The Parable of the Vineyard Workers

10 February 2008

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

Here in the midst of the miracle of life, we come to see if there might be a secret to it, a way of living that pays us in a better kind of currency.

Not pay in dollars, but in satisfaction, by helping us find more life, fuller life, more gratifying and grateful life.

Over and over, week after week, we come here to be reminded of the yearnings that hold the key to our hearts and souls.

And we come back because we know it isn’t as simple as just taking someone else’s authoritative answer. We come to hear and feel what might some day become part of our own answer to the perennial questions of who we are, what is worth believing, and how we should live.

The search itself is as sacred as it is frustrating, and it can bless each of us who show up to do the work of self-examination. There is hope there. And, thank goodness, there is also time. There is time for us to learn better how best to live. There is time for us.

Amen.

SERMON: The Parable of the Vineyard Workers

Jesus’ parable of the vineyard workers (Mt 20:1-15, adapted here from the Scholars Version done by the Jesus Seminar) is one of the most intriguing religious stories I know, and one of the hardest to pin down to a single interpretation. So I want to talk about it with you this morning. The Jesus Seminar rated it the third highest among the parables most likely to be authentic – in other words, a story Jesus actually told in something like this form.

I won’t assume you know the story, so will begin by reading it to you:

For the kingdom of God is like a vineyard owner who went out the first thing in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard. After agreeing to pay the workers a denarius, he sent them into his vineyard.

And coming out around 9 a.m. he saw others loitering in the marketplace and he said to them, “You go into the vineyard too, and I’ll pay you whatever is fair.” So they went.

Around noon he went out again, and at 3 p.m., and repeated the process. About 5 p.m. he went out and found others loitering about and says to them, “Why did you stand around here idle the whole day?”

They reply, “Because no one hired us.”

He tells them, “You go into the vineyard too.”

When evening came the owner of the vineyard tells his foreman: “Call the workers and pay them their wages starting with those hired last and ending with those hired first.”

Those hired at 5 p.m. came up and received a denarius each. Those hired first approached thinking they would receive more. But they also got a denarius apiece. They took it, but began to grumble against the proprietor, saying, “These men hired last worked only an hour but you paid them the same that you paid those of us who did most of the work during the heat of the day.”

The employer said to one of them, “Did I cheat you? Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius? Can’t I do whatever I like with my money? Or are you giving me the evil eye because I am generous?”

In other words, the vineyard owner hired people for a twelve-hour workday (6 a.m. to 6 p.m.). Some worked all twelve hours, some worked as little as one hour, but he paid them all a full day’s wage (the denarius was the silver coin that was considered a fair day’s wage for workers). Those who came at the last hour were delighted, but those who had worked a whole day in the hot sun were angry, even though he paid them a full day’s wage, which was what he said he’d pay them.

As you can tell, it’s not easy to know what to make of this. It doesn’t seem at all equitable. Conservative Christians often say that the silver coin represents heaven. Though some of those who wrote the gospels forty to ninety years after Jesus died did have him talking about heaven, Jesus was a Jew who never talked about heaven or hell, just focusing on this life here and now.

When you start reading some of the interpretations that people give this parable, they are absolutely all over the board, which should give you the nerve to give the story your own best interpretation. I want to share some of the ways Christians try to make sense of this odd story, then talk about what Jesus meant by it, and then wonder what we might do with it.

One online skit for two clowns says the point is that we should be happy with what we have – since all the workers agreed to work for a denarius: that silver coin. These clowns say they are hired by churches to come do skits to reinforce the bible lesson.

One of the many large Calvary Churches in the country says that in the Parable, the denarius is Heaven, the glorious payment of God for a whole life’s work of a believer.

God pays with the same coin to those working for 80 years in the church or to the one who repents at the last minute of his life.

But this is fair, they say – for after all, everybody gets to live up above the sky with God in heaven forever. So since the reward is infinite, there is no injustice. That’s at least clever.

An Anabaptist Christian reading doesn’t make it about heaven, but about serving God in this life. This man says: “So, having considered all this, wouldn’t you prefer to be a one-hour worker? Not me! I love the Boss too much! I pity the one-hour worker! He only has an hour to be about his Father’s business.”

He says the point of the parable is Ungratefulness, and ends by saying, “Let’s be so busy serving we don’t have an interest in whining!” This is pretty close to a big Happy Face reading, though I don’t think the original vineyard workers would have bought it.

But what seems worth keeping is that notion that those who spend more of their lives doing God’s work are to be envied because they served high ends rather than shallow or selfish ends. For this interpreter, the silver coin, the denarius, means serving the highest ideals with your life. We all want to do this, and while those who only did it for an hour had a glorious hour, it only lasted an hour instead of a whole life. This man talks about serving life-giving ideals as serving God, and that’s easy to understand whether you’d want to call it serving God or not.

Another commentator says the point of the parable is about answering the call when it comes. For those of us in liberal religion, what that “call” really means is like what the theologian Howard Thurman meant when he said, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

Those who use God-talk to talk about these things will call that serving God. But it doesn’t matter what you call that attitude, as long as you can call it forth.

A lot of interpreters get hung up on the money part, and need to spin it to save face for God, because if this is about money, it sounds like God isn’t very fair. One didn’t want to engage this argument, so just said the point of the parable is that there is no room in heaven for people who just want more money or those who are jealous of the few who didn’t have to work very hard for their money.

And this leads to one of my favorite interpretations – favorite in a perverse kind of way – from Paul A. Cleveland, a professor of economics and business administration at Birmingham-Southern College, a man who has converted to the late Milton Friedman’s economic gospel.

He says the point of the parable concerns “The Danger of Presuming the Right to be Treated Graciously.”

“No one has the right to force someone else to deal with them in a merciful and compassionate way,” he says.

What he calls government entitlement programs – like welfare, social security, education and health care – are often called social justice, but he says this parable shows that they are not just, and not what God intends for us.

Furthermore, it’s wrong to have the government provide any social services or welfare, because this “assumes that people have the right to be treated mercifully and that this right is properly established by taking property away from taxpayers.”

In short, “The attempt to establish mercy and charity on earth via the law is not a Christian concept.”

This is the gospel of Milton Friedman. Next month, I’ll devote several sermons to looking at the worldwide effects Friedman’s fundamentalist economic ideas have had on the world since at least 1972, when I spend some time on Naomi Klein’s good but disturbing new book The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism. But if you buy an economics of unrestrained greed, it’s no problem to believe that Jesus agrees with you. The truth is, you can interpret these and other stories almost any way you like. How you read them will be determined not by the stories, but by the spirit that possesses and guides you. Your interpretation is usually more about you than about the story. So when we hear these different interpretations, we’re not necessarily learning much about the story, though we’re learning about the interpreters, what they know and what sort of spirit drives them.

The last of these Christian interpretations I wanted to bring you is more in the “can you believe this?” category. It was posted to a chat list, not on this parable, but on the one that follows it. Here’s what the person said:

“I need help for a drama workshop on the Matthew 21 parable of the vineyard where the workers kill the owner’s son. Our church has two workshops per evening, one for younger children and one for older children. Any ideas? I’m burned out.”

Just from these few examples, you should get confidence to try your own reading of this odd parable and all other moral, ethical and religious stories. You couldn’t do worse than some of these, and would probably come up with a reading that you’d have a much better chance of incorporating into your own life.

Now let’s talk about what Jesus meant by the parable. Jesus, we have to remember, was not a Christian, and didn’t talk about heaven or hell. He was a Jew, and talked about living more wisely and fully here and now. So the silver coin wouldn’t represent heaven or any sort of afterlife. And it wouldn’t have anything to do with rewarding Christians, because Christianity wouldn’t be invented until several decades after he died. But the silver coin did represent what Jesus called the kingdom of God.

As I said last week, this was a common phrase used by lots of people at the time – Jews, Romans and later Christians – to mean the ideal world, the best kind of world. Originally, it was all here and now, not elsewhere and later.

And Jesus’ definition of this ideal world was shocking in its simplicity and its radical nature. He said the kingdom of God was one in which we all saw ourselves as children of God, and saw everyone else as children of God as well, no matter what social or economic class they belonged to, and then we all acted on the knowledge that we are all the beloved children of God. So the kingdom of heaven was defined by behaviors, not beliefs. I think this is one of the marks of Jesus’ profundity. Most of history’s great moral, ethical and religious thinkers have said the same: Confucius, Lao-Tzu, the Buddha and Socrates no less than Jesus. But this is not the way religions usually teach, then or now, as you know. They usually give you an identity defined not by behaviors, but by following prescribed beliefs, sacraments and ritual practices.

And Jesus was clear that this kingdom was not supernatural, wasn’t a thing yet to come through some magic. He said the kingdom wasn’t something that was “coming,” that you couldn’t point to it. It was already here, he said, within and among us, as soon as we see who we are in the kingdom – children of God – and act like it toward others. Like the Buddha, Socrates and other great thinkers he knew nothing about, Jesus put the ball in our court, whereas Christianity – unlike Jesus – gave the ball, the authority, to the Church. Jesus taught that the kingdom of God is a kingdom of radical love and compassion between all. And you’re living in it as soon as you act like it. You get paid in full the minute you finally get it. You know people who’ve lived that way for decades, and you must envy them, as I do. And you know others who have finally mellowed, or matured, into that quality recently. It transforms their life, whenever they get it.

If we see it early, we can have most of our life lived in this way. But even if we don’t get it until very late, we get the same quality of life, the same payment, just not as many years of it. So far, Jesus’ meaning is the best of the bunch. It is quite a pretty and poignant vision, but there are some things to question about it.

Jesus was young. He did his short ministry in his early 30s (some of the scholarly estimates now are that Jesus was probably born between about 5-7 BC, and may have been executed around the year 30). Does his vision sound realistic, that the world would dissolve into love? Does this sound like he had an adequate picture of human nature in the real world, or has he left out some terribly important things – like selfishness and power?

Dreams of peace and justice always seem to forget about power, as Jesus also seems to have done. Maybe it’s because those who dream about peace and justice seldom have any real power, so they assign too great an importance to mere ideas. They act as though those with power will just give up as soon as we start being loving. But history doesn’t support that. It shows they tend to see us as patsies, and take even more advantage of us, doesn’t it? Don’t tyrants love most of all those who will forgive them?

Even within a family or a relationship, his radical notion of forgiveness and love can only work where there is mutual love and respect. Practiced unilaterally, it can be very dangerous. As I’ve said before, if you want to see a place filled with people who practice loving their enemies and treating violence with forgiveness, go to a battered women’s shelter.

That kind of love and forgiveness can work within a loving and respectful relationship. Haven’t we all been opened, awakened, by someone in our lives who could forgive us something for which we couldn’t forgive ourselves, and love us anyway? It really can transform you into a more loving person. But if we’re dealing with very selfish, narcissistic or sociopathic people, it just makes us a sucker, and they’ll take merciless advantage of us.

That certainly seems true in politics, economics, history, work relationships and many personal relationships, doesn’t it? Can we say that Jesus’ vision, as beautiful and idealistic as it was, seems terribly naive, and that his dream of an ideal world forgot about the people who aren’t so inclined, and will take their advantages where they can get them?

After all, even in his story, those who worked only one hour had to know it was unfair to be paid for a full day. They just didn’t care. Neither do today’s CEO’s making nearly five hundred times as much as their workers. They’ll take what they can get, gladly. And they’ll always be able to find professors of economics and business who will swear that’s just what Jesus intended. Jesus’ kingdom of God was a utopian vision, and it’s perhaps worth remembering that the word “utopia” (Greek utopos) actually means “no place.”

All that said, however, there are still some things that are right and profound in this parable of Jesus’.

It isn’t about money, it isn’t about beliefs, and it isn’t about heaven. Jesus’ kingdom of God is about behavior, not belief. That’s what makes it a universal vision. It’s about finding a more compassionate, holistic way of seeing ourselves and others, so that we can begin to see ourselves as sacred creatures, put here for only a short time, challenged to find ways to make the time more fulfilling, so we can look back and say by God, I’m glad I lived that way!

That’s the silver coin that we seek. It’s one of the biggest reasons people come to the worship services of different religions. Even though we may not be much into magic or supernaturalism, many people come to sanctuaries like this each week hoping for a miracle: a word, a phrase, an image, an idea, a story or a connection that can open a door for us into a bigger living space.

The questions are always:

1. Who am I, really?

2. What am I serving?

3. Is it worthy of me?

4. If so, am I allowing it a commanding role? Serving it heart mind and soul?

In some ways, this complex parable of Jesus’ presents most of our problem today. We’re looking for the best way to live, individually and together. We believe it can transform the quality of our life if we’re serving the kind of ideals we should be serving. We know we can see the light we’ve been looking for at any time of life – the first hour or the eleventh hour, as this story puts it. And getting it right can make all the difference. We know all this.

But what’s the story that will do it? Jesus said it was a world of radical love and forgiveness. I’ve wondered out loud with you whether this might have been the fairly naive utopian vision of a very young prophet – for he seems to have left out any considerations of power, selfishness and ambition. This left a vacuum that history has filled with centuries of corruption, violence and war sponsored by the churches, and a toxic self-righteousness that has poisoned many families, including some of yours.

Some of life’s problems really do have simple and unambiguous answers that apply to almost everyone: we must work, we must eat, we must either play fair or gradually lose the respect of everyone we know, and so on.

But some questions require personalized answers, and the questions in this story are among them. If the “silver coin” is a life you’re glad you’re living this way, have you found it? How would you describe it? If you haven’t found it, what do you think it would be? Do you agree with Jesus’ prescription? (You don’t have to; arguing with teachers is an honored Jewish custom.) If not, how would you define the “kingdom of God?” What makes you come alive, what makes you feel beloved by God or by Life?

You see, we’re standing here in this marketplace of life, and all these potential employers are coming around, offering us what may be good offers, what may be Faustian bargains. The clowns are here, saying to just put on a happy face and be glad for what you have, no questions asked by golly.

Another says, “Oh, you’re not going to get much now, but if you’re obedient and don’t make waves, then some day you will win big, even if it isn’t until after you’ve died.”

The Friedman economist is here shouting, “Shut up and work! You don’t deserve anything the masters don’t choose to give you!” Some say the work is so satisfying you won’t even mind not getting paid.

Then there’s Jesus, with his idea that if we love one another and love our enemies too and learn to forgive, everything will be fine.

Finally, this preacher comes along who wonders if Jesus was too young and too naive, if just unilateral loving and forgiving doesn’t also make us easy marks for selfish or abusive people who’ll use us like patsies for their own ends.

But like so many good stories, this one is about life. The best stories are always about us, and we are all there in that market place of ideas about how to spend our lives, what kind of silver coin we think is worth our time, our trust, our life.

What about you? What currency could you work for that would make you feel that if this isn’t the kingdom of God, it’ll do until the real thing comes along? How do you find your own path between the whiners and gripers on the one hand, and the abused patsies on the other?

Another day has started. It’s already the fifth hour. What’s worth working for with your heart, with your hands, and with your life?