The Unfairness of God
Sermon
Church People Beware!
Have you ever noticed how sometimes life just isn't fair? It's one of the hard realities we learn early on. No one has to wait for adolescence or old age to find it out. You can learn it in nursery school. Sometimes life just isn't fair.
Little brothers and sisters seem to get such special privileges. The things my little brother and sister got away with! There were times when I really felt like the prodigal son story was some kind of Jungian archetype for familial systems down through the centuries. Well, I didn't exactly put it that way when I was 15, but that's how I felt. It's the way older employees feel when young hot shots come into the workplace and the older ones get shoved out into unemployment lines. It's the way veteran athletes feel when rookies get drafted with multi-million dollar contracts while the veterans have been slugging it out at smaller salaries all these years. Some coaches even treat these rookies differently from the rest, giving them special privileges the way we sometimes do with our children or our employees or our students. Of course there was one coach who never did that. Once in commenting on Vince Lombardi's fairness, one of the Green Bay Packers noted that Lombardi treated every player the same. "He treats us all like dogs," said the player. Some coaches are fair, but many are not in their treatment of players, just as parents are not with children, employers with employees and teachers with students.
Sometimes that's just the way life is, which is in part the point of the parable of the laborers in the vineyard. Chances are most clergy and laity of congregations around America have never been migrant workers. If you have, perhaps you can hear this story at more of a gut level. But if you haven't, it doesn't take much imagination to figure how mad you'd be. Suppose you had signed on to pick fruit for eight hours at the rate of five dollars an hour, or $40 for the day -- a fair day's wage for a fair day's toil. You work right through the heat of the day without letting up except for lunch. While making your way to the paymaster at five o'clock, you stand in line behind someone who showed up for work at four o'clock and who had only worked one hour.
You watch closely and see that she is paid $40 for her hour's work which sets your heart beating in anticipation. Naturally, you figure since you worked eight hours, you're going to get eight times as much. But when you get to the head of the line, open your pay envelope and find only $40, tell me how you are going to feel. Maybe not in the south, but in big union towns like Pittsburgh or Detroit, a deal like that wouldn't last five minutes. The word would be out on that employer, just like that! I don't know about you, but I'd be pretty upset.
But sometimes that's the way things happen, isn't it? Sometimes life just isn't fair. So we try to deal with the unfairness, like the little truck driver, just a little guy, who had parked his semi at the highway cafe and had gone in for lunch. While he was sitting there perched on a stool, three burly motorcyclists came in and began picking on him, grabbed his food away and laughed in his face. The truck driver said nothing, got up, paid for his food and walked out. One of the cyclists laughed to the waitress, "Boy, he sure wasn't much of a man, was he?" The waitress replied, "No, I guess not. He's not much of a truckdriver, either," she said pointing out the window. "He just ran over three motorcycles."
You see, some handle the fairness of life by dealing with it directly, or at least indirectly, anyway. Others try to deal with it by just thinking positively. You know the type. No matter what happens to them, they always see the sunny side of things. Surely something good can come out of this. Like the boy who was overheard talking to himself as he strutted across the backyard, bat on his shoulder, baseball in his hand. Just before pitching the ball in the air he said, "I'm the greatest hitter in the world," swung and missed and said "Strike one!" Undaunted, he picked up the ball and tossed it up again and said, "I'm the greatest baseball hitter ever," swung and missed a second time and said "Strike two!" He paused a moment to look at the bat and ball carefully and with all the determination and positive mental attitude he could muster, he tossed it up again and said, "I'm the greatest hitter who ever lived," swung the bat hard, but missed it the third time. Immediately he cried out, "Wow! Strike three! What a pitcher! I'm the greatest pitcher in the world!"
That's what I call bouncing back quickly! Some deal with the unfairness of life by just thinking positively. Okay if I'm not supposed to do that, maybe I should be doing this or if I'm going to fail that way, maybe I should try it this way.
For some that works pretty well, at least for a time. Then life deals a blow that really lays us low, so low that it even brings the world's most positive thinkers down, even a Jean Valjean in Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. It usually comes when bad things happen to good people and they do and they will. The good do die young while the wicked sometimes live long and seemingly happy lives; the good do get cancer and suffer while the bad are often physically and emotionally healthy. The honest and upright do lose their jobs or their businesses, while the cheats and the liars seem to keep theirs. Sometimes life is so unfair that not even positive thinking can overcome it. Imagine trying to tell Job to think more positively about his situation. Try telling someone who's living on the street or someone whose loved one has just committed suicide because she can't take the cancer or the depression any more.
Sometimes life is so unfair we can't begin to understand it. And that's when we begin to question not just the fairness of life, but the fairness of God, which is what the laborers in the vineyard, Job, and the hearers of both stories, no doubt did. In fact, there are plenty of biblical figures who would be happy to join this parade. Here is Jeremiah: "O Lord, thou hast deceived me… Cursed be the day on which I was born!" Here is Habakkuk: "O Lord how long wilst I cry for help and thou wilst not hear? Or cry to thee ‘Violence!' and thou wilst not save?" Here is Joseph in the Old Testament dumped in the pit and sold into slavery by his brothers and Mary in the New Testament eyeball to eyeball with Gabriel or was it the Holy Spirit demanding to know what kind of mess God had gotten her into. The Bible is full of folks who would love to tell us about the unfairness of God.
Add to this list the litany of all those who don't buy the deathbed confessions of serial killers or Nazi war criminals or slave owners in the old South. What kind of God is this, anyway? It's just not fair! Isn't this what we would call the offense of grace? Don't some of us now want to change the hymn to "Amazing grace how sorry the sound that saved a wretch like him." Whether it's Job or Job's friends or the laborers who had worked all day or Jeremiah or Mary or you or me, sooner or later we have to admit that there at least are some times in our lives when we wonder about the fairness of God.
But -- and here is a crucial point of today's passage so don't miss it -- saying life isn't fair is not the same as saying God isn't fair for two specific reasons. First, God doesn't owe us anything and second, God's justice doesn't work the way ours does.
Saying life isn't fair is not the same as saying God isn't fair because first of all God doesn't owe us anything. On the contrary, we owe God everything: our time, our talent, our money, even our very lives. The lives we live are lives that God has given to us; even the breath, each breath that we take in at this very moment, the clothes on our backs, the food on our table, our health in its varying degrees, since some of us do have ailing parts but at least we're here; the gifts of mind and body to do the jobs we've been called to do -- all of that is the sheer gift of God. In addition to all this is the amazing grace given to us through Jesus Christ that is beyond all imagination. In the parable of the unforgiving servant (Matthew 18:23-35) the king forgave his servant's debt for 10,000 talents. In today's rate of exchange that would be about $10 million. That's a good way to think about grace. For our sin and for the trouble we have caused God, ourselves and others, at the check-out counter, the checker rings it all up and do you know what your bill is? It's the same as mine: $10 million. That's what we owe. And just as we are about to faint, God walks through and rips up the ticket, not only for those of us who have been faithfully working around the store all these years, but for the ne'er do well who walks in right off the street.
Our bill with God is so big we could never say "Hey God, you owe me. I deserve more of your grace, more of your love than the one next to me in the pew." The fact is, we don't deserve any of it because God doesn't owe us a thing. And when God doesn't owe us anything, we shouldn't begrudge God's acceptance of those who seem less deserving of God's love than those of us who have been slugging it out in the church all these years.
We shouldn't think of God's love lavished on no-goods and tramps and big time sinners as unfair because God's justice doesn't work the way the world's justice works. It's not so much that it contradicts the world's way of doing things as some separatist religious cults would have us believe. The justice of the world is good. We need it to order society. Both Karl Rahner, a Roman Catholic and David H. C. Read, a Presbyterian, believe that justice and love are within the purview of God. Both theologians highlight the importance of contracts in our world, of being fair, and of being paid what was agreed upon. When the laborers cried out, the master answered the outcry with a straightforward appeal to legality and justice. "Look, you got paid what we agreed on, didn't you?" No matter how unfair the world sometimes seems, God is fair the way the world at its best can be which is "each according to his due."
Here, the justice of the world and the justice of God correspond. God's love does not replace the justice of the world as some separatist groups would like to think. That's why this Thomistic and Calvinist approach is so realistic since it does not set God's justice over against the justice of the world. With the Thomist, Rahner, the social justice of "each according to his due" is not denied, but extended. Love and justice both come from the same source, but love takes justice further. So good laws and good contracts are good for the community, but God's love carries good laws even further. Social justice is given an even deeper meaning by God's incalculable mercy: for less than a day's work, more than a day's wage, is given, which does not seem fair by the world's standards but, in God's eyes, it is ultimately fair. So God is not only fair since we were paid what we agreed from the start, "each according to his due," but God is more than fair, "each more than she is due." This is the love of God transforming the justice of the world with what Reinhold Niebuhr called the transvaluation of values.
How does that transvaluation occur in our lives? It makes us less jealous of latecomers and upstarts in the faith. It makes us less jealous of third world countries which represent now the church of the future and the future of the church. It makes us less jealous of illegal aliens and unwanted immigrants and little sisters who get special treatment. The point of this parable, believes Helmut Thielicke, is that no one will ever be able to see the goodness or the fairness of God with a jealous eye.
Worldly justice is not wrong. It just doesn't go far enough. God's benevolent justice not only does not contradict good contract justice; it goes beyond it and transforms it and in so doing becomes a model for us to be more just and more loving in our relationships with others like the old Bishop in Les Miserables who forgives Jean Valjean for stealing the silver and, in fact, says that he gave it to him in the first place and asks him why he left the two candlesticks behind to the shock and surprise of everyone, including Valjean himself.
God's grace is God's grace. It is the same for everybody. Since we don't earn it, it comes to us in different ways. To some it doesn't mean as much since we've been trying to live the right way all along. To others who haven't done a lot around a church or for others who have perhaps wasted nearly their whole lives and come to church late, God's grace means a lot more. But the gift of grace is all the same.
That may seem unfair to you, but it's not because God is more than fair, for in Jesus Christ, God took all the unfairness of our lives and our troubled world on himself and suffered the unfairness of death on a cross that we might have life. In church or hospital or home, in Scripture, sermon and song, in Word and font and table, we meet this God who is not only fair but immeasurably kind.
In Jesus Christ we find that what seems to be the unfairness of God in saving those who don't seem to deserve it is in reality the grace of God for you and for me. So worry not about those who don't seem to deserve it. Remember that, except for God's grace in Christ, neither do we.
Remember that the kingdom of heaven is a gift. In a way we're all latecomers, aren't we? And in Christ it's never too late to come home to God.
Little brothers and sisters seem to get such special privileges. The things my little brother and sister got away with! There were times when I really felt like the prodigal son story was some kind of Jungian archetype for familial systems down through the centuries. Well, I didn't exactly put it that way when I was 15, but that's how I felt. It's the way older employees feel when young hot shots come into the workplace and the older ones get shoved out into unemployment lines. It's the way veteran athletes feel when rookies get drafted with multi-million dollar contracts while the veterans have been slugging it out at smaller salaries all these years. Some coaches even treat these rookies differently from the rest, giving them special privileges the way we sometimes do with our children or our employees or our students. Of course there was one coach who never did that. Once in commenting on Vince Lombardi's fairness, one of the Green Bay Packers noted that Lombardi treated every player the same. "He treats us all like dogs," said the player. Some coaches are fair, but many are not in their treatment of players, just as parents are not with children, employers with employees and teachers with students.
Sometimes that's just the way life is, which is in part the point of the parable of the laborers in the vineyard. Chances are most clergy and laity of congregations around America have never been migrant workers. If you have, perhaps you can hear this story at more of a gut level. But if you haven't, it doesn't take much imagination to figure how mad you'd be. Suppose you had signed on to pick fruit for eight hours at the rate of five dollars an hour, or $40 for the day -- a fair day's wage for a fair day's toil. You work right through the heat of the day without letting up except for lunch. While making your way to the paymaster at five o'clock, you stand in line behind someone who showed up for work at four o'clock and who had only worked one hour.
You watch closely and see that she is paid $40 for her hour's work which sets your heart beating in anticipation. Naturally, you figure since you worked eight hours, you're going to get eight times as much. But when you get to the head of the line, open your pay envelope and find only $40, tell me how you are going to feel. Maybe not in the south, but in big union towns like Pittsburgh or Detroit, a deal like that wouldn't last five minutes. The word would be out on that employer, just like that! I don't know about you, but I'd be pretty upset.
But sometimes that's the way things happen, isn't it? Sometimes life just isn't fair. So we try to deal with the unfairness, like the little truck driver, just a little guy, who had parked his semi at the highway cafe and had gone in for lunch. While he was sitting there perched on a stool, three burly motorcyclists came in and began picking on him, grabbed his food away and laughed in his face. The truck driver said nothing, got up, paid for his food and walked out. One of the cyclists laughed to the waitress, "Boy, he sure wasn't much of a man, was he?" The waitress replied, "No, I guess not. He's not much of a truckdriver, either," she said pointing out the window. "He just ran over three motorcycles."
You see, some handle the fairness of life by dealing with it directly, or at least indirectly, anyway. Others try to deal with it by just thinking positively. You know the type. No matter what happens to them, they always see the sunny side of things. Surely something good can come out of this. Like the boy who was overheard talking to himself as he strutted across the backyard, bat on his shoulder, baseball in his hand. Just before pitching the ball in the air he said, "I'm the greatest hitter in the world," swung and missed and said "Strike one!" Undaunted, he picked up the ball and tossed it up again and said, "I'm the greatest baseball hitter ever," swung and missed a second time and said "Strike two!" He paused a moment to look at the bat and ball carefully and with all the determination and positive mental attitude he could muster, he tossed it up again and said, "I'm the greatest hitter who ever lived," swung the bat hard, but missed it the third time. Immediately he cried out, "Wow! Strike three! What a pitcher! I'm the greatest pitcher in the world!"
That's what I call bouncing back quickly! Some deal with the unfairness of life by just thinking positively. Okay if I'm not supposed to do that, maybe I should be doing this or if I'm going to fail that way, maybe I should try it this way.
For some that works pretty well, at least for a time. Then life deals a blow that really lays us low, so low that it even brings the world's most positive thinkers down, even a Jean Valjean in Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. It usually comes when bad things happen to good people and they do and they will. The good do die young while the wicked sometimes live long and seemingly happy lives; the good do get cancer and suffer while the bad are often physically and emotionally healthy. The honest and upright do lose their jobs or their businesses, while the cheats and the liars seem to keep theirs. Sometimes life is so unfair that not even positive thinking can overcome it. Imagine trying to tell Job to think more positively about his situation. Try telling someone who's living on the street or someone whose loved one has just committed suicide because she can't take the cancer or the depression any more.
Sometimes life is so unfair we can't begin to understand it. And that's when we begin to question not just the fairness of life, but the fairness of God, which is what the laborers in the vineyard, Job, and the hearers of both stories, no doubt did. In fact, there are plenty of biblical figures who would be happy to join this parade. Here is Jeremiah: "O Lord, thou hast deceived me… Cursed be the day on which I was born!" Here is Habakkuk: "O Lord how long wilst I cry for help and thou wilst not hear? Or cry to thee ‘Violence!' and thou wilst not save?" Here is Joseph in the Old Testament dumped in the pit and sold into slavery by his brothers and Mary in the New Testament eyeball to eyeball with Gabriel or was it the Holy Spirit demanding to know what kind of mess God had gotten her into. The Bible is full of folks who would love to tell us about the unfairness of God.
Add to this list the litany of all those who don't buy the deathbed confessions of serial killers or Nazi war criminals or slave owners in the old South. What kind of God is this, anyway? It's just not fair! Isn't this what we would call the offense of grace? Don't some of us now want to change the hymn to "Amazing grace how sorry the sound that saved a wretch like him." Whether it's Job or Job's friends or the laborers who had worked all day or Jeremiah or Mary or you or me, sooner or later we have to admit that there at least are some times in our lives when we wonder about the fairness of God.
But -- and here is a crucial point of today's passage so don't miss it -- saying life isn't fair is not the same as saying God isn't fair for two specific reasons. First, God doesn't owe us anything and second, God's justice doesn't work the way ours does.
Saying life isn't fair is not the same as saying God isn't fair because first of all God doesn't owe us anything. On the contrary, we owe God everything: our time, our talent, our money, even our very lives. The lives we live are lives that God has given to us; even the breath, each breath that we take in at this very moment, the clothes on our backs, the food on our table, our health in its varying degrees, since some of us do have ailing parts but at least we're here; the gifts of mind and body to do the jobs we've been called to do -- all of that is the sheer gift of God. In addition to all this is the amazing grace given to us through Jesus Christ that is beyond all imagination. In the parable of the unforgiving servant (Matthew 18:23-35) the king forgave his servant's debt for 10,000 talents. In today's rate of exchange that would be about $10 million. That's a good way to think about grace. For our sin and for the trouble we have caused God, ourselves and others, at the check-out counter, the checker rings it all up and do you know what your bill is? It's the same as mine: $10 million. That's what we owe. And just as we are about to faint, God walks through and rips up the ticket, not only for those of us who have been faithfully working around the store all these years, but for the ne'er do well who walks in right off the street.
Our bill with God is so big we could never say "Hey God, you owe me. I deserve more of your grace, more of your love than the one next to me in the pew." The fact is, we don't deserve any of it because God doesn't owe us a thing. And when God doesn't owe us anything, we shouldn't begrudge God's acceptance of those who seem less deserving of God's love than those of us who have been slugging it out in the church all these years.
We shouldn't think of God's love lavished on no-goods and tramps and big time sinners as unfair because God's justice doesn't work the way the world's justice works. It's not so much that it contradicts the world's way of doing things as some separatist religious cults would have us believe. The justice of the world is good. We need it to order society. Both Karl Rahner, a Roman Catholic and David H. C. Read, a Presbyterian, believe that justice and love are within the purview of God. Both theologians highlight the importance of contracts in our world, of being fair, and of being paid what was agreed upon. When the laborers cried out, the master answered the outcry with a straightforward appeal to legality and justice. "Look, you got paid what we agreed on, didn't you?" No matter how unfair the world sometimes seems, God is fair the way the world at its best can be which is "each according to his due."
Here, the justice of the world and the justice of God correspond. God's love does not replace the justice of the world as some separatist groups would like to think. That's why this Thomistic and Calvinist approach is so realistic since it does not set God's justice over against the justice of the world. With the Thomist, Rahner, the social justice of "each according to his due" is not denied, but extended. Love and justice both come from the same source, but love takes justice further. So good laws and good contracts are good for the community, but God's love carries good laws even further. Social justice is given an even deeper meaning by God's incalculable mercy: for less than a day's work, more than a day's wage, is given, which does not seem fair by the world's standards but, in God's eyes, it is ultimately fair. So God is not only fair since we were paid what we agreed from the start, "each according to his due," but God is more than fair, "each more than she is due." This is the love of God transforming the justice of the world with what Reinhold Niebuhr called the transvaluation of values.
How does that transvaluation occur in our lives? It makes us less jealous of latecomers and upstarts in the faith. It makes us less jealous of third world countries which represent now the church of the future and the future of the church. It makes us less jealous of illegal aliens and unwanted immigrants and little sisters who get special treatment. The point of this parable, believes Helmut Thielicke, is that no one will ever be able to see the goodness or the fairness of God with a jealous eye.
Worldly justice is not wrong. It just doesn't go far enough. God's benevolent justice not only does not contradict good contract justice; it goes beyond it and transforms it and in so doing becomes a model for us to be more just and more loving in our relationships with others like the old Bishop in Les Miserables who forgives Jean Valjean for stealing the silver and, in fact, says that he gave it to him in the first place and asks him why he left the two candlesticks behind to the shock and surprise of everyone, including Valjean himself.
God's grace is God's grace. It is the same for everybody. Since we don't earn it, it comes to us in different ways. To some it doesn't mean as much since we've been trying to live the right way all along. To others who haven't done a lot around a church or for others who have perhaps wasted nearly their whole lives and come to church late, God's grace means a lot more. But the gift of grace is all the same.
That may seem unfair to you, but it's not because God is more than fair, for in Jesus Christ, God took all the unfairness of our lives and our troubled world on himself and suffered the unfairness of death on a cross that we might have life. In church or hospital or home, in Scripture, sermon and song, in Word and font and table, we meet this God who is not only fair but immeasurably kind.
In Jesus Christ we find that what seems to be the unfairness of God in saving those who don't seem to deserve it is in reality the grace of God for you and for me. So worry not about those who don't seem to deserve it. Remember that, except for God's grace in Christ, neither do we.
Remember that the kingdom of heaven is a gift. In a way we're all latecomers, aren't we? And in Christ it's never too late to come home to God.
