Jonah 3:10-4:11 | Psalm 145:1-8 | Philippians 1:21-30| Matthew 20:1-16
Sermon text:
May the words of our mouths and the meditations of our hearts be always acceptable in Your sight, O Lord, our strength and our Redeemer. Amen.
Not long ago, I took my sons to breakfast at the Waffle House, and it was my younger son’s birthday. As we got close to the end of the meal, he shared with the server that it was his 11th birthday, and she congratulated him there at the table, but then she stepped back and said, “Hey, everybody, this is his 11th birthday!” Spontaneously, the entire restaurant cheered and clapped, and it simply delighted both my sons, but especially my younger son, to have such a display of enthusiasm and joy for his birthday.
In our reading from Second Corinthians, Paul is writing to the Corinthians, and it is almost impossible not to sense the joy that’s coming through as he writes about the reconciliation wrought by Jesus and this new creation. “If anyone is in Christ, new creation” — it’s like it’s pulled out of him. He can’t help but say it. Paul is enthusiastic about this. He is celebratory, and he’s inviting us — he’s inviting you and me — to be part of this celebration. In fact, we are called, he says, to be ambassadors of Christ, to be the ones who go out and share the reality and the truth of this reconciliation with others. We’re called to celebrate and invite people in to something in which they already are participants and yet don’t know.
But how can we be ambassadors of the new creation when there are so many things about our lives and about our society which seem to be evidence against the reality of the reconciliation of humanity with one another and with God? How do we do that? This world is full of what you might call contrary evidence.
I’ll give you an example. This was also at a Waffle House. I went to a Waffle House near my work one morning, and I was by myself. I was sitting at the tall counter, and the cook and one of the servers were having a conversation. It became clear very quickly that they were talking about a third employee who wasn’t there at the time but was coming in later. The server mentioned this person to the cook, and he just went on a tear about this young woman who wasn’t there. He started talking about how — well, you know — “Obviously I know she’s supposed to be in recovery, but you’ve seen her. She’s all padded up. How is she ever going to accomplish the things that she hopes to accomplish? She’s never going to get custody of her child again.” It just went on and on for about five minutes, almost, and the server, who had mentioned something to him, had just been sort of standing there and didn’t really know how to respond.
Then I heard the door open, and it closed, and I heard the server, in a sort of awkward way, say, “Oh, hi.” It turned out it was the young woman that they had been talking about. The cook in particular had seen that woman through human eyes — through eyes of the flesh — and he had heaped judgment upon her and had constrained her possibilities in his own mind. Now, when she came in, he did greet her, and then he turned to go back to his work. He didn’t say any of those things to her face, which honestly almost made it worse. Perhaps it did make it worse.
It is all too easy to see people from a human perspective. Paul wants us to celebrate. Paul wants us to testify to the new creation, and it may be that in order for us to testify to it, we first have to understand what it is we’re testifying to. What is it that is so powerful about this? What is it that elicits this exclamation from Paul — “new creation”?
I would suggest to you that it is the fact that God in Christ has unilaterally declared peace and put an end to the enmity between humanity and God, which was always one-sided, and put an end to the enmity between humanity. This is something to celebrate. It’s something to testify to. It’s something to invite people into.
Paul’s understanding, I believe, is that this is something available to all people. This particular passage, where Paul says “if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation” — I believe this is one of those times where there are multiple meanings to this text. If any one person is in Christ, they are a new creation. If any one person is in Christ, they testify to the reality of the new creation in which we all participate. If anyone is in Christ, then they themselves participate in a new creation that all are called to participate in. Various translations back this up — some talk about “if someone” or “if a man is in Christ, he is a new creation”; others talk about “if anyone is in Christ, then there is a new creation.” They testify to the new creation. You can see this diversity of meaning in the diversity of translation, but all of these are getting at Paul’s true meaning. It’s not just one — it’s all of them — because each of these things is true, and we are to be ambassadors of this.
But how can we be ambassadors of this if we see people heaping judgment on others, constraining the possibilities of other people, assuming the worst? How can we be ambassadors of hope in a world that too often lingers in the hopeless?
I have a third story from Waffle House to complete the triptych. A number of years ago — it was still on the heels of the Black Lives Matter protests; we had just been able to start going out to restaurants again — I’d taken my sons to a Waffle House again to have breakfast. I was getting up to pay, and in front of me in line was a Black man, probably in his mid- to late twenties, and he had a young girl with him, maybe three years old. He was paying for their meal, and as the server at the register rang them up, she said, “How was everything?” He responded, “Very good.” Then he leaned down to his daughter — she was smiling and jumping around — and he said, “Can you tell the nice lady thank you for taking care of us?” Which the little girl did.
Then something else happened. In order for you to understand this, you have to know that when I was standing at the register, if I looked to my right, over in the corner at the low bar, there was an older couple, perhaps in their seventies. The man was a bit older than the woman. He was in a wheelchair and had a Vietnam veteran cap on. I don’t know what their story was, but the little snippets that I caught as my sons and I were eating let me know that, in spite of the fact that they were very jovial and interacting with the staff, they were having some difficult times.
So the young man in front of me leaned forward to the woman at the register and said, “Excuse me, ma’am, I would like to pay for their meal.” She said, “Okay, let me get their ticket.” She got their ticket, rang it up, and he paid. He and his daughter left the restaurant, and so I got to be there, as I was waiting to pay, to see the server walk over to the older couple. When they asked for their check, she said, “It’s been taken care of.” I saw the surprise on their faces. The man sort of laughed and shook his head, and his wife teared up.
Now, what made this interaction all the more powerful is that this man and this woman were white, and this young man who had paid for their meal was Black, and it was in the context of a time in which we were — as we still are — wrestling with issues of race and discrimination in our country. I have no idea what may have motivated that young man. I don’t know what his faith background may have been. I don’t know if he was a veteran or if he had family members who were veterans. I don’t know if maybe he was just being kind. But regardless, he saw something. He saw an opportunity for kindness.
So, what are we to do in a world where there’s so much evidence built up against the reality of reconciliation, so much evidence against the reality of a new creation? How are we ambassadors? How are we to invite people to participate?
Well, the thing about being an ambassador is you’ve got to know a little bit about your country. The thing about being an ambassador is you’ve got to be able to interpret to other people. The thing about being an ambassador is you have to invite people to come and take part and experience something new so that they can know it themselves.
So our job as ambassadors is to point to the signs that we see, to point to the evidence of the kingdom — those moments of kindness. Now, here’s the thing. Some people might say that the Spirit only works in believers to do these things, but I’m going to say to you that no, the Spirit blows where the Spirit wills, and God works through all people in all places. Our first task is to look around. If we’re to be ambassadors, our first task is to look around and to see where God is already active.
And then, if we’re to be ambassadors for the kingdom, if we’re to be ambassadors for Christ, we are the ones who are called to interpret the signs. We are the ones who are called to share with other people what it means for there to be kindness in a world where really it sometimes appears that there can’t be — or shouldn’t be — any more kindness. We are, in other words, the ones who share the good news of the reconciliation of all people to God in Christ, and we’re the ones who share the evidence. And we rejoice in every example — like that server and the breakfast on my son’s birthday. We are called to announce the reality. We are called to announce the need for celebration. We may just be surprised how people will respond.
If anyone is in Christ — new creation. Amen.
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In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. I think one of the first values we learn as human beings is the value of fairness. Who in talking to children have heard something like the phrase, It could be because you put your foot down and said that they couldn’t do something. It coul
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In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
I think one of the first values we learn as human beings is the value of fairness. Who in talking to children have not heard something like the phrase, “That’s not fair”? It could be because you put your foot down and said that they couldn’t do something. It could be because a sibling or a friend got something that they couldn’t get. But we learn very soon a sense of fairness, and we begin to have a sense of frustration at what we perceive as unfairness.
It makes sense that this would be one of the first values that we would come to recognize, because we are not the only species that recognizes fairness and unfairness. There’s been a study of dogs — domesticated dogs. And if you have two dogs in the same domain and you reward one dog, they have shown that the other will eventually stop obeying, because they see the lack of fairness and respond.
But here’s the really interesting thing. When they studied wolves, they find a sense of fairness as well. This is a good thing.
We should talk about what fairness actually is, what we’re actually talking about. So here are a few definitions that you can find in dictionaries and elsewhere: treating people without discrimination, just in the circumstances; impartial and just treatment or behavior without favoritism or discrimination; free from favoritism, self-interest, or bias or deception; conforming with established standards or rules; of a person, someone who is just and impartial, not prejudiced; showing a lack of favoritism; or finally, showing reason or sound judgment.
Now, all of these things sound like good qualities, and we in our society talk about the fact that we want impartial justice. You hear people talk about it — fair and impartial justice. We want judges who are fair. Indeed, the sort of default spiritual position of our society centralizes the role of fairness.
Christian Smith, a sociologist who used to work at UNC Chapel Hill and now works at Notre Dame, is well known for his work among many generations. It’s something called the National Longitudinal Study of Youth and Spirituality, and he’s published a number of books on this. The first of which was called Soul Searching, and it was focused on millennials when they were teenagers. He identified what he saw as the definitive set of spiritual beliefs that millennials held, and he named them. If you’re aware of it, I’m going to tell you the name, because it’s important to know that we’re calling the cards: Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. He came up with that name for this type of spiritual belief. Moralistic, because it has to do with behavior. Therapeutic, because it has to do with what is beneficial to me. And deism, because while God is sort of there and believes and has created, it is best that God sort of goes and does God’s own thing and doesn’t get involved too much in the world.
So, moralistic therapeutic deism. And it has five components that he identified: A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth; God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions; the central goal of life is to be happy and feel good about oneself; God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life, except when God is needed to resolve a problem; and good people go to heaven when they die.
I sometimes have people in that category. These five beliefs are received from their parents and from religious bodies, but hold the same shape across generations. In the case of this sort of common set of beliefs and affirmations, it may be difficult for us to hear that the God of Abraham and Jacob, the God that Jesus points us to, the God incarnate in Christ, is in fact not fair — not in the way we normally think.
The story of Jonah demonstrates that. It’s one of the comedies of the Bible. Jonah begins by trying to get out of going to Nineveh. He gets on a boat, gets thrown overboard, and is eaten by a large fish or a whale, depending on your translation. He’s spit out on the shore. He ends up at Nineveh anyway. And he does not want to warn the people of Nineveh about the judgment coming their way — he does not want that because he wants God to judge them and do them in. He doesn’t want them to be saved.
And he knows God’s mercy. Jonah knows who the Ninevites are. He knows that Nineveh is the capital of Assyria. We don’t know all of that because the story doesn’t tell us all of it, but look at the Assyrians’ record. These are the folks responsible for the destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel — those lost tribes that you hear about in all the conspiracy literature. They’re lost because of the Assyrians. When they conquered a place, they would take all the leadership classes from that place — anybody who could read or write, anybody who was a military leader or a political figure or a religious leader — and just move them somewhere else in their empire, drop them down. And then they would move people from somewhere else they had conquered and move them there and drop them down. How do you prevent rebellion? You make it so people can’t talk to each other and there’s no leadership. And they were also just incredibly harsh in how they dealt with people once they had conquered them.
And so it’s there that Jonah is told to go. He doesn’t want the people of Nineveh to repent because he knows that God would be merciful to them. And mercy for people who’ve done that doesn’t seem very fair.
And yet that’s what God does. That’s what the story tells us about the character of God. God is merciful. God is just. God is not fair, in our understanding. And it creates this amusing story that I think we can all identify with Jonah in. At least I know I can. He’s there in the heat of the day, thankful for this bush that has grown up, and then God appointed a worm — I just love it — God appointed a worm to eat the bush. And it withers up. And then God asks Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about this bush?” And he doesn’t pause at all. “Yes, angry enough to die.” He is so angry about this bush. He didn’t want to go to Nineveh. I mean, he’s already been eaten by a whale and spit out. He hates these people. God makes him warn them. And now he’s not going to get to see them destroyed.
So God tells him, “If you’re angry about this bush and you did nothing to make it grow, how am I going to feel? Imagine how I feel about Nineveh — 120,000 people who don’t know their right hand from their left.” In other words, they don’t know what to do. And also many animals. Don’t forget them. God’s the creator. He loves all creation.
It’s funny, but it highlights the way we say we want justice. When we say we want fairness, it doesn’t include, for most of us, the idea of letting people like the Assyrians off the hook. But for God, that’s mercy.
Jesus tells a parable that is very similar in terms of its ramifications in today’s gospel — the parable of the laborers in the vineyard. I think, along with some other scholars, it might be better if we re-center the title as the parable of the generous landowner. The fundamental thing that Jesus is doing here is blowing up our sense of fairness and showing us God’s generosity.
So what’s happening here is there’s this group of day laborers waiting in the marketplace. I don’t know if there are any places in Nashville — I think there are a few — where there are day laborers you can find. You go to a Home Depot or Lowe’s parking lot or whatever and you can hire people. But there are parts of the country where it is very common. I was visiting family once in Los Angeles. I was driving through L.A. and I saw this huge crowd of men, mostly, standing out there with their work gloves and stuff, and a truck would pull up. You would see them talk through the window, and then you’d see three or four jump in the truck, and then they’d take off. So that’s sort of what’s going on here. It’s the ancient world. People are coming out, they see these laborers, and they’re hiring them for the day to do work.
So the owner of the vineyard goes out and he hires some folks, and then he goes on about his business. He comes back and there are still some folks standing there. He says, “What are you doing? Nobody hired you?” He hires some more, sends them in, and they go to work. At the end of the day, almost time to stop, he sees yet more who haven’t been hired, and he hires them and sends them to work.
Now, imagine if you were in that sort of situation where you’re waiting on somebody to hire you so that you can go and earn enough to support your family. They’ve been waiting there all day. And then here comes a landowner who, even though the bulk of the day is done, is willing to hire you. That would seem pretty generous, I think.
But let’s think about it another way. Maybe everybody was just chosen by chance. Some folks were chosen first because they just happened to be standing in a certain spot when somebody walked up. Maybe, if we’re thinking about it today, some people were hired first because they were wearing a brighter colored shirt and stood out. Who knows? But maybe if we think about it in another sort of situation where we have experience of people being chosen — maybe sometimes it’s like being chosen for teams in school. Ever experienced that? You’re waiting to be chosen for a team. Maybe somebody’s looking for heavy manual labor and they’ve got somebody bigger and somebody smaller — they pick the bigger person. Or maybe somebody looks sick and it doesn’t look like they would make it through the day, so they’re passed over.
Here comes this landowner and he says, “All right, go to work. It doesn’t matter how late it is. Go to work.”
And then this is interesting — Jesus structures the parable this way, and it’s evident in the response of the people who labored all day. The landowner tells the foreman who is going to be paying everyone: give them their wages, beginning with the last and going to the first. If they had been paid in the reverse order, the people who got paid first would they have been hanging around to see what everybody else got? They would have been happy with their wage. They would have gone on. They wouldn’t have known what others made. But Jesus structures the parable so that the people who labored all day — as they point out, in the hot sun — see that the people who came in last are paid the same.
And maybe they’re a little irked. Maybe they’re hopeful because they think, oh, if they’re getting a full day’s wage, we must be getting more. But when it comes time and they get paid the same amount, they can’t believe it. “That’s unfair. We worked all day and we’re getting the same amount as the people who worked an hour or two. That’s unfair.” If a company did that today, they might get sued. I don’t know. This is not ideal labor practice.
But it’s not from business school that Jesus is teaching. Jesus is telling us something about the character of God and about the kingdom. This is the way the kingdom is going to be — not based upon human ideas of fairness, not based upon trying to make sure nobody gets ahead of anybody else, but based upon the generosity of God for all people.
And that is a challenge for us. It’s a challenge for us to hear this. But it reveals the character of God.
You know, back to those dogs for a minute. That idea that they become more willing to tolerate a lack of fairness because of their relationship with these beings — maybe we can learn something about God from that. You know, there are these bumper stickers around. I’m sure you’ve seen them. Because if you have bumper stickers about God, then you have their counterpart about dogs, right? You have the one that says, “In God we trust,” and then there’s one that says the same but about dogs. Then my favorite: “God is my co-pilot.” By the way, I just want to note — “God is my co-pilot” concerns me a little. But there’s another one: “Dog is my co-pilot.”
So let’s talk about some similarities here. Dogs have affection for the beings they’re with. You may not want to call it an emotion exactly. But for whatever reason, they’re willing to tolerate unfairness because of their connection to us, their relationship with us.
God, we’re told in the gospel, is love. Love is not fair. Love is more than fairness. Jesus says in his summary of the law that what we’re called to as Christians is this: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind.” He says that this is the greatest and first commandment. The second is like it: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” On these two commandments hang all the law.
God is a different kind of judge. Not a fair judge, but a just and merciful judge, overflowing and abounding in grace. God is not fair. But thank God — God is not fair.
Elsewhere in the Gospel of John, Jesus says, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another, just as I have loved you.” Our way to love each other has an example in Jesus. Is it fair for Jesus to die for humanity? I’m not sure that fits our definition of fairness. “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this, everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” This is a defining characteristic of what it means to follow Jesus.
And here’s the thing: loving others is risky business, because it means they can hurt you. Because while God is not fair and replaces fairness with mercy and justice and grace, when human beings aren’t fair, it’s usually because they’re selfish. And so if you’re going to love people who aren’t fair and who are unjust, there’s a possibility you’re going to get hurt. And it hurts when people disappoint. It hurts. We’re called to love anyway.
Franciscan theologian Daniel Horan writes that “God is not fair” is actually one among many reasons for gratitude, albeit in a way counterintuitive to our usual thinking. The simple premise here is that God’s way is not our way. God’s love is not conditioned like our love. God’s mercy is not bound as ours is, and God does not discriminate or reward a person according to the standards of a given society, no matter how widespread such criteria may be.
God’s lack of fairness by human standards should challenge us to reconsider not how capricious or malicious God is, but rather how inappropriate, unchristian, and inhuman we are. It seems to me that too much of our faith is governed by our own insecurities, self-interest, and fears. And yet often we project what we see of our world, justified through the lenses of worldly logic, onto others and into our religion, as if it were not our way but God’s way. In other words, we try to have God be like us.
God is radical when it comes to God’s love for us. And the idea that God is not fair is good news. Who among us, if we’re really honest, wants to stand before a fair judge who applies all laws impartially regardless of the person before them? If you’ve ever been in trouble with a parent or a principal, you can’t tell me that you’ve always wanted them to apply the letter of the law. You’ve hoped, I’m sure, that they would be a little bit lenient, that there would be some mercy, that they would act first with love and not apply things straight across the board.
So we are called not to fairness, not to niceness, but to love. And the good news about that is that even though it leaves us open to being hurt by others when they disappoint us or act in a way that is harmful, it leads us down the path of being more like Jesus, who shows us that God is not fair — and that we should thank God for that.
Amen.
