September 21, 2008
Matthew 20:1-16
It just isn’t fair.
This is an interesting week in our nation’s history to be raising the question of what constitutes fair business practices. A full day’s pay for a full day’s work seems right, but we have heard and will continue to hear that the rules of the game are much more complex than that. Many of the corporate heads whose quest for profits lead to high times for workers and investors have now fallen on hard times. This morning’s post showed a large painting of Richard Fuld set up outside of Lehman Brothers in New York. The painting served as a graffiti board, and the inscriptions left by departing employees were not all kind.
The question implied in this morning’s gospel reading is one we will be revisiting in the days and weeks to come. What is fair? The System of risky loans and the towers built on those shaky foundations worked according to the rules. Does following the rules make things fair? Does fair have something to do with getting what we deserve, and if it does are the bailouts really fair? When we say we want things to be handled fairly, do we really mean that or are we just saying we want a better deal? When we ask for fair treatment we usually mean we want to share in what those who are better off have. We seldom cry unfair and mean we want to share in the troubles of those less fortunate. I have been thinking about what’s fair a lot in recent weeks, and though I know this may be a bad week to be saying this, I have come to believe that “fair” is highly overrated.
Most of us don’t want fair. We really want something better. Fortunately, the only place I know of where you can consistently get a better deal than “fair” is right here in the place where you are sitting this morning. Better than “fair” is exactly what Christianity has to offer, but for some funny reason, we are often suspicious of such a good deal.
Those who worked all day were outraged at the unfairness of having to work all day for the same wage, and we can easily understand their anger. There is another way they might have reacted, though it seems a little less likely. They could could have been glad that these others got in under the wire and were able also to receive what they needed to live.
Between these two different ways of looking at the situation, what would make the difference? What would it take to make those of us who think the pay plan unfair rejoice that these others were paid the same? Maybe if the others were our friends. Maybe if they were our children or relatives. Maybe if they were people whose situation we knew something about.....maybe if we knew they had been having a hard time finding work, or that they were seldom chosen for a full day’s work.....maybe then we could rejoice at their blessing; maybe if we knew them we could be happy for them. Somewhere between those two responses--anger at the unfairness of the deal and rejoicing at the good fortune of those who received better than they expected...somewhere between those reactions stands a mirror in which we might see something of our own spiritual well being.
This parable is of course about grace. We get what we don’t earn, whether we think we have earned it or not. Grace--receiving what we cannot earn--is the center of the Christian message. Grace is the Christian message. The conversion we all are undergoing is the conversion into grateful--or more grateful--recipients of grace. When you encounter those folks who want to tell you urgently about Jesus, what he has done for them and what he can do for you, people who seem a little upset, all fired up about their cause, those people whose stories we so often don’t want to hear--what they sometimes are trying to tell us if we could listen through all the unfamiliar, unepiscopalian Jesus language, is that they have received something that they know they haven’t earned. Some people get it all at once. One day they don’t believe in grace and the next day they do. It was like that for C.S. Lewis who gave us the Narnia books and so much more. One day he went to the zoo and he says on the bus ride out he didn’t believe in grace and on the return trip he did. But he only got there after the kind of long ongoing struggle that most of the rest of us have throughout our lives. He only arrived at that appreciation of grace after many long years of arguing against it. Grace is the message. It is the destination. Trouble is, we humans generally have difficulty warming up to the idea of grace and it is not entirely our fault. We have received a lot of mixed messages down through the ages about work and having to earn our way, even from the Church.
Haven’t we all at times seen the Church as the keeper of the rules. We come to church, we send our children to church to learn how to live in the world, how to live and act toward God and our neighbor. We come here to listen to Bible stories in which Jesus teaches us to be generous and to forgive, to care for others and to be wary of our desire for wealth. We come looking for direction and we find it. Over time though, the lessons become rules on a list, and being right with God comes to be about keeping the rules. There are whole books of the Bible devoted to long lists of rules. We have the ten commandments for Pete’s sake, our religion is full of rules. Surely those who keep the rules should get a better deal than those who don’t, right? That sounds like a fine system until we discover as we all eventually do that we are not capable of keeping the rules or that keeping them doesn’t get us where we need to be. When that happens, we may find ourselves open once again to the possibility of Grace. Only when we discover our own poverty can we appreciate the gift of grace. Fortunately for most of us, that discovery is a gradual process.
For others the fall out of self-reliance into grace has been precipitous and life changing. Paul, who as much as anyone shaped Christianity as a religion, was devoted to the law. He did what the lists told him to do, he followed the rules. In the end though, he was made whole only after he had been rendered helpless and dependent on the care of others.
Martin Luther while reading scripture one day was filled with a deep sense of God’s love and presence with him. It was a transforming mystical experience, and it struck him that it had occurred quite apart from the Church’s list of approved ways of receiving God’s blessing. Martin Luther and Paul both used the word “grace” to describe not just what they received, but the nature of our relationship with God. God is not a taskmaster who ties pay to work. God is parent, friend, lover whose very nature is self giving.
I am wondering about those grumbling workers. I wonder how long it had been since they were not chosen in the marketplace. I wonder if maybe things have been going a little too well for them to really be in touch with the kind of gratitude that understands grace. I think maybe those who are closer to the edge, closer to trouble are in a better position to be grateful for what God gives so freely.
I am thinking about all the people who will go to work on Wall Street next week knowing that friends, former colleagues, people as gifted and capable as they are do not have jobs. I wonder if maybe those who are still employed might have a different take on what is “fair” and whom they would like to see get a better deal. Maybe a gift of the current upheaval could be a shift among some people from a focus on profits to a focus on neighbor and community. And in that little shift might be found the seed of of what set the earliest Christian community in motion, a deep and profound sense of having received a better deal than “fair.”
JB