"So, What's So Amazing About Grace?"
First Congregational Church -- Wauwatosa, Wisconsin
Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost, September 21, 2008
Rev. Steven A. Peay, Ph.D.
[Texts: Exodus 16:2-15/Philippians 1:21-30/Matthew 20:1-16]

Reading the paper, watching the television news – especially the financial news – has not been very encouraging these last few days. Just as we’re getting a tad used to these gas prices, then the market has to go through some sort of crisis (and while I’m not an economist, I do know just enough to know that there is more than an “adjustment” going on here). You couple that kind of news with the ongoing situation in the Middle East and you have a recipe for depression. I add to that the violence that has been done against people of faith of late. The senseless shootings in that Unitarian Church in Tennessee not long ago come to mind. One of my students at Nashotah House from Tanzania told me about a violent attack on people in an Anglican church by Muslims. There are stories of churches burned in India and an increase of violence against Christians there. The stories go on and on and it’s really quite sad.

I look and listen and wonder, so what is so amazing about grace? Grace, defined as unmerited favor; or as the Puritan theologian Thomas Goodwin wrote, "Grace is the freeness of love." Where is grace in the face of all this? Where is grace in the many situations that each of us knows about here in Milwaukee, in Wauwatosa, Elm Grove or Brookfield or here in this faith community? We look at these situations, even at our own lives, and regularly say that this or that isn't fair. These people have had their rights violated, as have we, no doubt. So how can we possibly believe in a God who could be so unfair? Is grace absent or are we missing the point?

Jesus tells the story of the generous vineyard owner to make the point more clear to us. In those days, as the Biblical scholar William Barclay reminds us, the marketplace was like the employment agency. A man came there first thing in the morning, carrying the tools of his trade, and waited there until someone hired him. The folks that hired themselves out this way were the lowest class of workers. They literally lived from day-to-day, which is why they continued to hang around the market place, even to the end of the day, hoping that someone would hire them. For these people a day's wage could make the difference between the family being fed and going hungry.

The best tier of workers, who had been hired early in the day, had bargained with the vineyard owner. They had an estimation of their worth and what they expected to get what they had bargained for -- which they did. The owner wasn't unfair at all. Look at the protest again, we worked all day, they only worked an hour, and you've made them equal to us. The workers who had been there all day long, who only went to work after they had struck a bargain, had been paid what they had bargained for. What they wanted was merit pay! You see the workers, who come at the various times when he goes hiring, don't try to make deals. They just want to work. They didn't bargain with the vineyard owner, they didn't have an estimation of their worth, they just went out to work. So they go to get their pay for an hour's work and . . . surprise! The owner pays them a whole day's wage, more than they expected, far more than they could have ever bargained for. And the top hands, who see this, now expect more than they had bargained for and don't get it.

The story Jesus tells is to strike a point with the descendants of the Exodus. God's people have been missing the point of his grace for a long time, and still seem to do so. God demonstrates boundless generosity in freeing a captive people -- they complain about hunger. All of a sudden slavery in Egypt looks a whole lot better than freedom in the wilderness and the road to the land of promise. They miss the point that the God who has freed them can, and does, feed them. God's generosity is greater than any of their expectations, but grace -- and here is where we'd need to look a little further in the text than the lectionary does -- is not something which can be stored up or hoarded. It's something which must be sought daily, like the manna. And, like the manna, grace must be looked for in the most ordinary, humble places and even in the places we least expect.

We look at the world, I'm afraid, like the all-day workers, like the Israelites on the march. We think of it in terms of rights and fairness and what is due to us. So in the littleness of our minds we tend to short-circuit God's grace, so that we only get what we bargain for. Many people live their lives trying to strike merit-pay bargains with God, because the uncertainty of grace, the need to look for it daily, is more than we want to deal with. Our desire is to control ourselves, our surroundings, even God, so in a sort of self-righteous insecurity we try to coerce God to give us what we think is our due. And what we do in these dealings, as one commentator has it so well, is to make God over in our image, as miserly as we are ourselves. We, not God, thwart the richness of God's grace.

We have to understand that everything is the result of grace, that's what is so amazing about it. Julian of Norwich, a fourteenth century English mystic, had a series of "Divine Showings" Listen to what she describes: “. . . .our good Lord showed a spiritual sight of his familiar love. I saw that he is to us everything which is good and comforting for our help. He is our clothing, who wraps and enfolds us for his love, which is so tender that he may never desert us. As so in this sight I saw that he is everything which is good, as I understand. And in this he showed me something small, no bigger than a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed to me, and it was as round as a ball. I looked at it with the eye of my understanding and thought: What can this be? I was amazed that it could last, for I thought that because of its littleness it would suddenly have fallen into nothing. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and always will, because God loves it; and thus everything has being through the love of God.” The little ball she describes is the size of a hazelnut and it is all of created reality. God is that big, and everything else is that small – it never hurts for us to remember that.

The story from the Exodus and the parable remind us of a ridiculously generous God, a God who is very different from us. What we hear Paul telling the church at Philippi comes as a result of his own experience of God's grace experience in Christ. As a result, Paul sought to live in line with the generosity of God, so he looked at life and death quite differently than most of us. For him death became gain, an opportunity to be with God, but living meant service. Both were good. So he reminds the people at Philippi to live their lives in the unity of generous, self-giving service, the service which had been revealed to them through Jesus and in the life and example of Paul. Even suffering, now, becomes a graced thing.

Paul tells his people not to live out their salvation in a miserly way, but offering themselves freely, as Christ did. I don’t want to go off on stewardship issues here, but there are many of us who could be a bit more generous in our giving. For some of us, the work of the church is the last thing on the list, though we have no trouble benefiting from it and would miss were it no longer here. It’s important for us to remember that the church is here because people thought it worth supporting and gave of themselves to make it happen. Far too many of us simply assume that “someone else will do it,” or “someone else will give,” or “someone else will serve or care.” Beloved, as the great theologian Walt Kelly said, “We have met the enemy and they is us.” If anything is going to succeed here, it is because we – and I mean ALL of us – have owned it and help to bring it about. This, to a small degree, is what Paul means when he tells the church at Philippi to living life “in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ.”

I think there is a connection between what Paul is saying and what we've read in Matthew. One commentator sums it up well: “....today's Gospel is a guard against this measured approach to salvation. Grace is available freely from God each day. Those hired at the beginning of the day got themselves into an unnecessary fever because they never considered the character of their employer. They made themselves the best judges of their needs, and so they should have had no quarrel with the one who them on the basis of their own estimation of their worth. But when they saw the employer's estimation of the others, then they could not be satisfied with their own. Christian freedom is based on the knowledge that God adequately meets our needs each day. This kind of trust keeps us humble, so that we can never act as though we have grace on account, but it also gives us permission to live freely, trusting the one who has called us to labor in the vineyard. . . . Martyrs do not receive the grace of martyrdom until they face the fire, the teeth of the lion, the persecution of governments, or the misunderstanding of friends. How unbearable they might be otherwise!”

The Scripture lessons today challenge us, as does the reality of grace itself, to let God be God in our lives. The God who holds everything in being through love cares for what God has made, no matter how small. We cannot always understand what God is about, how God is guiding through this world, but we do need to remember not to limit God, not to try to make God in our image. We must not come into freedom only to once again put ourselves into slavery by our own narrowness of heart, mind, or vision. God's grace is amazing, but, as Thomas Aquinas – the great theologian of the 13th century -- reminds us, “grace builds on nature.” We have to receive it and allow it to build.

To answer the question I posed initially, I think we miss the point. Grace is not absent from our world or there would not be human beings with the courage to stand over against evil in all of its forms – be it the gentleman who stood between the shooter and a pew full of people in Tennessee or the Christians in Tanzania and in India who continue to preach their faith and live it in the face of persecution. Grace is not absent or there would not be the constant striving for good. Julian also heard, "Sin is necessary, but all will be well, and all will be well, and every kind of thing will be well." God's will for his creation is love and that will triumph. What is so amazing about grace is that ministry happens, that people give – some far more than a fair share –and all because God’s love is real. God is not unfair, we are. God is generous, loving us, caring for us, offering us friendship and an invitation to be partakers of Divine Nature even when we turn away – even when we place our service of God, our care for God’s people at the bottom of the pile. And that, dear ones, that is what is SO amazing about grace. Amen.