Economics 1:1

September 18, 2005 (Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost; Proper 20)

by The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer

• Jonah 3:10-4:11
• Psalm 145 or 145:1-8
• Philippians 1:21-27
• Matthew 20:1-16

(From The Lectionary Page)

Dateline: New Iberia, Louisiana. Two Red Cross shelters are still set up in this town of 25,000. My brother Tom knows one of them fairly intimately, having received hospitality there for several days following his evacuation from New Orleans. People who wound up at these shelters certainly represented all sorts and conditions of humankind. What they had in common was that their lives had been trashed by Hurricane Katrina. Some were people of means who had lost a great deal to the storm’s fury. Others didn’t have much to lose in the first place, at least, not in terms of how the world counts possessions. Some were hardworking, law-abiding, tax-paying citizens. Others, not so much. Some arrived early at the shelter. Others were the Johnnies-Come-Lately – people who either could not or would not leave until conditions had deteriorated to Third World status. All received the same thing: a warm welcome, a cot, some clothing, a hot meal, a place to get cleaned up, access to a cell phone. All who arrived – regardless of when they arrived -- received compassion in equal measure because that’s how it works.

And that’s not too surprising, is it? I mean, after all, can you imagine the Red Cross setting up special shelters only for well-educated middle class families who lost a 4-bedroom home? Can you imagine the Red Cross determining that that those who lost the most were therefore entitled to greater compassion, while those who lost the least received the least?

So we expect even-handedness when it comes to relief efforts, it seems. But if you’re like me, the evenhandedness of the wages paid to the vineyard workers in today’s parables rankles just a bit. If you’re like me, you might find yourself identifying more with the poor schlubs who worked all day in the scorching heat and end up getting paid the same amount of money as the guys who loafed around for most of the day. Nothing wrong with the landowner choosing to be generous, but hey, would it kill him to spread that generosity around a bit more? Maybe throw in a nice bonus for the guys who put in 12 hours? I love it when the landowner asks, are you envious because I am generous? Well, yeah, actually. If I don’t think I’m on the receiving end of that generosity, you bet I’m envious.

We’ve been set up, of course, as we always are with these wonderfully subversive parables. The canard in today’s passage is the notion of wages being paid. This is a pretty intentional feature of the parable because, after all, we do have a tendency to think of our relationship to God in terms of transactions. I do this for God, God does that for me. I lead a righteous life, and God responds with manifold blessings. Matthew’s original audience certainly would have been formed by the Torah to think in these transactional term, but we’re not that much different. Scratch the surface of most popular piety and you find the same underlying message: Lead a good life and God will reward you.

And Jesus turns all that on its ear. He introduces the parable by reminding his hearers that he is talking about the Kingdom of Heaven. In Matthew’s gospel especially, the Kingdom of Heaven is a present reality, not a future promise. In other words, Jesus is not talking about a heavenly reward in the sense of an afterlife. Rather, he is talking about God’s commonwealth, God’s economy, in the here and now. And God’s economy in the here and now operates a bit differently than human economy. Human economy is scarcity based. It presumes a finite number of goods which all of us compete for, and this presupposition leads us to play a zero sum game. If we’re hired to do the same job and you end up getting the same wages as I, but did far less work, then I’ve been robbed. If you won, then that must mean I lost. I’m over simplifying, of course, but in our world of balance sheets, real and imagined, we know that assets and liabilities are supposed to balance; only we don’t want them balanced on our backs. We want our lives squarely located in the asset column.

And so acculturated are we in this kind of thinking that it is well-nigh impossible for us to conceive of a different way of being. No wonder this parable throws us such a curve ball. In God’s topsy-turvy economy, there is only grace, divine compassion, and forgiveness, meted out to all with unfathomable generosity. There is only grace, divine compassion, and forgiveness. God emptied Godself of all else by taking on human flesh in the person of Jesus Christ.

Which brings me back to the shelter in New Iberia. Before the hurricane devastated their homes, I suspect the evacuees had little in common. The twelve-hour vineyard workers would have had little to do with the two-hour vineyard workers and vice-versa. The fury of the storm, in virtually one fell swoop, leveled the playing field, stripping away all the assets from everybody’s balance sheet. And what is revealed, not only to those who suffered the loss, but to all of us with eyes to see, is the truth of our human condition – that all that any of us ultimately can lay claim to is our needful humanity. What unites all of us vineyard folk is our common need for God’s graciousness. The truth that Jesus came to reveal in this parable is God’s economy whose payout of grace, compassion and forgiveness is as abundant as it is baffling.