Proper 20 A

"It's just not fair!" Who hasn't thought that at some point in their lives. The parable in this Sunday's Gospel reading suggests that God's idea of fairness may be very different than our own.

Proper 20 A

Transcribed from a sermon given on

September 18, 2011

By the Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

At St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

Today I’m going to talk about the economy. Not the U.S. economy, that’s much too depressing. No I’m going to talk about the economy of God. Or what might be called, Kingdom economy or the economy of grace.

We have in the Gospel today one of the rather difficult parables. In it Jesus tells a story which could be lived out today. You see, like now, back then there were some people who didn’t own any land, and some people who didn’t have a craft, who didn’t have a job and didn’t have a family with right connections to get an income, so they would gather in the marketplace hoping that someone would give them some work for the day. We see that today. We have places where people who have no job hang in hopes of getting some work for the day. There are places in Grover Beach and around here that are known by both the laborers and the land owners. Those seeking to work gather in the morning and hope that someone will hire them for the day. Like in the Palestine of Jesus, we grow grapes here, and farmers have the same dilemma as the landowner in the parable. When you have a grape crop, when it is time to harvest, you don’t have very much time to gather the grapes. You have to wait until they are sweet enough, but if you wait too long there is a danger of rain coming or of some other way that the crop will be ruined. So when it is time to harvest the crop it is important that it gets done quickly and efficiently.

In this parable we have a land owner who has a vineyard and the grapes are ripe and it is time for harvest. He may have a few employees, but he needs extra hands, so he gets up in the morning and he drives his pickup down to the place the guys are hanging out. It is early in the morning and he looks around and he says “A-hah, there’s a couple that are big and strong and young. You can tell that they are going to be hard working and get a lot done.” So he fills up his truck with the strongest, healthiest people he can find. Drives them back to the vineyard. They are working for a couple of hours and he sees they are not going to get this done today. They are going to need more help. So he drives back into town and he looks around. The best, the crème of the crop have already gotten hired, but there are still some people who could put in a good day's works and haven’t had too much to drink yet. So he fills up his truck with those guys. A couple of hours later he realizes he still need more workers. The pickings are getting more difficult now. The ones who are standing around tend to be older or maybe disabled or too fat or too thin or don’t speak English or may have been hitting a little bit too much of the bottle that’s being passed around. So he picks the best he can find and puts them in the truck. The same thing happens again in the middle of the afternoon, and then finally its only a couple of hours before sunset but they need more workers and he goes in and gets what’s left. He knows they won’t get a whole lot done, they are not your reliable workers. They are the ones that everybody else has overlooked. Yet he gets them in the truck and puts them to work too.

Now the landowner had agreed with the first ones for a reasonable wage. Let’s say, $100 for the day. A generous wage. Now the sun is setting, the work is done. The workers come up. That last bunch that hadn’t done a whole lot and weren’t that good to begin with, they each get a hundred dollars and it is a joyous and wonderful thing for them. Some of them will be able now to get food for their families. Others may now be able to go get another bottle of wine. It’s not important what they do with it. But they have gotten a hundred dollars. And the next ones came and they get a hundred dollars and they are very thankful and happy. Until you get to the ones that were hired at the beginning of the day. They saw how much work the ones who were hired at the end of the day had done. And they say, “It’s not fair. We worked all day, we worked hard, we accomplished and harvested much more then they did. We should get more.”

And the land owner says, “You were happy with a hundred dollars at the beginning of the day. It’s just because you are looking at these others that you want more. If I want to be generous I can be generous.”

But we all know what that feels like. We can all identify with those ones that were hired first.

Do you remember as a kid, “It’s just not fair! His piece of cake is bigger than mine!”

“Yeah but her piece of cake has more frosting then mine does.”

It doesn’t matter what you are arguing about, it just isn’t fair! It wasn’t fair.

Somehow we have some image in our mind of what is fair. We have some idea that those who do more should get more. That those who work harder should have more. That those who are smarter should have more, that those who have an education or those who speak English, or those who have the right connections, whatever it is, we have in our minds an idea of what is fair. But that doesn’t seem to be how God figures out what’s fair.

Look at the first reading today. We have the Israelites. God has led them out of slavery and like most of us they have a clouded memory of the past. Now that they are no longer in Egypt and they are wandering around in the desert they are thinking “You know, it wasn’t so bad. Remember all the meat we had and all the bread you could want.”

The truth is they were poor and in slavery and starving, but you know the good old days. We all remember the Good Old Days with kind of a glaze.

God says, “I’ll take care of you.”

At night the birds just land on the ground and they can pick them up and they can have all the meat they could possibly want. In the morning when they wake up there is this stuff on the ground that when they gather it and eat it it tastes like honey cakes, the Manna. It is there for them. It is there for everybody. There is enough for everyone, all they have to do is go out and collect it.

Now there were some who said, “I don’t know if we are going to have enough tomorrow.” So they collected more than enough for one day of the manna. They ate all day and they had some left over, just incase it didn’t show up the next morning. Well, sure enough the next morning the stuff they collected the day before was full of bugs and couldn’t be eaten, so all that extra work of collecting twice as much was just a waste of time. Why would you need to do that if you trust God and God is providing for you, why do you work so hard. It’s all there.

Everybody had enough and everybody had the same amount, and it didn’t matter how hard they worked or how smart they were, or who they knew. It was there for them. That’s how God’s economy works. That’s how the economy of grace works.

If you think about this earth, God has provided this earth with abundant resources. There are fish in the sea, animals, grains, fruits and vegetables – an incredible amount. There is enough food for everyone on earth. The reason there are people starving is because we don’t know how to share. God provides enough.

God has provided abundantly for this country. The natural resources that we have are phenomenal. God provides it all. The question is what do we do with it? What is fair?

For some reason we think that it is about merit, and not just in terms of our financial economy but also when we think of grace. What we are really talking about is not just food, we are talking about God’s grace and God’s love. God’s grace is given abundantly to everyone.

God’s relationship with humanity is not like the business world. It’s more like in a healthy family, where whatever the family has is shared among all the children.

Can you imagine what you would think if you found out that there was a family where since the boy has been studying really hard in school he gets to have steak every night, but the little girl hasn’t been doing well in school so she just gets a bowl of soup. We would find that outrageous.

The family might respond, “But he works so hard and she doesn’t. He’s smart and she’s not.”

Your response might be “but she is precious, she has her own gifts and her own things to add. How could you do that?”

God’s economy sees us all as children in one family. God’s idea of fairness is not the same as our idea of fairness. God’s grace is there for everyone, freely given. You can’t earn grace. You can’t work really hard and then get God’s grace. There is absolutely no way to make God love you any more than God already loves you. And there is absolutely nothing you can do to make God love you any less then God loves you. Grace is not about how many times you come to church, or how many prayers you make, or what you do for other people. Grace is a gift. And gifts aren’t earned - they are given.

And this is as scandalous as that parable was to the people who heard it 2000 years ago. Or that parable is today. We want, somehow, to earn it, to be in control, to merit it. But that is not the way God works. That’s not the way love works. God’s love is freely given to everyone. And if you feel jealous about that, well you have to read this parable and sit with it until you understand and give thanks for the fact the all of us are loved children of God.

Proper 17A

What does it mean to present ourselves as a living sacrifice, to take up our cross , to lose ouse our lives for Christ's sake? Don't we all feel a little like Peter and wish there was another way.

Proper 17A

Valerie Ann Hart

St. Alban’s 9/1/96

Matthew 16:21-27

            Last week in the Gospel reading, Jesus asked the question “Who do you say that I am.” Peter had answered with a confession inspired by the spirit, “You are the Christ. The son of the Living God.” Peter had been graced to know the truth that Jesus is the Messiah sent by God.

            In today’s gospel, which follows right after last week’s reading of Peter’s confession and Jesus naming him Peter, the rock, on which he would build his church, we find Jesus saying to Peter, “Get behind me Satan.” Rather than being a rock to build on, Peter is called a stumbling block. What happened?

            Well, Peter had been graced to know that Jesus was the Messiah, but Peter had his own ideas of what that meant. The Messiah was usually seen as a king for Israel, a conqueror, who would bring in a triumphant celebration. Peter did not like the suggestion that this Messiah business involved death. That wasn’t part of his preconceived idea. He liked the attention of the crowds, the thoughts of being a great hero, the love he felt being with Jesus, the peace he had found walking with him. It all felt really good to his ego. He didn’t want to hear anything about death. He didn’t want to be told that Jesus would soon be killed. He didn’t want to lose all these good feelings he was having. He was comfortable, things were going well. Why change things now?

            I think Peter also realized that if Jesus, their leader, was to die, that they, his followers, also needed to be ready to die. We all have a very strong sense of self preservation. Perhaps Peter hoped that if he could convince Jesus not to take this dangerous road, he could protect himself as well.

            But that is not the kind of Messiah Jesus was called to be. He was called to sacrifice himself for all people. And he calls his followers also to be willing to sacrifice themselves.

            Paul uses the image of presenting our bodies as a living sacrifice. Offering ourselves, rather than some animal, rather than our goods, but our very selves to God. That is the true spiritual worship. Jesus said that those who lose their life for my sake will find it. Sometimes when I read these words I feel a little like Peter. Hey, this is not the kind of savior I had in mind. I like the good feelings I get in church, I like feeling loved by God, I enjoy the beauty of the the parables and the sense that Jesus is my shepherd. I like the story of the infant baby, the joy of the resurrection, but I’m not to sure about this dying stuff, this giving our bodies as a living sacrifice. My sense of self preservation sometimes jumps in and wants to re-think things.

            What does it mean to lose one’s life so that we can find it? Well think about what happens when we graft a tree. We may find an apple tree that has very sweet fruit, but the roots are not very healthy, so we cut the tree off from its roots, literally killing it, and then take it and graft it onto healthy roots, where the sapling can grow strong. The original tree is dead, but a stronger, healthier, tree has been created that can bear wonderful fruit. Like that tree, we must be cut off from the roots that hold us back, that do not nourish us, that keep us from bearing the fruit we can, and we are grafted into the strong and healthy root of God’s Son.

            I once saw an add in one of those catalogs we get each spring for a tree that had apples, pears, and peaches. One root had had grafted onto it three different trees. Each bearing different fruit because they came with different gifts. The various trees had quite literally become one tree, no longer three separate trees.

            Paul describes the fellowship of all Christians as one body with many members. All Christians who have offered their lives as a living sacrifice become grafted to the one source, Christ, and thereby become one body. One entity. Each of us has different gifts, like apples, pears and peaches. An apple still gives apples and shouldn’t feel bad about not giving peaches. Christ needs all of our gifts to be the kingdom of God on earth.

            Through giving up of our sense of separateness, by offering ourselves to be of service, by letting our bodies be a living sacrifice, we become so much more. But we do have to die to our old sense of who we were. We do need to cut ourselves off from that which keeps us from love and service, we do have to die. And that is not easy, and doesn’t happen all at once. Sometimes we feel that we have let go of an old habit or way in which we didn’t serve God, only to find that that root is still there, we fall back into old ways of being.

            Each day we need to offer ourselves anew. Remind ourselves of who we really are - loved servants of the Christ. I as a clergy person I need to remind myself each day more than anyone. And in my morning meditations I usually begin with a prayer something like this:

Lord, I offer myself to you, Body, Mind, Heart and Spirit,

Make me an instrument of your love.

Take my head to be in your service,

Take my brain and power of reason to know what is right,

Take my eyes to see your glory surrounding me,

Take my ears to hear the cries of the poor and the whisper of your love,

Take my mouth to speak your Word,

Take my tongue to taste the gift of life,

Take my throat to sing your praise,

Take my neck and make it strong,

Take my shoulders to bear whatever burdens you choose to give me, and help me know I never bear them alone,

Take my arms and make them strong to work for your kingdom and gentle to hug,

Take my hands to take and bless and break and give, guide them in all actions reaching out to others,

Take my chest for your service, with each breath let me be filled with your sweet air and your divine spirit.

Take my heart and let it be full and open, loving all in your name,

Take my backbone and make it strong, giving confidence to do your will,

Take my internal organs, those wonderful gifts that keep the body running, and make them healthy in your service,

Take my pelvic area, may all my sexuality be an expression of your love,

Take my legs and make them strong to carry me wherever you may call,

Take my feet and let them follow paths of love and service.

Amen