August 31, 2025 - Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost: More Than You Deserve

August 31, 2025  Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost
Ladue Chapel Presbyterian Church
Matthew 19:30-20:16
“More Than You Deserve”
Douglas T. King  

I am an only child.  This means I did not grow up with the wrangling that often occurs between siblings as everyone is measuring to make sure they get their fair share.  Perhaps that is why I am fascinated by the ways in which my friends with multiple children are sometimes flummoxed in the near impossible effort to make sure everything is equal and fair to every child.  I have heard stories of running out on Christmas Eve after discovering, in the laying out of piles of presents, that one child has one more present than the other.  But I also know parents who completely ignore these attempts to relentlessly even everything out.  They are known to respond to complaints lodged by their children with the age-old adage, “You get what you get and you don’t get upset.”  I am not in any way qualified to speak to which parenting approach is the most effective but sooner or later we all need to learn that everything is not divided up equally among us at the close of each day.  

Nevertheless, I would venture to guess that there is no one in this room who at one time or another in their life has not felt like those sun-up to sun-down workers struggling with the feeling that they were not getting their fair share.  And I say that recognizing that most of us have a level of privilege beyond what many people in the world can even imagine.  No matter how much we have, no matter how much we have been given, we often look around to see who might have more and ask why, to deleterious effect. Theodore Roosevelt once said “Comparison is the thief of joy.”

The workers that labored from sun-up to sundown were paid a fair wage for their labor.  In a world where not everyone could find work, they were blessed to have worked and been compensated appropriately.  On this Labor Day weekend we remember the struggles in this country for people to receive a fair wage.  And yet when those sun-up to sun-down workers went home at the end of their day, they felt not satisfaction but frustration. They felt cheated that those they deemed less worthy received the same wage. During the day, as the landowner keeps returning to the marketplace, there is never any indication that more workers are needed, just that the workers have no place to work.  The actions of the landowner appear to be driven by the needs of those seeking work, not the needs of the vineyard.  Obviously, this landowner has never stepped foot in the Wharton School of business.  This is clearly not a story about how to effectively run a profitable vineyard.  

If we presume the radically generous vineyard owner is a stand-in for the divine, what does it reveal to us about how God does business?

Matthew, who is not known for being subtle, bookends this parable with the idea of the first being last and the last being first.  He amplifies the scandal in the double-edged sword that can be found in God’s grace.  When we are the ones who are last, grace is a pretty good deal.  When we are the workers rolling in at five in the afternoon and getting paid for a full day’s wages, grace is generous and amazing.  When we royally screw up and God opens up the divine arms and welcomes us in the midst of our broken-ness and tells us we are loved and valuable and worthy, grace is a miracle of generosity. Grace is transformative and expansive.  When someone else royally screws up and God makes the same offer, grace can feel capricious and devoid of basic fairness causing our once compassionate hearts to shrivel and shrink.  Grace is this remarkably undeserved privilege.  The thing about remarkably undeserved privileges is that we love receiving them but we dislike seeing anyone else receiving them.  And this is where we need to remember that this parable is not some perfect parallel to our relationship with God.  The all-day workers in the parable have earned their daily wage fair and square.  They are being appropriately reimbursed for what they have provided.  None of us are capable of earning what God is offering us.  There is no regiment of right action that we can trade in as payment for the gift of life itself and the blessings and love of God we are being offered.  We are all 5 PM hires.  
The last shall be first and the first shall be last is an absurd, surreal and nonsensical statement.  It creates a vision of the world that might be painted by the love child of Salvador Dali and M. C. Escher.  And that painting might be called,“The Illusions of Entitlement.”  

In a town like Ladue we can believe we deserve to be first because we have worked hard and achieved much in this world materially.  We deserve to be first because of the amount of money we make or the amount of money we give away to worthy charities.  In a university town people may believe they deserve to be first for all they have done to add to the scholarship of the world.  In an area of deep poverty and violence people may believe they deserve to be first because they have suffered more than others.  People who show up here on a three-day weekend when they could be out playing golf may believe they deserve to be first because they are in church and listening to me blather on.  Just about everybody can come up with a reason why they should be first.  But the moment we believe we are entitled to God’s grace, our hubris drives us away from accepting God’s grace.  

While I was at Princeton I ran a food pantry out of a tiny church in Trenton.  It was not a particularly sophisticated operation.  There was no screening process.  People would basically line up outside of the church and we would hand out bags of food until we ran out. Unfortunately, we always ran out of food before we ran out of people who needed food.  To reduce the scuffling of people as the food was being distributed we started handing out numbers prior to distribution.  Of course, people started lining up earlier and earlier to receive the numbers.  With a limited supply of food and a seemingly limitless need for it there was no way to avoid having people jockeying for position every week.  I think that if I had gone out one day and started handing out food to the back of the line first, I would have had quite the scene on my hands.
 
Trenton is not exactly the kingdom of heaven, and for that matter neither is Ladue.  But wherever we live, we all want to be first, whether it is a food pantry line or the line at Starbucks.  Perhaps the reason we want to be first is that deep down we worry there may not be enough to go around.  In the case of the food pantry line it was tragically true, in other cases it may not be true but we are never quite sure about that.

My friend Carla Pratt Keyes shared this quote with me from the author Lynne Twist.

“For me, and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is ‘I didn’t get enough sleep.’  The next one is ‘I don’t have enough time.’  Whether true or not, that thought of not enough occurs to us automatically before we even think to question or examine it. We spend most of the hours of our lives hearing, explaining, complaining, or worrying about what we don’t have enough of…This internal condition of scarcity, this mind-set of scarcity, lives at the very heart of our jealousies, our greed, our prejudice, and our arguments with life…” (Twist, pp. 43-45)  And this has never been more true than it is today in our world.

With this mind-set of scarcity, the first/last, last/first thing can be deeply unsettling.  But in the parable of the vineyard it is important to note that there is more than enough for everyone.  My friend Tom Long writes this, “Everybody in the parable is tendered with the wealth of the kingdom; the deep river of providence flows through everybody’s life. God gives everyone a daily wage so extravagant that no one could ever spend it all.  A deluge of grace descends on all; torrents of joy and blessing fall everywhere.  And there these (all day) workers stand, drenched in God’s mercy, an ocean of peace running down their faces, clutching little contracts and whining they deserve more rain…The rush of God’s generosity bears away in its flood every rickety shack built on human schemes of merit.” (Long, pp. 226-227)

Indeed.  You and I stand poised to have our deepest thirst quenched, as long as we are willing to step out beyond the parched perspective of our entitlement.  In the presence of God we are all 5 PM workers.  And we will all receive more than we deserve.

Thanks be to God.  Amen.

Twist, Lynne, Teresa Barker, “The Soul of Money: Reclaiming
 The Wealth of Our Inner Resources,” WW. Norton & Company,
 New York, 2003.