Texts: Exodus 16:2-15; Matthew 20:1-16
When I was reading through our passages this morning, one
word kept coming to me. Over and over. The word Grace. Grace.
Imagine this. Your whole life has been spent in slavery to
the Egyptian Pharaoh, building his great cities, the land on which you live
taken from you, your children taken and killed. Now, you have been freed by the
God of Israel and you flee to the desert. You are a group of people without
resources and without friends. You have run out of food, out of water—you are
desperate. And you are angry too—how are we going to eat, God? How are we going
to make it?
And what does God say? Does God say; “Well, you need to earn your bread.”
“You silly people, why didn’t you go a different way—the southern desert,
really?” “You are living the consequences of your choices.”
Nope. God just sends food. Lots of food. God sends quail. And
bread falls from heaven to feed your children.
Grace.
Imagine again. In Jesus’ story, in our gospel reading, you
are standing at the corner of the marketplace, that streetcorner where workers
gather, hoping to get picked up by someone who needs a job done. You all know
where that street corner is, right? You don’t have a steady job, you are
squatting in a house near the village with your family. And you are waiting all
day—hoping, hoping to get something so you can go home with food for your kids
tonight. You are probably are not the strongest of the bunch—you are not as
young as you used to be and your health is not what it used to be. Wages are
not good anyway—a denarius was the average daily wage for a soldier or a worker
and it put you right at subsistence level—just enough to feed a family for a
day. As the day goes on, you know you won’t make enough even for that today. So
you wait and you wait and you get picked up, finally, toward the end of the
day, by the guy who owns the huge vineyard and needs his grapes picked. You
figure—hey, an hour or two of work is better than nothing.
And what does Jesus say about this guy? That he is lazy and
should go find a better job? “Why didn’t you try harder to get picked up
earlier?” “Something is better than nothing?”
Nope. The landlord in Jesus’ story shows a tiny bit of
mercy. He pays you for a whole day’s work, even though you’ve only worked a few
hours. Your fellow workers are a little tiffed, and you can’t really blame
them, but you, you get to feed your family tonight.
And that word comes to mind again: grace.
Its interesting, isn’t it? Sometimes we think of the Bible
as a book about heaven, about spiritual things. About our souls. Sometimes
grace is explained as some kind of forgiveness of personal sin
so we can get to heaven.
But think again about our stories. Our two stories. They are
about real life. About bodies. About hunger. About survival. About feeding your
family. About trying to find work. About worrying about money. The Bible, and
Jesus, is obsessed with talking about real things. Real life.
And so grace too is about real life.
We sometimes say grace is getting what you don’t deserve. What you haven’t
earned.
Actually, grace never asks what you deserve. What you’ve
earned. If you are good enough. If you are deserving enough.
Grace simply gives. Grace is God’s belief that, simply
because you are created in God’s image, simply because you are human, you
deserve love, and care, and life, and joy.
That simply because we live, because God loves us, because
we are created in God’s image—we deserve to live a full and abundant life.
Simply because God loved them, the children of Israel
deserved abundant food.Simply because the worker standing on that corner desperately trying to get work, simply because he was a child of God, he deserved to go home with enough money to feed his family.
That, my brothers and sisters, is grace too. Grace in real
life. Grace in the here and now.
We live in a world where everything we need to live has
strings attached, right? Food, clothing, shelter—we live a world that asks
questions like this:
Do you deserve it?
Have you worked hard enough?
Are you really, I mean really, a good enough person?
Have you ever asked yourself that? Have you ever had this
strange feeling that you don’t deserve to be happy or to have enough? Have you
ever felt not good enough?
This is how the world around us teaches us to think. Its how
the Egyptians thought—the Pharaoh didn’t believe his slaves deserved good
lives, deserved to have their children safe, deserved to be free.
Many landowners in Jesus’ time didn’t believe that the
people of Galilee deserved enough to eat or deserved their own land or deserved
to live as well as they did.
They were just slaves.
They were just expendable workers.
And then God comes in. With grace.
Grace that always took the side of the people that society
said did not deserve it. Grace that saved escaped slaves from hunger and grace
that fed a temp worker’s children.
Grace given freely and without strings attached.
So, I want you to
listen very, very carefully.
If you feel like you don’t deserve goodness in your life. If
you can’t find a job in this job forsaken place, if you are struggling to pay
the bills, if you can’t make a living wage, if you are lonely and alone, if you
are told or believe you are unworthy—grace is for you. God is for you. Can I
get an Amen?
What does grace look like for this parish, for Aberdeen in
2014? Where do you see grace? Where do you long to see grace? Where do you long
for grace in your own life?
I have to share something with you, brothers and sisters. As
I do outreach, as I walk the streets of Aberdeen, there is an awful lot of
suffering in this town. I want you to know, people are literally dying out
there, all the time. Living in shacks, camping out, people are struggling to
just survive, longing simply for a place to belong. Every day. Its enough to
break one’s heart—to walk through this town. It sometimes is enough to rip my
heart out. We need grace in this town. Grace in real life.
After this service, some of you will join me with others of
our brothers and sisters here in Aberdeen for Bible study. We will light
candles and pray together for our struggling town. We will talk about what
Jesus’ life has to do with us, here, today. And then we will share a meal together—we
will cook together, we will talk together as neighbors. When I witness this,
when I witness how the community feeds each other, how the community prays
together, I catch a glimpse of grace. Real bodies. Real food. We talk about
struggle and hopelessness here in Aberdeen a lot, right? Well, Sunday
afternoons, I do catch a glimpse of hope and of grace. We catch a vision of
what a world might look like where all were fed, where all were honored, where
grace is a way of life.
Where do you see grace, my brothers and sisters? Where do
you see grace in real life?
Let us pray.
