Sermon September 18, 2011

By Rev. Harriet Kollin

Pentecost 14 (Proper 20): Jonah 3:10-4:11; Psalm 145:1-8; Philippians 1:21-30; Matthew 20:1-16

For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
nor your ways my ways, says the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts
(Isaiah 55:8-9).

We have been hearing a lot about the economy for many months now. During the past week I heard reports that indicated that claims for unemployment rose again. I also heard that 1 in 6 Americans live under the poverty line. I also heard more about the battle between the White House and Congress over how best to handle the economy. Europe and Asia are faced with the same economic crisis. I suspect we are all probably worried sick about our own financial health in the coming days or months. I myself am worried about my retirement. Right now, though, I’m tired of bad news. I want some good news. We could use some good news. So we come to church today and what do we hear about? The economy! (Ah, but) it’s “God’s Economy.”

Perhaps these two words don’t seem to go together. Chances are that you have not heard the two combined into one expression very often. However, early theologians, and even some modern day Eastern Christian theologians, regularly spoke of God’s economy. What they had in mind was not exactly what we have come to mean by the economy. In the ancient world, “economy” (deriving from the Greek word oikonomia) had to do with the management of a household. So when early Christian theologians spoke of God’s economy they were really speaking about how God manages God’s household, where God’s household includes, of course, everything in existence.

The lessons from Jonah and Matthew’s gospel are designed to show us how God manages God’s household. And as the passage from Isaiah that I cited at the outset suggests, I think it is safe to say that God’s management style is different from ours. At least it is different from the way I manage my household affairs.

It is this fact about God’s ways that seems to have motivated Jonah in his initial efforts to flee from God rather than to obey God’s command that he go to Nineveh and prophesy to them concerning God’s coming wrath. Thus, after Nineveh repents and God decides not to destroy the city, Jonah retorts “That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing.” In other words, Jonah resisted carrying out God’s directive because he was concerned that God would do exactly what God did. God would forgive the Ninevites and make Jonah look like a fool.

God tries to educate Jonah about God’s ways. God brings the tree into existence to provide shade for Jonah and yet causes a worm to destroy the tree to illustrate to Jonah that he is mourning the death of a tree. And how much worse would it be for 120,000 people to die? But this analogy is unconvincing; it does not seem to be convincing to Jonah, and I confess when I first read it I did not find it convincing either. After all, Jonah does not seem angry that the tree dies but that he has lost his shade. But perhaps Jonah and I simply do not understand the logic of God’s economy. As I reflected on it, it became more apparent to me for reasons that I’ll discuss in a minute. But for now I would like us to reflect on Jesus’ parable.

Jesus’ parable concerns a landowner who hires laborers to work in his vineyard. The landowner goes out on five separate occasions—early in the morning, at nine, at noon, at three in afternoon and again at five. At the end of the day when the landowner settles up with the workers, he does so in reverse order, paying first those who came in last and so on until he gets to those who had worked for him all day. And the thing is, this landowner pays the last as much as he paid those who had worked all day. So not only did those who were first spend the most time working, they also were the last to be paid.

In our ordinary way of thinking about things, it is pretty clear that the landowner here is treating the first workers disrespectfully. True, he has paid them according to the arrangements they made at the beginning of the day, but he is disrespecting them by valuing the labor of those who came last as much as he values the labor of those who worked much longer hours. They say, “You made them equal to us.” And Jesus is aware of the perceived unfairness of the situation, for he has the laborers grumble and the landowner justify his behavior by appealing to his generosity to those who arrived later.

But if this is the entire justification, it still rings a little hollow. Of course the point Jesus is making is that God is so generous and forgiving that it does not matter when we turn to God and begin to live as God desires us to live; God will reward us as if we had been there all along. And yet, if that is the only point Jesus wishes to make, it would seem he would have done better to choose a message that would not strike us as so patently unfair. And one might wonder why God does not provide more incentives for us to join God’s workforce earlier.

As I thought about this I began to wonder if perhaps the point that Jonah and the disgruntled day laborers from Jesus’ parable missed is that there is something inherently good and beneficial in taking an active part in God’s economy. We might think of it as a privilege, which is how Paul is thinking about it when he says that God has “graciously granted you the privilege not only of believing in Christ but of suffering for him as well.” When viewed in this light, the laborers who worked in the vineyard and Jonah who was called by God to serve his brothers and sisters in Nineveh, were not being wronged but being given a great gift—the privilege of working with God for the good of their brothers and sisters.

And so it is for us today. We, too, have been given the same great gift—the privilege of working with God for the good of our brothers and sisters. (The good news about that is) we have been equipped with enough. Amen.