proper20-st-peters.md

Sermon: Sept. 24: St. Peter’s

The Gospel today sounds like an offense to the best of our human instincts regarding fairness and justice.

Jesus: King. of Heaven is like laborers went out into the field … working various lengths. … so the last shall be first and the first last. …

None of us can hear the parable about the Kingdom of Heaven without first reacting – wait? what? … that’s a sign that we may be on to something.

On Easter this past Spring I preached at the church in Rock Hill. In it I tried to evoke the wonder and depth and significance of what we proclaimed on that night. In the course of it I recalled a commencement speech that had been given a year earlier by the dean of Harvard Graduate School of Education. It was filmed and shared on YouTube where it came to be viewed by millions of people – going viral I guess it’s called.

The key words of the commencement message that I wanted to focus on was a pair of words that are sometimes spoken by children and young adults when they are surprised by the depth and significance of something the parents have raised.

Imagine that someone you respect has told you something vitally significant about your life and what’s going to happen in it. Your first instinct might be to try to react as if was a normal conversation. And you would say, What! But then quickly you realize that the person has told you who you are, what is important in your life, and where your future life is going. Then you would say, Wait!

Jesus speaks to us that way – when we have ears to hear. Wait! What!

The parables we encounter in the New Testament – particularly when we do hear them as he intended – lead us to say Wait! What!

Because the parables – when we can hear them – are intended to wake us up, to shake our expectations, and to lead us into a new way of living.

Today’s gospel is one of those kind of parables.

If we can hear it, it offends our sense of justice and fairness.

Jesus says to his hearers, “The Kingdom of Heaven is like a landowner who went out and hired workers throughout the day, promising each of them a fair wage.”

Now as you would expect the workers who worked longer hours were angry at the unfairness of it all.

It is not inappropriate that we would think about the first reading where the Israelites complain to God – after he had successfully delivered them from centuries of slavery in Egypt.

In contrast to Rabbinic parables with a similar theme, this parable stresses God’s unmerited grace, rather than any sense of “earning” God’s favour. In this way it resembles the Parable of the Prodigal Son.

Yes, what we hear in the story is not fair. It is not just. We are not to be faulted for hearing it that way, for justice and fairness are one of God’s abiding characteristics.

Fair? Just?

What is fair? What is just? Literally it involves a kind of equation, a statement with an equal sign in the middle of it. E.g. “This 25¢ is = to this glass of lemonade.” It’s a fair price to pay at the children’s lemonade stand. The penalty one has to pay for speeding on the streets of Great Falls – well we could say that it is just, it is an appropriate payment for the infraction. There is a correspondence on either side of an equal sign.

• If you are willing to go a little ways with me on this lesson, perhaps you’ll go further when I affirm what Galileo Galilei said many centuries ago, “Mathematics is the language in which God has written the universe”. The equal sign at the heart of so much of mathematics is in fact God’s language. God knows about justice and fairness.
• God has given us the gift of recognizing fairness and justice and charged us with bringing about more and more fairness and justice into the world.
• But here is Jesus’ point in the parable. God didn’t give us His eyes and heart. He only gave us the means to grow into his eyes and heart.
• God’s justice and fairness, in the language of the parable, is: it is all gift, it is all grace

Paradox as a part of “religious language”

What looks and feels like unfairness and imbalance is in God’s eyes a greater justice. It’s why the writer of Matthew’s gospel “explains” the parable by saying that the first will be last and the last will be first. Jesus, it turns out was fond of saying that.

Living/Dying; first/last; strong/weak; hungry/well-fed; (beatitudes generally) … Jesus continually talked in paradox.

It’s the kind of thing the prophets had said before him.

Canticle 10 The Second Song of Isaiah Quaerite Dominum
Isaiah 55:6-11

Seek the Lord while he wills to be found; *
call upon him when he draws near.
Let the wicked forsake their ways *
and the evil ones their thoughts;
And let them turn to the Lord, and he will have compassion, *
and to our God, for he will richly pardon.
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.

Jesus spoke this parable to his hearers to provoke their sense of surprise and shock. Wait! What! So that they might recognize they weren’t yet able to see that God’s justice is in fact delivered in the form of a gift – in the form of Grace.

Jesus spoke the parable so that his hearers would be moved to change their thoughts, their ways, so that they might more easily recognize God’s thoughts.

A prayer attributed to St. Francis puts it this way:

• Lord, make us instruments of your peace. Where there is
  hatred, let us sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where
  there is discord, union; where there is doubt, faith; where
  there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where
  there is sadness, joy. Grant that we may not so much seek to
  be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand;
  to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is
  in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we
  are born to eternal life. Amen.

Or as Jesus puts it in today’s reading: The Kingdom of heaven is like this: the first shall be last, the last shall be first.