Whatever Is Right; Sermon from September 21, 2014; Bethany UCC

Exodus 16:2-15

The whole congregation of the Israelites complained against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. The Israelites said to them, "If only we had died by the hand of the LORD in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger." Then the LORD said to Moses, "I am going to rain bread from heaven for you, and each day the people shall go out and gather enough for that day. In that way I will test them, whether they will follow my instruction or not. On the sixth day, when they prepare what they bring in, it will be twice as much as they gather on other days." So Moses and Aaron said to all the Israelites, "In the evening you shall know that it was the LORD who brought you out of the land of Egypt, and in the morning you shall see the glory of the LORD, because he has heard your complaining against the LORD. For what are we, that you complain against us?" And Moses said, "When the LORD gives you meat to eat in the evening and your fill of bread in the morning, because the LORD has heard the complaining that you utter against him--what are we? Your complaining is not against us but against the LORD." Then Moses said to Aaron, "Say to the whole congregation of the Israelites, 'Draw near to the LORD, for he has heard your complaining.'" And as Aaron spoke to the whole congregation of the Israelites, they looked toward the wilderness, and the glory of the LORD appeared in the cloud. The LORD spoke to Moses and said, "I have heard the complaining of the Israelites; say to them, 'At twilight you shall eat meat, and in the morning you shall have your fill of bread; then you shall know that I am the LORD your God.'" In the evening quails came up and covered the camp; and in the morning there was a layer of dew around the camp. When the layer of dew lifted, there on the surface of the wilderness was a fine flaky substance, as fine as frost on the ground. When the Israelites saw it, they said to one another, "What is it?" For they did not know what it was. Moses said to them, "It is the bread that the LORD has given you to eat.

Matthew 20:1-16
"For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. After agreeing with the laborers for the usual daily wage, he sent them into his vineyard. When he went out about nine o'clock, he saw others standing idle in the marketplace; and he said to them, 'You also go into the vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.' So they went. When he went out again about noon and about three o'clock, he did the same. And about five o'clock he went out and found others standing around; and he said to them, 'Why are you standing here idle all day?' They said to him, 'Because no one has hired us.' He said to them, 'You also go into the vineyard.' When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, 'Call the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first.' When those hired about five o'clock came, each of them received the usual daily wage. Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each of them also received the usual daily wage.  And when they received it, 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 scorching heat.' But he replied to one of them, 'Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? Take what belongs to you and go; 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?'  So the last will be first, and the first will be last."

Whatever Is Right

Today I am here on behalf of A Just Harvest, a non-profit agency that feeds a hot, nutritious dinner every night to an average of 170 people in Rogers Park.  Meals are provided by partnering institutions of faith, and our dinner is served by volunteers.  In my role at A Just Harvest, I listen to the stories of the people who join us for dinner every night.  And currently, I do a lot of knocking on doors, talking with neighbors about raising the minimum wage. 

Please pray with me; Lord, we am grateful for the opportunity to seek your voice in our lives.  May the meditations of my heart and the words of my mouth be acceptable in your sight, O God, you who are our rock and our redeemer.  Amen.

Earlier this week, I was lucky enough to visit CTS to hear Dr. Reza Aslan speak.  You might not know Dr. Aslan unless you are a theology nerd like me.  Aslan is a religious scholar who’s recent book, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, has been sitting at the top of the NY Times Best Seller list.  He also received some unintentional fame when, while appearing on a Fox News talk show, was challenged on his right to author a book on Jesus, since his religion is Muslim.  Aslan responded that he was a historian and religious scholar, and the book is first and foremost an expose on Jesus, the actual man who quite specifically lived in an ancient world called Palestine.  (And he thanked Fox News for the bump in book sales.)

During his speech last week, Dr. Aslan said that, historically speaking (that is, not using the New Testament as historical fact), the only facts we can verify about Jesus of Nazareth are when he lived, and that he was crucified alongside two bandits by the Roman Empire.  (Bandits – not thieves – is a better translation, according to Aslan.  Bandits was the word used to denote revolutionaries and insurrectionists. Crucifixion was used in Roman times to send a message of intimidation – a warning – such as ‘don’t you dare try this.’)

Aslan argues that while we can’t historically verify the happenings detailed in scripture, we can learn very much about Jesus of Nazareth through the context in which he lived, and in that context, what he had to say about it.  One of the facts we do know is the enormous wealth inequality that existed in his time.  Rome was a massive and hugely successful empire with everything from Roman Senators to a subsistent peasant class to slaves.  Jesus is often referred to as a ‘carpenter’ – and in our modern world, we envision a competent, middle class tradesman who does woodworking and building.  But the Greek word in the bible was ‘Tecton’, which was actually simply one step up from a slave.  A Tecton was someone who traveled village to village looking for day labor.  A tecton more closely resembles the men you see hanging on the street corner near Home Depot, waiting for a truck to pull up and hire them for the day.  A Tecton, Aslan said, was a status so low in Roman society that the word was actually used as a curse word.

A curse word.  Think of the words in use today to denote someone of undesirable status.  That was the man we call the Christ.

Because of this massive wealth inequality in his time, apocalyptic ideology and insurrection were common, and were commonly put down by Rome.  Historical records show that the city Suferus, not far from Nazareth where Jesus lived, was a site of rebellion and put down, quite brutally, by the Romans when Jesus was about 5 years old.  The city was burnt to the ground, and Jesus likely watched it happen from the high elevation of Nazareth only a few miles away.  Ten years later, when Jesus was probably around 15 and finishing his apprenticeship, Herod Antipas, the appointed ruler over the Galilee region who eventually beheaded John the Baptist, set about building a gleaming city upon the ruins of Suferus.  As this was the greatest building project in the history of the region, there is no doubt that Jesus was one of the mass of day laborers that flocked to that city looking for work.  Nazareth was a village made up of mud huts and no roads…and every day we can assume that Jesus walked the hour journey to Suferus, a gleaming city of mansion after mansion, to get a days’ wage. 

A days’ wage – the denarius – was barely enough to feed a family for that day.  It was a subsistence wage.  It was the kind of cycle that ensured you only ate each day if you worked each day.  That’s why we can see, in our Matthew scripture today, why these day laborers were still waiting around at 3 pm and 5 pm – still hoping to make a days’ wage to feed their family. 

What Aslan has uncovered in his historical research is that Jesus’ parable of the laborers in the vineyard, and his consistent focus on the poor, came from intimate knowledge of the poorest and the wealthiest of his time. 

Every day at A Just Harvest, we feed people – about half of our attendance – who are working for a similar subsistence wage.  These are working people who cannot stretch their minimum wage pay far enough to provide food for their family, let alone afford housing, medical care, car repairs, birthday gifts – the kind of life that we assume everyone deserves.  A life of dignity, right relationship, celebration – pursuit of happiness.  Not of subsistence. 

And every year we repeat the scenario of searching for funding for feeding these hundreds of people.  In our modern day of wealth inequality, we receive money from people who can write a $15,000 check, people who can write a $100,000 check, and people who can’t afford a checking account – but still give us $10 per month.

So in our Matthew text today, we have these workers standing around in the daytime, and the odd occurrence of the landowner – not the manager – coming round and offering them work, repeatedly.  The morning workers are promised ‘a days’ wage’, but the workers hired mid-day are promised ‘whatever is right’. Which, of course, sets up the basic point of the parable – what IS right?  By the end of the parable, we see that every worker hired was paid equally, whether they worked 1 hour, 6 hours or 12 hours.  It was counter to most people’s sensibilities then – as it is now. 

After all, the capitalist system tells us that we should value people according to their ability – and those in minimum wage jobs have the lowest value. Capitalism tells us that those with skills will get ahead by virtue of their ingenuity, but that the economy functions best with a flush labor force desperate for work on a subsistence wage – if you can call making $17,000 a year a subsistence wage in our modern day, that is. The minimum wage was never indexed for inflation when it was created in 1938, and reached it’s peak in the 1960’s – and has been declining ever since.

Jesus’ parable of the vineyard owner turns this value system upside down.  It seems to say that every willing worker deserves the dignity of a days’ wage, regardless of output, in the Kingdom of God.  At CTS, we like to call it the kin-dom of God, stressing not so much the importance of God as King, but as God’s people as kin.  The beloved, covenanted community of God. 

Indeed, we are given insight into the community of God in our first text from the Old Testament. I have a confession; the Exodus scripture today is one of my favorite scriptures.  We encounter the Israelites as they leave their slave conditions of Eqypt for the unknown ‘wilderness’ with Moses.  Egypt, in the time of the Israelites, was another example of a harsh, brutal society built on the labor of slaves and peasants.

From bible stories like Jacob, we know that the pharaohs often had so much wealth – in these times, in the form of grain and cattle – that much of it would go to waste in silos while entire towns were starving.  The Pharaohs operated with a mindset of scarcity – that there were limited resources in the world, and so the smart, secure, important thing to do was to store up as much as you could.  Even if others suffered.  Even if it was ultimately for naught, because the food decayed and was never used.  This mindset of scarcity begins to be all-consuming, and leads one to see the world as a zero-sum game; where others’ loss is exactly mirrored in our gain – and if others get ahead, we get behind– and so we hoard resources to ensure security, prosperity, a larger and happier kingdom.

We certainly see this mindset of scarcity in our own world, don’t we?  We hear it everyday in fear mongering about businesses leaving Illinois.  We see it in government austerity, when Congress cuts the budget for food stamps and demonizes the character of people who need them.  And we hear it– I hear it - in conversations about raising the minimum wage – that increasing people’s livelihood will cause employers to cut jobs, or require customers to pay more, or simply that ‘we can’t afford it’. 

In the text, we see that once in the wilderness, uncertainty and fear grip the Israelite community. Although they have been freed, liberated, from inhuman conditions of Egypt, but the future is unknown, and their anxiety prevails.  They begin to complain to Moses and long for the security of Egyptian food – even when it comes without human dignity. 

God responds that he hears their complaints, and will provide flesh in the evening and bread in the morning, if they will only trust him.  And sure enough, quails appear in the evening, and in the morning, a fine, flaky substance covers the ground.  This is the origin of the ‘manna from heaven’ – even the Israelites didn’t know what it was until Moses made it clear; this is the living bread. 

But God’s provisions came with conditions; there would be no hoarding of food. The Israelites could collect only what would feed them for one day - if they collected more, it would rot by morning.  God was challenging the Israelites to break out of the scarcity mentality of Egypt, and to learn a new way of living that required trust and sharing, and would manifest in abundance.  God was challenging the Israelites to see themselves as a covenanted community, first and foremost, where all can eat with dignity until their stomachs are full.

God’s message is there is no scarcity. God urges us to trust, and live into a mindset of abundance in all things.

At A Just Harvest, we have been inviting congregations to screen Robert Reich’s documentary, “Inequality for All.” Reich is an economist who was the Labor Secretary under President Clinton, and I see in his movie this contrast between a mindset of scarcity versus a mindset of abundance.  Reich talks about the differences of a ‘vicious economic cycle’ versus a ‘virtuous economic cycle’.  In the virtuous cycle, a healthy middle class of workers who are paid well put more money into the economy, which in turn spurs economic demand, which in turn spurs tax revenue and investment in public infrastructure.  People live in abundance, and it multiples.

In the vicious cycle, cuts prevail.  Stagnant wages in the face of inflation mean people buy less, which spurs more layoffs, which spurs less tax revenue, tighter government budgets, cuts in income supports, and less investment in the public good.  Workers struggle to make ends meet and people have to pay more for things like college education, which causes even less spending and higher personal debt.  Sound familiar?  In the vicious cycle, people are gripped by a mindset of scarcity, and it multiples. Or subtracts, in a manner of speaking.

In a world where we discount the need for every member of the community to feed themselves with dignity;  insecurity, anxiety and fear prevail for all.  If our loss is their gain, then we must hoard every bit of manna we can to protect ourselves.  But, somehow, that doesn’t lead to abundance.

Reich’s point is the economy is not a zero-sum game.  Counter-intuitively, it more closely resembles God’s multiplying manna from heaven.  Investing in the public good of education, infrastructure, and higher wages lifts all of the community.  Supporting a policy that says all workers deserve enough to live on – a living wage – does not mean that others will have to sacrifice, because when you put money in the hands of people who live check to check, they immediately put it back into the economy, which generates more consumer demand, turning the cycle into the positive rather than the negative.  But more importantly, it preferences the principle of whatever is right – that investing in people’s economic well-being is right, and trusting that principle first and foremost mirrors God’s covenant with community.

Don’t be mistaken, I know we are living in a complicated world where jobs can be scarce, budgets are tight, and wealth does seem to have the ability to fly away – to multinational corporations and far away countries.  But if we don’t begin with the basic principle of trust in every person as a member of God’s community, that each person deserves a days’ wage that allows them the dignity to support themselves, then we are buying into the mindset of scarcity. The covenant with Yahweh asks that we make decisions that care for community regardless of our sense of security, knowing that our well-being is connected to theirs.  God’s request, in Hebrew times and rearticulated through Jesus’ ministry on earth, is that we live into a mindset of abundance that values the last as well as the first.  That we trust that we can respond compassionately to each individual within our community – and in fact, that compassion, that manifestation of God’s love for creation, will multiply readily into abundance.  And then we will be a little bit closer to bringing forth the kin-dom of God on earth. 

Amen.