josephholubsermons


 

March 24, 2010
Mid Week Lenten Service
Matthew 20:1-16

God Will Be God!

Perhaps there is nothing we utilize more in daily life than math.  Somebody floated the question on Twitter, “Where have you used mathematics today?” and got hundreds of responses.  We use math for everything:  balancing bank accounts, making change, telling time, measuring ingredients for a recipe, figuring income tax, calculating wages of employees… speaking of which takes us to our parable. 

Let’s face it, this is one crazy vineyard and one crazy landowner.  If you were to run your business the way the landowner in this parable ran his business you wouldn't be in business for long.  First, you would have an employee rebellion on your hands. Second, the labor unions would protest.  Third, such an imbalanced treatment of employees, that is paying those who worked the least as much as those who worked the most, would encourage employees to make a minimum effort. The whole thing is positively outrageous!

If any parable knocks us off our feet, this one does.  Nobody does business the way this landowner did.  But that’s exactly Jesus’ point!  That’s not the way we do business.  That’s not the way the world works.  But when set in the context of a Landowner and his employees, this is what God looks like, an eccentric landowner.  When measured by the world’s sacred value system, God is over the top! 

I really believe we live with an inclination to reduce God; to make God small; to make God as small as our aspirations; to conform God to our values; to shape God with our prejudices and fears; to paint a picture of God who fits our conception of who we think God should be.  The whole endeavor is based on our ability to delude ourselves into thinking that's the way God really is!

I'll never forget something that a member of my congregation in Anchorage used to say about those of us who live in Alaska.  Don had a conviction that the most people who lived up there for any length of time developed what he called a "delusion mechanism" that helped them cope.  His great one-liner was, "Those of us who live up here have deluded ourselves into thinking we really like it here!"  I must confess that for awhile I was one of those deluded people to whom Don was referring.

We do something like that when we bend and shape God into our image rather than allow God to shape us.  In other words, we prefer to play God, and a dominant story-line in the Bible from end to end testifies to human God playing.  Think of a few of the stories:

·         Adam and Eve thought they were smarter than God - they were not.

·         King Saul thought he had god-like impunity - he did not.

·         King David thought he had godlike authority over who lives and who dies - he did not.

·         The Israelites thought they had godlike exclusiveness - they did not.

·         Peter thought he had godlike loyalty - he did not.

·         Saul of Tarsus thought he had a godlike mission to rid the world of  Jesus followers  - he did not.

Let's go beyond the Bible:

·         The Romans thought they had godlike ruling power - they did not.

·         The Europeans thought they alone had a godlike image - they did not.

·         Hitler thought he had a godlike right to take over the world - he did not.

·         Medical science sometimes thinks it can play God - it can not.

·         Religious extremists think the "end justifies the means." - it does not.

Whenever we engage our inclination to play God, we always overstep our bounds, and in the process, God is domesticated to look much more like us than we ever begin to look like God. For all practical purposes God becomes the God of our stratagems and schemes. When we look at the landscape of history we see that some of the worst violence and most dehumanizing and brutal activities have been religiously legitimated. 

In this parable, Jesus is exposing the human inclination to minimize God down to human-sized aspirations.  This parable provides a wry glimpse at the contrast between God's designs and human designs.  The landowner's generosity is bestowed on these last hired laborers because of who the landowner was – what was intrinsic to him.   He does not explain or apologize for the bizarre accounting system that lavishes the same wage on everyone hired, regardless of the amount of time logged on the job. The only response the landowner gives to the disgruntled workers is, "Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?"

The utter and unmitigated sovereignty of God is something that we humans have never been wholly comfortable with.  Most of us would prefer a more democratic system, a system where we would get a vote or at least more say in the matter of how God should act and be.  Of course, it would be a way to keep God in check when God is out of control, especially when God goes crazy with grace, lifting up the last, lowest and least, like the landowner does in this parable.

I think the underlying reason the workers (in the parable) who had logged the most hours were so upset was that maybe they realized that if they hung around this goofy and lavish landowner for too long, they just might, after a while, start to resemble him and even become as goofy as he was. So they tried to nip it in the bud, but the landowner would have no part of it. He simply said (in so many words), "If you can't get with the program; if you can't begin to base your life on the economics of the kingdom of God, then it would be better if you just leave."

This parable is the closing story of a section in Matthew’s gospel just before Jesus rode into Jerusalem for the last time.   It’s a section of Matthew’s gospel devoted to discipleship, that is what it means and looks like to follow Jesus.  In the two chapters just before this we see Jesus affirm those that culture and religion had pushed to the margins, especially children and the poor.  He challenged Peter to forgive an offender 70 X 7 times; and he told another story about a king who forgave the debt of a servant who owed him big time. 

The bottom line on this parable is that God’s love is always BIGGER than ours; God’s compassion goes to people and places we avoid; God’s forgiveness far exceeds our willingness to forgive others or ourselves; God’s desire for justice for the oppressed and powerless never ceases.

So what's it going to be for you? Are you going to risk it? Are you willing to risk continued employment in the God's vineyard?   If you so, one of two things will happen, I guarantee it.

The more you live and work with this crazy Landowner, little by little, the delusions which have insulated you from God’s authentic character will gradually be stripped away and the result might be:

·         On the one hand, you might become so uncomfortable that you will simply leave the vineyard and go back to your delusions – to a God created in your own image.

·         Or, on the other hand, you might actually begin, in little ways, to resemble this crazy landowner, who refuses to live by sound methods of accounting and commensurate rewards and open your life to be shaped around His glorious, astounding, inconceivable grace.