It is of primary importance to us that we ask the right questions.  Last week I read an article in which a mother was talking about a question her young daughter had asked about her grandparents.  I have to say that the context of the article was the everyday concept of house-buying and wealth-gaining/retention, interest rates, and wages.  Looking at this lakeside house in which her grandparents lived with a jet-ski and other things that typically go along with lakeside houses, the young daughter asked this question: “What jobs did grandpa and grandma do that they could afford all of this?”

When I heard this, I could not help but think, “I wish that young girl would have asked something like, “How have grandpa and grandma created a life together or stayed together so long?” or something along those lines.  This is not to say that this question has never been asked by this young girl, and I hope it has (or will be).

Our parable today is told as a result of a question that is asked.  It’s really the wrong question.  Let us not be too hard on Peter, though.  Let us extend to Peter's grace.  This parable is at heart about judgement and grace.  The judgement falls on those who are unwilling to accept God’s generous grace.  “All is grace,” as someone has said and titled a book.  All is grace.  We’re looking at the scandal of grace here in our story this morning.  We’re looking at the impossible possibility of grace. “Amazing,” we might even say.

Let us pause and consider grace together.  It’s the thing that will save the world, and it’s the thing that the world won’t buy.  Someone has said this – “An eye for an eye won’t work because all it does is double the number of eyeless people.  Retribution won’t take evil out of the world, it will simply perpetuate it in spades.  A judgement that works only by punishing sinners and rewarding the righteous produces all hell and no kingdom: there are just too many sinners, and there are no righteous.  The only thing that’s going to get evil out of the world is for him (Jesus) to take it into himself on the cross – to drop it down the black hole of his death – and to make a new creation by the power of his resurrection.” Because with God, all things are possible, even the impossibility possibility of grace.  This word that can become so overused or sanitized we lose its meaning.  Undeserved favour.  Unmerited goodness.  A gift which can never be repaid, and it doesn’t have to be.  Someone has said a good sleep is grace.  Good dreams are grace.  The smell of freshly cut grass is grace.  Being loved is grace.  Loving someone is grace.

But scandalous?  Well, yes, sure.  In a world where we like to think that everyone gets what they deserve (or should anyway).  In a world in which we believe what goes around comes around.  In a world where the operative question is, “What’s in this for me?”  Peter asks, “What’s in this for us?”  A rich young man has just gone away from Jesus when he was instructed that to be perfect, he should sell what he possessed and give the money to the poor.  Jesus continues to surprise, and may he continue to surprise us too.  We might have expected him to say something like “Believe in me” or “Follow me” after all.  All this talk of perfection and selling things leads Peter to blurt out, “Look, we have left everything and followed you, What then shall we have?”

As I said earlier, let’s not be too hard on Peter.  Let us not forget the first part that precedes his question.  We have left everything and followed you.  We may not understand it all, Lord, but we’re with you.  We may not get it, and we fail, but we’re following you, and we know you’re with us.  We’re all coming to grips with this grace thing, after all.  To be a disciple of Christ is to be a student – it’s right there in the name.  The point of any study or apprenticeship is to learn things we don’t yet know.  None of us have come to a full understanding of this grace thing.  So we say to Jesus, “Tell me about grace…”  Tell us about the kingdom in which many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.  What does that look like?  What does grace look like?

For the kingdom of heaven is like…  This parable, by the way, is not about what God considers to be fair labour practices.  This parable is not about being humble or letting someone cut in front of us in a line.  Jesus tells a story about the labour market, a labour contract, the employed, the unemployed, rates of pay – all very current.  Let me retell the story in a current way:

Wayne Gretzky is overseeing his winery in Niagara-on-the-Lake.  He’s waiting for a good time to harvest the icewine crop (best harvested when it is between -12 and -15 degrees).  One Sunday, the weather forecast is predicting such temperatures for the next two days.  The next day (Monday), early in the morning, he goes to the local community centre in Virgil in order to hire day workers who gather there to look for such work.  They agree that $20/hour will be a fair wage for the work they are doing and that the workday will go from 6 am to 6 pm.  Twelve hours so $240 each.  Just before 9 am, Gretzky is informed that the forecast has changed.  The projected cold snap is now only expected to last the day.  He goes back to the community centre at 9 am looking for more workers, assuring them they will be paid whatever is right.  He does the same thing at noon and the same thing at three o’clock.  Come help with the harvest, and you will be paid whatever is right! 

Finally, he goes out at 5 pm.  Only an hour left in the work day.  Who is left?  Those who couldn’t get out earlier.  They might have been sleeping it off.  The unindustrious?  The unemployable?  Those with criminal records?  We can imagine.  Who’s still looking for work at 5 pm?  Those who are close to giving up?  “No one has hired us,” they say.  “Come on into my vineyard,” says Wayne.  Soon it’s time for the cheques to be handed out.  “Make sure the last workers we hired get paid first,” says Wayne to his manager.  When the first cheque gets opened by what many would consider an unsavoury-looking character - $240!  He starts to walk off, and his friend catches up with him.  “You got $240 too?!”  Word starts to spread as it often does in these situations.  We knew Wayne was fair and generous, but this might be crazy!  Has the hourly wage actually been bumped up to 240/hr?    This would mean $2,880 for those who worked from 6 am.  Even if it’s not that much, it must be something more.  A bonus for having been there all day at least surely!  When they receive the previously agreed upon daily wage, they grumbled against the landowner, saying, “These last  worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the freezing cold.”

“Listen pal/buster (this is the sense of the word “friend” that Jesus uses here), I am doing you no wrong.  Take what belongs to you and go (go enjoy yourself with a free glass of chardonnay in the tasting room!).  I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you.  Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?”

Or are you envious because I am generous?  This is really the operative question here.  Is my eye jealous because God is generous?  Am I coming to see everything more and more in the light of God’s grace?  Grace is not about keeping a ledger of our rights and wrongs so that we can earn something from God and look down on those whose ledgers don’t measure up to ours.  The kingdom of heaven is not a business transaction.  The kingdom of heaven is not a quid pro quo.  The kingdom of heaven is not about bookkeeping (though we’re thankful for bookkeepers and the work they do and the red and black ink they use).   There’s no being in the red or the black in the kingdom of heaven when it comes to grace.  All is seen in the light of God’s grace that makes those colours indistinguishable.  Someone has said that grace works by raising the dead, not rewarding the rewardable.  Because Christ is risen.  Christ has been raised.  New life in the risen Christ is a gift.  All is gift.  All is grace.

Do we begrudge the generosity that God shows to others – generosity that we feel they have no claim on?  None of us in and of ourselves have a claim on God’s grace.  Are we asking in any measure, “What will we get out of all this?”  Do we recognize that to be in Christ is to be in the vineyard?  To be in the vineyard means to be in communion with and in fellowship with our loving God.  We know this in part now, and one day we will know it fully.  To be in the vineyard, to be saved, to be delivered, to be in Christ, is not a means to an end.  It’s not a way to achieve a goal or profit for ourselves.  It IS the goal.  So if you’re in the vineyard, welcome home.  If you’re not, the invitation is before you.  Even if it’s 5 pm.  To be in the vineyard is grace.  To be in the vineyard is a gift.  To say, “We don’t understand everything, and we don’t have answers to all the questions we may have, but we’re with you,” is a gift.  To stand in such a position as a disciple of Jesus is to know life in all its fullness.  It’s to have put away the uncertainty, the fear, the rejection, the comparison, the competition that goes along with days spent in the community centre waiting and longing for something on which to stake our lives – something in which to find meaning; to find that in the vineyard we’ve already been found.  To find that the burden of the day is bearable because of the one who shares it with us. In the vineyard, in the owner’s care, we find that we’re able to bear the heat of the day.  If you’ve been in the vineyard for any significant length of time, you will have known this.  If you’re a more recent arrival, you will know it.  Listen to the promise found in these wonderful verses in Jeremiah – “Blessed are those who trust in the Lord, whose trust is in the Lord.  They shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream. It shall not fear when heat comes, and its leaves shall stay green; in the year of drought, it is not anxious, and it does not cease to bear fruit.” (Jer 17:7-8) The drought can be hard, and the day can be hot.  Helmut Thielecke described it in this way:  “Anybody who has ever gone through something hard with Jesus holding his hand, anybody who has had him as the companion of his anguish… that person would not for all the world have missed these experiences. He does not say in any case, I have never yet heard anyone say, 'Because of all the hardships I have had to undergo, God must surely give me a higher place in heaven.' What he does say is this: 'Not until I went down into the depths of hunger, fear, and loneliness did I experience the nearness of the Lord. There is where I first learned who Jesus is and how he can save and comfort and sustain… For the rest of my life, I shall live by the blessings of those hours of 'burden and heat.'

Blessed are those whose trust is in the Lord.  Blessed are those who are co-workers in the vineyard with our Lord; who do not see service as drudgery or competition but as the unmerited gift of God.  Blessed are those who live in that grace and in so living know life.  May we never be disturbed by the wideness of God’s mercy and whom it may envelop, no matter how long we’ve known life in him.  The vital question here is, “Am I envious because He is generous?”  May our answer be based on our growing in grace.

God’s grace is so lavish that the distinctions we like to make between first and last are erased in the kingdom of heaven.  Our brother Dennis (who is now with our Lord) talked highly of Brennan Manning, an American author and ex-priest.  I’ve yet to read a lot of his work, but I hope to.  This is how he described the good news of grace in a book called The Ragamuffin Gospel:

“The gospel of grace nullifies our adulation of televangelists, charismatic superstars, and local church heroes. It obliterates the two-class citizenship theory operative in many… For grace proclaims the awesome truth that all is gift. All that is good is ours, not by right, but by the sheer bounty of a gracious God. While there is much we may have earned—our degree, our salary, our home and garden, a Miller Lite, and a good night’s sleep—all this is possible only because we have been given so much: life itself, eyes to see and hands to touch, a mind to shape ideas, and a heart to beat with love. . . . My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ, and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it.”

May each one of us live in and live into God’s grace.

Amen