Sermon — September 24, 2023
Michael Fenn
I arrived home unceremoniously early from my semester abroad on March 20th, 2020. I had bought a price-gouged ticket, packed up my apartment in a day, traveled through an almost abandoned Edinburgh, and stayed in the Dublin airport for nine hours. Arriving home, it was quiet and unsettling. My sister came back from her school in New Hampshire a few days before I moved in, and my brother and his wife had been living with my mother for a few months already.
As the dust settled on COVID, we learned that of the five of us, only one was an essential worker. My mother, the MRI technician was not initially essential, my sister-in-law the medical assistant, was also not immediately essential, my sister-a theater student-was not essential, and I, a biology student doing aquaculture in a foreign country was, unsurprisingly, not essential either. My brother, the grocery store manager, was essential and was told to go back to work a few days after I arrived home.
Each night, we ate dinner together as a family. Even though all of us were adults, and saw each other pretty much all day every single day, we all still sat at the table every night. Four of us having done very little in the way of economic work–I took to the woods everyday from sunup to sundown, my sister made a sewing studio in one odd corner of our oddly shaped house–my brother worked in a job most people do not consider glamorous in a time where most people would rather do anything else.
My brother did not complain, at least, not about the actual work. He did not begrudge me my long days of sunning myself on rocks or splashing in creeks, nor our sister’s construction of increasingly elaborate and skilled garments (often for a large doll we had dug out from the attic). Though because he is human, he did often complain of people endangering him and his fellow essential workers.
At the end of the day, we all still sat together and ate the same meal together.
It was like each one of us was one of the Laborers in the Field: my hardworking brother arrived at the crack of dawn, my sister-in-law and mother sometime later in the morning, and my sister in the late afternoon, before I finally made it there just before sunset. And yet we sat down at dinner together, all receiving the same wages for our day’s labor.
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Backing up, I like the Brother of the Prodigal Son, he is responsible, he is dependable and stays home to make sure everything is going to be alright while his brother goes and squanders his wealth and inheritance. And I like Martha, who actually cares if the house is clean and presentable, who dutifully does her chores even if she might want to listen to Jesus like her sister Mary does. I think the Laborers in the Vineyard who worked the full day have a point. I think Martha would make a much better roommate than Mary, I think the Brother of the Prodigal Son would make a much better life partner than the Prodigal Son, and I can see where the laborers who got there early in the morning are coming from.
I suspect that a solid portion of you agree with me or at least see where I am coming from. In our culture we value things like tidiness, punctuality, letting people off the train before you get on, working to contribute to society, being dependable. People who squandered their opportunities, people who are wayward, lazy people, people who have messy houses and messy lives, who don’t work to “contribute” to society are not people we love, or people we do not love easily. We have limited sympathy for the laborers who did not work the full day.
So, even in the lovely example with my family, my brother very well could have asked “what did you even do all day?” just as the laborers asked “why do we all get the same thing at the end of the day?” What kind of fairness is it to give equally to those who did unequal work? Is God unfair?
This parable would appear to say, very certainly, “yes”
The issue here is actually pretty simple. In this scenario, we are bringing a human idea of fairness in front of God and coming up confused. We are bringing a human understanding of economy in front of God and coming up short. This reading abruptly de-centers our human conception of fairness and our human concept of economy.
Jonah, one of my favorite characters in the Bible (besides Jesus!), asks God why God saved the people of Nineveh when they were wicked for so long, why he made Jonah go all the way to Nineveh when God easily could have done something else if the end result was the same: the people of Nineveh don’t get #wrecked. Jonah, like us, is bringing a human concept of fairness to God, who does not have our human concept of fairness.
So, if God doesn’t have a human concept of fairness, then what kind of fairness does God have?
In the beginning of the parable, Jesus doesn’t say that the kingdom of heaven is like the vineyard, but rather that the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner. Losing sight of this one detail, we can lose sight that the amount of labor done in the vineyard matters less than the call of the landowner to the laborers, and the relationship that is now present for each of the laborers. It is through this relationship that all of the laborers are sustained, not through the amount of work they do in the vineyard. With God, just as with the landowner, fairness is instead replaced by an almost overwhelming grace.
God has a kind of fairness that does not give partially, that is overflowing in abundance to all who seek it, that saves the people of Nineveh even though Jonah doesn’t agree, who also looks after Jonah even when Jonah is kind of a spiteful jerk, that will give abundant grace even to those who labor only for an hour in the vineyard.
So, even though we like the brother of the prodigal son, and we like Martha, and we like the Laborers who get there on time; we are not always them, our loved ones are not always them, our communities are not always them.
We leave dirty dishes in the sink for weeks while our friends do them, we arrive late to racial reconciliation, we have denied the dignity of every human who could not get married before the Supreme Court said they could, we do not pick up trash in the woods even when we see it sitting there, we pass by unhoused people on the street without looking, we are short with our loved ones on long winter days, the list goes on. Like our confession says “in thought, word, and deed. By what we have done and left undone.”
In all this mess, at the end of the day, God still gives us the full day’s wage. Even though our labors come up short, which they have done, do, and will do whether we are aware of it or not. We are just as much the laborers who do not get there on time as the ones who did, we are just as much Mary as Martha, and we are just as prodigal as un-prodigal. But God, in all goodness, does not give to us according to a human notion of fairness, but gives us full and abundant grace, and this is great news.