PEOPLE'S CHURCH OF DOVER

Matthew 20:1-16                                                                     The Quality of Your Soul

Sermon September 21, 2008:  People's United Church of Christ, Dover, DE:  The Rev. Dan Griggs

 

            What we're watching on Wall Street this month, with the federal government taking over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the financial rescue plan, the bankruptcy of Lehmann Bro.s, the fall in the value of stocks, and all the words spilling out of the mouths of presidential candidates about it, and all the hand-wringing—maybe even more than in the weeks immediately following the September 11^th attacks:  what we're watching is a morality play.  The  moral is, "the first shall be first."  Only sometimes you don't want to be first—the first hostage, the first wife, the first person to contract AIDS, or the first and biggest and oldest investment company after a decade of questionable investment decisions.  This is the way Wall Street works:  "the first shall be first."  It's called "you get what you pay for," or maybe "you have to pay the piper."  Remember that popular song titled "Ain't We Got Fun," and the line "The rich get richer and the poor get poorer"?  Well, "the first shall be first, and the last shall be last" is the rule we live by in a lot of areas of our lives.  What might that say about the quality of your soul?  That's my question today:  the quality of your soul. 

 

            Jesus and his disciples are on the road to Jerusalem for the last time.  Most people at the time thought Jesus was going there to lead a revolt and take over the government.  A rich young man approaches and asks, "What must I do to gain eternal life?"  And Jesus tells him to obey the Ten Commandments.  He answers, "I've been doing that all my life.  What else do I need to do?"  So Jesus says, "Sell your possessions, give to the poor, and come follow me to Jerusalem."  But this the young man can not do, and he goes away sad that he can't be in the new government.  Jesus tells his disciples, "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God."  The disciples are shocked:  it's such a high standard, who can be saved?  Peter speaks up, "Look.  We've left everything to follow you to Jerusalem.  What are we going to get?"[1]  We're the first:  don't we come first? 

            That's the context in which Matthew places this parable about the workers in the vineyard—the Gospel today.  The parable illustrates Jesus' answer to Peter's question, "What will we get?"  You can almost feel the jealousy roiling through Peter's words.  He's like the older brother in Tennessee Williams' play ”Cat on a Hot Tin Roof":  Gooper is so jealous of his football-star brother that he and his wife scheme to get everything they can out of the estate.  That whole play is about the quality of your soul.  So to Peter's jealous question Jesus answers, "You will receive much; but the first shall be last, and the last shall be first."  What does he mean?  The parable tells us. 

 

            Now wait:  we need to know what a parable is.  A parable is a story about normal things that gives us insight about the quality of our souls.  A parable can have a lot of characters who do a lot of things, but the parable itself has only one point.  A parable is not an allegory.  We usually try to turn Jesus' parables in allegories:  we say that the land owner is God, the day laborers he hires are the people who come to Christ and do what Christ teaches, the pay time is Judgment Day, and the pay is the reward of righteousness.  That's how an allegory works:  each part of an allegory represents something else.  Parables don't work that way.  A parable has only one point, and the characters in the parable may actually do bad things to each other—it's that one point that Jesus is after.  This story about the workers in the vineyard is not an allegory, it's a parable about the quality of your soul. 

            What's the one point of this parable?  "The first shall be last, and the last shall be first."  Matthew places these words on Jesus' lips right before the parable, and again at the end of the parable.  "The first shall be last, and the last shall be first."  And just as the disciples were surprised when Jesus said it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God—just as that surprised the disciples, so this surprises us; because the moral standard we are used to, the one getting worked out again on Wall Street this week, is "the first shall be first, and the last shall be last."  So we need to understand why Jesus twists it around. 

 

            The kingdom of God is like a group of laborers, hired at different times of the day, but all paid the same wage.  The kingdom of God is like a farmer who hires many workers at different times, but pays them all the same, because he is free to do so.  And what does that say about the quality of your soul?  Peter wants to be first in line:  after all, he was one of the first four to become disciples of Jesus.  Shouldn't the first be first?  And over the centuries since then Peter's stock has only gained value:  he is regarded as the first pope, the one who set the doctrinal standards of Christianity.  That's pretty "first," wouldn't you say!  And here he is asking, "So what do I get?" 

            Our world is full of unfairness.  That's why we have rules like "the first shall be first," and "those who pay the piper call the tune."  The movie "Syriana" that came out last year is about this unfairness and how it affects the conflicts in the Middle East.  There are two young men, about eighteen years old:  an American high school senior, and a Pakistani working in Kuwait.[2]  The American boy wants to go to Yale and be on the rowing team and gain all the benefits of an Ivy League education.  He can speak with ease to young women, and he tells his father what's on his mind when his father says he'll have to go to the University of Maryland.  The Pakistani boy is poor.  He hasn't been to school.  He works in an oil refinery in Kuwait, and when the refinery is bought by another company he loses his job.  He can't get another job because he doesn't speak Arabic.  When the Al Qaeda representative comes around looking for converts this young man gets tricked by enough food to eat, by what passes for an education, and by the excitement of seeing an actual missile launcher; and he ends his life blowing up an oil tanker in the Persian Gulf.  Two young men:  one troubled by not being able to get exactly what he wants, the other defeated at every turn, troubled by every aspect of his life.  Our world is full of unfairness. 

            SO—this parable is full of unfairness, too.  Not only does the farmer pay the laborers who worked only one hour the full $79,[3] but he pays them first so that those who worked twelve hours in the hot sun can see that they only got $79 too.  That's not "equal pay for equal work," and they file a complaint.  We could say, if we were talking about an allegory, that this shows how surprising God is, and that God doesn't play by our rules because God wants to be more gracious.  But this isn't an allegory; the point of Jesus' parable is this:  "The first shall be last, and the last shall be first." 

            Peter, what is the quality of your soul?  You who are first in God's church—how much have you let the Spirit of God really change you?  Can you turn loose of a life-time's dependence on what you think is fair, and let God set the standard?  Or do you have to have a god who does things your way, including the morality of "the first shall be first"?  What is the quality of your soul? 

            There is a Christian virtue called "humility."  We American Christians have a hard time with the idea of being "humble."  Does it mean that I'm really not worth the air I'm using up?  Is that "humility"?  Does it mean that I should never assert my knowledge, my skills, my responsible place—just let somebody else take it over, because they will get some praise, and I'm supposed to be "humble"?  Sometimes we use the word "lowly" to mean "humble," and this word shows up in our Christmas carols:  "Infant holy, infant lowly"; "once in royal David's city stood a lowly cattle shed."  Jesus himself said, "Blessed are the poor in spirit."  But what Jesus meant is:  blessed is the man or woman who doesn't stand before God and shake their wallet-full of righteousness, as if God owed them something.[4] 

            Your humility is that God has chosen you.  It's not up to you:  it's up to God; and it's all by God's grace.  THAT is Christian "humility."  To be humble is to know who you really are, and where you really came from, and still God has chosen you.  "Humility" is to know my sins and my mistakes and my failures, all unworthy of blessing; and yet God has chosen me. 

            It's a matter of the quality of your soul.  So here are the laborers, each receiving from the farmer, and "the first shall be last, and the last shall be first."  And that's okay, because that's what the farmer decided. 

 

            In my youth there was a very irritating man in my church named Willis Harrison.  To describe Mr. Harrison simply and honestly, I'd have to say that he was a "hillbilly."  He and his wife Lois both looked like they had just walked down out of the mountains.  I guess his white shirt was clean, but it was stained; and his tie was always peeping out from the back of his collar.  He wore a good suit, but he had that body-build that made a good suit look bad—baggy in all the wrong places.  He was clean-shaven, but I guess it was his jet black hair that always made me think of him as unshaven.  Now all this was okay:  there were a number of mountain  people in my home church.  What irritated me no end was the way he sang tenor.  Now I used to be a tenor, and a pretty good one if I do say so.  I learned music and studied choral singing, learned how to balance my volume with the rest of the singers, learned how to direct congregational singing.  But when my church stood up to sing a hymn, from eight rows back Mr. Harrison belted out the tenor line so loud he almost drowned everybody else out.  And he would slur his notes—slide from one note to the next.  And he would add flourishes at the end of the lines.  And worst of all, he was a quarter-tone sharp, so his tenor didn't harmonize with anybody else in the church.  That's what irritated me about Mr. Harrison. 

            But Mr. Harrison came to church to worship God, not to please me.  Mr. Harrison came to church to lift up his voice and sing praise in God's house.  And he didn't mind who else was listening.  In fact, he was glad to have this gift he could lay before the altar of the King.  And me—well, let's say my reason for going to church was that my Sunday School teacher told us we ought to be there.  I looked down on Mr. Harrison when I should have been attending to my own begrudged church-going:  that's not humility.  Jesus' parable about "the first shall be last" certainly rang true in my relation to Mr. Harrison:  it called into question the quality of my soul. 

 

            So what about the quality of your soul?  "The first shall be last, and the last shall be first," Jesus said.  We number-ones who have so much—let's make sure we don't get left out altogether.                                   

AMEN