Better than Fair

A sermon on Matthew 20:1-16

In my previous call, you may know, I served as the associate pastor of a church in Manhattan, and one of the things I did in that position was overseeing the “sandwich line” ministry. Each Tuesday and Thursday, we would wheel a big cart full of food out onto the sidewalk, and we would give out fifty bag lunches to hungry people from the neighborhood. We distributed the lunches at 4pm (which doesn’t seem like quite the right time for a bag lunch, but many of our guests were eating these sandwiches for supper, or otherwise saving them for later, and many attended various kinds of day programs or got their lunch at a soup kitchen or senior center, so late afternoon was a convenient time both for our guests and for the church office). We noticed over time that people were lining up earlier and earlier, standing outside the church starting at 3:30, then three o’clock. Many of the people in line had various kinds of physical challenges, and many were elderly, and we grew increasingly uncomfortable with the fact that they were standing outside in the heat, or the cold, or the rain. And there’s the humiliation of it – the visibility of standing for an hour in a bread line on the sidewalk as people would stream past and look up and down the line, trying to figure out what all these people are lining up for. So we made a decision that we would brew a pot of coffee every Tuesday and Thursday, and put out water pitchers, and set up chairs, and let folks come wait inside for their meals. We decided, based on staff and building schedules, that we could open the doors for the sandwich line at three thirty each time.

As soon as we start letting sandwich line guests into the building at three thirty, they started lining up even earlier – standing outside the doors from two or two-thirty onwards, waiting until they could come inside. As I talked with the guests and tried to understand why they were lining up so early, I learned a couple of things. One is that I can’t control what other people do: these folks had made their own decisions about how long they were willing to stand outside waiting, and it was about one hour, and so they showed up about one hour before the doors opened, just like they had previously shown up one hour before we wheeled out the cart. That was what they wanted to do, that was what they were going to do, and there was nothing I could do about it. But the other thing I learned – or grasped in a new way – is how important it can be to people to be first in line, and hand-in-hand with that, how important fairness can be to us. People would line up outside the door, and at three thirty we would open the door and they would file downstairs to the fellowship hall, and the first person in line would take the first chair by the door, the second take the next chair, and so on all the way around the room. It was of paramount importance to them that they reproduce the order of the line exactly and precisely, although each of them would be getting an identical bag lunch.

Sometimes, as they negotiated their spots in line, I would think of the parable that Jesus told to the disciples and the crowd of listeners and followers in the Gospel reading for today. A landowner went out around six in the morning to the area where day laborers would stand and wait to see if they would be hired that day. He hired some workers, and they agreed to work in the vineyard for the usual daily wage, which was an amount called a denarius, about enough to feed a family for one day, although not especially well – this would have been enough to buy one’s “daily bread,” as the prayer says, but probably not meat. All of this would have sounded pretty familiar to Jesus’s listeners – this is how things normally worked with vineyards and laborers and landowners. But then the parable starts to take a turn: three hours later, the landowner returns to the marketplace and sees idle laborers. He sends them off to his vineyard, promising to pay “whatever is right.” Then he does it again at three, and again at five. “Why are you standing here idle?” he asks. “Because no one has hired us,” they respond. And off he sends them to the vineyard.

According to Jewish law, workers had to be paid before sundown each day, and so as evening comes, the landowner bids the manager to line the laborers up in exactly reverse order – just the opposite of the way the sandwich line guests would line up. Imagine yourself, for a moment, as one of those first laborers, at the end of a long, hot day. Sweaty, thirsty, dirty, bug-bitten. Your hands perhaps aching, perhaps a bit cut and blistered, back aching from reaching and bending and carrying. You’ve been promised a denarius, a coin that will buy enough food for your family, for the day’s work. And you’re sent to the back of the line. At the front of the line are the workers who arrived just an hour or so ago. They’ve barely broken a sweat. Ceremoniously, the manager hands each of them a denarius. Are you outraged? Perhaps a bit – they certainly didn’t earn that. But perhaps you start to feel eager anticipation. If they’re getting a denarius for their one hour of work, what will you get for your full day of hard labor? But then, as your turn comes, you also are handed a denarius. Enough to feed your family. No less, but no more.

As Jesus’ parable continues, the laborers grumble in protest: it’s not fair. And they’re right. It’s not. These ones who showed up at the end of the day, did one-twelfth the work, getting the same pay as the ones who worked the whole day, is not fair. The early workers have received what is fair, and the late workers have received what is generous. And perhaps, Jesus suggests, fairness is not as important in the Kingdom of God as it is to us in the here and now.

The guests of the sandwich line would file into the church basement, meticulously reproducing the order of the original line. Sometimes, someone would leave their chair to use the bathroom, and a newcomer would plop down in it, and there would be a small confrontation, and a negotiation, as the person returned to their seat and tried to send the newcomer to the back of the line. I’ve said that all of these people, in their meticulously formed line, were getting the exact same bag lunch, and that is true, but only sort of true. Sometimes, after we distributed one bag lunch to each person at four pm, I had a few left over and had to decide what to do with them. Sometimes, I had a few specially donated items – a congregant would drop off a bag of candies, or there would be some leftover food from an event, or in one case a nearby convenience store lost power to their freezers and gave us their entire inventory of ice cream. And in those cases, I was the landowner: I had given everyone what was fair, what they had lined up for and expected, and I had to pick a few, somehow, who would get something extra. And those days were really hard. Sometimes there would be someone with special circumstances — a pregnancy, an ailing parent at home — but usually, I’d just go back to the beginning of the line and hand out extras one by one until we ran out. But no matter what I did, it never seemed quite fair to everyone. Every day I’d make an announcement: “We start here at the beginning of the line, we go along the line until everyone has one. Then we wait a bit to see if anyone comes late. Then we give out any leftovers as seconds. Please do your best to be patient and kind to each other and the volunteers. We’re being as fair as we know how to be. Let’s just all remember that we’re doing our best.” In the here and now, usually the best we can do is to be fair, and sometimes generous. But fair doesn’t usually feel generous, and generous doesn’t usually feel fair.

Usually, interpreters say that this parable is about salvation. Biblical historians remind us of the tensions of the followers of Jesus and the early church: tensions between those who’d been there from the beginning and those who’d come late. Tensions between Jews, God’s covenant people, and Gentiles, grafted onto the tree of God’s salvation. Tensions between those who’d been trying to live righteously all their lives and those like Paul or Zaccheus who had renounced lives of zealous persecution or extortion and greed. Some of those tensions might sound familiar to us, and indeed perhaps we bristle to think that the same salvation is available to a mass murderer as to us – that at the end of the day, God’s mercy can be for literally anyone, early or late. But perhaps Jesus is not talking only about salvation. Because the people he was talking to would have known deeply, whether they themselves were day laborers or not, the anxiety of heading out for a day’s work, hoping to be able to provide daily bread. They would have known the aching back and blistered hands that merited a denarius, and the worry of finding oneself willing to work when nobody is hiring. If they were lucky, they might have known the landowner’s situation of having enough to be at least fair, and a little generous, and having to decide how to allocate. They would probably have known, and we do too, if we think about it, that when people are clustered in the marketplace or lined up on the sidewalk worrying about whether they will be able to eat that day, whether they can feed their kids that day, that is already irreparably unjust, and no daily wage can ever really make it right.

The kingdom of God is like this: more times than I can count, someone would arrive at church just after we had given out the last bag lunch, harried and desperate, having rushed just a little too late to the church to try to get something to eat that day. And almost every time, someone who had lined up outside the church at two thirty would rummage through her bags, pull out her bag lunch, and quietly hand it to the person. A different person every time. "You need it more than me," he or she would say. The kingdom of God is like this: a church basement where we all try to be at least fair, and maybe generous, in the sure and certain hope that in God’s kingdom there are no bread lines and no anxious idle workers lingering in the marketplace, and nobody has to worry about whether they will eat that day, or how to feed their children. The kingdom of God is like this: an abundance of bread and oil, milk and honey, grace and peace, whether you came early or late, did a lot or a little. The kingdom of God is not fair. It isn’t. But it might be better than fair.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.