much time with people
from the wrong side of the tracks,
the unrighteous and the unemployed and the unlearned,
people from the wrong social groups, the wrong racial groups,
people with the wrong moral codes, and the wrong occupations,
or the wrong religions.
The good, respectable, religious people
-- even some of those who accepted Jesus’ message –
were offended and scandalized at such implicit acceptance.
It is to them that Jesus addresses the words,
“so the last shall be first, and the first, last.”
Those who fail to comprehend, and accept,
and model their lives on this astounding truth
about the priorities of the heart of God
end up cutting themselves off from the power and possibility
of God’s surprising grace.
There is another aspect of this story that I can’t resist mentioning, at least briefly.
In verse 15, at the very end of the parable,
The New Revised Standard Version translates the landowner’s words as:
“Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?
Or are you envious because I am generous?”
But a literal translation from the Greek is,
“Is it not allowed for me to do what I wish with my own things,
or is your eye evil because I am good?”
I think that is as insightful and captivating a description
of the destructive power of envy as any I’ve ever read:
“Is your eye evil because God is good?”
For a person trapped in the web of envy,
every good gift in the world is looks to them like an evil.
When I envy another good fortune, my whole perception of the world is distorted.
I feel like any love given to anyone else,
any favor or blessing or help given to the other person,
is robbing me of something I crave and think I deserve.
My eye becomes evil in relation to any goodness I see around me.
When we look at another person’s gifts or blessings or good fortune
through the green filter of envy, we say,
“Why didn’t I get what they got?” or
“if he got that much, I should have gotten twice as much” or
“How come I had to work for all of mine,
and hers all came to her so easy?”
And each of these statements, of course, ends up demeaning
and denying the very worth and value of the good gifts and blessing
I have received
Envy mostly robs us of our own goodness;
It is a refusal to accept the gift of own good selves from the hands of God.
We throw God’s gracious generosity back in God’s face
when we choose to envy another.
“Is your eye evil, because God is good?’
We had a wonderful, very spirited and enthusiastic Eliot Leaders Retreat yesterday
in Brighton, where we talked about leadership and stewardship and growth.
We even called it “Evangelism”
(which, as Karla reminded us, only means “announcing good news”.)
And I’m thinking, what could be a better proclamation of good news than this,
in today’s uncertain world, with upside down roller coaster
of the financial near-meltdown and the vituperative rhetoric
of a presidential campaign:
“Let the greatest among you be as the least,
and the one who leads you be as one who serves,
for the last shall be first, and the first, last.”
That sounds like good news that we need to spread to all our neighbors!
Come to the church of the upside-down kingdom.
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