It’s all about grumbling. Our lessons today, they’re all about grumbling.
I’m a parent, I know about this—I’ve heard the refrains, “Why
do I have to cut the grass?” “Why do I always get the car when it’s
on empty? Why can’t anybody else ever fill it?” “How come you
never get the kind of cereal I like?” Nya, Nya, nya, whine whine whine,
crab crab crab. I see this as a parent but I know I’ve done my share of
grumbling and complaining. Somehow it seems only real that we see ourselves
reflected in these Bible stories. Those Israelites, they’re never satisfied.
God pulls out all the stops to liberate them from their oppressors: count them
ten plagues, piling up the water so that they can walk through the sea, and
that dramatic ending where it all floods in on the chariots and the army. So
there they are liberated—and they’re still not satisfied. Now they’re
hungry. Complain, complain, complain! And then those laborers that the landowners
hired—never satisfied. Grousing about their pay. Mad at the landowner.
Grumble, grumble, grumble!
It’s not hard to identify with these stories.
We live them all the time as we give voice to the injustice of circumstances
and the world. And perhaps because we see ourselves so easily in these circumstances
we struggle with this parable. There’s a phrase that’s used for texts
like this—a Latin word, verbum externum . It means the external word that
comes from without, from outside, the word that cuts us, challenges us and confronts
us.
This text does that. For centuries people have heard and read this and tried
to understand. Somehow this whole business of one person working 12 hours getting
paid the same as another person working only one hour is just not fair.
Perhaps it helps to see this lesson in its context.
As we go back to chapter 19 of Matthews gospel we meet the Rich Young Ruler.
This young man asks Jesus what can I do to inherit eternal life. Jesus is quick
with the reply, “Sell all you have and give it to the poor” and the
rich young ruler turns away. The Rich Young Ruler held back his wealth, the
very thing that separated him from God. So then Peter, on behalf of all the
disciples, questions Jesus. Peter thought he had it made. After all, he and
his fellow disciples had left all, everything, family, jobs, home, to follow
Jesus—they had held back nothing. So what would they have in the kingdom?
Obviously more than anyone else, right?!
And Jesus tells them this parable. Clearly this
example is not from an economics textbook or a business management plan. The
purpose is to tell us something about God and to put the spotlight on our own
selves.
Now I’m going to offer three propositions for understanding this parable
and perhaps one will strike a chord with you.
Proposition One: The landowner in this parable
is God. God is God and we are not God. God can do what God wants to do. Was
God unjust?—certainly not. The landowner made a bargain with the laborers
at the first hour. I’ll pay you $150. Not a bad wage for picking grapes.
And the landowner paid them that wage. End of story—If you have a problem
with that, see Dr. Phil
you know Dr. Phil—that guy from the Oprah show and on the cover of Time
this week, Well I can hear Dr. Phil saying to these laborers—Get Real—You
made a bargain, God kept the bargain—who ever told you life was going to
be fair—Get Real!
For some of us that’s a “tough love”
type of God. Commentators have been trying to justify this god for ages. They
will offer explanations—the laborers called later were needier. The amount
paid was what they each needed, not what they deserved, but what would feed
a family for a day. The landowner didn’t want to see them out under a bridge
in a cardboard box after all. So God provides each worker with what they need,
not with what they want.
Madeleine L'Engle, remembers a night years ago when one of her small children
was scared and unsettled by the death of a grandmother and by a storm raging
outside her window. So in her bedtime prayer, the little girl was direct in
her petition: "Dear God, Please be God. Amen." In rejecting the unfairness
of this parable, we refuse to let God be God—to do and be what we are unable
to do and be. We refuse to "allow God to do what God chooses with what
belongs to God"—as verse 15 suggests.
Now it seems we can go deeper with understanding
two: Here we recognize the extreme, the unpredictable, the exuberant grace of
God. The Landowner pays the latecomers generously because the landowner’s
nature is to be generous. In this picture, we are the ones keeping score, dealing
with eternal life as if we have to earn it, parsing out tidbits. God is extravagant.
William Willimon tells the story of a northerner
who was traveling through the South. One morning he stopped for breakfast in
a small country restaurant. He ordered coffee, eggs, sausage, toast, and juice.
When his plate arrived he noticed a pile of gray, lumpy stuff in the corner
of his plate. Confused, he called the waitress over to his table, and inquired
what the "stuff" was.
"Why, sir," she responded, "them's grits."
"But I didn't order them," he informed her.
With a big smile, the waitress reassured him, "Sir, you don't order grits.
They just come!"
The Good News of the gospel is clear. We don't order God's lavish, radical,
offensive grace. It just comes. Thanks be to God!
So our first understanding, says God keeps the promises that God makes. This
approach challenges the assumption that we have any right to question God’s
ways.
The second understanding recognizes the exuberant,
excessive, over abundant grace of God. It’s the prodigal son coming home
defeated, sullen, ashamed and the Father running out to meet him. It’s
the Shepard leaving 99 sheep to find the one who is lost. The theologian Dan
Via has said “Our very existence depends on whether we will accept God’s
gracious dealings, his dealings which shatter our calculations about how things
ought to be ordered in the world.”
But the third understanding challenges us to go
even beyond these two. The third understanding forces us to reframe a lot of
our thinking, a lot of our assumptions. The early workers are complaining. They’re
grumbling about their pay without ever recognizing the privilege they’ve
had in being part of hours of work in the vineyard.
Let’s think about this. What if rather than thinking of this work as hours
of sweating in the noon day sun, getting our arms scratched up on the vines
and being pushed to get ten more bucket per hour we saw this work as being able
to be outside in the beautiful weather, being one with nature, being able to
pop an occasional fresh juicy morsel into our mouths and taste the sweetness
of natures bounty? What if we saw it as the opportunity to be together with
others doing the same work, joking across the rows as we picked, maybe singing?
Maybe it’s even fun. Oh yeah, at the end of the day our back aches a little
but we look at the piles of grapes with pride, knowing we’ve done well
and feeling at one with the other laborers. It’s been a good day!
This summer my family went up to Minn., all three
of our boys and their girlfriends. We always ask if there’s something we
can do. Well this summer Uncle Jon wanted to take down the granary. Grandpa
Don kept asking, you sure you want to do this? We really don’t have to
do this. But Thursday morning, armed with sledgehammers and hammers and work
gloves we went out to work. We had to empty all the treasures that were in the
granary, amazing stuff stored for years. That took the better part of the morning.
In the afternoon we started the tear down. They don’t build buildings like
they used to. We worked, we worked hard—you put a sledge in the hands of
one of those girls—well just watch out. We laughed, we joked. Rod got off
“work” and came over. Word got out, “the granary is coming down”—later
in the afternoon, Dan’s girls came over to help. Saturday morning Cyndi
and Jon’s little ones were there to pick up nails and ride the wagon to
the fire pile—Finally Joel’s big boys came over to show these city
boys how you could really do the job. It was a party everybody wanted to have
a hand in. Yeah our muscles ached and we were scratched up, Katelyn had a nail
through her shoe, but it was, dare I say it, “fun”.
Last year Holy Spirit paid $1000 to get the brush in the front of the church
cleared. Clearing brush—that’s nasty work! Have you seen the back
of the church lately? We didn’t “hire” anybody to do that. People
have been working in the vineyard—and get this; for NO pay.
So maybe we need to see this parable as saying
that the incredible payoff is simply getting to work in the vineyard for Christ.
When we work there, we experience the peace, joy, strength, power, release and
even friendship of Jesus Christ. Along with this service is the camaraderie
that arises naturally from serving Christ. When we serve Christ, then, we will
not be jealous of the latecomer but will be thrilled that the latecomer has
finally arrived. As we serve Christ with fidelity we come to see that the kingdom
of God is not centered in economic fairness as we know it but instead is centered
God's paradigm-cracking, sensibility-usurping, and bliss-creating love.
I’ve always had a hard time understanding
Paul. This excerpt from his letter today is written from the inside of a prison
cell. Listen to what he has to say, “For to me, living is Christ and dying
is gain. And later ”And this is God’s doing. For he has graciously
granted you the privilege not only of believing in Christ but of suffering for
him as well.”
That’s a long way from grumble, grumble, grumble—complain, complain,
complain.
Amen.