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Wealth - Matthew 20
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
This is a story that invites us to see our wealth. Whatever it is that we've been given, the way that God sees God's wealth as an opportunity to redirect our excess into access for those who don't have it. Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week.
Speaker 1:Head to commons.church for more information. Welcome back. My name is Jeremy. I help to lead our team here at Commons, and thank you for being here with us this weekend. We really don't take it for granted that you would come and spend part of your weekend to worship with us.
Speaker 1:Last week, we launched into this new series that we're calling Wealth. And last week was all about coveting. Today is about the relationship between generosity and justice. Next week is about the pursuit of happiness. But last week, we began this conversation about wealth by talking first about our desire.
Speaker 1:And this is actually really important for me because wealth in the biblical imagination is not just the freedom to get whatever you want. It's so much bigger than that. It starts with the freedom from being driven by desire in the first place. And that means recognizing that much of our dissatisfaction with the world around us is often manufactured manufactured for us. First, in this realization that human desire itself is mimetic, which is just a fancy way of saying that it's imitative.
Speaker 1:We copy each other. We imitate each other. In fact, according to Rene Girard, we don't even know how to desire things for ourselves. We just copy the desires that we see in each other. And this is something that advertisers know intimately and work really hard to draw out of us and exploit in us.
Speaker 1:But second, it led us to this fascinating rabbinic reading of the 10 commandments. This recognition that Western audiences often perceive the 10 commandments as a set of rules, but that many Jewish teachers imagine a much more nuanced dialogue. And it's really neat thing to notice the disconnect between the first nine and the final tenth commandment. The first nine or at least all theoretically verifiable. Right?
Speaker 1:Murdering, lying, stealing, all of these are external actions. But the final one, the one about coveting, the one about wanting, the one about desiring what your neighbor has. I mean, what do you do with that? How how do you stop humans from wanting? And what some of the rabbis realized was you can't.
Speaker 1:And that being the case, what they realized was that maybe this was never a rule at all. Maybe it was always a promise. A promise that if you can live this way, if you can keep God in the center, if you can treat each other with dignity, if you can value rest, if you can stop competing and cheating and striving to get ahead of each other, then you might actually find yourself free from unhealthy desire, not wanting what your neighbor has. Not because you have everything, not because you got everything you wanted, but maybe because it's actually possible to exit the cycle of manufactured desire that seems to control us. And if that reading of that final saying seems a bit strange to you, some of that probably comes from the way that you're used to hearing it in English.
Speaker 1:Exodus twenty seventeen often sounds something like this, you shall not covet your neighbor's house. But that shall is entirely an interpretive decision. Because in Hebrew the text says, all that it says is that in the future you will not desire what your neighbor has. And whether that sounds like a command or a promise to you probably depends as much on your relationship to the divine as much as anything else. So with that in the background, we now turn our attention to the relationship between generosity and justice.
Speaker 1:But first, let's pray. Generous God, we know that everything we have comes from you. But we forget this and we lose sight of this, and sometimes we actively work to ignore this. And yet, we come back to you today because in our heart, we trust that you are the source of all that is good in the universe. That you are the one who makes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust alike.
Speaker 1:So as we speak today about wealth and generosity and justice, May we do that from a posture of deep gratitude. From the reminder that all that you have blessed us with, even when we struggle to see it, comes from you. That we are blessed, that we are graced, that we are loved, and we thank you. And so where we have been selfish, we ask for forgiveness. Where we have been myopic, we ask for perspective.
Speaker 1:Where we have looked perhaps too intently at our own bowl, we ask that you would help us see those in need around us today. Help us to be generous as you are generous, and in that, to experience true wealth. In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen. Okay.
Speaker 1:Generosity and justice. Today, let's talk about idle moments, backstories, some brain science, and then the real opportunities to change the world. But I wanna start with a parable, And I know we talked about parables in the spring. If you missed any of the parables of grace, you can check them out online. We have a YouTube channel that collects all of our content from both of our parishes.
Speaker 1:Then we also have podcast feeds if audio is more your pace. And we have a feed for Inglewood or Kensington that you can follow along with. Links are at commons.church. But this is not one of those parables. In fact, this is part of what we sometimes know as the kingdom parables.
Speaker 1:And Jesus will often tell stories about the kingdom of God. This was a subversive way for Jesus to contrast the existing kingdoms of the world with the divine imagination of the world. One of the things that we have to keep in the back of our minds when we hear Jesus speak of kingdom is that this is very political language with significant implications. Remember, most of his audience, most of his friends were Jewish people. These were marginalized peoples who'd been colonized by the Roman Empire.
Speaker 1:And so to speak of kingdom was a way of using the language of empire against the empire. It was meant to say that the imagination of God ran counter to the experience of kingdom in the world. In fact, when you hear the kingdom parables, there's almost nothing in them that sounds like a kingdom, and that's the point. And so when Jesus tells a kingdom parable, they have a wealth and generosity and justice, one that's meant to change our imaginations, well this grabs my attention. So we're gonna start at the start of Matthew 20 today.
Speaker 1:And there Jesus says, for the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire workers. He agreed to pay them a denarius for the day and sent them into his vineyard. Now, a denarius is a Roman term. It's a Roman currency. It was about a quarter of a shekel, which was the Jewish currency at the time.
Speaker 1:And the story here hangs on the premise that a denarius is a fair wage for a day's work. So the story continues. At about nine in the morning, he went out again and saw others standing in the marketplace doing nothing. He told them, you also go and work in my vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right. So they went.
Speaker 1:Now, couple interesting things here. First, your bible may read something like he saw others standing idle or lazy in the marketplace. The NIV has changed that to standing in the marketplace doing nothing. That's because the Greek word argus here has two meanings. The first is having nothing to do.
Speaker 1:The second is refusing to do anything. And that's kinda tough because that kind of drastically changes the story, doesn't it? Are these people the victims of unemployment having nothing to do, or are they culprits who refuse to work doing nothing? And while some older translations have gone with idle or lazy, most scholarship today would argue that that is actually a distortion of the story and that you need a reason to jump to the secondary meaning of a word rather than simply taking it at its face value, given nothing to do. The point being, at least at this point in the story, this is not about lazy people.
Speaker 1:This is not about idle persons. This is about the dignity of work and the inequitable distribution of those opportunities. I think it's worth noticing here that there's a story about the kingdom of God, and Jesus is very comfortable talking about work in that context. Remember last week, we said you are not your work. You are not what you create.
Speaker 1:Your value is not tied to your economic output. But work and contribution and creativity, these all do have a place in God's imagination. So if your concept of heaven is you lounging on a cloud sipping margaritas all day, you might be in for a bit of a surprise when you get there. Because work is holy, and your contribution to the world around you is sacred. But we should also notice here the landowner's promise.
Speaker 1:He says, I will pay you whatever is right. Now I'm gonna spoil the ending here. That does not give you permission to talk about Avengers Endgame yet. There's three people who still haven't seen it yet, and they need that moment. But Jesus told this story some two thousand years ago, and so the statute of limitations on spoilers has almost certainly passed for this one.
Speaker 1:So don't throw anything at me, but the twist ending here is that everyone is going to get paid the same wage. Now you may have guessed that already. You may have read this before, But notice here that Jesus doesn't give it away yet. A denarius is a day's wage. We've already agreed to that.
Speaker 1:Now he promises a fair wage. And what that does is it keeps the tension in the story. I think sometimes because we've heard a story before, it can be hard to hear it again. And it's important to remember that Jesus ending to this story is in no way obvious to his audience. It was a surprise.
Speaker 1:It was unexpected, and it challenged their assumptions of what was fair, and that was the point. Jesus was pushing against their imagination of justice in order to lead them to something better. And so sometimes, especially when we think we've heard a story before, we need to try to be open to being surprised again. But now that I've spilled the tea, let's keep reading here. It says, he went out about noon and again about three in the afternoon, and he did the same thing.
Speaker 1:At about five in the afternoon, he went out once again and found still others standing around. He asked them, why have you been standing here all day doing nothing? Remember our conversation about Argus? Well, here, Jesus introduces some new language. He uses a term, which means standing in place.
Speaker 1:And this is part of why we think that lazy or idle is probably the wrong translation earlier. Because now at five in the afternoon, at almost the end of the day, when the landowner finally speaks to this final group, the connotation is actually precisely of lazy. He says, why are you still standing here, standing put? As if to say, are you possibly still standing in attention in the marketplace hoping that someone would come and hire you even just for an hour? See, this group that's here at 5PM at the end of the day, they're far from lazy.
Speaker 1:They are desperate for work. These are probably the weakest workers, perhaps the least skilled laborers. These are the ones with the lowest chances of ever actually finding employment for the day, and yet here they are still standing in the marketplace, hopeful, eager perhaps even for a chance to work for an hour. And so instead of chastising him, the landlord says, perhaps something more like this, why have you been here standing all day given nothing to do? Because no one has hired us, they answered.
Speaker 1:And so he said to them, you also go and work in my vineyard. And you see how dramatically some of our basic assumptions about the story fundamentally alter the tone of the story. Is this a story about lazy people who don't wanna work, or is this a story about those who have not been given the opportunities that some of us have learned to take for granted? Those those are two very different stories, aren't they? Now some of this is a product of translation.
Speaker 1:Anytime we move from one language to another, we have interpretive choices to make. There's just no way to get around that. But really, I think, often what it comes down to is actually our personal experience of the world. There was a book that came out earlier this year by an author called Dan Meegan. Who's titled America the Fair using brain science to create a more just nation.
Speaker 1:And in it, Meegan, who is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Guelph, Yea Canada, writes about the very different definitions of fair that float throughout our popular consciousness. Tells a couple stories. One is about a well known phenomena tested by something called the ultimatum game. You come into the study and you are told that $100 has been allocated, and the first unnamed participant has been given the chance to allocate a portion of those funds for themself and a portion for you, and they get to do that arbitrarily. You can either accept that allocation as suggested and walk away with the money that was given to you, or you can reject the allocation and the test is over and no one gets anything.
Speaker 1:And what researchers invariably find every time they do this test is that the farther the allocation gets away from the fifty fifty split you expect is that the more frequently you will just simply reject it all and leave with nothing. Now on one hand, we kinda get that. Right? I mean, it's not fair. Why should one person get more?
Speaker 1:Why does this jerk get $90 and I get 10? But at the same time, even if the split is $90.10, why wouldn't you just take the $10 and enjoy it? I mean, you don't know the other person. You're never gonna meet them. Just take your money, buy yourself an ice cream cone, and enjoy it while you pout about how unfair the world is.
Speaker 1:And yet somehow the concept of fair is very deeply embedded in us somewhere. Meegan gives another example. This time from Sarah Brosnan of Georgia State University and Franz de Wall of Emory University, they demonstrated that monkeys who've been trained to give a token to a human in exchange for a piece of cucumber will often start refusing to participate if they see another monkey be given a grape for the same amount of work. First of all, proving that grapes are conclusively better than cucumbers, but also monkeys are pretty petty. In fact, they've even showed that monkeys will get so upset when a grape is given to a monkey that hasn't done any work that they will start throwing their cucumbers back at the testers.
Speaker 1:Cucumbers that they once found incredibly exciting, now they don't want them at all. So this is actually somewhere deep inside of us, this sense of fairness based on equality. And the theory goes that this rejection of what is seen as unfair treatment has the purpose of enforcing social norms about the allocation of resources within the group, and the acceptance of an unfair offer all but guarantees our future mistreatment. Our forceful rejection sends a clear message to the group, don't take advantage of me. And that response is hardwired into us by evolution, this conviction that life is a zero sum game and there's only so much to go around.
Speaker 1:Yet, all of that is premised off the untested assumption that everyone has the same story, that everyone comes to the story from the same story. I mean, a fifty fifty split in the ultimatum game, inherently, that feels fair to all of us. Right? But would you feel differently if you played the game and you received a ninety ten allocation, and then you were told that the allocator had a sick child, and they didn't have the resources that they need, and they hadn't eaten yet today, of course, you would feel differently. Right?
Speaker 1:Because you're human, and you care, and you want to see people looked after. And in fact, it's actually the same instinct for fairness that leads us to demand fifty fifty when we don't know the backstory that is the same instinct that leads us to want a different allocation when we know someone's story. The difference is simply how much of that story we allow ourselves to know. And this is why I find Jesus' story so utterly compelling. Because it almost feels like a bit of a Rorschach test for us.
Speaker 1:Are these people here waiting all day because they're lazy? Are they here because they're marginalized and they lack the opportunity? What's the story that we choose to read between the lines of what we're told? What do we choose to assume about each other? What do those assumptions do to our concept of what's fair in any given situation?
Speaker 1:Now when evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, call the workers and pay them their wages. Beginning with the last ones hired and going on to the first. The workers who were hired first about five in the afternoon came and each received a denarius. Remember that's a full day's wage and so seeing this, those who were hired first, they're getting pretty excited. I mean, this guy is giving out days wages for hours work, just imagine what we're gonna get.
Speaker 1:And when those who were hired first came, they expected to receive more and yet each of them also received a denarius as well. When they received it, they began to grumble against the landowner. Those who were hired last worked only one hour, they said, and you made them equal to us. And notice here, there's at least a hint in the story that this isn't really about the money, is it? And it never is.
Speaker 1:It's about how we compare ourselves to each other, how we rank ourselves against each other, how we perceive our value in comparison to each other. You made them equal to us, Us who have borne the burden of the work in the heat of the day. But he answered one of them, I am not being unfair to you, friend. Now, the detour here because I think sometimes we tend to read this with a bit of an edge to it. There was this old skit years ago on Letterman where he would pull people in off the street and interview them, just normal people, but he would constantly just call them chief or buddy or pal until finally they stopped him to introduce themselves and tell them him their name.
Speaker 1:That's not what happening here. This this friend is not a pejorative. It's entirely genuine. And part of what you have to understand is that the word here is, is a little different from the more familiar term, And this is part of why we read it as genuine. The boss is not pretending to be best friends here.
Speaker 1:You're not claiming to be a philos. He says, And the tough thing here is that we don't really have a good word for this in English. We tend to jump in our language straight from acquaintance to friend without a lot of categories in between. But in Greek, a is someone you appreciate, someone you care about, someone you have a shared interest with, but not necessarily someone you share a close personal connection to. And so what happens is some lexicons will translate this comrade or companion, and that works.
Speaker 1:There's a better translation, but we don't really talk that way in English, so it feels weird. The point being, the boss is not being condescending here. He's being compassionate. This is a real legitimate expression of care that's appropriate to the context of two people who have just met. He's not pretending they're BFFs, but he's also not interacting as a function of their economic arrangement solely.
Speaker 1:This is not employer employee. This is human to human conversation, and that makes a big difference in how we hear what he about to say. Because he says here, friend, didn't you agree to work for a denarius? I have been very fair to you. So take your pay and go, I want to give to the one who was hired last.
Speaker 1:And don't I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Are you envious because I am generous? And this is a fascinating conclusion to a great story for at least a couple reasons. First, because there is this idea that generosity, when it is unexpected, can actually beget envy when we see each other as competition. And I'm fascinated by this because I know it all too well.
Speaker 1:Something good happens to someone else, someone that you care about, something unexpectedly falls into a friend's lap, and you're excited for them. I mean, legitimately, you're happy for them, but you're also a little annoyed. Right? Like, I mean, come on. Why did they get that?
Speaker 1:Why them? Why not me? And this is a product of that same evolutionary response that tells us everything is a zero sum game. I don't know how, I don't know why, I couldn't even explain it to you if you asked me to, but I feel like if you get something unwarranted, that means somehow there's less out there for me. Right?
Speaker 1:This is embarrassing, but I remember vividly the first time that Rachel and I were on the wait list to adopt our son. And for whatever reason at that point in our lives, it seemed like everyone that we knew, all of our friends were getting pregnant, and we were happy for them. We really were. But it was also this sense of, come on. Another baby shower?
Speaker 1:Are you kidding me? This is just not fair. And, I mean, of course, what does someone else's pregnancy have to do with our adoption? Less than zero. I mean, unless you're gonna give us your baby, which would be nice.
Speaker 1:But, I mean, these things aren't rational, are they? They're based in that very primitive competitive part of our brain. And I wanna suggest to you that unhindered absolute joy for another is good for your soul, and you need to practice it. When something happens to someone else, be happy for them even if it's hard. But even more fascinating here is the curious translation choices that have been made again.
Speaker 1:You see, the NIV ends the story on the generosity of the landowner, and certainly, absolutely, generosity is a big part of the story. I'm not gonna argue that at all. But actually, the most straightforward translation of the word agathos that Jesus uses here is simply good. Friend, are you envious because I am good? And again, I wanna suggest that what we read here depends at least in part on what we bring with us to the story.
Speaker 1:Because if this is a story about lazy workers who lounge all day and receive more than they deserve, then sure. This is about surprising unwarranted generosity, and that's great. That's a good story too. But if this story has a backstory, and if this story is actually about providing equal opportunity, if this story is about wealth being used to create just access to work, if this is a story about a God who values everyone as friend regardless of their economic output, then generous is fine, but actually maybe good is better. Because good is where this parable becomes a really powerful image of God's kingdom for me.
Speaker 1:What if this was never about lazy workers receiving more than they deserved? What if this was always about an imagination of wealth that saw provision and access and opportunity as the primary metrics for success in God's economy. You see, people will gladly say things like Jesus talks about money more than anything else, and that's true. But then they'll take a story like this where he's talking about money and they'll say, well, that one's not about money, and I'm not so sure. Now don't get me wrong.
Speaker 1:This is a story about the kingdom. It's about salvation. It's about being freely invited into the heart of God, course, but it's also about what happens to us when we respond to that invitation. It's about how our priorities get changed, how our imagination is altered. It's about how our perception of success is irrevocably transformed by God's goodness and about how our experience of wealth can begin to look progressively more like God's.
Speaker 1:See, I think this is a story about how we begin to see our choices, our purchases, our transactions, our employment, our hiring, not simply as what benefits us, But as resources we have at our disposal to extend justice and opportunity to those who have not been given what we have taken for granted. See, think this is a parable about learning not to see each other as competition. It's a parable about trusting that there is always a story behind the story. It's a parable that calls us to recognize the ways in which God is looking to us and then through us to find the best in us and bring that out and nurture it and give it opportunity. It's a story that invites us to know ourselves as welcomed at the very last minute, but then to live as if we've actually been shaped by that kind of a story.
Speaker 1:This is a story that invites us to see our wealth. Whatever it is that we've been given, the way that God sees God's wealth as an opportunity to redirect our excess into access for those who don't have it. See, this is a story about your invitation into God's kingdom, but it's also about the invitation of God's kingdom into you. Also that whatever wealth you have, money, resources, talent, time, passion, energy, compassion, warmth, a shoulder to cry on for someone that you can offer it to, all of that might become more than something that you hold on to and you protect for yourself. Instead, it might become part of a larger story where your generosity becomes the servant of a more just world.
Speaker 1:May you live and give and shop and hire and earn and invest in the world that God imagines for each of us. For this is the kingdom of God. Let's pray. God, be present to each of us, reminding us that our wealth extends far beyond our bank accounts into everything that we have at our disposal. Our time and our energy, our compassion, our warmth, our ability to extend the bubble of our lives to include someone else.
Speaker 1:And God, might we begin to use all of that wealth to redirect our excess into access for those who don't have it. Might we begin to read between the lines to see that there's always a story behind the story. And might we then extend the most generous reading possible to everyone we encounter. Not so that we can be taken advantage of, not so that we'll get abused, not so that we can be stepped on or walked over, but so that we can extend grace and peace just like you did to everyone we encounter. May our generosity be more than just a good moment.
Speaker 1:May it actually be what aligns us and calls us to participate in a more just world, where the opportunities and access we take for granted are extended far beyond our closed circles. May we see everyone as an opportunity and no one as competition. In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen.