Free and Unbounded

A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC, June 23, 2024, the fifth Sunday after Pentecost. “Upward Focused, Outward Bound” series.

Text:  Matthew 20:1-16

Today as we begin our summer series based on core tenets of Wesleyan theology, I will focus on a piece out of the first conversation in our guiding text, Upward! Of course, like any Wesleyan theological text worth its salt, the first conversation is about grace—the true center of our spiritual tradition. The sentence that captures my attention is this, “God’s grace is free and unbounded.” That sounds lovely, right? Well, the biblical text from Matthew that came to mind to explore this statement gives us lots to ponder. So let us pray together and get into it…

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“God helps those who help themselves.”  This phrase gets passed along as the Gospel truth, doesn’t it?  Is that what this parable teaches us?  Let’s think about some other common phrases that we learn in life: “First come, first served.” “Last one in’s a rotten egg.” We learn a lot very early in life about the value of firsts and lasts. We know what it means when we’re the first one picked for the team or, on the other hand, what it means when we’re still standing there alone at the end of the process. “My momma told me to pick the very best one and you are not it.”  There is nothing wrong with wanting to be picked. It is profoundly human to yearn for connection, for acceptance, for love. And that is what we are yearning for at our most foundational level (regardless of whether we’re 5 or 500), as we stand there in whatever group we may be in, waiting to hear someone speak our name.

But, there is a way in which this good, human desire can be perverted into something that isn’t much good at all. Messages we receive from the media, from our families, from our own, learned, inner voices, play on our perfectly good desire for connection and relationship by convincing us that in order to be loved or accepted, we need to focus on things, accomplishments, desirability factors, lists of good deeds, net incomes, personal appearance—and sometimes we even learn that we have to try to be something or someone that we are not… In other words, according to the worldly economy, I have to have something or do something or pay something in order to get attention or love. Further, we can end up feeling indignant if we have done everything we can do and still feel that we’re not getting the love and respect that we think we deserve or that we have “earned.” This is such a typical way of thinking—this quid pro quo economy—and, sadly, it is the way that so many people negotiate all the relationships in their lives. Sometimes folks even end up projecting this way of relating onto God: “God knows how hard I’ve worked to be a good person and to do the right things in my family/work/church/world. God is a God of justice and I will get what’s coming to me, I’ll get what I’ve earned, because after all, God helps those who help themselves…”

Think for a minute about the God of all creation speaking the words of the landowner in today’s parable, “Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?” Who are we to decide what God owes us? Our parable today offers an opportunity for us to recognize where our perception of divine right, of divine justice has become distorted.

It does so by its scandal. It isn’t fair. Unequal work for equal pay is just not the way it’s supposed to be. Because we know, of course, that life works on the merit system. And surely those people who were hired last in today’s story are just lazy right? When we look at the parable we see that, when asked, the reason that they have been standing idle all day is that “no one has hired us.” They hadn’t been picked. And all of a sudden we are faced with the unemployed, with those who have been waiting for an opportunity, with those who have been passed over. I think of those who I see regularly—the skilled workers who make themselves available for hire outside Home Depot or Lowe’s, just waiting for someone to need their help. I think of the “latecomers” to our land, immigrants in varying circumstances, but all desiring a better life of opportunity and safety. Of course we could name person after person, community after community who have waited, are waiting, for an equal chance in our world. The ones in our parable today are akin to all these; they are those who were left waiting. And when they finally are hired, there is only one hour of the workday left. They get paid first and a full day’s wage!  

And this is where the story really gets good:  those who’d been privileged to come to work earliest in the day are at the back of the line and they see what the landowner gives to these latecomers. Just imagine! They must have smelled generosity in the air and anticipated their paycheck with multiplication tables in their heads and with some bit of intensity! And yet what they receive is what they’d agreed to at the beginning. They complain to the landowner. And we’d expect that their complaint would include a demand for more money. But this is not what they say. Instead, their complaint is that the landowner has made them EQUAL with the latecomers.

I would venture to guess that most of us might agree that all persons are created with different gifts, but equal value. We might even say that God loves all people equally. After all, we are all members of ONE body, each with our own purpose and value and contribution to the life of the whole. But this story challenges us to get real about how we really feel and how we really act. What is it that makes us recoil at the idea that we might be considered equal with those who have worked less than we have, or those who have accomplished less than we have, or those who have arrived later than we, or those who—for any reason—we consider undeserving? Do we really want to be considered equal with those we think are lazy or immoral or who act entitled or distasteful in some way? We would do well to reflect on whether we, like the all-day workers in today’s parable, want to keep the distinctions between the good, the bad, and the ugly because it helps us feel secure in our worth, our lovability.

When we hear this parable and understand the implication that God’s grace and mercy and love are freely and equally given to all, we may feel threatened. Why?  Are we envious because God is generous? Are we angry that God doesn’t seem to work on a straight commission system? Because that would make sense to us. It would make sense to us if God helped only those who help themselves. But one of the most consistent messages in our sacred texts is that our God makes a habit of helping those who, for any number of reasons, are unable to help themselves. We who are so conditioned by our quid pro quo world cannot fully make sense of God’s truly free love and grace. We have a difficult time understanding that when God truly reigns, the last are first and the first are last. No part of our worldly economy prepares us for the fact that the last become first purely by grace. And nothing in our ego wants to accept that the first become last by pride and by greed.

I wonder whether we, who tend to live with a sense of scarcity (either real or illusory—“never enough” time, money, energy, etc.), also become fearful at the generosity of God because we’re afraid of limited supply. If there is a limited amount of love or mercy or attention or eternal life to go around, then we who have spent our lives seeking to be faithful are entitled to get our fair share. While we, for the sake of caring for ourselves and our families, may need to be painfully aware of budgets and savings accounts, God does not have limited resources.  God doesn’t have to hoard or save. God’s grace and love are unbounded! So you see, if God is generous with the last to get picked, it doesn’t take anything away from the first. If God has mercy on some poor soul it doesn’t mean that YOU will get any less mercy.

“Ah,” you say, “that is all fine and good, but grace is not MONEY.”  That’s true enough to a point, I guess. But in our world, God has left it to us to be stewards of the resources in our world—including money. And the challenge is to do that in such a way that we reflect the grace—the love and mercy—of the God in whose image we are made and whose Body we are. No one said it would be easy to sort out how best to make immigration policy truly loving and just, how to dismantle what the late, great Rev. Dr. James Lawson called the “plantation economy,” how to combat the dehumanizing effects of media that glorify the objectification of bodies and certain kinds of possessions as a sign of status, or how to replace manipulation and might makes right with mutual respect and humble service as our “go-to” relational modes. It isn’t easy, but the call is pretty clear if we are paying attention.

My grandmother was the consummate hostess. When she was still living at home and our family would go for a visit, she would spend weeks preparing for us.  Hours upon hours went into making ready the home, the food, everything. At mealtime, she’d prepare a table for us, using her best china and serving pieces. All I had to do was accept the invitation and show up and I’d get to feast at this table prepared for me. I never did anything to deserve the fine china and polished silver.  As a matter of fact, I usually missed her birthday and owed her, on average, about 7 thank-you cards. But I would get the good stuff anyway, just because… just because I’m me. Because she loved me.

We all know in some part of ourselves that the most true, the most alive, moments of life have nothing to do with the merit system that we spend so much time toiling over. We also know that there will come a time, if it hasn’t come already, when we will not be able to earn a wage or win a prize or get picked first because of our strength or talent or good looks, a time when we will not be able to help ourselves, a time when we will be idle because of circumstance. And today we are assured that even in those moments we will be invited to come to the table of grace that is set before us and all we’ll have to do is to dig in to the feast that is given freely, lavishly. And maybe for this moment, we will know in our heart of hearts that, while all people are not the same, we are all in need of the same God, the same life, the same love. Maybe we will be able to release our fear, our pride, our greed, just long enough to admit that we, every one, deserve love and mercy and opportunity—not because we’ve earned it, but because we are human. Maybe we will be inspired to make changes in our attitudes and practices toward those who are waiting for a chance. Maybe when we acknowledge that we have received free, unbounded, unmerited grace, we will be able to finally give thanks that God does not, in fact, live and love according to our merit system. Maybe, by the mercy and grace that we receive, we will be able to love and to show mercy “just because,” and insodoing, truly live into God’s call at last to put grace first.