Matthew 20:1-16 "Great Laughter" Scott Hoezee

In her memorable sermon on Matthew 20, Barbara Brown Taylor says that this parable is a little like the cod liver oil that mothers used to give their kids to cure what ailed them: you know it's good for you, you trust the one who is giving it to you, but that doesn't make it very easy to swallow even so! Most of us are born into this world with a huge sense of infantile entitlement followed by, at a very early age already, a seemingly intuitive sense of fairness and unfairness. It's like Charlie Brown's little sister, Sally, in the classic "Charlie Brown Christmas Special." You may recall that at one point Sally is writing a letter to Santa Claus and in the process generates an enormous list of toys she wants. Then at the conclusion of her North Pole-bound missive she writes, "But if that is too much to carry, just send cash." When Charlie Brown sees this and despairs over his own sister's greed, Sally indignantly responds, "All I want is my fair share. All I want is what I have coming to me."

Apparently that's all that most of us want, including long after we become much older than Sally Brown. We want our fair share. We've got rights and the number one right we have in life is the right to have our rights met. So we chafe, we champ at the bit, we stomp our feet and wag our heads when we spy apparent unfairness in life. We go to a high school reunion and see former classmates who never went on to college. We've got four, maybe eight years more education than they have and so get driven clean up a wall when we discover they made millions in a car wash business even as we slave away teaching humanities at a Christian college, barely making ends meet at times. Driving home after the reunion, we mutter to our spouse, "Life's not fair."

When we are children, we count how many M&Ms Bobby got from grandma to make sure it's the same amount as we got. When we are grownups we do the same thing, albeit counting up other kinds of things than pieces of candy. We are very sure that in life, hard work should be rewarded, education should pay off, yahoos and bumpkins should not be better off than thoughtful people. The capitalist ethos in this country reenforces nicely this innate sense of fairness with which we were born.

People get ahead through hard work and diligence. We don't like free give-aways, even to the point of scorning those who merely inherit their wealth without ever having worked for it. Some years ago before he became Secretary of State, Colin Powell was here in Grand Rapids to give a speech. At one point in this inspirational talk, General Powell went out of his way to say what most capitalist-driven Americans want to make clear, "I earned everything I have in life. Nobody ever gave me anything!" Even the whole debate over affirmative action is fueled, at least in part, by the notion that it's wrong to give anyone a break that is not warranted by effort.

This is the air we breathe and, as I have been saying for about ten years in this pulpit now, this entire atmosphere leaks into the church, too, making also grace tough to accept. We like it just fine that we have received grace, but it takes only the gentlest of nudges to make us carp a bit if we see grace active in the life of someone whom we think, frankly, doesn't deserve it, hasn't proven himself a worthy recipient.

The parable of the laborers in the vineyard is Jesus' in-your-face attempt not just to startle us with the scandal of grace but even to make us a little mad about it. It is one of those times in the Bible when if Jesus can get you a little upset, it creates a teachable moment. Your pique, your squirming even momentarily over the apparent unfairness of grace, reveals that you still have much to learn. Because as we examine this story now, we will see that it is calculated to offend us.

Like most parables, the basic story is very simple and very mundane. A vintner is desperate to get his crop of grapes harvested. Maybe the weather is threatening to turn bad the next day, or maybe the grapes are so bursting with juice that if they aren't picked today, they will be rotten very quickly. Whatever the situation, the work needs to be done in a day. So at the crack of dawn he finds some eager folks lined up. It reminds me of the scene repeated so often (and so heartbreakingly) in Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath. All those impoverished and desperate Okies have descended on southern California. There are more of them than there is work to be had as it turns out and so the moment they hear a rumor that such-and-such a farm up the road would be harvesting the next day, the truly eager hopped into their jalopies before sun-up so they could be the first in line. If you came too late, you would miss your chance for work that day.

So also here: at first light the farmer goes out and finds these go-getters, these "early bird gets the worm" types straining to get to work. So he hires them, promising a denarius for their trouble. These people work literally from sun-up to sundown, a solid twelve hours of labor including right through the heat of the day. Apparently, however, despite the diligent work of these folks, the picking is not proceeding fast enough to satisfy the farmer. So all day long at 9am, noon, 3pm, and even as late as 5pm (a scant hour before quitting time) the farmer keeps hiring more folks, handing them empty bushel baskets and telling them to fill 'em up with grapes.

Jesus purposely lingers a bit over those last folks hired. These were not the eager beavers who had been standing at the farmer's front gate at dawn. For whatever the reason they had slept in. Maybe these were the ne'er-do-wells of the community--the kind of people who were unemployed but seemed to lack the gumption to do a whole lot about it. All day they had sat around on the fringes of the town square, sipping cheap beer maybe and just watching passively as over and over the farmer came looking for new workers. But they had not leapt to their feet each time he came to the square calling for more pickers.

Finally it got to the point where there were no other folks left in the square and so long about the time these lollygaggers were getting ready to head on home to sit on the sofa and channel surf the evening away while munching on the frozen pizza they had bought with food stamps at the A&P, the farmer comes back one last time. "Why have you guys been lazing around this town square all day doing nothing?" the farmer asks. "We dunno," they ask, "guess it's cuz no one hired us." Well, there was a reason for that, too, of course, but when the farmer tells them to get to work at last, they readily agree. Shucks, for an hour they could put up with most anything. "A little hard work never hurt anybody" the old adage says, and a little hard work was precisely what these fellows would be doing.

Jesus is setting us up. We are already looking at these blokes through squinty eyes. Examples of the Protestant work ethic they aren't! But then Jesus pulls a narrative fast one: he makes sure that these one-hour pickers get paid first. Had they been paid last after the crack-of-dawn folks had already left with their hard-earned denarius tucked into their wallets, there would not have been much punch to this parable. But instead Jesus' fictional vintner makes a point of ensuring that the people who worked the longest witnessed the fact that these lazy bums got paid one whole denarius each as well.

Actually, however, that was not the moment that brought about the anger, was it? Being fair-minded men with a firm sense of right and wrong and of what they had coming to them, they assumed that maybe as it turned out the going rate for this vineyard was one denarius per hour. And oh what a happy evening it would be in their households if they could come home with twelve denarii in their pocket! How wonderful it would be to swing by the store on the way home and at long last be able to afford a special candy bar for each of the kids, maybe even some flowers for the wife and one of those better brands of wine to go with dinner for once.

Except that of course it didn't happen that way at all. Everyone got the same pay. You know, just about everyone I know, starting with myself, has a certain expression, a certain look that involuntarily sweeps across the face the moment you feel cheated. It is a kind of pursed lips, sideways glance, head-shaking expression utterly transparent to the anger that is rising in your throat. That's how I picture these 12-hour workers the moment the master's payroll man plopped a single denarius into their sweaty palms. They stared at the coin in disbelief and then looked askance. One of them finally whispers, "Can you even believe this!?"

The master overhears and so reminds them that he had cheated no one. This was the contract they agreed to at dawn that day. "And as for the rest," he goes on, "what's that to you? You're not out anything. I can do what I want with my own money. So don't cut your eyes at me and scorn my generosity!"

And that's grace, Jesus says. It turns everything on its head. As I said at the outset, we know this to be true, but practically speaking, in the nitty-gritty realities of life when we can put faces and names to the faceless, anonymous characters in this story, then we find it hard to swallow. This story tells us that for grace to be grace, it needs to be the same grace, the same amount of grace, and the identical dispensing of grace to everyone. For grace to be grace, the amount of sin a given person has is not an issue. Saddam Hussein needs no more grace to be saved than Mother Teresa did. Both need the exact same thing: the complete sacrifice of God's only Son on the cross. The blood of the Lamb saves us, and you don't take something as precious as Jesus' blood and start to pretend you can be like a doctor who writes different prescriptions with differing dosages of Lamb-blood depending on the person in question. You don't say, "Goodness me, for you, Mother Teresa, you need just a teaspoon of Jesus' blood to cleanse you of your sins. But Mr. Hussein, well, you'd better bathe in an entire swimming pool of the stuff and stay in there a good long while." Nope. Doesn't work that way.

Yet there are those moments in life when we're pretty sure it should. But honestly, it's not the big scenarios of Hussein versus Teresa that nettle us. As C.S. Lewis once said, if you want to learn how to forgive, don't start with trying to forgive the Nazis but concentrate on that person who works at the desk next to yours and who drives you clean nuts with the twittering she does all day long about the most trivial facets of life.

So also with seeing grace in action: where the rubber hits the road for us is probably when we see another member of this church who just can't seem to get his act together, who never volunteers to do a single thing at church, who is known to have some real problems at work or at home, but there he is proudly holding the baby when it gets baptized or loading up his plate at the potluck and taking the Lord's Supper with the rest of us--the rest of us who, by the way, do everything around here!

Without meaning to do it, we peg a lot of our spiritual worth, our spiritual self-assessment, to how much work we do for the church. In the heat of the day, in the dark of the night, on Tuesday mornings when we don't feel like driving to church yet again, and on Sunday evenings when most other folks don't even show up for worship, we're here. And before we realize it, we slowly begin to assume that maybe we need less grace than some other folks. We're getting to heaven on the installment plan as much as by grace. Maybe God does grade on the curve after all, and if so, by jimminy, we are determined to be well out ahead of that curve.

This happens in the deep citadels of our hearts. It happens to me, it happens to maybe most of us at one time or another. We're pretty sure that we understand grace and so we try to revel in that grace. But then one day we are confronted with someone who seems to be sneaking in under the spiritual wire and suddenly all these other thoughts bubble up in us unbidden--suddenly thoughts of fairness and unfairness dominate our mind. Hopefully when that happens, we are led to repentance, to a renewed sense of humility and gratitude to God. Maybe we can use those times as an opportunity to meditate again on the cross and on exactly what it took to save not just other people but you and me as well.

But as commentator Marguerite Shuster points out, we also need to monitor our attitudes toward the kingdom work we perform. It's not always easy to labor in the heat of the day but when it is all said and done, would we really want to trade places with the people who spend the day in the town square doing nothing? Does that kind of life look good? And what if, despite how I depicted them a little while ago, what if some of those unemployed folks are not lazy but desperate to find work yet are unable to do so? Sometimes it is back-breaking to be bent over kingdom vines all day long. But it's no picnic to sit around all day and watch the clock tick with each new hour bringing you closer to yet another evening when you can't put enough food on the table. Would those of us who work hard really trade in that work to go back to the uncertainty of the town square?

If we have work to do and the talents to do it, this needs to become not a point of comparison with anyone else but a lifelong exercise in gracious gratitude to the God who enables our work in the first place. Grace called us to work in the kingdom, grace lets us perform ministry, grace compensates for our shortcomings in that work, and grace, not our own hard-won merits, is what crowns the work at the end of the day.

But, of course, there is a last point to be made tonight, and I can make it best by asking a question: When we read this parable, why do we tend so immediately to identify with the folks hired at the crack of dawn? Why do we so readily assume that when God's kingdom fully comes, we may be the ones tempted to feel upset in that we will also be shown to have been the hardest workers of them all? Maybe we should try to identify with those shorter-term workers who had reason to feel joy that they got so much so undeservedly.

Frederick Buechner has often said that as much as anything, one of the things that finally made him turn his life over to God was something that the preacher George Buttrick said in a sermon one Sunday. Buttrick said that every time Jesus is crowned as Lord and King within someone's heart, this wonderful moment takes place amid "confessions, and tears, and great laughter." Buechner says that it was the joy of that last item, the "great laughter" that caused something within him to awaken and led him to want to have this holy hilarity in his own heart. Such holy mirth and deep delight should be true of everyone who receives the gift of grace.

Barbara Brown Taylor imagines that in the parable, when the farmer improbably hands the one-hour pickers a whole day's wage, there must have been hoots of laughter and some "ain't we the lucky ones" good-natured back-slapping going on. But on that great and final day when Christ shall come again and bring us to himself, we should pray not only that we will indeed discover that the grace of Jesus is more than enough to get us into the kingdom. We should also pray that when we discover that eternally joyful fact, the great laughter and joyful back-slapping will be our very own. Amen.