Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Brother Randy Greve, n/OHC
BCP – Proper 20 A - Sunday 18 Septembere 2005
Jonah 3:10-4:11
Philippians 1:21-27
Matthew 20:1-16
"You have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat."
Who is your "them"?
The Book of Revelation imagines heaven's heart as the great throne of Christ the Lamb. The faithful from all the ages encircle the throne and worship for all eternity. Any feeble attempt to imagine the unimaginable is dangerous, but in my mind's eye I see rows of saints rippling out from the throne at the center.
Is there order to anyone's place in the numberless masses, I wonder? Surely, I am prone to believe, the more pure, holy, and spiritual you were in this life, the closer you'd get to having a front row seat. After all, hadn't you earned it? In my seating chart the apostles would be closest. Next are the martyrs, then the great mystics, teachers, and doctors of theology. Behind them are the monks and nuns. Then the ordinary Christians - Americans first, of course, followed by the rest of the world's Christians - what there are of them. Way in the back are Bishop Spong and Karen Armstrong - they're in, but appropriately far behind me.
What would your seating chart look like? Who is your "them"? It may be interesting to reflect on who you would seat behind you and why. Of course I also enjoy naming those who I'd rather not be there at all. A friend defines Hell as the alternate choice for those who arrive at the gates of Heaven, look in, and say to St. Peter, "Thank you, but no. We're not in communion with them."
Placing myself within the world of this morning's Gospel parable, I realize that merely being called out into the vineyard is not enough for me. I'm not content just to pick grapes. I want to pick more and better grapes than anyone else. I want the other laborers - them - to see me picking more and better grapes. And I want the landowner to pay me what I'm worth - reward me for the indispensable worker that I am. I'll bear the burden and the heat of the day if I know there's a big payoff at the end. But for the average daily wage? I'm not so sure.
Being average and ordinary is my worst fear. Who was ever content with all "C's" on their report card? In what Frederick Borsch calls "blinding insecurity" I must be better than them. I yearn to know that the lazy, the sinful, the less enlightened and sophisticated, the "other" - is worse, deserves less, and cannot, will not have as much value to the landowner as me. Keeping the focus on the inferior latecomers and off myself allows me the smug comfort and arrogant detachment that my ego craves. I keep my "them" them.
Until I listen to the parable again and allow it to do its work. Then I can begin to see a new way of relating emerge - a way out of the "us" versus "them" trap. In the vineyard that is the world, we forget we're not the landowner. We don't define the terms. We don't sign the checks. We go into the fields and work. Work for the landowner. We gather the harvest before us as best we can, knowing that other workers will come and work in different parts of the field.
Some of the landowner's personnel decisions are mysterious to me, for sure. It's tempting to look around in the field and wonder, in the words of my favorite cocktail napkin, "Who invited all these tacky people?" Well, these tacky people have been called into the field just as I have and they are gathering in fruit as sweet as mine.
We are being shown how to move from us against them to a common vision of what our shared labor means to the landowner. Can I, can we welcome and value the worker who's different, who doesn't work like me, talk like me, look like me - those behind us in our heavenly seating chart?
If we hear this parable deeply and allow its truth to transform our definitions of in and out, for us and against us, us and them - we can celebrate our common labor in the one field. As we do that we get a glimpse, a hint, a taste of what will be when the kingdom has come.
In heaven, around the real throne, when we know even as we are known, we'll get our daily wage. And it will be sufficient, even good. We didn't have to be hired, but we were. We may have refused to work, but we didn't. We bore the burden and the scorching heat. Some bore more and others less. But in heaven we will finally be equal. We will accept the gift of being average and ordinary. We will not sit in ranks or rows. Grace has no seating chart. When our work is done. When we put down our baskets for the last time and enter into the day where there is no dawning, no sunset, no heat, no burden - will join the one circle - unbroken, undivided, around Christ the landowner. We will all have front row seats.
Br. Randy Greve, n/OHC
