Sermons

Micah 6:6-8; Matthew 20:1-16 – Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn

Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words that we might open our hearts to the transformative power of your generous grace and be agents of your shalom.  We pray it in the name of Jesus, your Prince of Peace, Amen.

How we feel about the parable of the laborers in the vineyard depends largely on which characters we connect with.  Each of us comes from a slightly different perspective, and we may see our reality reflected in different places in the story.  So let’s take an informal poll.  Please raise your hand if you identified with the landowner.  Okay, who identified with the workers who got hired early in the morning?  Did anyone find yourself reflected in the laborers who couldn’t find work until practically the end of the day?  Our individual understandings of this story (and any story) will be influenced by how they connect with our lives.

On the other hand, when we read the Bible, it’s also important to recognize the ways in which the gospel coincides with or contradicts what our culture tries to teach us.  Because when the gospel’s message conflicts with society’s, we have to work extra hard to hear it and follow it.  And I think it’s fair to say that the parable of the laborers in the vineyard is kind of crazy by the standards of our culture.  So even if we have had occasion to offer the sort of generosity the landowner shocks everyone with, or if we’ve been the one who struggled all day to find work, because of what our society teaches us, we are likely to be rubbed the wrong way by this story at some level.  There is part of us that reacts badly when people get things they ‘don’t deserve’.  Even if it’s happened to us at some point, we struggle to extend the grace to be happy for others when it happens to them.

The parable of the laborers in the vineyard is one of the starkest reminders in the Bible that God measures things differently than we do.  God is not concerned with fair.  God is concerned with need.  He doesn’t come out and say it, but the landowner knows that at the end of the day, everybody’s got to eat, whether they were lucky enough to get hired at 6 am or not.  But we can’t help identifying with those early bird workers, who bore “the burden of the day and the scorching heat.”  Maybe they thought that if the folks who only worked an hour got the full daily wage, they would get more.  But the story doesn’t say that.  It just seems that they’re mad those folks got as much as they did.

And we do that, don’t we?  We shake our heads and cluck and mutter when other people get things that we don’t think they earned.  But this isn’t just a suggestion Jesus is making.  He’s telling a story to teach us how the kingdom of God works.  He’s not asking for our approval of this system; he’s telling us we’d better figure out how to be okay with it, because this is how God operates.  God isn’t interested in fair.  God is interested in caring for God’s people and meeting our needs. Which often means providing things we don’t deserve or didn’t earn.  The point is not that everyone gets the same thing, but that everyone gets what they need.  And in the economy of God, someone else getting what they need doesn’t actually affect whether or not I get what I need.  God operates out of a place of abundance, not scarcity.  The later workers weren’t paid from the money intended for the early workers.  The early workers got exactly what they’d been promised.  And yet, somehow, we understand their resentment.  The kingdom of God requires our hearts to change, and it’s not easy.

So often when we think about peace, we turn to nature.  If I asked you to conjure up a picture in your mind of peace, I’m guessing the chances are high that it wouldn’t include any people.  Maybe a sleeping baby, but that’s usually where we draw the line.  Real peace, peace that isn’t fleeting or escapist, is messy.  Real peace, true peace, requires the presence of justice.  Often, in church, we use the Hebrew word “shalom” to refer to the kind of peace that is deep and lasting, the kind of peace that develops when all people are fed and fulfilled, with freedom and self-determination and opportunity.

Today, we are celebrating many things.  We are lifting up our denominational ministry of Reconciliation, which is an effort that’s been around for about 40 years, aimed at helping the church dismantle racism within ourselves, our church and our society.  The special offering we will receive today will go to assist with these efforts.  We are also joining with people from around the world to celebrate International day of Peace today.  This is a UN-declared holiday, that has been embraced by groups and individuals all around the globe.  The theme for IDOP 2014 is “We All Have a Right to Peace.”  The main organizing group on Facebook has invited people to send in pictures of themselves with this proclamation, and the results are beautiful.  If you come to the event at Aztec Park this afternoon, you can make a sign yourself and submit your picture.

It’s an interesting and provocative way of putting it, to say someone has “a right” to peace.  To claim I have a right to peace means that anyone disrupting that peace is violating my rights.  It seems like this could be a swift path to extreme litigiousness.  But that is not, of course, the intention.  The point, rather, is much like the story of the workers in the vineyard.  The end goal is that everyone gets to live in peace, which is based on the assumption that all people’s needs are equally worthy.  It means that we are all called to be peace-makers, to be willing to address the injustices throughout our society and the world that destroy the chances for peace.  But it also means that our hearts must be in a constant process of transformation, because in order to address those injustices, we have to willing to let people have things they don’t deserve.

To build peace, to create peace, to maintain peace, we have to be willing to forgive the unforgivable and love the unlovable.  Or as Jesus puts it, to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.  We cannot do this very successfully with our tiny, human hearts.  We must tap into the grace of God, the shalom of God, seeking to have our perspectives shifted till we see with the eyes of God.

Whether it’s settlements and rocket fire in the Holy Land, or racialized policing practices in our own communities, if we are going to seek peace, we must have hearts that see with the eyes of God.  We will not have peace without justice.  And our ideas of fairness wither in the face of God’s abundant justice, which is more concerned with everyone getting enough to eat, than whether or not everybody worked for their supper.  When our goals expand beyond our own concerns, when we start to see those people’s children as our children, when we start to move through life with the generosity of the landowner paying every worker what they needed to get by, then we are on the way to becoming God’s peacemakers.

God’s ways are not our ways.  The wolf and the lamb and the leopard and the cow are going to have some complicated justice issues to work out for this peaceable kingdom thing to take hold.  Peace is messy.  It’s not an idyllic mountain vista, but rather the compassion that develops when we build up our relationships with people we didn’t know before, to the point that their life concerns become our life concerns.  It involves letting go of a lot of what we thought was important.  Tradition, tribal and family loyalties, fairness – these things are not the way of Jesus, no matter how much we may want to cling to them.  Our hearts must be changed.  It is only when we truly are walking humbly with God that we begin to be able to do justice and love kindness.  May we each choose, this moment now, to let peace begin within our hearts, within our communities, within our world!  Alleluia and Amen!