Work it

The best parables always say more about the reader than they do about the cast of characters in them, which is the point.  There's a bit in Monty Python's Life of Brian where Brian is trying to blend in with the manic street preachers, and begins to tell a parable of his own just to get the Roman guards to overlook him, and not notice that he was on the run from them.  As he starts to tell his parable, the people who are listening ask him for the names of the people in the parable,  and Brian says 'it doesn't matter!'  They don't take it too well, and ask for the names again, to which Brian responds 'Simon and Adrian.'  The crowd shouts back 'He's making it up as he goes along!'

Yeah, the names of the people in the parable don't really matter, because the parable isn't about those people, it's about you.  That's why it's vague.  These both aren't real people, but they are also absolutely real people, because they are you and me.  They're both everyone and no-one all at the same time.  And the parable about laborers in the vineyard is absolutely no exception.  Think for a moment about that parable, about those who were hired by the owner of the vineyard, and what they agreed to.  The first of the day were called into service and promised a denarius, that is, a day's wage for doing a day's work.  But the harvest was plentiful, and the workers were few as they tend to be, so the vineyard owner recruited more people to go out to work in the vineyard.  At the third, sixth, ninth, and eleventh hour.  And everyone agreed that what they were being paid was fair.

When quitting time came around, everyone lined up to get what they had contracted for.  The last guys to arrive, the ones who had only worked for one hour, each got a denarius, or a full day's wage for their work.  When those who had worked all day saw this, they got all excited, got all worked up, got all thrilled, and thought to themselves about all the money they were going to make.  After all, if someone gets a full day's pay for an hour's work, then how many days will you get paid for for an actual full day's work?  That's a heck of a question, and they were no doubt rubbing their hands together in anticipation.  And when the time came for the pay to be given to those who had gotten there first, they were paid.

One Denarius.

Now, that's exactly what they had contracted for, it was what they had agreed to, it was what they had said was fair, and it was what they were given, right on the money.  That sounds good, right?  Well, in this case, fair seems unfair, or to be more accurate, the unfairness that we saw last week seems really unfair now, to the point that those who had been there all day, working all day, were upset that they had earned the same denarius as those who had just arrived.  And so, they complained.

Their complaints, though well understood and duly noted, unfortunately run aground at one particular point.  They run aground on the virtue and understanding that they did actually get more than the late arrivals of one particular thing, and no, it wasn't the money.  It was the work.  They got to work for more time.

On the surface, that seems bad, right?  Wow, what a thrill, they had to work eight times as long for the same wage?  That seems bad.  But that only seems bad if you understand work as something to be avoided under pretty much all circumstances.  If you see work as something to be steered around, avoided, to be thrown beneath the bus of your own sloth and gluttony, then work is the thing you do to get the money.  But hopefully, you have found yourself in a situation, in an understanding, where the work you do is worth doing, and worth doing well.  If it's not, if you're essentially like a surly teenager just putting in the hours doing the absolute minimum to not get fired and cashing your paycheque at the end of the week then who's the sucker?

When we were younger, we all wanted an easy job.  A job where we could surf the internet all day and do as little as possible while still being paid.  it sounded great, right?  Show up for eight hours, and then go home, and when you get home, you.....surf the internet some more? After a year of this, give or take, something bizarre happened to most of us, where we sorted out that the job we had, if we were going to spend eight hours a day at it anyway, that job was going to have to be something that was worth doing, because no amount of money is worth you throwing your life away eight hours at a time for your most productive years.  And then you realize that the work you do has great potential in it, to do amazing, worthwhile things that will imbue those hours with meaning, that they might not be wasted, but might be productive.  And no, this isn't a story where I tell you to do what you love and the money will follow, because that's not really true.  Ain't nobody paying me for playing with slot cars, I tell you that.  Except when I bring them to youth group.  Then they do.  But beyond that, it's not a matter of doing what you love and the money will follow necessarily, and those who say that are in a really cushy, really easy position where if everyone had their sort of job, the economy would collapse.

For most everyone, you have a job that you have to work at, and you can't afford to just quit and take off backpacking through Europe for a couple of summers.  It's a job that you can stand, but likely not one that you like that much.  So you have some choices with the work that you do.  You can either mope through it, and survive each day, looking forward to the money only, or you can work through each day as an opportunity to partially define yourself through the output and the work that you do, to do it well, and to realize that you are able to do a job worth doing instead of sitting on the couch watching the price is right.

You know, if you're going to be working all day anyway.

And this brings us full circle back to the parable again, and the idea, the notion that the first men who arrived to work that day got to do more work than those who got there later.  No, not had to work, but got to work.  That is, they were allowed and welcomed to do more work than their tardy counterparts.  This point is cemented later on where it says that the men who were found later on were found standing idle, not going anywhere or doing anything of note. So they were recruited into the service in the vineyard.  They all got the denarius, but some of the workers weren't standing out in the marketplace all day.  They were working.  They were changing the land and having it change them.  They were defining that day through effort, through struggle, through achievement, and through work and through output.  For you need to know something about the beginning of everything, as well as the end.  From the beginning of creation, work was something that humans were supposed to do, were created to do.  They were made to work, they were designed for it, and placed in a space where they could do good, meaningful work.  Work wasn't a punishment for sin, work tied to survival was.  By the end of the scriptures, even in paradise, after the end of everything else, there is still the tree of life, still a garden, and still crops for people to bring in, though the curse of work to earn is gone.  And that's what we need to understand, which is that the work isn't tied to the denarius.  For us, as Christians, given the work that Christ has done on our behalf, the earning is done, it is accomplished, it is finished.  We don't get any more pay based on how long we've been working out in the field, and I hope last week's sermon really served to get that across.  It's not about the denarius, it's about the work itself.  It's not that you have to work longer for the same pay, you get to work longer.

We are a people who are desperate for meaning in our lives, and we are living in a world in which we are constantly told to define ourselves by our consumption; our starbucks orders, our furniture, the car we drive and the clothes we wear.  We are people who are less made up by the balance in our bank accounts, and more composed of the accumulation of things that we have .  That's what we have been told to define ourselves by, brands and logos.  But we all know that deep down, we are defined

by work . As redeemed people of Christ, we are defined by his work for us on the cross, and now that the denarius is earned, we get to also define ourselves by the work that we do in his field and in his kingdom.  For God wants us to do quite a few things.  He has in mind for us to accomplish certain things in his vineyard, he wants us love our neighbors as ourselves, to give to those who ask, to protect the orphans and widows in their distress, to stand for righteousness and faith and charity even and especially when it hurts.  He wants us to forsake sorcery and fornication, to flee immorality, and to be at work in his kingdom.  And he knows something important about us, which is to understand that this work is not punishment, for us as Christian people, as humans striving for meaning in a corporate world governed by purchase and brands, we are offered an identity not defined by what we are sold, but by what we do, output not consumption.  And when you look at the work that Christ would have you do, you'll understand something else, which is that observing his laws and commandments, repenting where you have gone wrong, and rejoicing in what you have done right, your every day is imbued with meaning, with purpose and direction.  You're not lost in a corporate morass, you're not fumbling in the darkness, you're guided by the light of Christ and being encouraged by his grace.  It's not there to punish you, or tie you to earnings through your output, rather to encourage you to embrace the work, to hold fast to the challenge, and to realize that the work itself is the blessing.

That's why Jesus wants you to be at work, because it's good for you.  Not so you'll earn more, for everyone receives the same reward through faith in Christ.  The work itself, properly considered in the meaning and blessing it can give, itself is the reward.  This parable is about those workers, of course, but it is also about you. 

Fair

I present to you a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip that I remember fondly from my own childhood.  It spoke to me a great deal when I was younger, and hopefully you'll appreciate it now.

As you get older, as you have kids of your own, the strip of Calvin and Hobbes has a way of switching over.  It worked when you were a child, enjoying the many exploits, real and imaginary, of Calvin and his tiger, but when you grow up, when you have kids of your own, you tend to find a new layer in the mix.  You tend to enjoy the interactions and the personalities of Calvin's parents.

Now, that's a treat.  It's fun to watch that happen, to see something from your childhood become new and interesting, to find a new appeal in it, and the strip above is something that ages really well.  That is, as a kid you identify heavily with Calvin, with his desire to have things be fair, and to come to the conclusion that things are unfair, and yet stacked against you.  However, as a parent, the answer of the world not being fair isn't dismissive, or trite, it's actually massively important.  I'll explain.

Calvin, as the strip will show you, lives the life of an average child.  He has a treehouse, plays outside, gets into mischief, has friends, goes to school, has a tiger whose company he enjoys greatly, that kind of thing.   Here are some things he doesn't have.

-A Job.
-Responsibilities
-Bills to pay
-A family to feed
-Anything to do beyond just what he feels like.


I understand that from his perspective, Calvin feels as though things are phenomenally unfair, but things actually aren't fair, but it's in the other direction.  Growing up, when we were told to help out with one chore in a while, that kind of thing, and it always seems horribly unfair, that sort of thing. . What we didn't realize was that it was amazingly, spectacularly unfair, but unfair in our favor.  Doing the dishes is a pretty small price to pay in return for every single need being met in our entire lives.  We were living an existence of super abundance every day that there was, but we still found time to insist that things were unfair because we were expected to help out every once in a while. And had we been thinking about it, had Calvin been thinking about it, we would have realized that the very last thing in the world that we would want is for things to actually be fair.

This brings us to the Gospel reading from Sunday.  The reading in which Peter asks Jesus a sensible question, 'Lord, if my brother sins against me, how many times should I forgive him.  Up to seven times?'  That question on its surface is actually, even for us humans, possibly overstating the case.  That is, if someone sins against you, and you forgive them, are you supposed to forgive them more than once?  From a worldly perspective, we would say no.  We would say that forgiving them more than once is a sucker's game, it's for mugs only.  Why would you want to forgive someone who keeps on going back to you and keeps on messing up.  Surely, after once, you can sort of cut that person off, and deal with them as a sinner and a tax collector.  Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.  Fool me seven times, we're off the rails now.

 

We all remember that bit from George W Bush, and though he's largely considered to be a figure of fun now, his line about not being fooled again sort of has some perspective when it comes to this Gospel reading.  Surely, Jesus doesn't expect us to be suckers, does he? He doesn't expect us to do things that would be bad or difficult for us, does he?  Because the people we don't forgive, those people don't deserve forgiveness, right?  

Well, I have some bad news for you, fellow Christian.  I have some bad news for you as fellow Christians who are going to have to hear something from the scriptures that you don't want to hear.  You're going to have to hear the following words.

Forgive us our trespasses 

As we forgive those who trespass against us.

That's from the Lord's prayer you know.  Straight from the horses' mouth.   And in the Lord's prayer, Christ makes it clear to us that we need to forgive one another if we expect to be forgiven.  Of course, our usual understand of prayer is that it is a list of things that we expect God to do for us, but there is a separate aspect from prayer, and that is that you will find in it things that you expect God to change about you.  To soften your heart.  To conform you to his will, and to make you more likely, and more eager to forgive.  And lest we skip over that vital couplet in the Lord's prayer, think on this.  The next two verses in the Gospel of Matthew after the Lord's prayer are as follows

If you forgive others who sin against you, your Heavenly Father

will forgive you.  But if you refuse to forgive others, your Father

will not forgive your sins.

Gee, how nice.  We look at that passage, and we realize that in the Christian faith, forgiveness is not optional.  Peter thought it would be simple enough to say seven times of forgiveness, but Jesus ratchets it up to seventy times seven.  And are you counting?  Likely you're not.  That number is so large it might as well be ten thousand talents, a number so big as to be impossibly, laughably huge.  And you, as a Christian, are expected to go to all the effort of forgiving the same person who wrongs you seventy times seven times?  Really?  That's not fair.

Trust me, the last thing in the universe you want is fair.  Oh sure, you may kick and scream and beg that the situation was fair, but you don't want that.  You have no desire for fair.  What you want is the situation you have, in which things are unfair, but they are unfair in your favor.  Think of the debts in the Gospel reading, the debts the way they are listed have the servant owing ten thousand talents. Ten thousand talents is around seven billion dollars in today's money, which is a chunk of change.  I know the servant said that he would pay it all back, but how on earth was he going to do that if he was staring down seven billion dollars.  None of us will ever see that much money in our entire lives, it is impossible to even contemplate.  The pit that this servant had dug for himself was so big that he was never going to get out of it.  There was no way he was ever going to work hard enough, try hard enough, get another job to pay it all back.  It would be impossible, laughable in the highest order. That was what the first servant owed.  He owed an astronomical amount, so high as to be impossible.  And what was he owed?  A hundred days wages.  Now, the amount that he was owed, rather than the one he was owing, it's still big, don't get me wrong.  It's still an amount that should be paid back.  It's still an amount that someone would be right in demanding, of course, if he hadn't just been forgiven a debt that would have crippled his own family for generations.  Given that that's the case, the first servant, who had been forgiven an amount so big nobody can really imagine it, should have forgiven the small amount he was owed from his fellow servant.  But he did not.  He wanted things to be fair.  It would unfair for his fellow servant not to pay him back.  If things were fair, however, and he could throw his fellow servant in jail until the debt be repaid, then it stands to reason that that would be what would happen to him as well except for much longer, since the debt is much larger.

You see, that's how it goes.  We want things to be fair, but that's not what we really mean.  We want things to be unfair in our favor.  We want to collect what is owed to us, but to have our own debts canceled.  We want our sins to be forgiven by God, but we want to hold against others what they have done to us.  We say that it's not about what we want, it's about what's fair, but it really, really isn't.  For if things were fair, if everyone got paid what they owed, if the system worked the way we say we wanted it to work, we'd be in a hole so deep we would never get out of it.  If you take seriously not just way the Bible tells you to behave, but also how you think other people should behave, then you'll realize that you're seriously behind where you should be, and getting further behind all the time.  Essentially, every day that goes by you're doing more wrong than right, you're withdrawing from an account that gets closer and closer to overdrawn every day that there is, because you're making more withdrawls than deposits.  It's getting out of control, which is why fair isn't what you want.  

What you want is Jesus.

In the cross of Christ, you see the most unfair thing in all of creation, the godly dying for the ungodly, the righteous for the unrighteous.  You see Jesus Christ, true God and true man, dying for the sins of the whole world, yours included.  You see the lamb of God who comes to take away the sins of the world, the lamb of God who took on flesh, dwelt among us, and died for our salvation.  This is what it means to be a Christian person, which is to have a massive debt wiped clean, paid for in blood by the only person who could possibly afford to pay it. It's unfair for sure, completely, ludicrously unfair that that debt should be absorbed by another person.

But it's not about fair, you know.  It's about grace.  And Grace is what God provides, because the last thing in all of creation that you want is fair.