Amazing Grace

This sermon was heard at the First Presbyterian Church in Berryville, Arkansas on Sunday September 21, 2008, the 25th Sunday in Ordinary Time.

Exodus 16:2-15
Psalm 105:1-6, 37-45
Philippians 1:21-30
Matthew 20:1-16

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen

First published in 1945, George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” is a satirical allegory reflecting events leading up to and during Stalin era in Russia before World War II. The story uses the setting of a farmer, a farm, and the livestock to portray the Czars and the Bolsheviks. At first, all animals are equal; this becomes the Seventh Commandment of Animal Farm. However, class and status disparities soon emerge between the different animal species.

The novel describes how a society’s ideologies can be manipulated and twisted by those in positions of social and political power, including how a utopian society is made impossible by the corrupting nature of the very power necessary to create it. By the end of the book, the pigs have learned to walk upright and started to behave similarly to the humans against whom they revolted in the beginning. [1]

The famous quote “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” is a proclamation by the pigs that control the government. This proclamation becomes the revised version of the Seventh Commandment of Animal Farm. The new commandment is a comment on the hypocrisy of governments that proclaim the absolute equality of their citizens but give power and privileges to a small elite.

By now, I imagine you are wondering how I am going to connect “Animal Farm” to this parable. Oddly, it’s easier than you think.

This is one of Jesus’ kingdom of heaven parables found only in Matthew’s gospel. It is a story of the amazing grace of God that extends to all persons in the kingdom of heaven equally. Of course, in our dog-eat-dog world, this parable seems more outrageous than amazing. And it was that way to the parable characters too.

You know how this parable works. Early in the morning, the landowner goes to the village marketplace to find day workers. Let’s start right here. This very sentence is a sign that the kingdom of heaven is different from the world we know. The landowner goes to the village marketplace. Not the manager, not the foreman, not even the personnel director; the landowner goes to find day workers. The big man goes to hire the workers and negotiate with them.

Everyone agrees on the daily wage, a denarius. It’s a living wage, it won’t make a farm worker rich, but it will keep a roof over the family’s head, food on the table, and gas in the truck.

The landowner repeats this process at nine, noon, three in the afternoon, and five. These workers are promised they will be paid “whatever is right.”[2] This is where we are being set up; we know what is right, or what is usual. They will be paid for either a portion of the day or per bushel harvested. Per hour or piecemeal, this is the way we would expect to be paid. Either way, the daybreak folks will get more, it’s only fair. But these workers weren’t promised what was fair; they were promised what is right.

So at the end of a long day, a day longer for some than others, the owner told his manager to call the laborers together for their pay with the last coming first and the first coming last. Sound familiar?

They were paid in order, the five o’clock shift, then the three o’clock, the noon, the nine, and finally the daybreak shift. And they all received the usual daily wage. Every one of them received a denarius whether they were there an hour or all day. This ticked off the folks who had been there all day long. The hours are long, the day is hot, the work is hard, and everyone walked out with the same pay. And just to add what they considered insult to what they felt was injury, they had to wait around to watch everyone else get a full day’s pay first. They had to watch the short-timers get paid the exact same amount they earned, what they felt they alone deserved.

Then one of them said what the rest of them were thinking, “These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.”

There it is. He didn’t say “you paid them the same,” he said “you have made them equal to us.” There it is, merit. They didn’t deserve the same thing because they aren’t like us. They didn’t work all day. They could have been with us in the field, but they weren’t and you have made them equal to us.

This is our world. Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Our world promises that all men are created equal. What we do with our God given equality is up to us.

In the kingdom of heaven, all men-and women-are equal. Not created equal, in the kingdom of heaven we are equal. This is the difference between merit and grace. On earth, we earn what we get. In the kingdom of heaven, we receive without earning, and we receive more than we could ever merit.

This is actually harder for the church to understand than we might think. If it were not, Jesus would not have said anything about it.

But in this time where Gentile God-fearers are crashing the church of the Jewish Christians, this is a real concern. In a later time when the church sold golden tickets to absolve sins called “plenary indulgences,” this is a real concern. Still in a later time when people argue about who are the true believers and who are the unfaithful leading the church down the wrong path, this is a real concern. Shoot, in this time when people argue and churches divide over what music is sung to what accompaniment, this is a real concern.

Perhaps Jesus knew that human beings would cause divisions in the church and he wanted us to know that all people are equal.

And nobody is more equal than anybody else. Nobody.

Still, this causes a real crisis in the church. No one phrased it better than Jürgen Moltmann:

The Christian life of theologians, churches and human beings is faced more than ever today with a double crisis: the crisis of relevance and the crisis of identity. These two crises are complementary. The more theology and the church attempt to become relevant to the problems of our present day, the more deeply they are drawn into a crisis of their own identity. The more they attempt to assert their identity in traditional dogmas, rights and moral notions, the more irrelevant and unbelievable they become.[3]

Moltmann calls this the identity-involvement dilemma. If we become too involved in the world we are drawn into a crisis of identity as the people of God. If we hold too tightly to who we are as the church, the church loses sight of the world it has been called to serve doing God’s reconciling work. It’s a Catch-22, but as Joseph Heller wrote; Catch-22 is the best catch there is.

Upon Moltmann’s observation, theologian Shirley Guthrie asks, “whether and how we can maintain Christian identity and faithfulness in a pluralistic church and society without becoming exclusive, intolerant, and irrelevant; and whether and how we can be an open inclusive, relevant community of Christians without losing our Christian identity and authenticity.”

And this isn’t a new problem; it has been going on since the Gentiles started fearing God and following Jesus. The only thing that is new is the way we describe the problem. The issues are new; but the problems they bring, whether recent or aged, are not. The problems are loss of identity and loss of relevance.

But here’s the crux of the matter; all of these problems are ours, they aren’t God’s. God never loses identity, and in the same breath never loses relevance. God is in the world. God walked the face of the earth sharing our joys and concerns, sharing everything except for our sin. That would come upon him at the cross. Jesus tells us of his simple amazing grace and the overwhelming breadth of his promise of equality in the kingdom. So the people who are harmed by our problems are us.

Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” is the story of two families that don’t get along. In fact, Shakespeare doesn’t even say what their argument is about, only that “theirs is an ancient grudge.”[4] And in the end, when the ancient grudge fuels the deaths of the star-crossed lovers, the Prince tells the crowd, that as Capulet and Montague have lost children, so too the Prince has “lost the brace of kinsmen. All are punished.”[5], [6]

Let us know that if we lose our way in the Lord, we are punished. When we fail to know that in the kingdom of heaven all are equal, we are punished. When we fail to treat others as equals in the kingdom of heaven, we are punished. We are punished as we lose the brace of kinsmen. And while the Lord never looses the brace of kinsmen, the Lord grieves as we cause ourselves to be punished when we reject others.

In his book “Santa Biblia: The Bible through Hispanic Eyes,” Justo Gonzales notes that this parable elicits surprisingly different reactions when read to typical, middle-class audiences in America compared to Hispanic audiences.

Most people are perplexed that someone who had worked for only an hour should be paid the same as someone who has worked for eight hours. It seems patently unfair. Moreover, most people don't understand the fuss. The logic is so clear, typical Americans cannot understand on what grounds one could argue the fairness of Jesus’ approach.

When the story is read or studied by a Hispanic audience, however, the reaction is quite different. These are people, Gonzales says, who identify with the problems of the field workers. They understand the laborer who travels in his pickup truck trying to find work with little success, or, even if he finds work, he is standing around waiting until the job materializes.

At the end of the parable when the landowner pays the wages, the Hispanic congregation applauds when the laborers who worked for only one hour get paid a full day's pay. They are not confused by this, but understand that the people looking for work and who have been waiting for work need a day's pay to survive. They rejoice, then, at the grace that is not contrary to justice, but that flows with justice. They are paid what they need and deserve rather than the wages they might have been paid had society's concept of justice prevailed.[7]

This parable of the kingdom of heaven is a story of the amazing grace of God that extends to everyone in the kingdom of heaven equally and abundantly. In the kingdom of heaven, all are equal. This parable understands that in the kingdom of heaven, justice is served when all receive the full measure of grace without regard to merit. It’s the story of grace being extended fully and extravagantly to all who need God’s grace.

It understands that Orwell’s Animal Farm is a human society, and that God’s grace and power cannot be corrupted like we are. The kingdom of heaven is greater and more grace filled than any human utopia could ever hope to be.

Of course, in our dog-eat-dog world, this seems more outrageous than amazing. This is the world we as the Church of Jesus Christ must reach beyond. There is alone the Son Jesus Christ, our head, our brother, our pastor, and the great bishop of our souls, the one through whom we are elect;[8] through whom we are the church, his body on earth. Hence when we fail to recognize the equality of all persons through the amazing grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, we are all punished.

[1] Animal Farm, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Farm_(book), retrieved September 20, 2008.
[2] Matthew 20:4
[3] Moltmann, Jürgen, “The Crucified God.” New York: Harper and Row, 1974, page 7.
[4] Shakespeare, William, “Romeo and Juliet.” Act 1, Scene 1, Line 3.
[5] Ibid, Act 5, Scene 3, Line 294.
[6] Pronounced “punish-ed”
[7] Gonzales, Justo, “Santa Biblia: The Bible through Hispanic Eyes.” Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996, pages 62-63. Found in Homiletics Online, http://www.homileticsonline.com/subscriber/printer_friendly_installment.asp?installment_id=3125 retrieved September 16, 2008.
[8] From the Scots’ Confession, Chapter VIII, Paragraph 2