Tuesday, September 26, 2017

What Time Zone Are You In?

This is a sermon that was preached on September 24, 2017 at United Presbyterian Church in Sterling, KS.  Listen to the sermon here.

Read Matthew 20 here.
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A man named Steve retired in his early 50's and started a second career. But he just couldn't seem to get to work on time. Every day he was 5, 10, 15 minutes late. He was a good worker, and clever, so the owner was in a quandary about how to deal with it. Finally, one day he called Steve into the office for a talk.

'Steve, I have to tell you, I like your work ethic, you do a great job, but you're being late so often is a bit of a problem.'

'Yes, I realize that, sir, and I am working on it.' replied Steve.

'I'm pleased to hear that, you are a team player. It's odd though, you're coming in late. I know you're retired from the Navy. What did they say if you came in late there?'
'They said, "Good morning, Admiral."’[1]

--
Show of hands- Are you an early person or a late person?  If you’re an early person, do you resent people who arrive late? If you’re a late person, do you resent their resentment?

In the parable of the laborers in the vineyard that Blaine read from Matthew today, there is resentment for those who come late because they get paid the same.  We don’t know why they weren’t there at the beginning, but we do know that at the end of the day, the workers who worked twelve hours get paid exactly the same as the workers who worked one hour.  We have no trouble understanding why the twelve-hour workers are upset.  This is not fair pay…in the kingdom of earth, but Jesus is telling us about the kingdom of heaven.

The wage they got paid was a denarius, a typical day’s pay.  A denarius was a silver coin with a picture of the current Roman ruler on it – Caesar. In the King James Version of this story, it says that the workers were paid a pence or a penny, which isn’t the equivalent value, but rather simply words that represent coins.  In Britain the symbol for a pence is a “d” because of this connection with a denarius in the Bible.
The actual value of a denarius varied quite a bit.[2]  But we know from today’s text that whatever its actual value, it was a standard wage to give a worker for a day’s work.

I’ll admit I wasn’t quite able to wrap my mind around what’s happening in this parable at first….until I was reading Psalm 73 in which we see the value system that the Bible teaches us.[3]

I have found that whenever I am having trouble understanding something in the Bible, the first thing to do is to ask God about it.  I don’t always get the answer right away, but I do get answers.  The second thing to do is see if other parts of the Bible help explain it. Reading more – the whole chapter, for starters – helps us to have the context.  It’s important to be reading the whole Bible, because there are parts that won’t make sense until we read other parts.  For instance, Hebrews makes much more sense to us if we have read the first five books of the Bible, because Hebrews is full of allusions to those books.

Psalm 73 helps us understand the value system at work in today’s parable.  In Psalm 73, the psalm-writer is working through feelings that are similar to those being expressed in our parable by the workers who had worked the entire day.  The psalmist is upset about unfairness in the world, and wondering why good things happen to bad people.  He says in verse 3,
For I was envious of the arrogant;
    I saw the prosperity of the wicked.
The psalmist goes on in the psalm to describe how he was envious of their success and prosperity, but then comes to a turning point in verses 16-17 when he says:
But when I thought how to understand this,
    it seemed to me a wearisome task,
 until I went into the sanctuary of God.
When he turns to God, he realizes he was focusing on the wrong things.  The highpoint of this realization is expressed in the verses that are most often quoted from this psalm:
Whom have I in heaven but you?
    And there is nothing on earth that I desire other than you.
 My flesh and my heart may fail,
    but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.
He desires nothing more than God. God is his strength and his portion.  This is a statement of the value of God, or rather more specifically, the value of having a relationship with God, which is worth more than worldly possessions or status.
That word portion might seem odd to us, until we read in the book of Numbers about Israel when they have finally arrived in the Promised Land and they are dividing up the land, deciding where each tribe will live in Palestine.  One tribe, the tribe of Levi who are the priests, gets no land, and instead this:
And the Lord said to Aaron, “You shall have no inheritance in their land, neither shall you have any portion among them. I am your portion and your inheritance among the people of Israel.” -Numbers 18:20
Instead of a portion of land, they get a special relationship with God.

In the parable of the workers in the vineyard, if we stick with the idea of workers getting paid for hours of work, we fully understand the resentment of those who worked the full twelve hours.  But if instead we think of this in terms of something else of even greater value, the parable makes much more sense.  If the most valuable thing we can have is a relationship with God, and it is, then it doesn’t matter who worked more hours.  Our portion is not the denarius, the wage we get paid.  Our portion is God’s grace.

If we still think this parable is about money, we need to look back at the conversation that is happening just before Jesus tells this parable.  A rich young ruler comes to Jesus asking what he must do to achieve salvation.  Jesus tells him to sell all he has and give it to the poor, and the man goes away sad.  Jesus further explains to the disciples that it’s harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle.  The disciples are amazed and ask, “Can anyone be saved?”  Jesus reply is one of my favorites of his words.  “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”  You’d think that would end the conversation, but Peter still doesn’t quite get it.  He says, “But Lord, what about us?  We’ve left everything behind to follow you.”  Jesus answers:
“Truly I tell you, at the renewal of all things, when the Son of Man is seated on the throne of his glory, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. 29 And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields, for my name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold, and will inherit eternal life. 30 But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.” (Matthew 19:28-30)
I imagine the disciples probably still had some quizzical looks on their faces, and so Jesus continues with the parable we read today, and ends with a repeat of his earlier statement, “the last will be first, and the first will be last.”

In the kingdom of God it’s not about who is the best or has the most or does the most work, it’s about God’s incredible generosity.  God doesn’t treat us fairly.  He loves us all the same.  He sent Jesus for the salvation of us all, so that we might all have a relationship with him forever.

We get off track with this so easily because we don’t always recognize the value of this relationship.  We take it for granted.  God becomes like that loyal friend we don’t have to pay much attention to because they’re always going to be there anyway.
We begin to have greater appreciation of the value of our relationship with God when we remember that Jesus Christ died on a cross so that we could have it.
We do a lot of different things as a church, but all of them revolve around fostering our relationship with God, encouraging one another to grow in our relationship with God, and helping those who don’t know God to find the joy that we have found in having this relationship. Our acts of service are about our service to God because we have this relationship. We aren’t in competition with other churches because we want people to be wherever they find encouragement in their faith. 

Another way we get off track is we, without realizing it, start to focus on and place too much value on those things that have been a part of helping us to find God.  We might begin to idolize a particular song because we’ve connected with God in it.  We might become obsessed with going to a particular place or event, or a particular speaker or pastor because they were instrumental in connecting us with God.  All of those things are great and important means for connecting with God.  We just have to be careful not to get so caught up in the means that we forget about the end, the reason for those things, connecting with our amazing, wonderful, beautiful God.

The landowner says that the problem is that the 12-hour workers are envious of the one-hour workers.  Haven’t we also been envious of those who get paid more than we do? Or seem to have more than we do?

I don’t know how many of you watch The Simpsons anymore, but there’s an episode from 1997 that could be a modern day version of this parable.[4]  Homer has a co-worker at the nuclear power plant named Frank Grimes that starts to notice that no matter how badly Homer messes things up, he doesn’t get in trouble.  Homer doesn’t get fired when he causes accidents or melt-downs.    Grimes, the co-worker, has had to work hard for everything he has, and lives alone in a room above a bowling alley.  Homer has a nice house and a family. Grimes can’t understand why Homer doesn’t seem to have to work for anything. Grimes eventually drives himself crazy trying to figure it out. 

It’s true that Homer doesn’t deserve any of the breaks he’s had in life.  What makes it work in the world of the Simpsons is that Homer never claims to be anything but the bumbler he is, and so nobody except that co-worker gets upset about it. Homer doesn’t look down on others, and even tries to make friends with that coworker who despises him. 

We, too, have blessings we don’t deserve.  We live in a world that is full of conveniences that others invented.  We are worshipping in a church that was founded before many of us came along, and we are recipients of a faith that others died for us to have.

We cannot be prideful or self-righteous about our faith because none of us has earned the grace we have received from God through our faith in Jesus Christ.  Grace is an amazingly generous gift.  All we have to do is accept it and give thanks for it, and use it to continually reach out to God and enjoy our relationship with him.

What time zone are you in?
It doesn’t matter how early or late we are, or what time zone we’re in.
Whenever we connect with God is the right time. 
Now is the right time to say thanks to our amazing God.



[2] Zondervan Pictorial Dictionary of the Bible, 1963, page 554-5.
[3] I was reading Psalm 73 as part of this devotional in Our Daily Bread http://mobi.rbc.org/odb/2017-09-19.html
[4] “Homer’s Enemy” (The Simpsons, season eight, episode 23; originally aired 5/4/1997). A discussion of this Simpson’s episode here: https://tv.avclub.com/a-classic-simpsons-episode-explores-the-universality-of-1798237956  Watch the episode here: http://www.simpsonsworld.com/video/436466755640

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