Pentecost Sunday Sept 21,2008

Good jokes, like good stories… Like the stories we read every Sunday from the scripture…. need to be told over and over again and enjoyed. One of the jokes I’ve retold over the years when I try to explain that there are bad ways to read the bible. Especially of you take a verse here and a verse there, out of context, and just apply it to anything.

So there was a man who thought he’d read a verse each morning at breakfast as a thought for the day. The first day he opened his bible and ran his hand down the page to the verse, “and Judas hanged himself.” He didn’t like that as a thought for the day so he closed the book and opened it again to another page. This time the passage was, “Go and do thou likewise.” He slammed the bible shut not liking that either. A third time he opened the book and came to rest on the verse, “What so ever thou doest, do quickly.” So we know we can get in trouble with this method. With the method in mind however, we had a lot of laughter in the bible study last Wednesday when we read, in that fashion, the verses from the Jonah passage for today. Given the fact that this has been a very tough week economically and many people have lost a lot of money from their pension funds and savings. Financial markets are in great turmoil. We read from Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?” And then, “Yes, angry enough to die” and then, “the great city, where there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left,” and lastly “many animals.” I wonder if those are bears or bulls?

Given the fact that this has been a very difficult week in the financial areas it is also a week to be reminded of God’s great mercy. In Jonah we pick up on the story of how God saved a whole city that Jonah wanted destroyed. The other wonderful story for this week is the parable of Jesus that we commonly call the workers in the vineyard. This has to do with economics.

The story has to do with day laborers. I can identify with this because in my early 20’s I had a chance to experience what this is all about. I would get up at 5:15 and have a little breakfast and walk to the employment office at the plant by 5:45. I would get my name on the clip board along with many others who sought to work for the day. There we would stand. Shoulder to shoulder. Waiting. At 6:00 if my name was called out, “Mueller!” then, I would know I’d have a job for the day. Usually, it was heavy tough work but it would pay a day’s wage. If my name wasn’t called by 6:15 I would know that it might be time to head home. No job today. Try again tomorrow. I also had the experience of working side by side with migrant workers in onion fields. You would straddle one row and have one on each side. They were small onions about 3” high. You would start on one end and crawl about a quarter of a mile weeding. Each row was worth 75 cents.

Jesus told this parable of the workers in the vineyard to day laborers. Some scholars tell us that about 90% of the population had been reduced to positions of day labor. This is important to understand. Once they had probably owned land. Maybe it was land that belonged to their family for generations. But heavy taxes to support the foreign army of the Caesar and more taxes to pay for the remodeling project that Herod had done to fix the temple caused many people to lose their ownership. They borrowed money to pay taxes and when they could not pay off their loans they were foreclosed on. Does that sound familiar? The next step down that economic ladder was to be a tenant farmer. This meant they could stay on the land but the profits would go to the absentee landlords. When debt piled higher there was one more step downward toward economic oblivion. That was to be a day laborer. This meant that if one was lucky enough to find a job for one day one would get a wage that would buy a day’s worth of food. Don’t ask me what it meant if one had a family. Now imagine 90% of the society in this position. The other 10%, of course, were like our Wall Street bankers. Probably driving the newest chariot!

The parable is about God’s kingdom. The workers come to the vineyard at 6:00 and 9:00 and noon. Others come at 3:00 and 5:00. At the end of the day those who came at 5:00 were given a day’s wage. In fact they all got a day’s wage. Those that had worked all day say this isn’t fair. But when is an economic system fair? Whose rules are we playing by? This isn’t about fairness and it isn’t about wages. It is about justice and worth. The point is that all were worth being fed one more day. Your worth isn’t determined by what you produce. In God’s kingdom you have worth regardless of what you do. A day’s wage was enough to eat for one more day. The kingdom of God is characterized by justice.

This is good news in a week when markets are going wild. All people have value and worth regardless of what they make. This is God’s kingdom’s economics. It’s about a God who, as Jonah’s story tells us, saves the cities of the enemy and attaches worth to all people. It is about a God who sees value in all of us, no matter what we produce. This is a radical difference of the empire of God as opposed to other empires.

So in a world that is literally going nuts with economies that are out of whack you still have worth in God’s eyes. God’s kingdom reigns! Amen.