Proper 20, Yr A (2023) The Rev. Karen C. Barfield
Proper 20, Yr A (2023) The Rev. Karen C. Barfield
Exodus 16:2-15 St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
Matthew 20:1-16
In the name of the one, holy, and living God:
Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifying Spirit. Amen.
Consider this scenario:
On your way home one afternoon you hear an announcement on the radio that one of your favorite musicians is going to give an acoustic concert.
It will be at a small venue,
which is even better,
because it means you can sit right up close and not have to bring your binoculars!
You might even be able to sit close enough to watch their eyebrows rise and fall and notice the slight tremor in their hand.
So as soon as you get home you run inside,
pull out your computer ,
and buy a couple of the general admission tickets.
The day arrives,
and you’re so excited
that it’s hard to focus on anything else.
You’ve got everything planned out,
and it’s time to go.
You allow extra time to get there in case there is an accident or road construction you didn’t know about.
And on top of the extra time,
you also planned to get there an hour early
so that you could get a spot at the front of the line.
You arrive at the venue,
find a parking spot,
and join the queue.
Happily, you get there in time to be amongst the first to arrive.
Settling in to your place in line,
you chat for a while with your friend or significant other you brought along to enjoy the concert,
then you spend some time on your phone checking your email and surfing the web.
Right after you put your phone in your pocket,
someone walks up from the side and “bumps into” an old friend in front of you
and starts chatting them up.
A little irritation arises as you begin to wonder if they are going to get in the door ahead of you…getting the pick of a better seat when you’ve been standing there all this time, having carefully planned out your evening to get there early.
At last, the door opens and the person who is going to take up the tickets closes the door behind them and announces that there are plenty of seats for everyone who has a ticket but that this evening they are going to start letting folks in from the back of the line.
Nope…I don’t think so!
That’s not how things work.
There apparently is some sense of fairness – or unfairness –
that most of us human beings seem to live by.
It is a sense of fairness that is based on meritocracy…
and that meritocracy is based on my effort or your effort
and it seems that it is not just my effort or your effort but my effort vs. your effort.
There is implicit competition as if there isn’t enough to go around.
I remember an interview I heard on NPR with a woman named Elizabeth,
who lived in California…in her car.
She had had a good paying job as an administrative assistant in a solid company.
Her mother was diagnosed with cancer,
and Elizabeth took care of her until she died.
While caring for her mother,
Elizabeth used up much of her vacation and sick days.
11 months after her mother died,
her father was diagnosed with cancer, too,
so she took over care for her father.
By the time her father died,
Elizabeth had used up all of her vacation days, sick days, personal days
and time available to care for a family member.
She was laid off.
With both of her parents having passed,
she began to take care of her adult brother who had significant disabilities.
She had put him up in a rooming house,
and he often had to move because folks didn’t understand
and could not live with his disabilities.
Elizabeth then began to live in her 20 year-old car,
parking it wherever she can find a spot for the night.
Each morning she woke up and found a bathroom where she could clean up.
She worked as a security guard for $13/hr on the swing shift: either 2-10 p.m. or 3-11.
When that shift was over, she either called her supervisor to see if anyone had called in sick so that she could pick up their shift, or she would call a friend who runs a cleaning service so that she could go clean on the graveyard shift.
You all can fill in the rest of the details of the story:
health care costs too much,
the car needs a repair and takes all her savings,
her brother gets moved along…again.
Now, if we were actually talking meritocracy,
she would be at the front of the line!
But she’s not.
She’s barely treading water.
The segment on NPR was ironically one in which they were talking about “upward mobility.”
Her story was not about upward mobility at all…
it was about living with dignity!
Living with dignity
or not.
“Jesus said, ‘The kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard.’” (Mt 20:1)
Now, the laborers probably were not the poorest of the poor,
but they certainly were the ones who showed up looking for work every day.
Some folks were there first thing in the morning and were hired for a day’s wage.
The landowner kept coming back throughout the day:
at 9:00, noon, 3:00 and then at the very end of the day at 5:00.
When the workers line up at the end of the day to receive their wages,
the landowner tells the manager to pay them all
beginning with those who arrived last!
The last to arrive were paid in full view of the first to arrive…
those who had withstood the heat of the day
and worked their fingers to the bone all day long.
When the last to arrive were paid a full day’s wage,
the folks who arrived early in the morning got excited
because they expected to get paid even more…
after all they had worked for it.
And then when they received a day’s wage,
they were indignant.
What?!
“These last worked only one hour,
and you have made them equal to us.” (Mt 20:11-12)
Therein lies the key to this Gospel story.
“You have made them equal to us.”
In God’s kindom, there is no hierarchy.
There is no meritocracy.
There is Grace.
God’s kindom functions differently from our kingdoms.
How often do we read the last line of today’s gospel:
“So the last will be first, and the first will be last”
as a reversal of the order?
We see the order being reversed…the first in line move to the rear
and those at the end of the line move up to the front.
But according to this story,
the kindom of heaven is one in which all are treated as equals.
All receive what is needed to live with dignity…a day’s wage.
That is also what we see in today’s story in Exodus:
God provides enough manna for the day…
if you gather too much, it rots.
Being able to use our God-given talents
and to receive a living wage for them
provides for living with dignity.
In the kindom of God we need not jockey for position…or possession.
There is no first and last…we are all equal.
While that may be a challenge for our way of thinking,
it certainly is Good News!
God’s arms of Grace are wide enough to care for all…
to welcome everyone into the kindom.
I pray that we all may have the Grace to do likewise!
Amen.
