So Much Better than Fair

[Sermon excerpt on Matthew 20.1-16, the parable of the day laborers all paid the same no matter how long they worked]

A day laborer is someone who works one day at a time, with no guarantee of a job or work from day-to-day.

When the trucks come, I imagine it’s a very desperate kind of beauty-pageant atmosphere . . . Standing straight and tall, trying to look bigger, stronger, tougher, more able, than you really are, hoping and praying . . . pick me, pick me, please, oh please, oh please, pick me!

Real people . . . tens of thousands, if not millions, live this life every day. It’s hard. It’s desperate. It’s ugly. And it’s very competitive. . . literally, if you are picked it means that I am not. If your family eats tonight, mine will not.

How very sad Jesus must have been when he saw that his own followers, after all they had seen, after all they had been through together, still imagined the Kingdom of Heaven as an agribusiness and still saw themselves as competing against others to get in.

But . . . Jesus is not chastising the disciples for being jealous . . . he is pleading with them to understand. . . the Kingdom of Heaven . . . God . . . is the landowner who pays more not less . . . the landowner who seeks more workers, not less . . . who ‘upsizes’ rather than downsizes . . . who fills rather than empties . . . who brings all to the table . . .

We are all but day laborers in the Kingdom of God. . . but we are day laborers invited to a party . . .

When it’s a party, we aren’t sorry that some come late . . . we’re just glad they could make it . . . glad to see them . . . enjoying the good fun with everyone else . . .

But when it’s ‘work’, suddenly we’re all certified accountants, counting, measuring, making sure it’s all ‘fair’ . . . to us . . .

How could the first workers have missed that the last workers were the ones no one wanted? That they were not ‘hired’ because they were deemed somehow ‘not good enough’? That unless the owner of the fields went and found them, they would have had no work at all?

Expectations are the problem - they know what they’re getting, but suddenly, it isn’t ‘enough’. Is it that they want themselves to get more or their compatriots to get less? Either, I suspect, would do, so long as it was ‘fair’.

But would they, would we, really argue to take money away from the poor day laborers at the end? Would we really urge the landowner to give them so little that they couldn’t feed themselves, let alone their families, just so it would be fair?

What do you suppose the landowner God in Jesus’ parable would have to say about that? I’m guessing that God would say “come on in” to everyone, no matter how late they got to the party.

But, but, but, we sputter . . .it wouldn’t be fair for me to devote my life to Christ and have someone who never even gave Christ a thought to inhabit the same cloud as me, now would it?

How can that be?

Where is my better cloud?

Fair requires hell. . . on earth as in heaven . . .

Fair requires hell.

But the question is, does God?

Here’s the thing . . . what God offers . . . what God provides . . . is so much better than fair . . . for you . . . for me . . . for us all . . .