Scripture: Matthew 20:1-16; Matthew 20:17-28; Psalm 22:1; Psalm 69:1 Series: 2020
Closing sermon in the ‘The Way’ discipleship series. Using the parable of the laborers in the vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16), Wilson contrasts the world’s scarcity mindset, which sees life as a competitive race, with the radical abundance and unmerited generosity of God’s grace. Through the extended metaphor of his Cleveland marathon and running pace-setters, he reframes the life of faith as running faithfully together rather than finishing first. He addresses the fear that grace breeds license (moral hazard / antinomianism), arguing God transforms our will toward love rather than coercing robots. Drawing on the rest of Matthew 20 (the sons of Zebedee and Jesus’s call to servanthood), he urges humble service, comforts the struggling and doubting with the assurance that Christ is already present even in lament (Psalms 22 and 69), and invites a free step toward Jesus.
Illustrations: cleveland-marathon, beating-brother-in-law, running-pace-setters, moral-hazard-2008, forgiven-teenager-thought-experiment
The Race
Matthew 20:1-16
“For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. After agreeing with the laborers for the usual daily wage, he sent them into his vineyard. When he went out about nine o’clock, he saw others standing idle in the marketplace; and he said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’ So they went. When he went out again about noon and about three o’clock, he did the same. And about five o’clock he went out and found others standing around; and he said to them, ‘Why are you standing here idle all day?’ They said to him, ‘Because no one has hired us.’ He said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard.’ When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, ‘Call the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first.’ When those hired about five o’clock came, each of them received the usual daily wage. Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each of them also received the usual daily wage. And when they received it, they grumbled against the landowner, saying, ‘These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.’ But he replied to one of them, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?’ So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”
When I was in my twenties, I ran marathons. Two, for sure, but the great thing about running more than one is that it can be plural and I can say, “Oh, yeah, I’ve run marathons,” and people may think that it is anywhere between two and fifty, when it was exactly two. The first one I did okay, the second one, I finished (I don’t like talking about the second one). But the first one was fun. It was in Cleveland, Ohio. I had never been to Cleveland before. My sister’s family lived in Indianapolis and I was going to run it with my brother-in-law and we were trying to fins a location roughly between Durham, NC, where I was in graduate school, and Indianapolis, and so we ended up in Cleveland. The nice thing about the Cleveland Marathon is that a lot of it is downhill. And so for people like me who trained for it but are not super athletically gifted, it was a really good first marathon. The other factor is that most of the people who ran it were running a half marathon. We get there the night before. We have a big carb load and are ready at the line and then we are off. It is fun. It is like a party. I didn’t realize that running a marathon, if you are not super serious, can be a fun socially. Everybody is doing the same thing. Everyone has a pace that they are aiming for and if you trained well, you can have a good conversation while running your pace. The point of the pace is to get you to the finish line. It is not trying to run the fastest that you can imagine. My pace for that race was about half the world record time as it currently existence. I was cruising in my mind and it was fun. People had worked hard to get to this moment. And people on the side were cheering us on and it is a really powerful thing to be cheered on. And so, what happened at that race is that a little before the half way point all the half-marathon folks veered off to the finish line and the marathoners kept going. So the race thinned dramatically and it went from a party to a wasteland. I was not a super serious runner. I am not that athletically gifted. I am stubborn and that is why I was able to finish the marathons. I am stubborn in my training in that I had a training system that I found and that I wanted to follow and I did. But I am not super gifted in that way. The really strong athletes in long distance running often run with pace-setters. A pace setter runs a period of the race (1 mile, 2 miles, etc.) with a person because it is a lot easier to run with someone than to just be in your head. And if you are trying to break a record or finish really strong, you have a number of pace-setters for different segments of the race or of training all working together to help you beat your time. That race in Cleveland, I was trying to beat 4 hours. I did not beat 4 hours. But mostly, I was trying to beat my brother-in-law, which I succeeded in doing. That was enjoyable. That was my great athletic feat, even though he is about 15 year older than me, but he is actually athletic so I felt good about it. Now when we talk about how this life is a race and getting ready for the race, sometimes it is so easy to sink into seeing the life of faith, the journey of life itself, as a competition between the people around us. This deep scarcity mindset that there is a finite set of resources and that we have to compete for that. There is a finite number of people who are going to be in the top of the race so we have to push and pull and strive and do whatever it takes to be in that place. And this is not what the kingdom of heaven looks like. Instead of a scarcity mindset, what God offers is a life of abundunce, but that can be shocking in a lot of ways. My brothers and sisters, we are finishing up our series on the Way, and what discipleship can look like. How the first disciples and Christians were not called Christians. They were called followers of the way. And we started this series talking about how we need to do this life of faith together. How where two or three are gathered, God is in the midst of them. Last week we talked about how the goal of discipleship is not to look like a Christian in any way society tells us but to look like Jesus, to strive to be like Jesus in all the we can, and that is what following Jesus looks like. Today, we are going to look at the race of life itself, the race of discipleship itself. The reading for today comes from Matthew 20:1-16:
“For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. After agreeing with the laborers for the usual daily wage, he sent them into his vineyard. When he went out about nine o’clock, he saw others standing idle in the marketplace; and he said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’ So they went. When he went out again about noon and about three o’clock, he did the same. And about five o’clock he went out and found others standing around; and he said to them, ‘Why are you standing here idle all day?’ They said to him, ‘Because no one has hired us.’ He said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard.’ When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, ‘Call the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first.’ When those hired about five o’clock came, each of them received the usual daily wage. Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each of them also received the usual daily wage. And when they received it, they grumbled against the landowner, saying, ‘These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.’ But he replied to one of them, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?’ So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”
“So are you envious because I am generous?” These are some of the last words in the parable. And how the generosity of God can sometimes feel unfair from certain mindset. Generosity seems unfair from a scarcity mindset. From a mindset of limited resources and limited realities. There are limited things we can do. There are limited things that God can do. Generosity can seem unfair. Especially when we spend all of our life and all of our time comparing ourselves to others. When we see the race that life so often is as this competition between you and the people around you. Even a friendly competition between you and your brother-in-law pulls us away from the generosity of God that looks radically different. And we have to understand that grace offers a generosity that this world does not understand. A generosity that is not merited. Grace looks down on the center, looks down on those who don’t do what they say they are going to do, those who abuse what they have been given and the people around them, and grace offers an opportunity for transformation, or even transfiguration, as being something completely different, the conversion of the imagination. The fact that you are loved, that you are forgiven is a radical generosity that is hard to fit into the categories of this world. The rest of chapter 20 in Matthew continues this notion: the last will be first and the first will be last, which is, again, so often antithetical to how we conceive of the world. SO often it is the case that we think that the first will be first. The first deserve it. They are there because they have earned it. They deserve, so we don’t want to take anything away from them. And if we give what is deserving to them to someone else, that is not really fair to anyone. There is this concept in economics called moral hazard. There was a big of it around the 2008 financial crisis. The fear of moral hazard is that if the government steps in to support large banks it would teach the banks to be riskier in their investments and to self-regulate their risk because they know that no matter what happens, the government will step in and support them. In the history of the church, something similar to this has often been brought up, and it is called antinomianism. Antinomianism is the idea that if there is no law to follow, people will do whatever they want. Theoretically, you can see that happening. If you imagine a 15 or 16 year old child and you tell them that no matter what they do, you will forgive them, so they may do whatever they want. They may not, though, and I am not recommending this as a parenting strategy. But you can imagine it as a thought experiment. if you tell people that they will be forgiven no matter they do, who knows what they are going to do? We can’t control their behavior. Yet, in a lot of ways, what the message of Jesus offers to us is that God is not trying to turn us into robots. God is not trying to control our behavior as if we have no will, as if we have no agency of our own. Instead, what God offers us is to transform our will, transform our agency. So it is not that we are so afraid of the punishment but that we desire the God who is love. That we are not striving to compete with the people around us, but we are striving for that transformation of love that Jesus offers to us, that transformation that many of us have seen with other people in our life. The life, in some ways, can be like a race, in that we have pace setters with us. We have people who walk or run with us. This is what is so essential about being a part of a church is that we have people who walk the walk with us, who hold us up, who say to us, “didn’t you say you wanted to be running an 8:45 mile, let’s do it together.” As well, we have others whom we are pacesetters for. The story of faith does not end with us. We are not the ultimate expression of God’s love. We are part of the continuing sharing of God’s story with this world, of God’s love story to all of creation, that all of creation is going to be redeemed. You, I can be a pace setter for another in faith. There are people in your life who look up to you, who see you as an example. Your children see you as an example, your friends, your colleagues see you as an example. You can be an example. And sometimes that may feel like a burden. It is like, “Oh my gosh, people are watching me! What am I going to do?” But instead, what Christ offers us is a radical freedom because in following Jesus, in pacing others and pacing ourselves we are not striving to be the first finishers of the race. We are striving to be faithful to the Lord of all creation who is already won the victory. And yet even the disciples themselves were sometimes caught in this trap of striving to be first. Matthew 20 continues:
While Jesus was going up to Jerusalem, he took the twelve disciples aside by themselves, and said to them on the way, “See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and scribes, and they will condemn him to death; then they will hand him over to the Gentiles to be mocked and flogged and crucified; and on the third day he will be raised.”
So Jesus lays out the whole story. All of it is there. There will be some bad stuff that happens in Jerusalem and then he will be raised up. Okay, the very next verse.
Then the mother of the sons of Zebedee came to him with her sons, and kneeling before him, she asked a favor of him.
So Jesus explains the passion right there for everybody. He is like, “Okay guys, stuff is about to get really really real real. People are going spit on me. I am going to be punished. I am going to be killed. But then I will be raised again, don’t worry. I have the power over death. God will defeat death. This is the context in which the mother of James and John come to him.
And he said to her, “What do you want?” She said to him, “Declare that these two sons of mine will sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your kingdom.” But Jesus answered, “You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I am about to drink?”
She missed the point. They missed the point. I probably think that they were asking their mom, “Mom, can you go ask Jesus the thing?” And egging her on about it, even though Jesus says what is going to happen. James and John then answer:
They said to him, “We are able.” He said to them, “You will indeed drink my cup, but to sit at my right hand and at my left, this is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared by my Father.”
When the others hear about this, they are angry at the two. They think, “Hey, wait a minute, why are you all trying to sit at Jesus’s side?” Again, Jesus has set this all out for them clearly but the disciples are still striving to be the teachers pet. Still striving and they are missing out on the heart of what Christ is offering.
Jesus continues:
“You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not be so among you;
The kingdom is not like that. The kingdom of heaven is not about lording your authority over others.
but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave; just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”
The abundance and generosity of Christ offered in discipleship, in following the way, is not found in us individually earning the victory or getting the ribbon at the end of the race. The way it often looks, in an inverted way, like humbling ourselves to others, like serving others, like serving the people we like, serving the people we don’t like, offering ourselves in humility to people that we would rather not be around. Because, again, if we have this image of the race, if we have this image of the life of faith, we have our race, we have the pace-setters around us, but that is not all. The life of faith is not this materialist thing but the reality that the Holy Spirit is infused in all that we do and that Christ is present there and that in order to be a servant to all, the Holy Spirit has already been present with us. That you can do all things through Christ our Lord because God is with you. So you don’t need to be afraid of serving others. You don’t need to be afraid of how it is going to look. You don’t need to be afraid of finishing last. And sometimes, finishing last can be a gift to others because then they don’t have to finish last. And you can handle finishing last because Christ is in you. You don’t need to finish first, because Christ is in you. You don’t need to beat your brother-in-law in a race because Christ is in you. And all it takes is seeking. Christ offers us this comfort that even in those seasons of doubt and discouragement, even in those seasons of trauma and grief, that by seeking Christ, we have already found him. The desire to seek Jesus in this world can only emerge from the already present nature of Christ in our lives. So if you are struggling, my brothers and sisters, if you are struggling in this season, if you have struggled in your life. If there have been moments of despair, moments of screaming out, “why, God, why?” You are not alone. Christ is already with you in that screaming out. That screaming out, like in Psalm 22, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” That screaming out, like in Psalm 69, “Save me, O Lord, for the waters have come up to my neck. I am drowning in my tears.” That Christ is already present in us. And the same brokenness around us that makes us despair and hurt is the brokenness that Christ came to earth to save, so that all of creation will be redeemed. The brokenness that is overcome by resurrection, by following the way. We don’t need to strive to be first. Following the way of Jesus is striving to be faithful together. To do the things of God together. To have mercy for each other together, to have an idea of the generosity of grace. To not try and horde our grace, to not try and horde what God has given us, but to share it with others in our lives. To share it with the people we know, to share it with the people we don’t know, that is what discipleship comes down to along the way together. God has offered this path to you. Whether or not you became a Christian as a child or late in life or whether you don’t even know you believe at this point, you are welcome, you are loved, you are forgiven. The way is offered to you. It takes you taking a step, though. You have to take that step towards Jesus. God does not create robots. We are not robots with all of our decisions already preprogramed in us. We are created free in the image of God and out of freedom God desires a response from us. So in this season, I pray that you are able to take a step in that direction, even if you are struggling, even if you are doubting, by the very articulation of that doubt your are taking a step towards God. By reaching out to God in an unfamiliar way, you are acknowledging that God is already present with you, that you are loved and that you are not alone.
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.