Preached on the Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 20A), September 24, 2023, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by the Reverend Stephen Crippen.
Exodus 16:2-15
Psalm 105:1-6, 37-45
Philippians 1:21-30
Matthew 20:1-16
Vineyard, by Maria and Miro Kenerov.
My father is a member of the Silent Generation, born on the high plains of southwest Minnesota in the mid-1930s. So as you might expect, he is an eminently sensible person. But at Christmas as I was growing up, my father allowed himself to be generous and enthusiastic.
Because they had seven children, my parents proceeded carefully when it came time to purchase Christmas presents. I remember a formula, something like this: one large gift for each child, two more medium-sized gifts, and a few small, stocking-sized treats. In the seventies my parents got into making banners for church, and my father was inspired to create seven banners for Christmas morning, each bearing the name of a child. And so, when it was time for us to thunder down the stairs, we would descend upon seven piles of gifts, each one marked with an identifying banner.
My father’s good holiday spirit flourished within this orderly system. The gifts he and my mother chose were generous, often quite thoughtful. It was all abundant and delightful.
But the piles of loot were always, always as equal as possible in size, value, and quality. One year, my brother John received only a box of wires, but it was a joke; they had not given him nothing by comparison to everyone else, but rather these wires were part of a new stereo system. The machine itself was offstage, the better for a big, exciting reveal.
Even now, when my father is securely retired from Santa duties and all of his children but one are older than fifty, even now I feel that old Christmas morning excitement. My husband is generous, too, but it isn’t his gifts (as good as they are) that add sparkle to Christmas morning every year. It’s just the lifelong effect of being treated well enough, cared for well enough, loved well enough. My parents expressed their love in different ways, and sometimes our family had serious problems, but always we seven children could trust that we all belonged, that we all had everything we needed. We had enough.
Every once in a while I would wonder if my parents were anxious about equality when they assembled the seven sets of gifts. Did they worry one of us would feel resentment, discovering that the others got bigger or better gifts? Perhaps. But for all the fact that we siblings would often compete with each other in various ways, fierce competitiveness and anxious comparisons were not really central to our family dynamic. No one felt cheated. (Well I suppose I should speak for myself: if one of my siblings runs across these words, they might disagree. But I think overall we all understood that love is an inexhaustible resource.)
And that is how we are taught to behave here at church, here in this assembly, here in what we like to call the Body of Christ. No one gets more when they work harder; no one loses out when they arrive late; everyone has enough. If this way of running our household of faith were defined in economic terms, it would not be a capitalist system, where the market governs everything: in a capitalist system, if I don’t produce a good crop of heirloom tomatoes, I can’t sell it at the market, so I have less money. No, here at church I get enough, I am taken care of, I receive abundant blessings, no matter whether I can produce anything valuable.
But this is not a communist system, either. Sure, the Christian community described in the Acts of the Apostles sounds fairly communist, what with everyone “holding everything in common,” but in today’s parable there is one landowner (or one householder, to translate the Greek word more accurately), and this one householder is hiring and paying everyone else.
And speaking of that householder, the householder is not God, despite the fact that many down the ages have interpreted the parable in that way. God is present in and among everyone in the story, and of course as Christians we are trained to recognize God not only in the rich and the powerful, but also – even especially – in the least among us. So God is found among the workers who came near the end of the day; and God is found in the hard labor of those who worked in the scorching heat. God is also quietly present alongside their roiling resentment, a latent power that can open their hearts, releasing them from anger.
The parable, then, is not about how God gives us all that we need no matter how much we work (even though, yes, God does do that); no, the parable is about how we are called to do good things with our abundance, good things for all in our midst. You yourself may be the householder in the story, or you’re a worker hired at one or another time of the day. Whoever you are, the parable is about the choices we make with all that we have been given.
As I listen to this parable, I wonder if I am one of the coins. Perhaps I am a denarius, placed into the hand of someone who’s been working all day in the scorching heat. If I am a coin, then I have intrinsic value; I can empower a family of that time to eat for a few days; I am useful to someone, even someone who is burning with resentment because they feel cheated.
And maybe, if God is in the story as a specific character, God is in the land itself, verdant and fruitful, a source of nourishment for everyone. I like this take, because even if we don’t learn anything from this story – even if we abuse the land, fight among ourselves, hoard our treasures, and resentfully micromanage our affairs on an eternally anxious mission of fairness, with everyone receiving only what they earned – even then, God as the land itself remains available to us, a silent teacher, inviting us to listen, inviting us to open our hands in both need and generosity, inviting us to share.
Finally, I invite you to rest for a while with the image of a coin, particularly the denarius, one of the coins from the world of Jesus and his friends. I’ve had the privilege of holding a denarius in my hand, because our member John Proebstel owns an impressive collection of historical coins. They are tiny, these coins, and they of course were not minted in a modern, automated factory, so they are not perfectly circular. They’re more like a small, flat blob of precious metal, stamped with the bust of the emperor, etched with a few other markings.
If I worked in the householder’s field and got in line to be paid, no matter how long I had been working, someone would drop this little blob into my hand. Can you think of another place where you get in line and receive a little blob of material, the same amount for everyone in the line? Of course it’s right here, at this Table. You come up the aisle, take your place at the rail, and I tear off a small piece of bread, trying (with mixed success) to give everyone the same exact size.
Now, this is not fair. It is not equal. It’s just not right! After all, some of you work many hundreds of hours a year for St. Paul’s, and others walked in the door for the first time this morning. Some of you are cradle Episcopalians, others are agnostic and not even sure you want to join us as members of our community. Some have generally avoided getting into serious trouble, and others have arrest records. Lots of us have sped in traffic, parked illegally, cared not at all about our carbon footprint, lied to our loved ones, cut corners. But not all of us have done those things! Yet everyone receives enough.
Why come up here and get a little blob of bread and a tiny sip of wine? It’s not a proper meal, even though we call it that, and we call this a Table for a feast. We do this to remind ourselves that every single one of us receives from this community the abundant blessings of God, no matter what. God is in and among all of this: in our good and generous actions, in the work we do in the vineyard of this neighborhood, and of course in the little blobs of bread, the Body of Christ.
So come on up. It’s not a capitalist system, or a communist one. It’s not fair, it doesn’t make good sense, it’s not reasonable. It’s more like a generous parent who works in the wee hours of Christmas night to show all the children of the household that they are loved, they are lovable, they matter. Come on up. Come and receive. Come and feed. Come and share all these good things.