“Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more.”  Isn’t that always the way?  How many people have ever heard this parable before?  How many people like this parable?  (It kind of depends on where you perceive yourself in the scheme of things – whether you are usually there from the beginning or usually coming in at the middle or the end of hard work, doesn’t it?)  As an oldest child of four, I have a river of righteous indignation that runs through me which springs from some place called, “I’ve been doing chores since before you were born!”   I bet at least some of you are like me.  If it’s not your family of origin, it’s some place else where you’ve been working long and hard.  We consider ourselves hard workers and would just as soon not live in the realm of heaven if this is what it’s going to be like, thank you very much! Hold that thought.

      I’ve been preaching a lot about the Gospel of Matthew and its interest in community.  For Matthew, every story told, the order, the way it’s told, is about community in the early church.  The Gospel of Matthew takes this story from Jesus and makes it into a theological allegory where the landowner is God and the workers are like the old timers and the newcomers in the church.  Matthew makes it a story about how God’s grace is going to be bestowed equally among them no matter when they’ve joined the community.  That’s a nice story, and I think he’s right.  I believe that God’s grace works just like that – it’s not something that we can merit.  God is extravagantly generous and compassionate no matter how long you’ve been laboring.  God’s grace is available to you “wherever you are on your spiritual journey” as we say at Emmanuel Church.  And God’s abundance exceeds anything we can earn.  That’s what I really wanted to preach about on Welcome Back Sunday.

      The thing is, I don’t think that Jesus started out telling a story about how God’s indiscriminate grace falls equally on everyone (even though that that’s exactly what God’s grace does).  That is not really a very dangerous story to tell – and I don’t think telling stories like that would have gotten Jesus executed by the government.  The kind of story that Jesus told challenged economic and political power, which is why he was such a threat to the Roman government.  The government perceived him as dangerous.

      Here’s the kind of story that could make people with some economic and political power very angry.  I think that the landowner in Jesus’ parable is a very rich man, with vast holdings.  I don’t think that in Jesus’ telling the landowner stood for God at all.  I think that the landowner stood for someone who takes advantage of an unemployed work force to meet his harvesting needs by making a series of “take it or leave it” offers.  He was the boss who can do whatever he wants, whether it’s fair or not.1

      When the landowner pays all the workers the same amount no matter how hard they’ve worked, he insults and shames the hard workers.  He basically tells them that he doesn’t really care how hard they’ve worked.  When they complain, he singles one out and embarrasses him further.  The wage is not generous, not life sustaining, because it is only enough to provide a day’s worth of subsistence.  With unemployment high, day laborers don’t work every day.  A living wage paid intermittently is not really a living wage.  And the word that gets translated ‘friend’ (hetaire) here is not a friendly term at all.  It’s condescending.  They are not friends.

      If he shames and embarrasses them, they’re likely to feel so badly about themselves that they won’t even think about the power that they might have if they all stuck together.  They’re probably afraid of not getting more – and this is a serious thing to be afraid of – especially because they are poor and hungry.  Jesus was telling a story that exposes the oppressive system of the landowner and encourages the peasant workers to talk with one another and cooperate with one another.  He was exposing “the smothered truth … that the landowner was dependent on them and, as a result, that they could have power but only a power that grew out of their solidarity.  Divided, they would fall one by one before the withering hostility and judgment of the elite.”2

      We don’t have to look very hard for a contemporary parallel of the rich landowner mistreating laborers.  According to the latest reports from the Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy, 2007 was another banner year for CEOs and a dismal year for workers.  “S&P 500 CEOs last year averaged $10.5 million, 344 times the pay of typical American workers.  Compensation levels for private investment fund managers soared even further out into the pay stratosphere. Last year, the top 50 hedge and private equity fund managers averaged $588 million each, more than 19,000 times as much as typical U.S. workers earned.”  Meanwhile, poverty rates in this country are increasing.  The number of people who are hungry on a regular basis is increasing.  The news of failing financial institutions grabs headlines while the disparity between rich and poor, white and black or Latino grows exponentially.

      Are you ready for some good news?  In the past, great economic distress in the U.S. has resulted in reforming public policy.  We certainly are in a period of great economic distress and we can affect public policy.  And I want to say to you that it is our ministry as Jesus followers to be concerned with political and economic issues because Jesus was concerned with political and economic issues.  We have been invited, through our baptism, to live lives worthy of the Gospel of Jesus Christ – as Paul says in Philippians.

      It is our baptismal ministry to be concerned with unmasking the shaming forces that discourage solidarity with one another in the face of indignity, injustice, or indifference.    Our ministry is to expose systems of oppression, and instead of fearfully trying to leverage our own positions, our ministry calls us to align ourselves with those who are the most vulnerable.  Jesus’ ministry was about standing for and with the least, the lost, and the last –and our ministry must be also.