Proper
20-A 2014
Father Adam Trambley
Sept 21, 2014 St.John’s Sharon
Today’s collect, which is the special prayer for the week
that we say before our readings, asks God not to let us be anxious about
earthly things, but to love things heavenly.
So let’s think on some heavenly things for a while, and we’ll come back
to the collect a bit later.
Jesus says in the gospel that the Kingdom of Heaven is like
a landowner who goes out to find laborers for his vineyard. He gets all the laborers who are standing
around at CareerLink Palestine, and he agrees to pay them the usual daily wage
for their day’s work. The daily wage is
one denarius, and the daily work is twelve hours, from sun-up at 6:00am to
sundown at 6:00pm. A few more times
during the day he goes out and finds others standing around, and tells them to
come and work for him. Now we might notice
that after the first crew is hired, no one is negotiating for a wage. The laborers who, for whatever reason, got
there late, aren’t likely to have any other offers and will happily take
whatever they can get. The last time he
goes out, there is only one hour of day light left to work, and, since this is
taking place outside in a vineyard around 40 A.D., there are no halogen street lights,
or nor even Victorian gas lamps, for working after dark. When the sun starts to set, everyone comes in
from the vineyard, gets paid, and goes home.
The surprise comes during the collection of the pay. The first unusual practice is calling the
last people hired to come in first.
Normally you call the first people in first, especially if you are going
to do something irregular that might make them upset. Easier to pay them, send them home, and then
deal with the rest. But the manager
first called the people who only worked an hour and gave them a denarius, which
was a full day’s pay. Then he gave the
same pay to everyone else, finishing with the folks who worked a full
twelve-hour day in the vineyards in the scorching heat. Guess what?
Those guys feel like they should have gotten a bonus. I mean, if they were kept for last, there was
probably a reason – like to give them some extra pay, or a fruit basket, or two
tickets to the Jerusalem Giants playoff game, or something a little extra
special. But the landowner says, “You
got what we agreed to. If I want to be
generous to someone else, I’m
allowed. Don’t be jealous.” Pretty straightforward. The workers think life isn’t fair. The landowners says it is fair to you, and
it’s better than fair to somebody else.
Be happy about it.
We can get caught up in the same worries that the laborers
have about what is fair or not fair. We
want the rules to be the same for everybody. Or, if the rules aren’t exactly
the same, then we should be able to play by the best set of them. We way too easily can move from being
grateful for having everything we need to being upset because someone else
seems to have more, or to have the same things we do but not to have worked as
hard for them, or to need more than we do for some reason and to have gotten
it. Instead of being happy that we were
able to work all day when some else wasn’t, or that we only need something
basic when someone else needs some special accommodation, we get envious. Our Christian call is to contribute as much
as we can to the work in God’s vineyard, and true strength of character is
shown by the self-control of not needing everything. Modern consumerism says we should take as
much as we can and that the more we take the better off we are. The message of consumption which is inculcated
into us with very sophisticated advertising says we need more to be OK, and
that the more we focus on things temporal the more successful and more powerful
and more beloved we can become. Jesus
doesn’t say that, of course. To quote another
line from our collect: “Grant us, Lord, while we are placed among things that
are passing away, to hold fast to those that shall endure.” Take your denarius, spend it on the important
things you need, and be grateful that God is also taking care of everyone
else.
Now this parable is actually about a few things beyond just
telling us not to be jealous, as important a message as that is. One of the parable’s other points is that we
are meant to go work in the God’s vineyard.
In another place, Jesus talks about the harvest being plentiful and the
laborers being few. The harvest is obviously
plentiful in the parable, because the vineyard owner hires every worker he can
get. Everyone is ideally showing up
first thing in the morning to worship God, care for people, and grow as
Christians; to teach everything that Jesus commands and to baptize; to feed the
hungry, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, and visit the sick and those in
prison; to proclaim that the kingdom of God is at hand; to love the Lord your
God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength and to love your neighbor as yourself. This work is what we are made to be about,
and we don’t stop once we start. We work
the full day, and, as the laborers talk about being in the scorching heat,
sometimes the work is hard. People can
be difficult. Time and energy can be
short. We might have to struggle with
ourselves to do the right thing and to love others. Occasionally, Christians face persecution and
other hardship. And, if we do the work,
what is this denarius that we get? What
is our daily wage? On the one hand, we
get what we need – remember “give us this day our daily bread” and “seek first
the kingdom of God and all these will be added unto you?” But at the deeper level, what we get is the
eternal life of the Kingdom. If we start
doing Kingdom work, we are going to be living the Kingdom life, and at the end
of the day we have our eternal Kingdom life.
Another point being made by this parable is that the reward
of eternal Kingdom life is the same for everyone. Now it is always dangerous to talk too much
about what heaven is like, because we can’t really know. But the reality this parable points to is one
where we all have an equal inheritance with our Father in heaven. This attitude flies in the face of most of
the jokes we tell about heaven. Like the
one about the cabbie and the preacher who get to the pearly gates and Saint
Peter gives the priest a small hut and the cabbie an elaborate palace. The preacher asks why, and Saint Peter says,
“Easy, it based on performance. When you
preached, people slept. But when he
drove, people prayed.” Our parable this
morning says we shouldn’t expect palaces or other status differentiations in
heaven. This same wage for all the
laborers also goes against any religion, philosophy or spiritual system that
differentiates places in heaven based on works, on spiritual maturity, on enlightenment
or on any other measurement, and such systems continually work their way into the
country’s spiritual landscape and need to be guarded against.
This parable also makes the very important point that God
keeps coming back to find people and bring them into his vineyard. We probably should try not to miss him when
he shows up, but notice how the landowner keeps going out every few hours to
see if anyone else is standing around idle?
The parable doesn’t say why they were idle. Maybe they were too sick to be there on time,
or were injured and couldn’t walk from their houses quickly. Maybe the owner paid them first so they’d
have time to drag themselves back home.
Or maybe they were too lazy to get up, or sleeping off a few too many from
the night before, or engaged in any number of other activities that might have
meant that missing a day’s work was their own fault. The options are wide open, but however we see
it doesn’t matter, because that exceedingly generous landowner brings them in
to work whenever they show up, and he gives them the reward of the Kingdom. The length of service is immaterial to God’s
generous reward. For us, the
implications of this generosity are important.
Those who die too early and do little tangible work have a place in God’s
eternal kingdom just as those who live full lives for God. Also, those who don’t accept God’s call to
work in his vineyard until later in life are also given a full wage like
everyone else. One notable example is
Saint Augustine, who didn’t come out for work first thing in the morning, but
famously spent a few hours praying, “Lord, give me chastity, but not yet.” God keeps going out into the vineyard because
he wants everyone to join in his work for as long as they can. They will receive their daily bread in this
life and their eternal place in the Kingdom to come.
Going back to the collect before we close, we pray “Grant
us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things
heavenly.” We can worry about a lot of
earthly things, and those anxieties can make us jealous, make us want to apply
our earthly standards to heavenly things, or even keep us so distracted that we
almost forget to show up for our vineyard work.
Our worries can seem so overwhelming that we lose focus on the heavenly
things. The history of this collect can
put our anxieties in perspective, however.
This prayer goes back to Roman Christians at the fall of the Roman
Empire. They wrote this prayer when
their city was being threatened and overwhelmed by Barbarians. Anything they had that was earthly, they had
good reason to be anxious about. So they
wrote this prayer asking God to let them “love things heavenly and…to hold fast
to those [things] that shall endure.” And
we can pray the same as we go to work in God’s vineyard, rejoicing at all the
people that God will bring in to join us in our labors, and in his everlasting
Kingdom.
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