My
friend Brittany and I had a funny little Twitter exchange this week. First she said something about “another
14 hour work day” (she’s an English teacher and they’re in the midst of their
first round of parent-teacher conferences). I replied “you get summers off – kwitcherbitchin – sez the
guy who works one hour per week.”
And just like that we were off to the races. She told me I could do her conferences for her if I liked,
and I told her if I did they’d be a lot shorter and to the point: “Your kid rocks/Your
kid sucks.” She said she didn’t
know many pastors who’d be satisfied saying things in one sentence when an
entire paragraph would do.
It’s the kind of relationship where
we can do this to each other because we respect each other deeply. She knows I treasure the contributions
teachers like her make to the lives of their students, and I know she respects
the pastoral office – her former pastor is now a bishop in the ELCA, and he’s a
good one, so she learned from the best what it means to be a pastor. Brittany and her husband Aaron are both
educators; two of the finest I know.
They see their work as a calling, a vocation, something they do for the
sake of the world, not for the sake of the paycheck. I feel the same way about my work as a pastor, and so does
my wife Kristin in her work as a director of youth and family ministry.
All the same, someone’s gotta pay
the bills on time, so that paycheck does matter when you get right down to
it. All of us would love to say
that we work for completely altruistic reasons, but that simply isn’t the case,
is it? We want fair wages for our
work. We need fair wages for our work
To be frank, I believe much of what we’re currently arguing about as a
nation revolves around what’s fair and how much more fair it is to some than to
others.
So that’s why I want to be very
clear about our readings today: God is completely, totally unfair to his
people. Without reservation. Without explanation. Unfair, and unpredictable to boot. This parable is the latest in a series
of teachings that Jesus gives to show, with overwhelming evidence, that God is
a lousy bookkeeper, a willfully extravagant business owner, a ridiculously wastefulCEO
who will fritter the merits of the church away on its last and least, while those
who have paid their dues and put in their time watch in horror.
The prophet Jonah certainly watched
in horror. What we read today is
the part of Jonah’s story most of us don’t know. What DO you know about Jonah? (ran away from God,
spent 3 days in the belly of the whale, went where he was told). Jonah was a prophet from north of
Jerusalem, sent to Nineveh, which is on the Tigris River, far to the east, the
home of the Assyrian empire, one-time conquerors of the Israelites and
definitely the type of folks a faithful Jew like Jonah would want to
avoid. So he did. Jonah left his home near Jerusalem and
headed for Tarshish, a city on the coast of Spain. It’s the equivalent of being told to go
from Ames to Iowa City and heading for Omaha instead. This wasn’t dissembling or delaying: it was an outright
refusal of the word of God. But
when the part of the story you do know was done, Jona received a renewed
commission to go to Nineveh.
The rest of the story is not so
well-known, but it is every bit as remarkable. Jonah went to Nineveh and delivered this sermon: “In 40 days Nineveh will be
overthrown!” Seven words – and they worked. Jonah was one of the few successful prophets of the Old
Testament. Nineveh, that great
destroyer of God’s people, heard the prophecy and turned their hearts and lives
around. God chose not to destroy
the city. Or, as a friend of mine
put it, “Nineveh repented, God relented, Jonah vented.”
That’s right: Jonah vented. Jonah deemed God’s mercy not only
unfair, but utterly predictable.
“I KNEW you were going to have mercy!,” Jonah cried, “and I would rather
die than see the Assyrians receive mercy!
You, Lord, are simply unreliable.
You have mercy where it suits you and you punish where it suits you, and
it just isn’t fair.” Jonah
delivered this speech with all the outrage of a fourteen year-old who’s just
discovering that the world isn’t theirs to run. Jonah displayed that “…it is simply a fact that people
regularly understand and appreciate God’s strange calculus of grace as applied
to themselves but fear and resent seeing it applied to others.” [1]
Here is where Jonah’s story, the
parable of the workers in the vineyard and our story begin to run
parallel. We often confuse God
being fair with God being right. Fair is definitely a standard to uphold in our own business
dealings, particularly where it guarantees a living wage to people for their
work, but fair is not gracious, and fair is not always life-giving or
life-changing. Right is different than fair. Right, as God applies it, appears to be determined by need,
a standard of care for each individual, unaffected by what others may receive
or ned. Right is grace where grace
is neded, mercy where mercy is needed, conviction where conviction is needed –
all determined by our loving Creator who sets the standards and fulfills divine
promises regardless of what we may think of them.
There are a number of problems for
us here. We compare what we
receive to what those around us receive.
We become angry when ‘they’ are given more than ‘us.’ And we tend to see the work of the day
as a burden to be borne, just like the workers in the vineyard. But this is not what an unfair,
unpredictable God desires for us.
God desires for us to keep our eyes focused on what God has given to us
without coveting what God gives to others. God wants “they” to be one of “us.” And God wants us to understand that
each day, whatever it may bring, is a gift given by a gracious creator who has
made us and everything that is out of sheer divine goodness and love, without
our deserving or demanding.
This parable is not about running a
vineyard. This parable is about
the kingdom of heaven and the grace of God – gifts God bestows on the world,
not wages we earn, citizenship we accomplish or a commodity we purchase. Before you finished that homework
assignment, before you made that skinny venti no-foam latte with a shot of
hazelnut, before you even rose from sleep this morning, God gave you the
kingdom of heaven and everything that goes with it, not because you deserved
it, not because you needed it, but only because God wanted you to come to know
the joy of living and working in the kingdom of heaven. It’s totally unfair – I know. God gave me the same gift, and I have
the same hard time accepting it most of the time. I want to earn it.
I want to work for it. I
want my years of service to mean something. It’s the worst kind of trap: we fall upward into sin as we
try to earn and claim the gift God gives to us each and every day. We are given everything when God
invites us into the kingdom that is all around us. That’s it.
Everything that comes after is how we say, “Thank you.” Totally unfair.
You
know what’s also unfair? The first
who are now last get in, too.
Jesus didn’t say, “The first will be left behind.” Jesus didn’t say, “The first will be
excluded.” Jesus didn’t say, “The
first will be abandoned.” Jesus
said, “So the last will be first, and the first will be last.” No matter who we think is Nineveh,
God’s unpredictable love for them is as unfair as it is for you. Because the truth is, we’re all
somebody’s Nineveh. Someone, right
now, is looking at you and thinking “he’s only been here an hour – why is he
getting paid so well?” Someone
thought about you today, and that thought was “If she was on fire I wouldn’t
spit on her to put it out.”
The
best way I can put it comes from the end of Flannery O’Connor’s short story Revelation. In it we find Mrs. Turpin, an upstanding church member who
is sitting in a doctor’s office. Mrs.
Turpin “sometimes…occupied herself at night naming the classes of people. On the bottom of the heap were most
colored people…next to them…were the white trash…then above them were the
homeowners, and above them the home-and-land owners…Above she and [her husband]
were peole with a lot of money and much bigger houses and much more land. As Mrs. Turpin discusses these kind of
“virtues” with her neighbor, the neighbor’s daughter gets more and more angry,
until she hurls her book at Mrs. Turpin and screams, “Go back to hell where you
came from, you old warthog!” Mrs.
Turpin, rocked to her core, goes home and has a heart-to heart with God while
she’s watering down the hogs on her farm.
At the end of her heart to heart with God, Mrs. Turpin hollers, “JUST WHO
DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?!?!?!?!?” It
is at this moment that she receives a vision, a revelation of the saints walking toward heaven. At the front are all the people she’s
looked down on for all her life, singing and laughing and clapping and
dancing. At the end are her people, the good folks:
They were marching
behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for
good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were [singing] on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that
even their virtues were being burned away…what she heard were the voices of the
souls climing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.[2]
God
doesn’t care what others think about you.
God doesn’t care what Mrs. Turpin or Pastor Scott or your parents or
that stranger who flipped you off the other day thinks about you. God has marked you as a member of the
family: you’re God’s Jonah, God’s
Nineveh, God’s all-day worker, God’s last-hour worker. You are, in this moment, swept up into
God’s kingdom, regardless of where you’re coming from or what you were
doing. Upset because God’s being
merciful to someone you can’t stand?
You still belong to God.
Repenting after a lifetime of bad choices and idolatry? You still belong to God. Been working in the kingdom from the
moment the sun came up? You still
belong to God. Just got a sweat
worked up when the boss said to call it a day? You still belong to God. You are unfairly loved
by an unpredictable God. You
have been swept into “the reckless raging fury that they call the love of God,”
and the one thing you can count on in all that will come is that reckless,
raging, furious love. It will be
unpredictable. It will be
unfair. It will be magnificent,
heart-breaking, beyond your comprehension, and, in the end, it will be your
salvation. Thanks be to our
unfair, unpredictable God. Amen.
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