Radical Equality

Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost / September 18, 2011

Matthew 20:1-16

In case you haven’t noticed, God is not a particularly good businessman.  God doesn’t get the basics of a market economy.  God doesn’t seem to understand that a person is supposed to be paid based on things like level of performance and years of education and number of hours worked.  Somehow God has missed the fact that some workers are simply more valuable than others.  It’s odd, but it doesn’t seem like God’s goal is to make money.

I mean, look at today’s parable.  Initially the landowner seems like a good businessman.  He goes out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard and agrees to pay them the usual daily wage.  The parable doesn’t tell us who he hires or how many he hires, but we can imagine that he hires much of the usual crew – laborers who have worked for him before.  One can imagine that he hires as many people as he needs for the day, as it seems that there is no shortage of folks looking for work.  At the end of the day the laborers will go home with enough money to pay for their daily needs – not much extra.  But then they are day laborers – we don’t expect them to get rich at this job.

Initially, this parable seems like an ordinary situation.  But then the landowner goes out again at nine o’clock and hires others who are standing idle, agreeing to pay them whatever is right, but not suggesting a set amount.  Why does the landowner want more workers?  Didn’t he already have enough?  And why are the workers willing to trust that he will pay them whatever is right instead of negotiating their pay?  It’s odd behavior, for both the landowner and the workers.  But I suppose some pay is better than none, and being busy is better than standing idle all day.

But then the story becomes quite odd because the landowner goes out again at noon and at three o’clock and again at five and hires more workers.  Has he gone mad?  He just tells them to go into the vineyard – they don’t even discuss pay.  And the workers go.

Now six o’clock rolls around and it’s time to pay the workers and all our suspicions that this landowner is a poor businessman are exposed as he pays everyone exactly the same amount – the usual daily wage – starting with those who only worked one hour and finishing with those who worked through the scorching heat of the middle of the day.  It’s no surprise that the early morning crew grumbles – even though they were paid exactly what had they agreed to.  This is not fair – treating all of the workers equally when some worked all day and some barely worked!  The landowner is simply throwing away his profit and leaving several of his daily workers feeling very resentful.

No, God’s economy is definitely not the same as our economy.  God doesn’t wait for the workers to come to him.  Instead God seeks out those who are searching for work and gives them a job, never even asking for a resumé or checking references.  God never asks those who have been idle all day where they were at 9 o’clock and noon and three o’clock – God just hires them at five o’clock.  God treats all of those who agree to work in his vineyard exactly the same – paying them enough – giving them all a living wage – not a penny more or less: “Give us this day our daily bread.”  And when some of the workers grumble at the seeming unfairness, God points out that he has done no wrong.  Which is true.  God is honest, fair, and generous.

Most of us are quick to relate to the grumblers – we work hard for what we earn and it just isn’t fair that some folks barely work and still get rewarded.  It seems like this happened to me all the time growing up.  I was the older sister, so I was responsible for all kinds of chores that my little sister didn’t have to do.  But at the end of the day mom would hug both of us and tell us how wonderful we were.  And at the end of the week we both got the same allowance.  It just wasn’t fair.  I thought I deserved more.

I can understand the frustration of the worker who cried out, “You have made them equal to us!”  It’s not fair that the person who only worked one hour got paid the same as the one who worked a full day.  But then God’s economy is not our economy.  God doesn’t run this business called the Kingdom the way a CEO runs a corporation or a president runs a country.  God wants to be able to offer everyone a place in the kingdom no matter who they are or where they’ve come from or what they’ve done.  God will go out and offer everyone who is seeking access to the kingdom a place – no questions asked.  And God will provide for everyone who enters the kingdom.  Everyone will have enough.  God doesn’t discriminate – period.  God loves us all, no matter our age, our level of education, the color of our skin, our country of origin, our religion, and so on.

Now I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know in your head, but I’m not sure we believe in this radical equality in our hearts.  We look around and recognize that there are people who are hungry in our communities.  We know people who are unemployed or underemployed or underpaid and can’t make ends meet.  We recognize that we are nowhere near having universal health care.  We see a broken school system that favors students who have parental support.  We hear stories of racial profiling and look at prisons full of young black men.  We know that the kingdoms of this world are full of painful inequalities.  As Christians we know in our heads that we are called to confront these injustices and show God’s mercy to all.  But I’m not sure our hearts are always ready to embrace and share God’s abundant grace with everyone.  Somehow we want more of that grace for ourselves.

And yet, God has made them equal to us.  God has made the prisoner and the hungry child and the homeless man and the drug addict and the housewife and the TV evangelist and the Al Qaida terrorist and the Buddhist monk equal to us.  God has made people we pity and people we fear and people we never even think of equal to us.  God is so incredibly generous that he seeks out the lost and pours out his grace equally on the first and the last.  We know this in our heads, but we don’t always believe this in our hearts.

I say this because I know that once we believe it in our hearts the way we live our lives is forever changed.  Mine certainly was.  I first truly encountered God’s radical equality several years ago in with a young African American male in the Durham jail.  At that time, I was in the habit of going into the jail every two weeks to lead worship with a small group from my congregation.  We would sing and pray and study scripture in a stuffy room behind locked doors with guards watching our every move.  I always encountered Jesus in some way in the jail, but this time was different.

This time, as we finished this young man came up to me and asked me if I would pray for him.  I asked him what he wanted me to pray for and he told me he wanted me to pray for his soul.  He then told me he had murdered two people and had been on his way to kill a third when the cops arrested him for some unrelated reason.  Fear ran down my spine as I took his hands, looked him in the eyes, and said “Let’s pray.”  I prayed for this young man as the guards hollered at the prisoners moving them out of the room and back to their cells.  I prayed, feeling the peace of Christ envelop us.  I prayed until one guard put her hand on my shoulder and said I had to leave.  And as I looked back up into the eyes of this young man I did not see a murderer.  Instead I saw my brother.  I hugged him and left.

I have no idea what happened to that young man.  I do know God forever changed my heart that night.  God made him equal to me – or better said, I finally recognized that we were equal in God’s eyes.  Both human beings created by God in the image of God.  Both sinners in need of grace and forgiveness and mercy.  Both children of God deeply loved by God.  I recognized that there was nothing either of us could do that would enable us to earn grace – grace is truly a gift from God.  I also recognized that as the recipient of this abundant grace I would never again sit idly by, grumbling about God’s generosity.   

In our economy, the workers grumble at the unfairness of the landowner who pays everyone a day’s wages regardless of when they showed up.  And perhaps we find another vineyard to work in the next day where the landowner is more fair.  In God’s economy, the workers delight in a landowner who takes care of the first and the last, providing equally for all.  And we bring our friends the next day, so that they can also experience this abundant generosity, this incredible grace, this radical equality in the eyes of God.