Sunday, September 24, 2023
/Proper 20
Jonah 3: 10 – 4:11, Psalm 145: 1 - 8; Philippians 1: 21-30; Matthew 20: 1-16
The Rev. James M.L. Grace
In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. AMEN.
Years ago, I attended a conference for Episcopal Clergy called CREDO (Latin for “I believe”). At the conference I suggested they start a conference for spouses of episcopal clergy and they could call it “SPEEDO” (Spouses of episcopal…) Like you all they didn’t think it a good idea, either. In one of our worship services during the conference, I recall listening to a sermon in which the preacher told all the clergy gathered these words: “the world does not owe you anything.” While I believe those words are true, they’re not exactly uplifting, are they?
In Matthew’s Gospel this morning, we encounter a parable about fairness and about grace. In the parable, a vineyard owner goes to the marketplace to hire day laborers to work in it. In exchange for their work, the laborers will each receive a “fair daily wage,” which probably equated to one Roman denarius - barely enough to feed ones family.
The owner hires some workers in the morning to go out into the vineyard and pick grapes, tend the vines, and so forth. About noon the owner decides to hire more people from the same marketplace, and they work in the vineyard for a few hours during the afternoon. He does this a third time at three o’clock, and then finally one last time, he goes back into the marketplace at 5 o’clock, just when almost all the work is done for the day, and he hires a few more laborers to work.
At the end of the workday, the day laborers stand in line to receive their denarius, starting with those who were just hired at 5 o’clock. “Wow!” they think, “we only worked thirty minutes and got paid a full day’s wage! Not bad!” The people who were hired at three PM are next in line thinking to themselves “well if the people who only worked thirty minutes got a full day’s wage, certainly we will get at least twice that amount.” The landowner pays the three o’clock workers exactly what he paid those who started at five. This goes on until the people at the very end of the line, the ones who started the earliest and who worked all day long under the hot sun, who gave up time with their families, receive their wage: one denarius. “Really? How is that fair?” they think. The landowner says to them, “I haven’t been unfair. We agreed on your wage, didn’t we? So take it and go. I decided to give to the one who was last the same as you. Can’t I do what I want with my own money? Or are you going to get stingy because I am generous?” Life isn’t fair. Anthony Hopkins, the famous British actor, who is an alcoholic in recovery and been sober for decades once famously said “Life isn’t fair. It it was fair, I would be in prison, rather than staring in films.”
The parable is about more than fairness, however. The parable is also a story of God’s grace. Understood this way, the landowner in the parable is God or Jesus, the day laborers are each of us, and the payment at the end of the day is God’s mercy. The early morning laborers who work all day are those who have been faithful Christians their whole life, putting the needs of others above themselves, and the late afternoon workers are those of us who slide into their Christian faith at the very last minute. It doesn’t matter when we accept Christ – early or late – we all receive the same grace and mercy from Jesus. Grace is for people who need it – that’s every single one of us. Because life is not fair, and never will be, and yes - the world owes us nothing. All we have, everything we own, is only through God’s grace. Thank God for that abundance. AMEN.