California Zebras & Grace

 

Jonah

Matthew 20:1-16

 

           

 

 

With all the jitters that hit the economy this past week, wouldn’t you know that today’s Gospel reading would be a story about a very bizarre economic policy that goes against everything we know about sound business management principles. To make the story even more disturbing, it is God who carries out this strange policy.

 

            If we’re honest, we have to admit that we’re probably on the side of the workers here. This is blatantly unfair. If you had been working in the fields all day, and someone comes in just before quitting time, and you find that they get paid the same as you, wouldn’t you resent it? Is that any way to run a business?

 

            In struggling to make sense of this, I remind you again of the basic rule of stories, metaphors, and analogies. There is a yes and a no to each of them. The yes is the point of the story, the no are the details that are there only to advance the plot. Find the point of the story and don’t get side-tracked by the details.

 

            Jesus did not tell this story as a seminar in how to run a business, or conduct labor negotiations. He told it to reveal something about the nature of God.

 

            So what does it reveal?

 

            When we were out in California in June, the boys and I were riding up the coast on highway 1 in the middle of nowhere. As we’re looking out over the open hills we saw something that made us do a double take. Standing out in the middle of thousands of acres of grassland is a small herd of zebras.

 

            Wait a minute; we’re in California. There are no zebras in California. They’re African animals. There were no wild animal parks anywhere in the area. Why are we seeing zebras out in the wild in California?

 

            It turned out that we were within a few miles of the Hearst Castle, the 165-room  retreat of newspaper tycoon Randolph Hearst. Hearst liked to spend his money in extravagant and bizarre ways. So in addition to constructing his own airport and a swimming pool lined with pure gold, he brought in all kinds of exotic animals. When he ran into money problems, he could not longer keep up the mansion, and he just turned many of the animals loose. The zebras survived, and more than 60 years later, the wild zebra herd is still there.

 

            Hearst was an example of the fact that, when someone has more money than he knows what to do with, there’s no telling what he’ll spend it on. There’s no accountability; it’s his money, he can do with it what he wants.

            One interpretation of this story in Matthew is that it is about God’s will and power and our obedience to that will and power. Since God owns everything that is, God can do with it what God wants. In the Gospel story the landowner responds to complaints about the unfair pay scale by saying, “I paid you the wage you agreed to. If I want to give the man who was hired last the same as I gave you, don’t I have the right to do what I want with my money?”

 

            The moral then, seems to be, the ways of the Lord are inscrutable, far beyond us mere mortals. God is God and can do what God wants with creation, and who are we to question it.

 

            My problem with that is, why would God go to the trouble of giving us this book of revelation if the point was to accept that we can’t really understand God or what God does? The Bible exists because God wants to be known, to the degree that it is possible. Jesus existed because God wants to be known, to the degree that we can understand God. If God’s point was “accept whatever weird thing I choose to just because it’s my world and I can do it,” there would be no point to this Bible. The God of the Bible wouldn’t be any different from Randolph Hearst, or any pagan god of any primitive culture. This powerful, eccentric, and mysterious God wouldn’t change any lives.

 

            We can find a clue to what’s really going on in this story by reading the delightful book of Jonah. 

 

            Again, it’s easy to miss the point of the book by focusing on what it isn’t about. Jonah is not a biography or history. Ninevah was the capital of the mighty Assyrian empire. Assyria worshipped a god they called Asher, which is how Assyria got its name. There’s no evidence either in any other book of the Bible or any other historical, that Assyria had any kind of religious awakening where they dumped Asher in favor of the God of Israel. In fact, Assyria was the empire that came down and conquered Israel, destroyed it as a nation, and killed or enslaved most of the population, and then was defeated by the Babylonians.

 

            The story of Jonah is a tale told in once-upon-a time language. It is filled with hyperbole. The Hebrew word gadol means great or tremendous, and that word is used repeatedly in the story. Everything is gadol. A great wind, a great storm, a great fish, a great city. It concerns the greatest and most evil empire on the earth.

 

            The story pushes the limits of the human imagination and even goes beyond it to make a point. Jonah is a what if story? Could God show mercy and grace to the cruelest and most powerful enemy of his people? What if there was a way to make these evil villains repent and turn to God? After all the evil they had done, should they be allowed to get off the hook? Could a God of justice do that?

            And then, the story takes that a step further. Suppose God called you to go to those vicious archenemies of your people and preach a message with the purpose of saving them? Could you do it?

 

            Probably not.

           

            Jonah acted the way we would. He hated Ninevah with a passion and for good reasons. It was an evil place that posed a deadly threat to his people. Jonah did not want to see them saved, he wanted them destroyed. He knew that God’s patience had run out and that God was on the verge of destroying them. That’s what Ninevah deserved, and that’s what Jonah had been praying would happen. The last thing he wanted was to see them welcomed into God’s arms. What if he got them to repent now, so God would call off the punishment, and then in the next generation, they slip right back into their evil ways and come down to destroy Israel?

 

            Jonah represents all of us who want no part of aiding and abetting the enemy. He refused God’s command. He fled. A lot of strange things happened to him because he disobeyed God. He was brought low and made miserable, until he realized how helpless he was without God. He repented and asked God to save him. God did.

            So now Jonah has no choice but to go preach to the people of Ninevah. He does so, but grudgingly. He made it clear he was not a happy camper. He thought God was wrong, and he did what he had to do only under protest.

 

            So God gave him a little object lesson with the shade tree. See how attached you became to an inanimate object in the course of a few hours? Imagine how I feel about all these people who I created and nurtured and tended. Do you think I can just throw them away without fighting for them?

 

            In fact, Jonah, all I’m doing with Ninevah is what I’m doing with you. You blatantly disobeyed me. You deserved death for that. But I didn’t give up on you. I kept after you, saved you, and brought you back into the fold.

            That’s exactly what I’m doing with Ninevah. They have disappointed and angered me. Yes, they deserve death. But I don’t give up that easily. If there is any way I can save them and bring them back into my arms, that’s what I will do.

 

            After reading the Jonah story, the story of the fields becomes clearer. The story is not about fairness, about people getting what they deserve, or what they earn.

 

            It is about the giving of a gift. The people the landowner hired had nothing to do. They are idle, living pointless, purposeless lives. God goes out and finds them, and brings them in and gives them something worthwhile to do. He gives them purpose, a life that has meaning.

            That was the landowner’s goal. It was not that the landowner had a production quota to fill and needed people to pump out the product. The goal was to get people involved in the Kingdom of God. Some got in on it early, some came later. The point was that God never gave up on people. God kept going out and looking for more people to bring in. If there is any way God can save them from a meaningless existence and into new life, God does.

 

            If the kingdom of God were something we earn, the grumbling workers might have a point. But it isn’t. The gift of relationship with God, the gift of salvation, the gift of joining God in bringing new life to all of creation is a gift offered to all, whether they accept that gift as a small child or whether it happens on their death bed.

            Jesus’ story tells us something important about God. It tells us that God’s grace is relentless, that God is constantly seeking to bring us in. It has nothing to do with deserving or earning—God offers it to everyone, for no particular reason other than that’s who God is.

 

            Yet God is not a rich eccentric who acts in grace on a whim; it’s not something God does on impulse just because God feels like it, or because God can. Grace is who God is.

 

            How do we respond to this grace? By claiming we’re more deserving of God’s love than other people? Because we’ve been living in God’s grace longer and have been more active? No, the proper response is gratitude for the gift we have been given.

 

            This congregation has been a recipient of God’s grace in many ways. Recently that grace came in the form of a gift from the Eleanor Nelson estate.

             

            We didn’t do anything to deserve it. Very few people in the congregation had ever met Eleanor, and that includes me. I’m not aware of anything that Salem did for her in the past 50 years. The gift came out of nowhere.

 

            Yet that gift of grace was not a whim. She thought about it for a long time; before I ever came to this church, she contacted a member of our congregation to make sure Salem was still here. She gave the gift not because of what we have done, but because of who she was. A woman blessed by grace, who passed on that blessing to others.

 

            I have never been prouder of this congregation than I was last Sunday, when we voted to give a tenth of the Eleanor Nelson estate to others.

 

            I was talking with a pastor in our synod whose congregation recently received a similar gift a couple of years ago. He made a similar proposal that the congregation tithe the gift. The congregation voted it down. And ministry at that congregation has suffered because of that action.

 

            Like the early workers in the parable, they took their eye off the ball.

 

            The grace of God is not to be hoarded or begrudged when others less deserving get the same as we do. It is to be received thankfully and shared so that others, too, may know the joy of a life with purpose.

 

            Which is why we say every Sunday, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit by with you all.