St. Peter's By The Sea
The Episcopal Church in Narragansett, RI
September 21, 2008
19th Sunday after Pentecost
Can you remember the first dollar you ever earned, or your very first job? I’m not necessarily talking about a “real job” that includes W-2s and all that. I’m talking about being a kid and having somebody hand you money—not for your birthday or Christmas or losing a tooth—but for something you have done. Maybe you were a babysitter, or helped out with chores, or delivered newspapers. You could have been extremely young, long before you actually knew what you wanted to “do” with your life and were just happy to have something to do that someone was willing to pay you a few bucks for. I was. I was eight and my family was living in Temple, Texas, where we had just moved the year before. We had a kind neighbor who was recently widowed. She couldn’t have been older than 50, I don’t think. She had this beautiful dog, an Akita, named Joji. The woman worked late most days and so she asked me to come by each day after school and check on Joji. I would feed her and play a little with her. She was a trained guard dog, so I had to follow strict instructions on how to interact with her, so as to not trigger any defensive instincts. I took this work very seriously and never missed a day.
For going by each day and looking after the dog, I got paid the princely sum of $20/week. Think about that. In the mid-1980s, an eight year old getting paid $20/week! That was a well-paying job. And I saved almost every penny. I don’t think I possessed enough imagination at that age to spend that kind of sum. So I served as sort of a bank to my family. Anytime my father needed cash for business trips, he would come to me and borrow the money. I remember having a tight little roll of $20 bills tucked in my sock drawer.
So what did I learn from my first job? Well, at the time, the only thing I learned was that money grows on trees, and great jobs are right next-door. (Yeah, great lesson.) I can still remember thinking that with this job, I would always be flush. I completely and totally took it for granted, assuming that jobs like this were easy to come by. But inevitably, a year or so later, the woman—or as my parents used to call her, my “benefactor”—moved away, taking my free ride to college with her. It took years to unlearn what I had learned, to truly understand how incredibly blessed I had been for a time. With the gift of time and distance, I can now see what an uncommon blessing that job had been. I had no special talents or skills; I was eight years old, after all. I didn’t really earn the money I was paid, not in any real sense. That woman gave me a gift when she invited me to take care of her dog. The whole thing, as I look back on it today, was the picture of grace.
What did your first job teach you? Did it give you your image of money and work, or did you get it from somewhere else? Can you even remember learning what you believe about money and work, or have you always just thought that way?
Well, in this country, we hold in common a belief, or set of beliefs about money. They are the base of many of our views on work and wealth, and I would guess that no matter where you come from, or when you grew up, you have been taught to believe them. The first is that you if you work hard you get what you deserve. It’s the reason that ¾ of Americans think the statement “God helps those who help themselves” comes from the Bible, when in fact it was first uttered by Ben Franklin. It’s the belief that hard workers succeed, and those who struggle to get by must be deficient in some way, and are most likely just plain lazy. This belief stands at the root of our cultural addiction to work—and for many it is an addiction—making us one of the most overworked, stressed societies in the history of civilization. We have a deep seeded idea that we get what we earn, and we only earn what we work hard for.
And then what we earn is ours. That’s the second belief, which is reinforced by brokerage firms and investment banks who tell us to “Let your money work for you.” You earned it, so now put it to work, too. This is the very American belief that serves as the seed for the way we spend our money. I worked hard for this, we say to ourselves, so I have earned the right to buy this car, or house or whatever the thing is I feel the need to justify. This belief has gotten mixed up in our very western understanding of rights; that is, we have the right to do with our money what we want, because it is ours. After all, we worked hard for it. We earned it.
Today we heard a parable from Jesus that initially seems to be a story about fairness, and it flies in the face of what we might hope to hear from Jesus. A bunch of laborers are hired early in the morning by a landowner to work his fields. After a few hours, the landowner goes back to the same place and hires several more. Two more times the landowner goes and hires laborers to work in his fields, right up to the late afternoon. At the end of the day, when it is time to pay out the workers, he calls the ones who have worked the least over first and gives them a full day wage. Quite understandably, the workers who’ve been out in the sun all day long are upset by this apparent injustice. What are you doing? That’s not fair! They didn’t deserve that much money!
According to everything we know today, everything we have learned from our society, they were justified in their complaint. Those latecomers absolutely didn’t earn that wage. It wasn’t fair. They hadn’t worked nearly as hard, for nearly as long. When we put ourselves in the story and use our belief system that we’ve inherited from society, we would most likely be right there with them, complaining about fair business practices and wondering who we could sue.
And maybe that’s the reason the landowner pays the ones who arrived latest first. Because the lesson is not for them; they take their generous wage—surprised and delighted, I’m sure—and leave. If he had paid them last, like we all probably would have, no one would have realized that there was anything amiss in the wage scale. No, the lesson is for the ones who have worked all day, who showed up early and feel like they have truly earned what they get. Put another way, they feel entitled to something more because of what they’ve done. But Jesus is not out to reaffirm our mixed up notions about money. To them—and to all of us, by implication—Jesus says, “Are you envious because I am generous?”
The people who worked all day think that because they worked all day, they earned more. But the reality is that everything they get comes from the generosity of the landowner. They are so focused on the idea of making money, they can’t see that the very fact that they have a job all day is a gift from God, the fact that they make a fair day’s wage is a gift from God, that everything about their day has epitomized blessing. It has all been a gift. And yet they complain about others and what they have received.
Jesus is trying to tell the people who worked all day that didn’t “earn” anything. God’s system of economics isn’t like ours. We don’t have the things in our lives because we earn them. We have the things in our lives because God gives them to us. God doesn’t help those who help themselves, to contradict good Ben Franklin. God gives us what we have because God is generous.
We have this illusion that what we have is ours, that the money we earn is ours. It’s sort of like when I was a kid, when I had the illusion that I would always have that job feeding my neighbor’s dog, and I deserved the money she paid me. The reality was that the lady gave me a gift, the gift of feeling like I accomplished something and a generous gift of money. God is like this generous benefactor. God has graciously given us the ability to do these things—whatever it is that you do, be it fisherman or investment banker—as well as everything that comes from them. They are gifts, pure and simple, and not something we’ve earned. They’re Gods, not something that is ours.
When you finally understand this, it’s like a revolution in your soul. The envy and frustration that typically plagues our hearts melts away. You are filled with gratitude instead of jealousy, generosity instead of fear.
This change in perspective is not easy. It may take a long time to truly embrace and be the work of a lifetime. But when we can finally see that all that we have comes from the outstretched hand of the Almighty, we come a little closer to establishing that glorious kingdom of his right here on earth.
Posted on: Sun, 21 Sep 2008 12:44 pm
Category: Sermons