The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
September 21, 2008

Proper 20-A
Jonah 3:10--4:11
Philippians 1:21-27
Matthew 20:1-16

The kingdom of heaven is like an employer who gives all his workers the same pay, a good day’s wage, whether a worker works all day or only an hour.

Now I want you to know that I didn’t say that. Jesus said it. And I want to be clear about who said it, because it’s a very unsettling notion. So I want to make it entirely clear that it was Jesus who said that the kingdom of heaven is like an employer who gives everyone the same pay, a good day’s wage, whether he works all day long or only a few minutes at the end of the day. That’s what God’s kingdom is like, said Jesus. Heaven is being in the presence of the gracious goodness of God who loves all alike and is gracious to all alike.

Later, just before we come forward to receive the grace God gives us at Holy Communion, we are going to sing about how amazing grace is. And then, after we’ve received the grace God has for us in the Sacrament today, we’re going to sing one of the great hymns of Charles Wesley: ”O for a thousand tongues to sing my dear Redeemer’s praise, the glories of my God and King, the triumphs of his grace!” And I hope, by the time we get to these hymns, that we can sing them heartily and not gag on them, because, you know, Charles’ brother John once got kicked out of a church for preaching the words Charles wrote, the words we’re going to sing: “O for a thousand tongues to sing the triumphs of God's grace.” And after he got kicked out, John Wesley wrote a friend and said, ”There is no more repugnant Christian doctrine than the affirmation that we are saved by the grace of God through faith.”

He's right, isn’t he? Because we’d really like to believe – wouldn’t we? – that we are saved by how righteous or good we are, or at least by how hard we try. And if I work twelve long hours in the hot sun and get a day’s pay, then the guy who puts in only an hour at the cool end of the day should get only one-twelfth of what I get, shouldn't he? It’s repugnant to think that the boss would give him the same as he gives me. It’s repugnant to believe that God is like that. So I can see that anyone who would preach that grace opens heaven’s door to all sinners just might get ejected from church, if not taken up a hill and crucified, and that’s why I want you to know that it’s Jesus who said it, not me.

The kingdom of heaven, Jesus says, is like an employer who goes down to the unemployment office early in the morning, about six o’clock, and hires some men. These guys are delighted. They haven’t had a full day’s work in months. The employer agrees to give them a fair wage for the work to be done – let’s say, these days, $240.00 for the day’s work, 6:00 a.m. until 6:00 p.m. So these guys are whistlin’ a happy tune as they leave the employment line and head off to the job site.

Later that morning, about nine o’clock, the boss decides he needs more workers, so he goes back and offers work to others, and he tells them that he’ll give them a fair wage as well. Then he picks up more workers at noon, and at three o’clock he hires some more guys still hanging around the employment office.

Then, about five o’clock that afternoon, he decides he could use still a few more workers, and since he has already hired all those at the employment office, he goes up to Acacia Park and strolls over to the bandstand where some guys are sitting around shooting the breeze and smoking their joints, and he asks, “Why aren’t you fellas working today?” And they snarl and ask, “Why should we?” And the employer says, “Well, I’ll give you a fair wage if you want to work for me for the rest of the day.” So they say, “What the heck! It can’t be too tough, working for just an hour, and it’s amounts to a couple more six packs for the night.” So they toss their skate boards in the back of an old Chevy and their joints in the gutter, and they hop in the man’s truck, and off they go.”

At six o’clock, when the work day is over, the boss starts handing out the pay envelopes, starting with the guys from Acacia Park and ending with those he had hired at six o’clock that morning. And when they open them, they all find that every blessed pay envelope contains twelve crisp $20 bills – $240.

Heaven is like that, says Jesus. And that bothers me, I say, because I can add and subtract and multiply and divide, and it somehow smells fishy to me. Heaven is like an employer who gives everyone the same, regardless of what everyone does? Heaven is like that?

But the more fishiness I smell, the more I begin to wonder if the stink isn’t coming from me. I begin to wonder if I’m not inclined to look at something that’s good, and call it evil. I begin to wonder if I don’t have a talent for messing up heaven when I see it, and that maybe that’s part of what Jesus’ story is all about, because, when those who had worked all day started grumbling about the fact that those who signed on at five o’clock received the same pay as they did – “You’ve given them the same as you gave us!” – I can, if I am honest, hear myself. “You’ve treated them the same as us, when we worked all day long in the boiling sun, while they worked only a few minutes. That’s not fair!”

And the boss says, “Look, buster...!”

That’s the effect of the Greek word for “friend” here. Hetaire, I’m told, means friend, but it’s a distinctly unfriendly word for friend. It’s “friend” with a tone of voice. It’s “friend” as in “Look, pal!” or as in “Look, buster! Take your pay and do what you want to with it. I’m not being unjust with you. You needed a fair day’s pay and I agreed to give you one. And this morning you were tickled to have it. Don’t I have the right to do what I want with what is mine? Don’t I have the right to give everyone the same if I want to? Is your eye evil because I am good?”

And that is literally what the landowner says in the Greek: “Is your eye evil because I am good?” In all the versions I’ve consulted since the King James Version, this verse is translated as “Are you right to be envious (or jealous) because I am generous?” But the Greek is, literally, “Is your eye evil because I am good?”

Or, in other words, do you look at what is good – God’s grace, God’s generosity – and see evil? Do you see hell where heaven is? Does your eye sometimes look at heaven and turn it into hell?

We sure can spoil grace, can’t we? I see the good fortune of someone else, and what I see leads my brain to start adding and subtracting and multiplying and dividing and keeping the books on myself and the other person, and that leads me to grumble about the grace that God has blessed me with.

That’s what Jonah was doing. Jonah didn’t want to go to the wicked city of Ninevah over there in present-day Iraq in the first place, because Jonah knew what God was like. He knew that God is more than just. He knew, as the psalmist knew, that God is “gracious and full of compassion, slow to anger and of great kindness,” and therefore Jonah just had a hunch that God might be gracious to those evil Ninevites if he, Jonah, were to tell them the Good News of God and the Ninevites were to hear it, even though God and everyone else knows that they are pagans and have been sinners all their lives.

Now we all know that because Jonah had his suspicions about what God might do in Ninevah, Jonah took a little detour to the west before God got his attention and got him to go east to Ninevah. But when Jonah finally did what God told him to do, and when God was, if fact, gracious to the Ninevites and did spare them, Jonah sulked. “I might as well be dead,” he said. “If you’re going to save those foreign devils,” he told God, “well, that just leaves me speechless!” But it didn’t really leave Jonah speechless, of course, because he still had some stuff to get off his chest, and he goes ahead and reminds God that Israel has been sweating for hundreds of years trying to keep God’s law and do what is right, and yet at the drop of a hat God goes ahead and spares the wicked Ninevites, who don’t know their right hand from their left and who don’t even know who God is! “It’s not fair!” he grumbles.

And God said to Jonah, “Look, buster! Don’t I have a right to be who I am and to do what I want with what is mine? Is your eye evil, Jonah, because I am good? Do you look at the grace I extend to others and call it evil? I’ve been fair and just with Israel. I’ve been more than fair with that bunch of complainers who ate my manna all the way to Canaan even though they never as much as turned a hand to produce it, anymore than you, Jonah, did anything to produce the vine I gave you for shade. I’ve been more than fair with that bunch of grumblers, who can’t even remember who it was who brought them out of slavery in Egypt in the first place and who seldom remember even to thank me for it. So if I want to be gracious with Ninevah, isn’t that my business? Take your pay and go. Either go on back into Ninevah, Jonah, and join the party, or go to hell. Take your pick. The choice is yours.”

Is your eye evil because God is good? Do you sometimes look good in the eye and see evil? Do you look God in the eye and see hell where heaven is? Does your eye sometimes see heaven and turn it into hell?

Envy is one of the seven deadly sins. It can certainly kill grace, can’t it? And grace killed, or grace spoiled, is hell.

I want to be clear. There is nothing wrong with justice and fairness. Fairness is good. Justice is a virtue, one of the cardinal virtues. Being just with others is something God expects of us. We are called always to be just with each other, to give each other what is due and to pay a fair wage. We are called always to do at least what is just.

But that’s just where an evil eye can come in and spoil things, because we can look at justice and see either the maximum that’s expected of us, or we can look at justice and see an opportunity to do more, an opportunity to move beyond justice to mercy and grace. And what we see will be either heaven or hell, depending upon what we want to see and do.

Justice is good. And because God is good, God is always just. But that’s only part of the truth about God, because, for God, justice is only the beginning of who God is. God doesn’t end things with justice. God is “gracious and full of compassion, slow to anger and of great kindness.” God is more than just. God is generous. God begins with justice, and then adds to it. Generosity is justice, plus. Generosity is fairness, plus. So generosity – mercy, grace – doesn’t deny justice. Generosity – mercy, grace – completes justice and enhances it, and points us to heaven. But often our eye wants to see something else. When we insist that justice is the maximum that one ought to receive, rather than the minimum, then we are capable of turning heaven into hell!

It’s like the little boy who wanted a bicycle for Christmas. And on Christmas morning he ran downstairs, and there was his new bicycle under the tree! He was thrilled! Until he took it outside to ride it. And then, a few minutes later, he burst into the house in tears. And his mother asked, ”What’s the matter, Peter? Is something wrong with your new bike?” “Yes,” he said. “George got a bike, too, and his has ten gears.”

Or like the two little girls whose mother bought them new dresses, a blue one and a red one. And she brought the dresses home and asked the younger girl to choose which one she wanted. And the little girl said, “How can I decide? I don’t know yet. I can’t decide until she decides. I don’t want either one. I want hers.”

About today’s parable, Robert Capon says that heaven is Miller Time. Most of you are old enough to remember Miller Time. Heaven is all the hardworking guys taking their pay checks down to Jack Quinn’s or Old Chicago and enjoying their good fortune with one another and tipping one up for the boss. That’s heaven.

Or, to take a line from another of Jesus’ stories, heaven is like a father who kills the fatted calf and throws the biggest party you ever saw for a son who tells his father to drop dead and to give him his share of the family inheritance, and then goes off and throws away the family’s savings on promiscuous living and finds himself having to eat pig slop to stay alive. Nonetheless, when he comes home, his father throws the biggest party for him you ever saw and invites everyone – including the boy’s older brother who has stayed home and worked hard all his life – to come join the party, because his son who was lost has been found. And all those who do come to the party give the boy a a big hug, and they all raise a toast to dad as well. That’s heaven!

And hell? Well, there is hell in the story as well – if, like the older dutiful brother you insist that you wouldn’t go to any party for that no-good son of your father even if your life depended upon it, which it does. “But would your eye be evil because I am good?” the father asks his older son. “Do you really want to stay out here in the barn and sulk?” he adds.

We need to remember that no one ever sings about hell. People sing only about heaven. That’s what heaven is like: ”O for a thousand tongues to sing my dear Redeemer’s praise, the glories of my God and King, the triumphs of his grace.”

We are saved by the grace of God, not by anything we do to earn it, or by anything we ever can do. That’s the most repugnant of Christian doctrines, said John Wesley, who should know.

And it’s true. Because if the world could have been saved by bookkeeping; if the world, and you and I, could have been saved by God’s keeping books on who does a full day’s work and who doesn’t; if the world, and you and I, could have been saved by God’s giving us only what we deserve; if the world, and you and I, could have been saved that way, then we would have been saved by Moses and the law, not by Jesus on a cross.

“Prayer,” Marilynne Robinson reminds us, ”is a discipline in truthfulness, in honesty.” And when you look at your own life honestly, with an eye toward truth, what does your eye see? And what does your ear hear when you listen to Jesus’ story with an ear for truth? Are you sure you are one of those who has worked the full day for a full day’s pay? Are you sure that you want your pay envelope to contain exactly what justice directs is your due, and no more? If you’re sure of that, then – to draw from still another of Jesus’ stories – then I guess, when all is said and done, you’d be entitled to throw a stone or two at others, and also to throw a stone or two at God, who is “gracious and full of compassion, slow to anger and of great kindness,” and who, at the end of the day, is generous with all. If you’d want to. But would you want to?

Are you sure? Are you sure there aren’t a few dollars of gratuity in your own pay envelope as well? Are you sure that your own pay envelope doesn’t include a few bucks for minutes stolen leaning on the water cooler, or for for what, by right, is due back to the boss for company tools misused or company resources wasted? Is it possible that all of us have worked less than a full day, and maybe even, from God’s point of view, only the last hour, and then only grudgingly? When you consider your own life and the great saints of the world, when you consider Jesus, are you sure that justice is what you really want to insist on? And we as a people, are we sure? Are we sure, at the end of the day, that justice is what we want to insist on? Are we sure we want to see evil where God is good?

Friends, let’s give thanks for the grace God gives us! And then, maybe, just maybe, we, too, can begin in our own lives to move beyond justice toward mercy and grace, and to sing with thanksgiving and gratitude about how amazing grace is, which is heaven itself!

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.