Fair go and grace

The text for this sermon is Matthew 20:1-16, and you can find all the texts from Sunday here.

I like this parable. For me, it has always sounded like good news. But I know that’s not the case for everyone.

I remember when I was an intern, listening to my mentor minister, Alf, telling a story about this parable. He’d started his career as a policeman in Liverpool, back in the day when coppers walked the beat. After his ordination, and some parish ministry, he worked for some years as a prison chaplain in Wellington. All of which is to say, he’d seen something of life and he was pretty canny. So when he read this parable to the prison inmates at a chapel service one day, their reaction took him completely by surprise.

You might think that they, of all people, would get what this parable is about. You might think that they’d be relieved to hear that you can come late to this party and still get in, never mind get paid a whole day’s wage for one hour of work. But no. They were outraged. They were disgusted at how this parable is not fair. The latecomers clearly don’t deserve what they are given. The ones who have worked hard do deserve what they are given, but in light of what the others have got, they now clearly deserve more.

In the prison world, it is like saying to the ones who have served 19 years of a 20 year sentence that everyone with a 20 year sentence can get out at the end of the year – the ones who have just begun are let off paying the price, and the ones who have spent that time inside have had the weight, the worth of their loss reduced. It makes sense that there’d be an outcry about that. When the system is supposed to be just and fair, it’s deeply disruptive to bring in grace.

I wonder if you have heard this parable as good news?

I suspect that it depends a lot on who you identify with most in the story…

If you feel you are most like the vineyard owner, the one who goes out and brings people in, the one who looks out for those who might need a bit of extra help…the one who sees the potential even in those who are too old, too tired, too weak, too disabled to work hard….if that’s who you identify with, then this parable seems very validating.

But if you feel you are most like the active, able and hardworking folks who were up early, keen as mustard, fully responsible, doing the right thing and making sure that your family is going to eat at the end of the day…if that’s who you identify with, then this parable seems disruptive.

And what if you identify with the ones who only work an hour? What do they experience when the manager hands out their pay? Do they get their wages and stare at it in disbelief? Surely that’s a mistake. Maybe they consider making a run for it…or trying to slope away before anyone notices that they gave you the wrong coin and it should have been a penny in your hand and not a denarius?

Do they protest, and try to give it back, saying ‘I can’t take this. I didn’t earn it?’

Does that denarius tell them that their one hour’s work is still worthy? Does it tell them that they are not measured by what they can do?

Does it assure them of their dignity as human beings made in the image of the creator?

Or does it feel somehow patronising? Does it feel like it says, ’You can’t really contribute anymore, but we’re still going to pretend that you are worth something’.

When my father retired, he said he felt like he’d been thrown on the scrap heap. His work made him feel useful. It gave him a sense of worth and significance and without it he believed he had no real value.

Do you remember that sermon I preached a few weeks ago about if someone in the church hurts you, go and talk to them? And I said, that’s a good thing to do but only, ONLY when you have taken the time to check your own story first.

Well, I bet that everyone who received the daily wage in the parable had a story about it, although we only hear what the full day labourers think about it. Their story is, “It’s not fair.”

They are saying, ‘my sense of worth is threatened – I have earned this by sweat and industry, and grace cheapens my efforts, makes my work insignificant’.

But it’s just as likely that for the end of the day labourers, their story would say, “I have not earned this, and grace rewards me as if I had a significance that I do not feel.”

For the first, their sense of worth is threatened. For the last, their sense of unworthiness is threatened. It may seem strange to you that anyone might be attached to a sense of their unworthiness, but actually this is a powerful story and it’s woven into a lot of Christian thinking. For centuries, guilt and shame have been used as strong motivators for keeping people in the straight and narrow path of religious observance.

You might be able to spot it more easily among our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters, since they have a history of making confession to the priest and then doing penance by offering set prayers, making special payments, or otherwise offsetting their sinful emissions. But our Reformation forebears leaned in heavily to guilt and shame as levers to improve behaviour and increase devotion.

Guilt and shame keep us coming back to confess and be forgiven again and again in a cycle that somehow doesn’t quite manage to lead us into freedom and inner peace. And the story of God providing manna in the wilderness tells us that it has always been so. Every time God meets us with grace, we have trouble receiving.

That old story, that idea of justice, of deserving or not stops us from accepting grace, and often stops us from offering it or allowing others to receive it.

So, I’d like to invite you to close your eyes. Breathing in and out through your nose, if you can, take in a few deep, belly breaths. And move your hands to rest in your lap, palms up.

Into your open palm, Jesus places a coin…a daily wage….all you need for today….pressed into your hand, tenderly but firmly, with love, with a smile of recognition.

Maybe he says a few words to you….maybe he says something like: this is for you…there will be another tomorrow, I promise. No questions asked.

Will you trust me?

Maybe you say something to him. Maybe you have a question.

What’s it like for you to receive this? Is there something you need to let go of first? What’s the story you tell about it?

Take a moment or two now, to tell God what is happening for you, and to listen for the Spirit’s response.

Prayer as a touchstone for life

This week we had an interactive service at St Peter’s, with a little bit of everything thrown in.

In our music and liturgy we recognised Te Reo Maori week, and with an intentional focus on the theme of creation we listened to a selection of readings reflecting on creation in relationship with human beings from a variety of voices and through the centuries:

Irenaeus of Lyons (120-202), Against Heresies
The initial step for a soul to come to knowledge of God is contemplation of nature.
By choosing to create, fill and sustain all things, our God is a God who is intimately connected to God’s creatures.
 
St. Athanasius (296-373), On the Incarnation
For no part of creation is left void of God: God has filled all things everywhere.
 
St. Augustine (354-430), De Civit Dei, Book XVI
Some people, in order to discover God, read books. But there is a great book: the very appearance of created things. Look above you! Look below you! Read it. God, whom you want to discover, never wrote that book with ink.
Instead, he set before your eyes the things that he had made. Can you ask for a louder voice than that?
 
 
Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179)
We shall awaken from our dullness and rise vigorously toward justice. If we fall in love with creation deeper and deeper, we will respond to its endangerment with passion. Glance at the sun. See the moon and the stars. Gaze at the beauty of earth’s greenings. Now, think. What delight God gives to humankind with all these things. All nature is at the disposal of humankind. We are to work with it. For without it we cannot survive.
 
A Reading attributed to Meister Eckhart (1260-1328)
Apprehend God in all things, for God is in all things.
Every single creature is full of God,
and is a book about God.
Every creature is a word of God.
If I spent enough time with the tiniest creature—
even a caterpillar—
I would never have to prepare a sermon, 
so full of God is every creature.

Julian of Norwich (1342-1423), Revelations of Divine Love
I saw three properties in the world: the first is that God made it. The second is that God loveth it. The third is, that God keepeth it. But what beheld I therein? Verily the Maker, the Keeper, the Lover.
 
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), Walden
Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.
 
Sandra Steingraber (b. 1959), biologist, author, and environmental activist
We are all musicians in a great human orchestra, and it is now time to play the Save the World Symphony. You are not required to play a solo, but you are required to know what instrument you hold, and play it as well as you can. You are required to find your place in the score. What we love we must protect. That is what love means. From the right to know and the duty to inquire flows the obligation to act.
 
Rebecca Solnit (b. 1961), Hope in the Dark
Hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. Hope is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal. Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope. To hope is to give yourself to the future, and that commitment to the future makes the present inhabitable.
 
Hear what the Spirit is saying to the church.
Thanks be to God.

The readings acknowledged how available God is to us, how the door into awareness of God’s presence is wide open to us, how wisdom and insight are revealed through the simplest and smallest of things, how natural the rising of both prayer and action are from moments of contemplation in creation…and so we turned to our own praying, and gathered in groups to brainstorm what we knew of prayer through six people’s stories in the bible – Hannah, Daniel, Jonah, Mary, Jesus and Paul.

From our short conversations, we moved into a crafty response.

Creative responding

The invitation was to take a stone and paint a word or a symbol that would remind or inspire us to pray – a prayer touchstone to return the heart to be anchored in God’s presence, to adjust course or simply as a reminder to Be Here, Now.

We closed with a fresh take on the song Morning has broken, and a beautiful blessing in Te Reo, led by Mike…words may appear here at a later date!

You can watch the recording of the service here.

If someone in the church hurts you

The reading this sermon was based on is Matthew 18: 15-20. You can read all the lectionary texts here.

I don’t know what it was like for you, but in my family when there was hurt there was anger. The anger came so fast you couldn’t see the hurt that had caused it, you just suddenly became the target – or the witness – of angry words. And then there were usually tears and remorse and sorrys were said but there wasn’t really understanding. Truly, no one set out with the intention to hurt others. No one lay in bed at night plotting what to do or say the next morning that would hit just the right spot, push all the buttons at once to set off the parental or sibling fireworks. And so the sorrys were usually genuinely meant, but didn’t mean relationships were restored. For sure we held grudges but we did it quietly, because we also knew that was wrong. And we might have felt that there was still some injustice that had not been corrected, but once the sorrys were said there was no going back to sift through the debris and see…what was it that had lit the fuse?

Why was there a fuse there in the first place?

And, perhaps most confusing…whose problem was it?

This passage is all about community relationships, and while it seems to give some pretty clear guidelines, it raises so many issues for me.

First of all there are issues of boundaries – figuring out the ownership of the problem and my part in it. What if the other person is feeling deeply hurt not because of what I have done or said, but because this circumstance reminds them of an earlier one where they were badly hurt and so this defensive reaction is wildly out of proportion in the situation now? How would I know? If I cause hurt to another, without meaning to, am I responsible for that? Is it all my responsibility, or is it possible that the hurt person is over reacting out of misunderstanding? What if they heard something in what I said that I didn’t actually mean? Their interpretation may not even be close to what I was trying to say.

What if they are hurt because they feel criticised – and think that I am blaming them or judging, but I think I am simply making an observation or offering a suggestion?

Which one of us should modify our behaviour? Which of us is at fault? Or is it both?

When the boundaries are not clear – what is yours and what is mine – and when the boundaries are not respected – what is ok and what is not ok – then this teaching can be easily misunderstood or misapplied.

I do think Jesus is advising us to keep a closer eye on the words that come out of our mouth. Not as constant vigilance to scan and filter for possible offense or as a sin management programme, but as a way of developing our awareness of what and how we are communicating. It is not an accident that people who devote their lives to prayer often take vows of silence. In James’ letter to the church, he says that the tongue is the most dangerous part of human beings and is capable of destroying human relationships.

But this teaching on what to do when someone’s words or actions have hurt me does not mean that anytime I feel you haven’t properly supported me, that you haven’t responded positively enough to me or if I hear that you have criticised me for something, then I should come to visit you and tell you how lonely it is for me as your minister, how undermining, how discouraging and hurtful your words are… so you can hear me, apologise and assure me that you will try harder in future.

Jesus can’t mean that’s what I should do, because that would just bounce the hurt back onto you, wouldn’t it?

You might take it on and feel hurt by my expectation that you should change to suit me, or you might bounce it back to me, in which case I’d have to come back with some elders. That wouldn’t actually create connection and understanding between us, would it?

I think this teaching is mostly about listening, and listening is a special skill. It is much more than not speaking while another person talks.

Listening means leaning in with your attention. It means actively trying to understand what is being communicated from the perspective of the person doing the talking. And a lot of what is being communicated is not in the words that are said.

So the angry words I heard as a child, the angry words that I said, they were usually communicating hurt or fear and often a sense of injustice. Sometimes the anger said, ‘I feel left out’ or it said ‘I feel powerless and afraid’. I didn’t have the words for those feelings and fears – most children don’t unless their parents intentionally teach them, and help them to recognise and name them. Instead, as I got older I learned to modify my behaviour, to keep the angry parts more or less under control and found other ways to express or suppress those emotions.

Many of us – possibly even all of us – moved through childhood and into adulthood without being taught healthy ways to manage our own emotional boundaries and how to let others know, kindly and clearly, where those boundaries are. 

As I grew up, however, I began to learn these things.

It can be hard and takes practice and sometimes – many times! – I am sure I revert to the pattern of my childhood. But I am learning to stop and check first. And I always have to start with me.

I have to ask myself:

• what’s going on that I keep returning to that conversation?
• What’s bugging me about that incident or that person?
• Why do I suddenly have no energy and want to binge watch Netflix?
• Why am I being so hard on myself about this?

The practice of stopping and checking in with yourself is an especially important step to bear in mind when we read this passage as guidelines for a church community. While it might be someone’s delicious fantasy to point out other people’s faults and have them meekly agree and repent, it is always, always important to examine your own story first. Chances are high that, just like in my family, the truth is below the surface and focussing on what’s on top isn’t going to lead to restoration and healing of the relationship.

If you haven’t stopped to ask yourself why you feel hurt, if you haven’t checked to see what you are bringing to the situation and what you have contributed to this interaction and what else you might need to find out – what other stories might be involved – then it’s dangerous to point the finger and tell someone else what they have done wrong.

Listening needs to come first. Listen to yourself. And then once you have that straight, go and listen to the other person. Remember, listening means actively trying to understand what is being communicated from the other person’s perspective.

At the Coracle gathering last month, at one point we were put into pairs and given five minutes each to speak about our context and what was happening in it. It wasn’t a dialogue. One spoke, the other listened. Then we swapped. Then our twos joined up into fours and we had to retell the person’s story we had listened to.

If you are really listening, then you can tell the story not just repeat the words but tell the story as one who understands it from the inside – because that is what you were trying to do when you were listening.

Again this is a special skill and takes practice, but God is gracious and usually provides us with lots of opportunities learn in.

It is this listening which allows us to tune in to the heart of God and when we ask from within God’s story of love, we are simply telling what we have heard. This listening means that when we are gathering with that story at the centre of our attention, we truly are the body of Christ.

What would it mean for our world if we began to listen to these stories, leaning in to understand one another.

What if, in the season of creation, we listen to the story being told by earth, sea and sky, by the creatures and insects, fish plants and birds?

What story are they telling us?

This listening could lead you to make small changes and with your small changes, we change the world.

Closing prayer
God of love, we pray for our life as a community.
We pray for the gift of forgiveness.
We pray for the gift of discernment,
of deep listening for you among each other.
We pray that we may live in your peace,
bonded together in your grace,
for the sake of your love.
Jesus promises to be among us;
grant that we may trust him and seek him,
that we may listen for him and follow.
These things we ask in the name of Jesus
and the power of your Spirit. Amen.