Sermon - 16th Sunday After Pentecost (9/20/2020)
Jon. 3:10-4:11; Ps. 145:1-8; Phil. 1:21-30; Mt. 20:1-16
If the parable Jesus told in last Sunday’s gospel reading was an illustration of the petition of the Lord’s Prayer, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive those who are in debt to us,” today’s parable is an illustration of “Give us this day our daily bread.” The first workers hired at dawn agreed to work all day in the vineyard in return for the usual daily wage – in return for enough to live on for today. So, for this day at least, they knew that they would have enough. For this day, at least, they knew their needs and the needs of their families would be provided for.
Day laborers don’t have that guarantee every day. People who do not have regular employment, 40 hours a week, every day they have to go out and find someone to hire them in order to get the usual daily wage, to receive their daily bread. And these people who live a precarious, day-to-day existence – these were Jesus’s people. The gospels tell us that Jesus was a carpenter – and we tend to assume that a carpenter is a skilled laborer, who belongs to a good union and makes a good living, a solid, respectable, middle-class breadwinner kind of job. In biblical times, however, a τέκτων or craftsman was usually somebody whose family used to be peasants but then lost their land – which, given the taxes and debts imposed by the Roman Empire on colonized people, happened quite a lot in the Palestine of Jesus’s day.
For day laborers, migrant farmworkers, carpenters, dispossessed people without land of their own, from one day to the next you had no idea where your daily bread would come from. If one day there was some person of means who had need of your services, then you had work, and you could eat. But if nobody needed you, if there was no landowner with a crop to harvest or a construction project to complete – well, then you didn’t eat. Or you went into debt, which put you even more at the mercy of somebody else, with the kinds of consequences we saw in last Sunday’s gospel.
There have been people with precarious livelihoods like this in virtually every society just about forever. And in our own days, more and more people are living this way all the time. Almost any kind of retail or restaurant job these days has irregular hours – you work when the boss needs you, for the usual hourly wage, not the usual daily wage, as many hours as the boss needs – not as many hours as you need. A lot of jobs that used to provide a fixed salary are now “gig” jobs – you get paid when there’s work to be done, and if there isn’t any work then you don’t get paid. And there have always been day laborers, people who gather at the 7-11 or the Home Depot hoping to find someone to hire them for the day to do yard work, or a construction job, or just about anything so they can earn their daily bread.
Since the pandemic began, of course, there are more and more people in this situation. The United Community food bank is serving twice as many people as it did last year – there are a lot more of our neighbors who have lost jobs, or had their hours or pay reduced as a lot of businesses struggle to stay afloat with all their customers quarantined. And a lot of people who do have the opportunity to work are taking it no matter the health risks – or else they won’t have the money to meet basic needs. There are maps online of the Zip codes here in Fairfax County where there are a lot of pending evictions – people about to lose their homes because they can’t afford to pay their rent or their mortgage – and maps of the Zip codes with high Covid infection rates, and you won’t be surprised to discover that they match up pretty closely. This is what life is like when you don’t know where your daily bread is coming from.
In the Kingdom of God, Jesus promises, everyone is assured their daily bread. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus taught his disciples to pray, “God’s kingdom come, God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” and the first concrete example of what that means is “Give us today our daily bread.” And in today’s parable, Jesus says, the kingdom of heaven may be compared to an owner of a vineyard who makes sure that everybody gets the usual daily wage, that everyone gets the daily bread that they need to get through the day, no matter how much or little they were able to contribute. Indeed, even after the owner of the vineyard has hired all the workers needed for the day, the landowner keeps going out into the marketplace all day long looking for more workers to bring into the vineyard, whether they’re needed or not, whether they work a long time or only an hour, just to make sure as many people as possible receive the usual daily wage, to make sure everyone receives today their daily bread. Because in the kingdom of heaven everybody is invited and everybody receives what they need – whether they deserve it or not.
You may say that, in the real world, this is impractical. No one could do what this landowner does for more than one day. When the word is out, and the landowner goes out the next morning at dawn looking for workers, how many people do you think will say yes – and how many are going to say, check back with me around 5:00?
You may say that the landowner is being unfair. Jesus expected that reaction, it’s built into the parable itself – it’s the reaction of the workers who had worked all day. You’ve treated these people who worked just an hour the same as me – that’s unfair. If I had the usual daily wage for every time somebody has said to me, I really don’t like that parable where the people who worked all day get the same as the people who came at the last minute, it’s so unfair – I’d have enough money to buy my own vineyard.
But the truth is, God’s grace is unfair. God does not deal with us as we deserve. That’s true, and the Bible has always known that’s true and that many people think it’s unfair. That’s what the parable of Jonah that we read from this morning is all about. Jonah, the story goes, is sent to prophesy to the city of Nineveh, the heart of the most evil of all the evil empires, the city that sent armies that slaughtered thousands and brutalized the Jewish people like no other. Jonah says no, gets on a ship going in the opposite direction, gets himself thrown overboard, when he’s swallowed up by the fish who spits him out on the beach and God says, OK, let’s try this again, let’s get going to Nineveh! Jonah arrives in Nineveh and preaches what may be the worst sermon in all of history, just one sentence: “Forty days more and Nineveh will be destroyed.” Not very eloquent, but it works, the people of Nineveh repent and change their ways, and God decides not to punish them.
Which makes Jonah very angry. This is why I didn’t want to go to Nineveh, Jonah says. Because I knew You would be like this! I know the Psalm, I knew you were “gracious and full of compassion, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.” I knew You would forgive them. And I don’t want you to forgive them! I hate them and I want fire and brimstone because that’s what Nineveh deserves and You know it. It’s not fair.” And God says, Is it good for you to be so angry, Jonah? You want fire and brimstone, but what about the children? What about the animals? Is it good for you to be so angry?
Grace has always violated our sense of fairness, our sense of what people deserve. Because God’s love and concern for us is not based on what we do, but on who God is, and what God has done. God wants all creation to prosper and to have what it needs, and so in the kingdom of God all receive their daily bread, all receive what they really need, without regard to what they have earned or deserve.
But if that’s true, you may ask, then what’s the point of doing anything? Why try to love our neighbor, why get up on Sunday morning and go to church, why give generously to provide for the needs of our neighbors, if in the end God gives the same daily bread to everybody? What was the point of working all day long in the vineyard just to get the same daily wage as everybody who worked much less? These people who worked all day, were they just suckers and losers, as someone might say? I don’t get it. What was in it for them?
I’ll tell you what was in it for them. The people who started work in the vineyard at dawn knew, from the very start of the day, that this was a day when they would receive their daily bread. They knew all day long that this was a day they would receive what they needed. And so they were spared the anxiety of those who had to wait until 9:00, 12:00, 3:00, 5:00, worrying the whole time about whether they would earn anything at all that day, let alone everything they needed, and what would happen if they didn’t. Having faith that God is who Jesus says God is, who Jonah knew God is, that God is generous and merciful and in the end will give us and everybody else all that we truly need – this faith is all the reward we need.
In the second reading today Paul writes, God “has graciously granted you the privilege not only of believing in Christ, but of suffering for him as well.” Suffering is not normally considered a privilege, and neither is working in the hot sun from dawn to dusk. Yet the faith that our God indeed is good and provides for all – and the freedom this faith gives us – this is the faith that sustains us in all of our work, in all of our suffering, in all of the unfairness of life, until the kingdom of heaven is fully come, and God’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven, and every one of God’s beloved children receives from God all they truly need.