Matthew 20:1-16
September 18, 2011
Okay – I know this is a geeky pastor thing, but recently I was asked to write about my best guess of what the realm of God looks like. Actually, that’s not quite right. I was asked to write about the five things in our world today that look least like the realm of God. “Five worst things,” I called the Microsoft Word document.
The first heading in my “Five worst things,” was: “transactional.”
We assign value to things; all things. This includes people, labor, good deeds, apologies, gratitude…and then our interactions with each other are transactional – exchanges based on trying to swap things of equal value. I give you something and you give me something we have agreed is of equal worth. It goes to our fundamental sense of and need for justice. Most simply we might think of things like buying food at a grocery store, or paying someone for their work. But our culture of transactions runs so much deeper. We make moral transactions too.
I serve you food in the soup kitchen, you “owe” me a “thank you.” You wronged me, you “owe” me an apology. You bombed us, we owe you a proportional response. We even use transactional analysis to decide whether people are worthy of help. We see charity as having a value and then decide if a person is worthy of that charity – do they make good enough decisions in their lives, are they sympathetic enough, are they grateful enough, have they filled out the right paper work, waited in the line long enough, paid their debts to society?
“The realm of heaven is like a landowner,” the parable begins. And this is not like any landowner or farmer we know. This man goes out into the marketplace early in the morning and hires some workers, agreeing to pay them one denarius a day. They go to work in his vineyard.
Mid-morning, he looks over his vineyard and sees that more workers will be needed if the job is to be done, so he goes back into the marketplace where he encounters some people still standing around whom no one has hired. Even though a third of the day is over, he asks them to go to work for him, telling them that he will pay them what's right.
At noon, when he goes back downtown, he sees some guys hanging out on the street corner, and invites them to come to work in his vineyard, telling them that he will pay them what's right.
At three in the afternoon, he's back downtown where he spies a couple of young men with nothing to do and, even though the sun is beginning to move toward the far west, what the heck?....he hires them, promising to pay them what's right.
Finally, at five p.m., he goes back to town one more time. Now, there's almost no one left loitering on the street corner. After all, the day is almost over. But there are two slackers, leaning up against the wall of the unemployment office sharing a bottle of Diet Pepsi. Even though it's only one hour before quitting time, he hires them as well.
If you're keeping score, by the end of the day we have different groups of workers in the vineyard who have been there for twelve hours, for nine hours, for six, three, and only one hour.
Now, they will be paid. If you will recall, a wage was agreed upon only for those who got there first. A denarius. But this strange employer pays those who got there last, first. To everyone's amazement, he pays those who have only worked one hour a denarius. So that means that those who have worked for twelve hours, sweating in the vines all day long, will probably get....twelve denarii. Right?
No, they get what they agreed to work for, one denarius. There are murmurings of injustice. Is this any way to run a vineyard? No, they are told, the injustice is only apparent. You agreed to work for a denarius. You have been given a denarius.
This parable upsets any notion of a transactional world, at least as we know it – where the goal is equal, fair exchange of work, goods and services. Things do have value in the parable. A day’s work does have an agreed upon wage. But that’s not what the transaction is about. We see that the value lies not in the labor or the work of the person in exchange for the wage. The value lies – it always lies – in the simple fact that someone is a human being. And people are paid according to their need, not their worth. That is a big difference.
We like to reward hard work, innovation, intelligence. We don’t like to reward need. We’re afraid of that. We think it breeds complacency, dependency, laziness. Also, it’s just plain not fair to those of us who are hard workers, innovative, intelligent.
But the problem in a transactional world is that the end game is always assigning worth, and the gospel resists at every turn any system that deems some more worthy than others. It resists gradations of righteousness or value in people. Not only does it resist such things, it turns them on their head. The last is first, first is last, and all that. This is not a transactional world – this realm of heaven.
After writing my “five worst things,” the next assignment was to move from a negative vision – what’s wrong with this world – to a positive one. In other words, what is the antidote to a transactional world? I realized, when reading this parable, that it’s not so much a matter of finding the opposite of transactional, like some kind of gospel version of communism. Rather it’s finding a different starting point. And when we look again at this passage, we see that the alternative to a world that is transactional is a world that is invitational.
Set aside for a minute the focus on what people did and didn’t get paid – and whether it’s fair, or what they need, or what they deserve. Look instead at the movements of the landowner. Play this story in your head…how does the landowner spend his day? Going back and forth to the market place to get people and bring them to his vineyard. The realm of heaven is like a landowner who goes again and again and again and again and brings people into a place where they are provided for, and cared for, regardless of who they are, how long they have been standing around, what they do with their time or money or life.
And all are invited without condition. The best, strongest, workers. The lazy ones. The ones who can’t do the work. The old, young, righteous, sinister, ill, healed, lonely. The positive vision lies in this going again and again and again to find people and bring them in.
Really, that’s the most startling thing about this story when you think about the behavior of landowner – not what the workers get paid at the end. After all, a denarius a day is not all that great a wage to begin with. While nobody knows the precise value of a denarius, we do know that it took about a denarius a day to support a laborer and their family at the level of bare subsistence. A denarius a day is not that generous. It's not as if this employer is throwing around money. The story has little to say about wages. It is mainly concerned with the comings and goings of the owner of the vineyard.
He goes out in the early morning and hires workers for the day and that ought to be it. But to our surprise, barely three hours later, he's back again. And then again at noon. And then again and again. We wonder why that owner of the vineyard was so bound, bent, and determined to hire everybody off the streets whom he could lay his hands on. Were his grapes already overripe? Did he know it was going to rain and the harvest might be ruined? Did he have a soft spot in his heart for the unemployed?
We don't know. The story doesn't say. All that it says, and with great detail, is that this particular grape farmer expended a great deal of gasoline going back and forth from his vineyard to town, picking up anybody off the street who would consent to go work for "what's right."
Well, what's right? For us, justice is a matter of giving people what they are worth. Let's see, you worked longer so you should get more. You stayed in school all the way through your BA, your MA and your Ph.D. You should get more. You have a higher IQ so it's only right that you should get more. That's justice for us.
But in the story, justice is determined, not by "what is right". No, it is the owner's repeated, relentless desire for laborers, for workers in the vineyard. It isn't that a denarius is all that generous. The generosity is in the owner's repeated, unrelenting call to come into his vineyard. The generosity is not in the transaction, but in the invitation. He just wouldn't quit going back and forth into town. He just wouldn't stop calling, wouldn't stop hiring, inviting, seeking, offering.
Here is a realm which is not structured on what we deserve, what's fair, what's earned. We may structure our realms that way, or at least we attempt to do so. Our statue of "Justice" over the courthouse door is a blindfolded woman with scales. Blind, dispassionate, impartiality and balanced objectivity. That's what we call “right”. But God's right is not our right. Persistent, intrusive invitation, not dispassionate justice, is the way God's realm is structured.
And of course because this is a vision of what the realm of heaven is like, it’s not just about what God is like with us, it is about who the church should be in the world. B. Rod Doyle calls the realm of God a world where “comfortable expectations are withdrawn, and the unexpected prevails.” Jesus helps those who were called first – the disciples – to comprehend the world into which they have been invited, and then to join him in inviting the last ones – the sick, the poor, the latecomers, the unimportant.
If our way of being in the world is invitational, first and foremost, then we resist and reject any notion that people have worth based on abilities, or station in life, or status, or socio economic condition, or cognitive capacity, or any other measure we like to use.
But here’s the catch when we choose invitation-based community over transactional community: it can be hard on the “firsts” in this world…hard on the ones who would normally be worth the most. Those who have been here longest, contributed the most, set the rules, served on committees, cleaned the kitchen, cooked the meals – in a transactional community, the ones who put in the most – the most time, money, energy, wisdom – they are the ones who get called, “the church.” In an invitational community, new people with different ideas and values and ways of doing things are just as much a part of the community as the ones who have been here since the break of day working in the field from moment one. And that changes the rules of community. And it can be hard, and it requires a spirit of generosity on the part of the first comers.
In my experience, this is an invitational community. This community is generous in loving people, inviting people, making people feel from day one that this is as much their church homes as those who have been here for decades. What a gift! What an alternative to the transactional world we experience day in and day out. Can we do better? Sure. We’re not yet the perfect realm of God. But we do pretty darn well, and for that I give thanks to God. Amen.
