The Office of the Keys: Who Can Forgive Sins? (Copy)
The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard: God's Generous Grace for All (Matthew 20:1–16)
Sermon by Pastor James Huenink Scripture: Matthew 20:1–16 (with Matthew 19:16–30)
Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
God's Generosity in the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard
We have a very generous God, the God who gives us the parable today from Matthew chapter 20. How amazing is it that the generosity of God goes out to those who are part of His kingdom, a short time and a long time? That's what the parable is all about.
Jesus tells us that the kingdom of heaven is like a master who went out to hire workers for his vineyard. He begins in the morning and hires them for a denarius. Then, throughout the day, he goes out and finds more workers. Over and over and over again he hires more people, and as the day goes on, he simply tells them, "I'll give you what is right." So they go out and work, and at the very end of the day, he lines them up, and the foreman gives them their wages. The people who worked only a couple of hours get a denarius, but so does everybody else. Everybody gets the same pay, from the last to the first, all the way through the whole day.
Why the Workers Grumbled: Our World Pays by the Hour
There's some grumbling, because the people who started work in the morning get the same pay as the people who worked only a few hours. And I bet you get that, don't you? We all get the idea that someone who works more should get more money, and someone who works less should get less. We also get that people who are more skilled should get more, and less skilled less. That's how our whole world works, doesn't it? We have hourly wages for a reason. People get experience and seniority, and their wages go up. They punch the clock, and the more hours you work, the more money you get. It's all about that when we talk about our labor.
So we totally get why those workers would be upset. The ones who were there all day long, with the sun on their backs, the scorching heat, the labor, all of it, get the same wages as the people who only worked in the afternoon, or even in the middle of the day.
Now, this is of course not about your wages, or what your workplace should be like, or whether your managers are good managers. You likely would not get a lot of employees working the whole day if you paid everybody the same amount. They'd sit in the marketplace and say, "Don't worry, I'll be here at 4 p.m. when you want to hire me then."
This parable is about the generosity of a God who gives to all who come to Him. Whether you are brought into the kingdom of God as a child, as a baby, baptized into the grace of God, or whether you convert on your deathbed, God gives His gift of grace to all who believe in Him. There is no difference. It is all a generous gift, won by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
The Context: Peter's Question, "What Then Will We Have?" (Matthew 19)
This parable was given to the disciples to help them understand how the kingdom of God is different from the rest of the world, in its rewards and in the ownership of God's people. It comes as a response to something Peter says.
Jesus is interacting with the rich young man. He comes up to Jesus and asks what he must do to inherit eternal life. They go through the commandments and all of that, and then Jesus says, "You lack one thing; sell everything you have and follow me." When the man goes away sad, Jesus turns to His disciples and says, "How difficult is it for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." The disciples ask, "Who can be saved?" Jesus replies:
"With man it is impossible; with God everything is possible."
— Matthew 19:26
And Peter says:
"See, we have left everything and followed you. What then will we have?"
— Matthew 19:27
Peter is wondering what their reward will be for being first, the Twelve, the ones who left everything and followed Jesus. Peter left behind a wife and a house and a business and everything else. What will their reward be?
Here's how Jesus responds:
"Truly, I say to you, in the new world, when the Son of Man will sit on His glorious throne, you who have followed Me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel, and everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands for my sake will receive a hundredfold and will inherit eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and the last first."
— Matthew 19:28–30
The Last Will Be First: Grace Without a Vesting Period
This parable is an explanation of what Jesus means. Peter and the Twelve do not get more ownership in the kingdom of God, more reward, more grace, more gifts than those who would follow them. The people who have been in the church their whole lives don't get any more than those who are brought in only recently. Notice how Jesus ends the parable:
"So the last will be first, and the first last."
— Matthew 20:16
The divine generosity of Jesus is not like earning in the world. The retirement plan of the church does not have a vesting period. You do not have to wait five years before you can get this plan given to you. There is no qualifying section, no probationary period. All of us are given the grace of God, no matter what. We are given this amazing gift right upon entering His kingdom, and whether you've been here forever or only a short time, the reward is the same. Christ raises you from the dead on the last day to give you eternal life. The first are last, and the last first.
I think each one of us gets that, right? We look into our congregation and we say, "Hallelujah! God does not give based on our time in the church, based on how many boards we join or how often we serve. He gives based on Christ and His generosity." The Master is generous with what He gives us. We all have an equal share in the kingdom of God, an equal gift given to us.
Where that becomes a challenge, though, is what happens when we have to live that out in our congregations and in our communities.
When the First Gentiles Joined the Church: Living Out Equal Grace
Let me give you an example of what this might have meant for the people who were first there, as the church was growing in the early days, when Gentiles were first brought into the kingdom of God. I want you to think about what it would have been like for those very first Jews when the first Gentiles showed up in your church.
Imagine you have been raised your whole life, you're fifty or sixty years old, and all of a sudden Jesus ascends into heaven, and everything changes. You've been told you can't eat with those Gentiles, can't go anywhere near them. When you go out to the marketplace, you've got to wash off their uncleanness at home before you can even put your own food in your mouth. You've got all the rules, all the traditions. To be a good person, you have to do all of those things, and in the Christian church, they continue doing them because this is how we've always lived. This is what we've always done.
And then Peter goes and eats with Cornelius, the very first Gentile Christian in the book of Acts, and all of a sudden all the rules are changed. Peter is eating with a Gentile. All these new people come in and join the church, and they're one with us in Christ, and they don't have to get circumcised. They don't have to be clean. They don't have to go to the temple. They don't offer sacrifices. There's no Passover or Tabernacles or Hanukkah. They're not doing any of these things. How crazy is that?
And it's not a doctrinal thing. It's just that they're weird and different, and all the things I'm used to aren't happening anymore. All my ways and habits and practices, even the way they arrange their families, is weird. That would have been tough on them, and we see it early on, even in Jerusalem, when the Greek-speaking widows and the Hebrew-speaking widows are in a fight over language.
Galatians and Ephesians: "We Are All One in Christ"
Very early on, we see this conflict in the Bible. The book of Galatians is all about how you let the Gentiles into the kingdom of God. Do they have to be circumcised? Do they have to follow the food laws? All that sort of thing. We're welcoming these Gentiles into our church. How much do they have to be like us? And Paul tells them we're made one. The law has been fulfilled in Christ, and we are one in baptism:
"There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."
— Galatians 3:28
It meant they kind of had to get used to each other, Greeks and Jews and Romans and Gentiles and all these people moving in the same church. For the Jews, it would have been a new thing as Paul was writing Galatians. We think Ephesians might have been a letter that came a little later. Paul has been out doing his thing, and the Jews have converted, but many more Gentiles are coming into the Christian church, and all of a sudden the Jews are outnumbered by the new people, and everything is changing even more. They used to be in charge. They used to sing their songs and have their thing, and now there are so many more Gentiles. What do you do?
Paul has to write to the Gentiles to say we are all one in Christ. The division is not there. We are built up together as one household. We have an equal share in the kingdom of God. Don't look down on those who came before you. We are all one together. That's a tough thing for a community, whether it was the church in Ephesus or the church in Galatia, or even communities today.
Small-Town Belonging and the Church: Why Newcomers Can Feel Like Outsiders
As you all know, I grew up in small-town Wisconsin, and small towns are weird. Everybody knows each other, especially those really itty-bitty towns. There are some towns where you move in, you've got your family, you go to school, you grow up, and all these things are happening, and you are still the new person three decades later. Or if you buy a house, they give directions and say, "Turn left at Old Man Johnson's house," even though Old Man Johnson hasn't lived there for thirty years. These tight-knit communities are often hard for outsiders to be in.
That sometimes happens in churches, doesn't it? Tight-knit places where you're still the new guy many years later.
Cross-Cultural Ministry: Welcoming Immigrants into the Congregation
We've seen this in some challenging circumstances in Lutheran churches. There was a story of a church in an inner-city neighborhood, a church that had been declining for many years (white flight, all that stuff), and people were commuting into the congregation. The pastor told the story of how one day a Liberian immigrant showed up in his office and told him, "This is our church now. We're going to be coming here. Liberia is a Lutheran place; lots of Lutherans there. It's growing."
Sometimes when immigrants come, they come over as a whole big group, the whole extended family. On Sunday there were thirty or forty new people who came to that church, and it was their church now. They joined the congregation, and the congregation celebrated. "Our church has doubled in size! How great is that?" Until they had to figure out what to do with a whole bunch of new Liberians, and how that would change the congregation, because they act different, and they think different, and they have different ways of doing things. They've come to America, but they bring their culture with them, their family, their work, and their ways of being, which are very different from the way we might think about doing things.
How do you figure out how to welcome them? How do you merge them into the congregation? How do you do it in a way that makes them feel welcome, too? That's the thing we have to ask if we want an equal share in the kingdom of God and want to be generous like our God is generous to us. How do we do that?
Eric Law's The Wolf Shall Dwell with the Lamb
A man named Eric Law wrote a book called The Wolf Shall Dwell with the Lamb, and it's a fascinating book that examines cultures, especially in the church, to help us understand how to do ministry across different people groups. One of the challenges for us is how unique we are in the world. By that I mean not just us, our church, but Americans.
Law examines this cultural interaction by looking at cultures in a couple of ways. One is their level of hierarchy: how much hierarchy is there in the congregation, in the culture? Another is access to power: how likely are you to simply reach up and say, "I'm going to do something. I can do this"?
Americans have low hierarchy and high access to power. It's a low-permission structure. When you go into a classroom and somebody has a question, you're expected to volunteer and say, "I have a question." If you have an idea or want to do something, you're expected to say, "I've got an idea," and we just kind of wait for people to do that. No one else in the world does that. We're the weirdos.
So when you have a community like that, and you bring in a whole bunch of Liberians, there's a challenge: How do you get them involved? The Americans were like, "We're just waiting for them to volunteer," and the Liberians said, "We're waiting for them to ask us to help." Just cultural differences that created some conflict.
Welcoming Muslim and Afghan Neighbors in Jesus' Name
So why am I saying all of this? It's a good question. We have just made a really interesting partnership with a group that does work with Afghan immigrants, and we're in the middle of a community with Chaldeans and Syrians and Muslims. What a joy it would be if our greatest dreams, our wildest prayers, were answered, and they started coming in our door. How amazing would that be? Muslims turning to Christ, receiving an equal share in the kingdom of God. We would rejoice.
But it also would mean we'd have to figure out how to make them welcome, wouldn't we? How they would feel welcome, and not how we would feel like we're welcoming them. That's a challenge in cross-cultural ministry, isn't it? Saying to people who are different from us, "We want to welcome you in a way that you feel welcome. We want to bring you in and empower you to be one of us fully." That's a challenge for any community, any place, and it's a challenge that, if our dreams are answered, if our prayers are answered (and I say hallelujah), we will have to face. And I hope so.
What's the answer? How do we do that? I actually don't know. I don't know if you know this, but I'm an American too. It's a question we'll be asking and trying to figure out as we welcome immigrants and Muslims onto our campus to say, "We love you in Jesus' name, and we want you to have an equal share in the kingdom of God with us." We're going to have to ask what it means to welcome them in a way that they see. How do we cross our cultural barriers to bring them into our congregation and empower them in Christ? We'll have to figure that out.
Our Generous Master: An Equal Share in the Kingdom of God
Because our Master is generous. He gives to all people the gift of God, no matter how long they've been in the church, whether it's been all their lives, or whether they turn to God in the last few days. We're all welcome in His kingdom.
In Jesus' name, Amen.