Deacon Marty Garwood
September 21, 2014
Exodus 16:2-5; Psalm 105:1-6,37-45; Philippians 1:21-30; Matthew 20:1-16
The kingdom of God is like.....
That is what parables do - they help us to visualize what the kingdom of God is like.
In today's reading from Matthew we are given a glimpse of what the kingdom of God is like. It is a time ... it is a place ....... where there are no winners or losers. Whether you work all day, half a day, or just a few hours, you are paid the same wage.
Well that hardly seems fair does it?
But I suppose that my idea of fairness and perhaps your idea of fairness could be shaped in this instance by whether we worked all day in the sun or whether we were one of the later hires. It is all a matter of perspective. I am certainly more apt to feel it is fair if I am paid the same wage for my two hours of labor as you were for your eight hours of work.
Let me give you another example,
The kingdom of God is like an Episcopal Church. The founding members of the parish have cushions on their pews and they take communion first so they get the freshest piece of communion bread. Those members of the congregation that have only been coming for 15 or 20 years sit in pews but aren't given cushions and they wait for their rightful place at the communion table. The newcomers, those that have been here 10 years or less - they have rickety folding chairs placed along the outside edges of the sanctuary, At communion, they receive whatever crumbs might still be left-over.
Well that hardly seems fair does it?
We didn't like the first parable because it seemed unfair to give the same reward for different service. And yet, we don't like the second example because it seems unfair that the reward is not the same for different length of service.
My goodness, we are hard to please aren't we?
The kingdom of God is like .........
We talk about the kingdom of God as something far off and perhaps unobtainable. But we also talk about the kingdom of God as the here and now. We are indeed living our lives - every day - in the kingdom of God. How can we not be when we believe that all of creation, all of what was and all of what is comes from God. But there is yet a fullness to the kingdom of God that has not been realized. A fullness that we have the potential to work towards - a potential to be God's partners.
With one set of lenses, we can see clearly what we are taught from early childhood on. Life is often not fair. We live that out daily. We are humans. We are not God. Part of the humanity in which we find ourselves is that there is something in us that harbors jealousy, envy, lust, and the list goes on. We want what we want and it isn't fair if we don't get it.
The Hebrew people were as human as we are. God, you led us out of Egypt. You freed us from slavery. Couldn't you at least include decent food in the package? We left our homes and are journeying to a unknown land. We asked for food and you gave us quail at night and manna from heaven in the morning. But we will get tired of quail and manna and will soon be complaining again.
We tend to hear the story of the exodus and get a little smile on our faces and smugly think that the Hebrews were just a bunch of whiners. "It isn't fair." they complained. "It isn't fair." we complain.
With our new corrective lenses, we will see that when the fullness of God's kingdom is reached, we will realize beyond any doubt that it never was an issue of fairness. It is, has always been, and will continue to be an issue of unlimited generosity.
Who we are and whatever we have is a gift from God. God has created us to become more than what we are. God has created in us the opportunity to be transformed. As we grow and mature in our spiritual lives, we too will offer to others the amazing gift of generosity, of love, of acceptance, of affirmation.
We are created to love and to serve God. And we are created to love and serve God in others. When we let go of that idea of fairness, we will realize that we can love lavishly and freely. We don't do it alone. We do it with God's help. Specifically we do it with God's example in our own lives. We also do it with the support of a faith community. I am a better person, a better child of God, because of each of you. We see in one another the vastness of God's gracious ways.
When we come to that point - and we will - when we come to the point when we willing go to work in God's vineyard with happy hearts and willing bodies, and minds set on God - that is when we will have finally accepted our God-given worth and value. We will no longer feel that we must compare ourselves to others. We will know that God's love is always beyond our finite view of fairness.
In his book "God Has a Dream", Archbishop Desmund Tutu described the vision of God. Archbishop Tutu put it this way:
"Dear Child of God, before we can become God's partners, we must know what God wants for us. "I have a dream," God says, "Please help Me to realize it. It is a dream of a world whose ugliness and squalor and poverty, its war and hostility, its greed and harsh competitiveness, its alienation and disharmony are changed into their glorious counterparts, when there will be more laughter, joy and peace, where there will be justice and goodness and compassion and love and caring and sharing. I have a dream that swords will be beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks, that My children will know that they are members of one family, the human family, God's family. My family."
Bishop Tutu continues:
"In God's family there will be no outsiders. All are insiders. Black and white, rich and poor, gay and straight, Jew and Arab, Palestinian and Israeli, Roman Catholic and Protestant, Serb and Albanian, Hutu and Tutsi, Muslim and Christian, Buddhist and Hindu, Pakistani and Indian ----all belong."
The Kingdom of God is like.....
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