The is a revision of a sermon I posted yesterday here. Most of the changes come at the beginning, though I tried to tighten up the sermon throughout. It is based, as the headline above states, on Matthew 20:1-16.
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It just isn’t fair!” – is a common refrain that parents hear from their children.
“How come my brother or sister can do this or that, and I can’t? – It just isn’t fair!”
He got more candy or more soda or more of whatever than I did! Unfair!
And as a older brother, I learned that life could be especially unfair because parents are almost always more lenient when it comes to how they treat their younger children.
Am I right?
But whether kids cry out “unfair!,”
or use a more verbose phrase like “There’s no justice in this family!,”
It is obvious that our sense of justice, our sense of what’s fair,
develops very early in our lives.
It is also obvious that these attitudes of fairness carry over into adulthood as well.
I remember my Aunt Marie telling me how unfair it was that my Uncle Walter had died an awful, painful death of lung cancer in the prime of his life,
and this was a man who hadn’t smoked for years.
And I know of many people who still begrudge events long passed in their lives,
reliving them over and over,
and never being able to let them go because what they experienced just wasn’t fair.
And, of course, when someone complains to us about fairness and unfairness,
we’ve got our pat answers ready –
“No, life isn’t fair”, we might say … or
“Life wasn’t meant to be easy”.
Or, remember this one? –
“Think of all the starving little children in India, or Africa, or China!”
These kind of pat answer are of little help even to those making the comments,
let alone to the ones feeling cheated or betrayed.
Yes, even grownups have trouble with the idea of fairness.
The meltdown of stock market, the collapse of several financial firms and the subsequent government bailouts this past week have made this evident.
“What right does the government (or federal reserve) have to bail out a company at the taxpayers’ expense?”
Why doesn’t the government do something to help the little people?
And we get really angry at the CEO’s of giant corporations who earn multi-million dollar salaries at the same time they’re downsizing their company and laying off their lower paid employees to fend for themselves in an increasingly weak job market.
And just think of all the “mom and pop” investors who have lost their savings in these collapses and subsequent market turmoil.
This week a lot of people, all over the world, have been crying “Unfair!”
All of this and our gospel reading for this morning caused me to remember a story told by Frederick Buechner that is amazingly similar to the one from Matthew’s Gospel.
Buechner writes,
You are students on the first day of class,
and the professor says, "I have this very complicated math problem for you to solve.
Your answer to this problem, and only that answer,
will determine your final grade in this class.
I giving you this problem now at the beginning so you all can start work immediately,
and I do urge you to begin now if you want to pass the course.
I want you all to make A’s.
Well, you want to do well, so when you get the problem,
you get right to work.
You go to the library . . .you begin your calculations.
But to your surprise, you notice that, even after a month,
only a few of the other students have joined you in working on the problem.
Well, you say to yourself, they’ll be sorry in the end.
The week before final exams finds you are proudly putting the finishing touches on your paper and the solution to the problem,
when you hear some saying that if they work hard over the next few days,
they might get their problems answered.
And you also note that there are still others who haven’t even begun yet,
even at this late date.
But, again, you say to yourself, that’s their problem.
Finally the last day of class arrives.
You have finished with time to spare and proudly come to class with work in hand,
but to your surprise everyone else has also finished their problems.
How did they do it?
You soon learn how.
One student says, as she hands in her paper,
"Professor Smith, thanks for helping me figure this out last week.
Why, without your help, I would have never gotten it finished,"
"Well, here it is," says another,
“All done, thanks to your kind assistance yesterday, Professor."
And no sooner have you heard this,
than another voice speaks up,
"Thanks for coming by my dorm last night to help me."
By now, you are furious.
No wonder they finished their work.
While you were hard at work figuring it out all by yourself,
this professor, if that’s what he really is,
has been going all over the campus spoonfeeding everybody the answer,
everybody but you.
But when you are finished giving Professor Smith a piece of your mind,
he asks you,
“Why are you so angry?
The goal of the class is to get people to finish the problem.
You were able to finish it on your own. Great!
But others needed a little special attention.
You get an A and they get an A.
What’s wrong with that?
What`s wrong with that?
Why only everything, that’s all.
It’s unfair,
it’s not right.
They got more than they deserved.
You stomp out of the room, fuming about the situation,
and you grumble and mumble all the way home and for weeks to come as well.
The nerve of that man to give everyone the same grade!
How dare he!
Now if this reaction makes sense to you,
then you can understand why the people who worked all day in the vineyard did not leave the farm with a song in their hearts and a dance in their steps.
Their grumbling and complaining is perfectly justified. Right?
What the landowner did was patently unfair.
And even if we can begin to comprehend that this story is all about grace,
that it is about a God whose way of doing things is completely different than our way of doing things.
We are still liable to find ourselves angry about the unfairness of it all.
Will Willimon tells the story about a young woman who approached him at the end of a worship service at Duke University Chapel,
a service over which he had presided and in which he had delivered a sermon.
He writes:
She came up to me at the end of the service saying,
“I was really troubled by the service today.”
She was wearing a Duke blue usher’s robe.
“Where do you get these stories that you tell in your talk?” she asked.
“Stories? I guess I get them from growing up in South Carolina,” I said.
“Well I was really bothered by the one today,” she said.
“I just don’t think that’s anyway to treat people.
I mean, if you work longer than other people, you should get paid more.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “That’s not my story, that’s from Matthew.”
“Matthew?” she asked.
“It’s in the Bible,” I said. “
Why are you ushering here?” I asked.
“Well that tall guy over there, I’m dating him.
And he needed somebody to usher today so he called me and here I am,” she said.
“Next question,” I said, “what is your religious background?”
“We went to church some when I was a kid, but I’m not anything really,” she said.
“Well let me tell you something.
You found that story offensive to your notion of justice. Right?
Outrageous. Right?
Well, just for your information,
the man who told that story was later murdered for telling it,
because it really is an offensive, outrageous story.”
And I bet there are many of us here today, if we are honest,
who are outraged and offended by what Jesus says in these 16 verses.
After all, grace, for most of us, is fine up to a point.
And we expect the owner of the vineyard to be gracious,
but not too gracious.
One or two trips back to town to find workers is fine,
but not that constant back and forth,
wear down the tires on the truck,
all day long search, for God’s sake.
And perhaps giving a bit more than expected to the late-comers would be alright,
but not this everybody makes the same wage regardless of how long they worked socialistic, communist stuff.
It’s curious how the grace shown to me doesn’t seem so gracious when I compare it to the grace shown to others.
It’s curious how the more amazing God’s grace becomes,
the more frequent and louder the grumbling and complaining that it evokes.
Today’s gospel shows just how unfair God’s grace can be,
and just the kind of reaction that it can provoke.
John Wesley, the founder of our particular denomination,
knew all about the dangers of preaching on God’s grace.
Did you know that he was once physically thrown out of a church one Sunday because of a sermon he was preaching?
Do you have an idea what his topic was?
It was the grace of God.
Afterwards, when Wesley wrote about this to a friend, he said,
"There is no Christian Doctrine more repugnant than the affirmation that we are saved by the grace of God through faith.
And the reason it is repugnant?
It is repugnant because deep down we believe that we control our destiny.
That we save ourselves by what we do.
We believe that if we serve God all our lives,
in the end God will reward us.
We believe that our pious activities,
our acts of service and our work for the Lord,
will bring us salvation.
We believe that if we do the right thing,
we will have eternal life and the joys of heaven in the world to come.
And that is why we are here.
To set ourselves straight about the rules,
and then to get the motivation necessary to obey the rules.
As another preacher has said,
we gather on Sunday and go down our checklist.
Racism? I’m okay on that. Check.
Materialism? Hmmm…. Okay, Check.
Envy? Got a little more work to do on that one next week…."
In this view religion exists to assert the rules and gives us the means to obey the rules,
and when we do,
this kind of religion promises that we will get what we deserve.
And what about those who aren’t here?
Those who haven’t figured out the Christian religion…
those who don’t have the correct or proper beliefs…
or those who haven’t straightened out their lives,
What about them?
Well, according to this world-view, they are out of luck.
They should be here in church with the rest of us.
Here they could figure out the score.
Here they could get their cards punched,
their lists checked off,
and their lives in order.
If they would only see things our way,
then all would be well.
There would be tit for tat, cause and effect,
rewards for the good and punishment for the bad.
Yes, then all would be well.
But in today’s gospel Jesus seems to be saying that that’s not how it works at all.
Jesus seems to be saying that grace and grace alone saves,
and that God’s amazingly naive and irresponsible grace is available to anyone and everybody.
And that troubles us to no end.
You see, when we run headlong into God’s unfair grace,
when we see that God’s way of doing things is so far removed from our way,
Then there is bound to be grumbling.
After all, if God is going to run a vineyard like the one in the gospel lesson,
if God is going to give everybody the same pay regardless of their actual work hours,
then what’s the use of getting up early in the morning to work when you can just wait until an hour before quitting time to show up?
What is the good of sitting in church,
listening to dull sermons,
if these outsiders,
these johnny- and Jane-come-latelys can waltz in here at the last minute and receive the same treatment as the rest of us.
How many of you have heard of Velma Barfield?
Velma, a resident of North Carolina, was convicted of poisoning 4 people over a span of 7 years with arsenic.
Now in case you don’t know,
arsenic poisoning is a horrible, slow, agonizing way to die.
And so, after her conviction, Velma was given the death sentence,
But while awaiting execution,
Velma Barfield began writing to, of all people, Mrs. Billy Graham.
In time she even accepted Christ,
became a "born again" Christian.
And Mrs. Graham in turn came to praise Velma as a (now get this)
a "vibrant, new Christian with a beautiful witness to God’s grace."
On November 2, 1984, after having spent only six years in prison,
Velma was executed by lethal injection in the state penitentiary in Raliegh, NC,
and is now in the loving embrace of her God?
Is that fair?
And perhaps you didn’t know this either,
but while I was on vacation a while back,
I attended a worship service where it was reported that Jeffrey Dahmer
the mass-murdering serial killer of young men and self-confessed cannibal,
Jeffrey Dahmer,
who killed at least 17 people,
and who during the summer of 1991 was murdering up to one person each week,
this same Jeffrey Dahmer asked Jesus into his life while in prison,
and was baptized into Christ before being murdered by another inmate.
And guess what, if Dahmer really did became a Christian,
where do you think he went upon his untimely death?
You know where, and you know as well as I do how unfair that seems to be.
What are we to make of such stories and such people?
These people come to God at the last minute,
these people make most of us look like saints,
and yet they expect to receive the same welcome we will get.
Many of us have been Bible-believing, church attending,
nose-to-moral-grindstone Christians all our lives,
and yet these people are just as loved by God,
just as forgiven by God,
just as accepted by God as we are?
Who do they think they are?
And just who do they think God is?
But perhaps the better question might be,
who do we think God is?
Who do we think God is?
My friend, if God is anything,
then God is gracious and loving beyond our own understanding.
If God is God, then God’s grace is available to all,
no matter who they are, where they are,
or what they have done.
In England there is a tombstone which reads:
"John Newton, Clerk, once an infidel and libertine,
a servant of slaves in Africa,
was by the rich mercy of our Lord and Savior,
Jesus Christ, preserved, restored, pardoned,
and appointed to preach the faith he had long
labored to destroy."
John Newton wrote his own epitaph.
And what he had to say can be summed up by the word grace.
You see, Newton spent much of his adult life as the captain of a ship used to
transport slaves from Africa to the shores of America.
But on one particular trip he began reading "Imitation of Christ" by Thomas a Kempis,
and when on that same trip a vicious storm threatened to sink his ship,
in a moment of desperation Newton became a Christian.
Now unlike many people who make promises when the going gets bad,
and promptly forget them when things return to normal.
Newton kept his promises.
He resigned his office and began to preach the gospel.
And the theme he preached over and over again was the grace of God.
It was in his later years of life that Newton took this theme and put it into the words of a hymn that is still sung in churches today:
"Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see."
It is this amazingly unfair and undeserved grace that offers us all salvation.
A God who would save even a wretch like a John Newton, a Velma Barfield, or even a Jeffrey Dahmer,
A God with that much grace and love would save me and you.
A God like that would give me and you and the entire world so much more than any of us deserve.
I can affirm what another once said about God.
"Unjust? Yes, thank God!
I, for one, am wonderfully content with a God who refuses to be just.
If God dealt with me just as my deeds deserve,
I’m afraid that I would never be able to enjoy his presence in eternity,
I would never be able to gaze at the face of Christ,
and I would never live the fullness of life eternal without tears or fears.
If one day Christ calls me home by saying,
"Come, blessed of my Father."
It will bot be because God is just,
but because God is good,
and because God is a God whose name is mercy,
and whose gift to all is his grace.
My friends, grace is what the gospel of Jesus Christ is all about.
It’s not about being decent.
It’s not about morality,
and its certainly not about our own goodness.
In fact the gospel isn’t even concerned about these except that they are by-products of sorts.
No, the gospel is about being our being steeped in and surrounded by the grace of God in Christ,
so that we, in turn, can show others this grace.
For grace is God’s extra.
It is the way God deals with us beyond what we deserve or feel we have earned.
May we allow God’s grace to so permeate our hearts and lives,
that we will have no choice but to give it to others as freely as we have received.
