September 21, 2014 – Matthew 20: 1-16
Matthew 20:1-16
The Generous Landowner
15th Sunday after Pentecost [Lectionary 25] – September 21, 2014
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
This summer Theo and I drove back from Vancouver together and camped along the way.
We had never done this before, so as we drove along I pointed out things to him that
I remembered from childhood or things that triggered memories from my past.
When we drove through Swift Current, that triggered a lot of memories for me,
because my best friend Anthony, who lives in Japan now, grew up there.
As we passed the McDonald’s on the highway there, I said to Theo,
Oh! There’s the McDonald’s where our wee Anthony got his start as a workin’ man!
Quick: someone pass me a tissue! I think I’m gonna cry!
When Anthony was in high school, he got his first job at that McDonald’s as a 16 year old.
Back in the day, McDonald’s was full of young teenagers his age,
working for gas money or little spending money.
These days, though, it’s not quite like that anymore.
Most workers at McDonald’s are now adults, with a median age of 28.
About a quarter of their employees in North America have children they are trying to support on
a fast food worker’s wage.
Last week’s New Yorker magazine had an article about the plight of the fast food worker in
North America.(William Finnegan at http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/15/dignity-4)
In New York, a city with a very high cost of living, most employees at McDonald’s receive
the minimum wage: $7.50 per hour.
An employee with a 5 year old who had been working there 8 years
was now receiving $8.35 an hour.
A fourteen year employee and grandmother of 4 was now making $8.50 an hour.
Many of these fast food workers are now organizing and pressing for an industry wide minimum
wage of $15.00 an hour.
They point out that in the fast food industry, the differential between
CEO and worker pay is higher than in any domestic economic sector: 1200 to 1.
In the construction industry, by contrast the differential is 93 to 1.
In other words, if a fast food worker is lucky enough to bring in $20,000 a year,
a McDonald’s CEO brings home $24,000,000.
52% of fast food workers are on some sort of public assistance in order to get by.
This amounts to $7 billion a year of taxpayer money in the United States that
essentially subsidizes the fast food industry, writes William Finnegan.
I bring all this up as a contemporary means of wondering
the same thing Jesus’ parable makes us wonder: what is fair?
Because Jesus’ parable certainly brings to mind the migrant agricultural labourers in Canada
as well as service industry workers in North America.
We are familiar with the parable, usually called the Labourers in the Vineyard.
The workers who work one hour and the worker who works ten receive the same wage!
It seems outrageous and it seems excessive – and it totally totally is.
Simply put, the Master in Jesus’ parable is outrageously generous.
He says in our translation, “Are you envious because I am generous?”
But what he literally says is, “Is your eye evil because I am generous?”
An eye that is evil is stingy and ungenerous with one’s neighbour.
The Master looks into the labourers’ eyes and sees only stinginess.
But Jesus is saying that if you look into God’s eyes – into his eyes,
what you see is sheer generosity.
This parable probably shouldn’t be referred to as the Labourers in the Vineyard.
It should probably be called The Parable of the Generous Landowner.
For it is about the generosity of God.
For sure, God would not make a very good businessperson!
Jesus, I think, maybe needs to go to Business School!
The generosity of the landowner is excessive.
But this is not unusual in Jesus’s view of God, right?
The literary critic Frank Kermode has pointed out what he calls
the Rhetoric of Excess in Matthew’s Gospel,
the exaggerated language that is repeatedly used to describe
the generosity of God, life in God’s realm,
and our own human responses to God’s generosity.
(Dan Clendenin at http://www.journeywithjesus.net/index.shtml)
We are not only to love our neighbours, but also our enemies.
Wise people leave their dead unburied.
We cannot be followers of Jesus unless we hate father and mother.
A rich young man is invited by Jesus to sell all his possessions
and give all his money to the poor.
Forgive 490 times.
And it’s not limited to Matthew.
In Luke, a widow puts two coins into the Temple treasury, which is all she had to live on,
literally, it says, she put in her whole life.
In John, a woman anoints Jesus with a bottle of perfume worth $50,000 in today’s wages.
Everywhere in the Gospels, Jesus uses the language of excessive almost unimaginable
lavishness to describe God’s generosity and a proper human response.
And in this portion of Matthew, the repeated refrain is: the first shall be last and the last first.
The workers who work during the heat of the day and ones who stood doing nothing during
that times receive the same wage: the last receive 12 hours of pay for one hour of work.
If Jesus were telling a parable today, he might well say that in God’s realm,
when God is properly reigning, McDonald’s food service workers will be paid the most,
and the CEO’s the least.
That brings the outrageousness and maybe the offensiveness of Jesus’ parable home, right?
This way of looking at the world, through the generous eyes of a generous God seems strange.
But I’m not sure it’s that strange.
I have often said that capitalism was without doubt initially conceived of as
a much more fair way of getting the fruits of God’s creation more equitably distributed,
where more people would benefit from the gifts of the earth.
And initially it was – but of course nowadays that is obviously no longer the case,
as the wealth of the earth is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands every year.
Communism too, of course, was also conceived of as a way of distributing the gifts of creation
in a fairer way, but of course that has not been much of a success either.
Obviously the Gospel can never be equated with any particular economic or political system.
And this parable, just as obviously, is never going to give us any easy answers.
But the parable is inviting us to look at our world and at our neighbours
through the eyes of a generous God – perhaps when we leave here today,
if we have our lunch at a fast food restaurant, perhaps to look at them through the
eyes of a generous God;
and of course we should all applaud the efforts of
our provincial government in raising the minimum wage substantially.
I think the God Jesus is revealing to us is not so much about fairness, maybe,
as about generosity, of an order that is difficult for us to comprehend.
Generosity, finally, is how God has decided to turn our hearts.
I have some news for you: it doesn’t always work!
Just ask Jesus, who got a cross for his all generosity and who never asked for – or received –
a dime for all the healing, feeding, forgiving, including, and advocacy he engaged in.
No: it doesn’t always work.
But the further generosity revealed in the resurrection and forgiveness of
a generous God often did – and still does.
Is it more important that something works? Or that it participates in the Divine, generous life?
I think Jesus is inviting us today to participate in the Divine generous life and
be generous ourselves – and let God worry about the outcome of our generosity.
Because let’s face it: the same eyes of generosity Jesus invites us to look at our neighbours with,
are the same eyes of generosity with which the God of all mercy and compassion
looks at each one of us.
Do any of us deserve to be died for? Well, in God’s eyes, every single one of us does.
Would we die for anyone?
For those we love, maybe, as Paul writes – but would we die for our enemy? Jesus does.
And he invites us into the Divine life of generosity as we come to his table again today,
set with all the gifts that are free for the taking: communion, forgiveness, grace,
new life, strength, dignity, freedom, assurance, hope, and deep deep joy.
We’re invited to share these gifts generously in the same way they’ve been given,
with a generosity of Spirit, of compassion, and of labour on behalf of the vulnerable.
For it’s the labourers who have been waiting till 5 o’clock who are most vulnerable after all.
In a subsistence economy, even working all day would only give you enough to by that day.
The labourers with whom the Master is most generous –
happen to be those who are most vulnerable: they get enough simply for their daily bread,
which is exactly what we ask for from God every day. Nothing more:
the rest is excess.
We are invited to be generous, to labour on behalf of the vulnerable, without calculation and
without counting.
For the economy of God’s kingdom is not about counting or calculation – like last week,
Jesus is trying to free us from counting and keeping track, trying to free us from
comparing what we have compared to our neighbour and whether it is fair or not,
like the labourers who came first.
Because the truth is that the only eyes in which people might see
the Divine generous eyes of Jesus – are our eyes.
Jesus doesn’t calculate, Jesus doesn’t measure. Jesus is pure excess.
Jesus sees a person in need – and does something about it.
Deserving has little to do with it in Jesus’s eyes,
for as he notes in one last little sample of excess,
God makes the rain to come on both the just and the unjust – because that’s just the way God is.
Generous, to a fault. So together, let us say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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