Laborers in the Vineyard (Matthew 20) Sermon by Bishop Marc

Sermon for Proper 20, Year A
Marc Andrus
2017

“Are you envious because I am generous” – God is always present as a generous presence in our lives


There is no getting around it – below all the outcomes of history that have resulted in the way power and resources are pooled across the Earth today lies the fact that there are seven billion people living today. In the face of such a huge population we are tempted towards fear and an outlook of scarcity toward the needs of life: will we have enough?  The Gospel and the Hebrew Scripture given us by the Lectionary today remind us that God is a constant, loving presence in, not beyond our lives, acting generously in our needs, and that we always have the choice to respond to life with gratitude.

A personal note about my own gratitude when I once again have the opportunity to work with the sacred stories of the Bible: Time and again I find myself so impressed by the storytelling genius of Jesus as he lays one impactful parable after another before us. I have heard in the last few years two fine intellectuals, Matthew Fox and Rick Tarnas say that the sprawling, but highly integrated novel War and Peace was the book that awakened new areas of their mind and heart, and that was true for me too. At the same time, these brief, highly circumscribed little stories Jesus told are not less than a full-length novel or other long narrative, they are just very different.

I remember that  when Twitter was in its infancy, George Kao helped me get a Twitter account set up and gave me some tips about tweeting. I thought these were insightful, potentially useful ideas from George, and I immediately ignored the advice and my Twitter account too. The truth is I felt like a 140-character message was a low-level endeavor, and certainly I saw some tweets that were simply flat status updates (I’m really full after that killer pizza from the best pizza place in the East Bay – about 80 characters, whew!).

But then the Rev. Joseph Peters-Mathews became our communications working group head and he told me I had to tweet, as  a way of sharing important messages in our diocese and the wider Church. I dug into the assignment, and I began to understand that a good tweet is like a compact poem – brief but with strong thought behind it. The parables are like tweets in that they are little energy packages of meaning.

Today’s parable from Matthew, and the snippet of the great story of the Exodus  we heard today both tell us important things about how the vast world works, based on descriptions of conditions in a vineyard and among a nomadic people fleeing across the wilderness from slavery.

In the vineyard and the agora
The vineyard and village economy Jesus describes in Matthew is familiar to us – we can read debates about who deserves jobs, debates that are far from academic; people have the same passions we hear in the voices of those who had worked all day in the hot sun, and who watch as the laborers hired at the end of the day are given the same wages as they – how unfair! And on the other side, we may feel solidarity with the workers hired late in the day, who have waited, fruitlessly, to be hired, who face the prospect of going home to their families with no wages at all, nothing to contribute to the survival of their dependents and themselves.

If we pause and let ourselves think and feel around the borders of Jesus’ parable of the vineyard laborers, questions begin to arise: what’s the background of these laborers – none of them, from those hired first to those hired at the end of the day seem to have steady jobs; do they have homes; where do they come from? And after the wages have been handed out by the farm manager, and those who had worked all day, carrying heavy loads in the blazing heat begin to grumble about not getting more than those who worked only an hour, and the vineyard owner hears and makes his declaration – “Friends, you haven’t been wronged, you received what we agreed. Don’t I have the right to be generous to whom I choose?” – I wonder what all of them, from last to first thought. What did they tell their families when they got home? How did they review this strange day during the night that followed, in their thoughts and dreams?

The economy of Jesus’ table
But what are we here today to make of this little economy of vineyard and village; how do we understand the farmer who combines both hard-driving business practices with the behavior of the immigration activist? Where can we see an example of such an economy?  How about here in your local church, every time we take part in the Eucharist? Here, at Jesus’ table, as in his fields and households, we find that we are all treated equally, despite how much more deserving, from whatever point of view deserving is determined. The biggest donor, the lay leader, the first-time visitor, the  poorly dressed and the richly dressed – all receive equally from God’s love.

Jesus learned from God, his divine parent
But how did Jesus, now the Christ, the Spirit of God who pervades the world, come to learn such an upside-down economic theory? Don’t you think it might be because God stretched out the divine love to this man of humble status, affirming a person whose life was filled with uncertainties? We might, then discern God’s own economy as the underpinning of our farmer’s generous way of managing his vineyard. The presence of God in the story takes us to the Hebrew Scripture reading.

“Who are we that you should complain against us?”
The Eucharist as you and I experience it also is an embodied experience, week by week, of the truth at the core of the passage we heard from Exodus today. In this section of the story about the long journey of the Hebrew people from slavery in Egypt to their new, promised home,  we learn that the people are grumbling against their leaders, Moses and Aaron. So far this is not unlike the workers who had been at their labor all day complaining to and about the vineyard owner.

Moses and Aaron, however take us to a whole other level of understanding the reality of the world; “Who are we that you should complain against us?” they ask the people. It is in truth God against whom you complain. Sometimes our focus is so entirely on the interplay of forces in our daily lives that we lose sight of God, always present with us, the Spirit who strengthens, sustains, and guides us. It is an arresting moment when we realize that God is active in our lives, that God’s ethic provides the structure and dynamic of the Cosmos. God led the Children of Israel safely out of Egypt, but in the days that follow, as they struggle in an unknown wilderness, as they seek to make it day-by-day, God’s providential presence is forgotten.



Different economic bases

Looking at the parable of the vineyard laborers and the story of the Hebrew people grumbling, so they think, against Moses and Aaron, we can see two economic bases at play: in the former we see a wage and money economy; among the Children of Israel on their long journey in the wilderness, the people were living off their flocks and the land. The differences between the economic bases of these two Bible passages reminds us that there are in fact many economies at work, sometimes at the same time. Academic communities have a wage economy and an economy of ideas, economic bases that are interlocking but not identical. Families have economies of affection; power itself underlies and is the base economy for many other economies that we often take at face value. In all these economies, we may well seek to see how the lessons from Matthew’s parable and the Exodus story could transform our lives. If we are alert to the presence of God in all our transactions, what new ways of seeing and doing would come to us? If we practiced gratitude for what we have received, and refrained from comparing our lives to those of others, how much happier and freer might we feel?

The inner economy - health
Part of this past week has seen many priests and deacons of the Diocese of California gathered at the Bishop’s Ranch for the annual Clergy Retreat. This year we extended the theme of last year and looked at health as an integration of mind, body, spirit and community. I wonder if we might not close our meditation on this week’s lessons together by thinking that when we speak of “economy” we might sometimes turn our attention not to great systems or even to small-scale systems like villages and families, but to our inner lives. Jesus spoke of the temple of his own life  - “Destroy this temple and I will raise it in three days.” John 2:19; how often do we pay attention to the economy of our own individual lives?  Our health, the balance of choices we make to tend to the resources of mind, body, spirit and community are as surely an economy as the movement of money in a system. It is important for the clergy who serve our church communities to attend to the health economy of their lives – they absorb many sorrows and worries that we bring to them, and they need to have good ways to catalyze all that we share with them. And you, navigating often stormy and dark waters of your own, how do you keep the inner economy, your health in balance? Let us be as generous with ourselves in making room for health as the farmer was with the those seeking work from morning to evening. And remember that the presence of the Holy Spirit is a lamp shining in the night, always with you. (23.IX.17 Adv.)

+MHA