It’d Be Funny If It Weren't

From tcu.edu

The absolute funniest Candid Camera episode I ever saw was The One Millionth Customer.  The lady was set up at a supermarket to be the millionth customer.  As customer 998 won an all-expenses paid trip throughout the United States and #999 won a world tour, the woman set up to be the millionth customer was ecstatic . . . until she was told her prize – wait for it – a walking tour of the sister store in Newark, New Jersey!

Boy, was she mad.  She said a lot of bleeped words – the only one you were allowed to hear as a home viewer was “unfair”, followed by a lot more bleeping.

Then, of course, affable Alan Funt came out to tell her she was on Candid Camera.  But the reveal didn’t stop her even for a nanosecond.  Even when she found out it was a joke, she was still mad!

She was the millionth customer!  (even though there was no millionth customer)

She should have received the best prize, not the other two (who weren’t receiving anything at all, since it was all a joke).

She was cheated!

It just wasn’t fair!

The sense of disappointed entitlement was so staggeringly ridiculous that it became funny - funnier even than the original joke.  The thing that still gets me is that the woman wasn’t mad that she was the butt of the joke; she was mad because it was unfair.

It occurs to me that in these United States, too often we act like the sham millionth customer, disappointed in the outcome of a contest that doesn’t exist . . . demanding our fair share of a pie that isn’t there . . . treating our expectations as reality and crying like children when they’re not met.

I would have more respect for Democrats if they stopped promising me the moon.

I would have more respect for Republicans if they stopped telling me who took the moon away from me.

I would have more respect for us as a nation if we voted for the candidate who promised to give the most to someone else – someone that needed the ‘it’ more than we do.

I would have more respect for myself if I didn’t act like that woman at the supermarket every time someone disappointed my expectations. . . if I didn’t scream, if only in my mind, It just isn’t fair! . . . if I thought more about what’s in it for you and less about what’s in it for me.

Really, I would.

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 . . .