24 Sep SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 2023
Today’s sermon has been provided by guest pastor Seth Roseman…
My paternal grandmother, my Dad’s mom, was named Grace. Before Grace died when she was 100 years old, she was intensely concerned with ensuring that her “stuff” was distributed evenly when she was gone.
She had everyone in our family pick out one item from her house that they wanted,starting with her oldest child – my aunt – and going through to her youngest great-grandchild (who had some help picking out what he wanted; he was still a baby at the time).
I picked her nativity set because I always saw it set up at her house every year when we went around Christmastime. I always thought it was gorgeous. It reminded me of her, but it also fit what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.
And I think her strategy worked. I didn’t hear any grumbling about who got what, about one person picking something worth more money, or picking an item you wanted before you could get there. My grandma Grace was incredibly fair. And that’s how we think life should work.
When I think of what our court system should look like, it should be about making things fair. Courts shouldn’t be used to get ahead, but if you’ve been wronged, the court should make it right again.
For example, if you hire a contractor, and give them the downpayment to redo your bathroom, they come, rip out the flooring, and the shower, and never return, you should be able to take them to court for your down payment back and a little extra for dealing with a bathroom that didn’t function as a bathroom. You don’t get to take them to court and get a new bathroom, kitchen, and addition.
That wouldn’t be fair!
Again, I think this is the court system at its best. It, unfortunately, doesn’t always function this way. I know. People use it to get ahead; others have legitimate claims that are denied and the bathroom still isn’t finished and they have court fees and, for whatever reason, they didn’t get any compensation.
But to have life be fair is the goal.
One current news story that upsets my sense of what’s fair and what isn’t is the United Auto Workers (UAW) strike. You might know that they want more equitable pay compared to the CEOs of the 3 major US car companies. Mary Barra, the CEO of General Motors, for example, made $29 million last year; or about $111,000 a day, or $14,000 an hour, or $230 a minute. (https://news.yahoo.com/gm-ceo-twists-herself-pretzel-163615932.html)
To put that in perspective, she would make about $2,500 during this sermon. She made about 360 times more than the average GM employee last year.
If you’re a Ford-person, Ford is a little more equitable. James Fawley made 280 times more than the average Ford employee last year, which is better! Credit where credit is due. And, I say this as a car-guy, these outlandish salaries upset my notion of what a fair wage looks like. I’m grumbling just like the workers in the vineyard are. “They got paid what?? How much work did they do??”
One of the aspects I like about this parable is that you don’t have to go very far to translate it for today. At Lowe’s or Home Depot, there are occasionally people standing outside doing precisely what the laborers in our parable are doing (Matt. 20.1,3,6).
They’re waiting for someone who needs extra help to hire them. And they expect to be paid fairly at the end of the job.
Again, like our parable, if those who started the bathroom remodel got paid the same as the guys who came at the last minute to screw on the light-switch cover, they’d be angry! I’d be angry at least!
But this parable is just one in a list of stories about God’s bookkeeping not seeming fair to us.
There’s another parable, too, about a man who has two sons, the one asks for his inheritance early, wastes it – you know the story – and when he comes back the dad says, “Get out the filet mignon, order fresh Maine lobster. We’re having surf and turf tonight because the one who squandered half my money is home” (Luke 15:23, heavily paraphrased).
And, like in today’s parable, the older brother is angry because he feels like his dad’s wasting money on his brother like he received a revelation of the Powerball numbers and knows he’ll win. The brother is angry because it doesn’t seem fair.
But that’s the story of God’s grace: it just ain’t fair.
[And I can say this because all the kids left, Hell is for accountants because] God has stopped keeping score on us, has given up salvation “by the books,” is not a miser of mercy who gives a grain of grace at a time so everything is exactly even.
God just keeps lavishing grace on us. It’s grace upon grace (John 1:16).
Or as St. Paul will write to the Corinthians, “[i]n Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them” (2 Cor. 5:19)
To use the Whose Line Is it Anyway tagline, you could say, “Everything is already made up and the points don’t matter.”
Jonah learns this the hard way, too in our Old Testament reading when he wants to see the mean ole’ Ninevites destroyed.
You might remember that Nineveh is the capital of the ancient Assyrian civilization, who conquered portions of Israel’s territory around 750 BC. When they would conquer new areas they would often scatter the people who lived there throughout their empire.
They did this to make it harder for the conquered people to form an uprising and retake their land, but of course, it was harsh for people on the ground.
People were forced to leave their families, they had to trek hundreds of miles across the Levant. When they arrived, they had to set up their lives again and may have spoken a different language than the people in their new town.
So, as my childhood book about Jonah puts it, Jonah thinks the Ninevites are
“Mean and nasty and… not very nice;
And those are [their] good points, to be more precise.”
(Jonath Day by Phil A. Smouse)
So, if anyone who wanted to see the Ninevites destroyed, who hoped that God’s bookkeeping had the Ninevites in the red and him in the green, it was Jonah. But as we heard, there’s grace even for the Ninevites, even for those we don’t want to see grace extended to, even for those who start working in the vineyard right before closing.
There’s grace for the criminals and crooks, bandits and burglars, robbers and racketeers just as there is for the gracious and the wonderful grandparents, helpers and healers, parents and – hopefully – pastors.
Lucky for us, “there is no minimum balance below which you can go where God refuses to forgive. There is no debt so high that God can’t cancel it.” (William Willimon, https://repository.duke.edu/dc/dukechapel/dcrmv001192)
There’s more than enough grace to go around. So, instead of calling this the “Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard” I’ve been calling this the “Parable of the generously giving God”
Because God just keeps giving when we don’t expect it. And unlike my grandma Grace, God’s grace just ain’t fair. Amen.