Annoying Grace

Text: Matthew 20:1-16
Other texts: Jonah 3:10-4:11

A blessing is a favorable outcome. When we ask for God’s blessing, we ask God to contribute to a favorable outcome. When we sit down to eat, we say a blessing (which is also called “grace,” and I’ll talk about that in a minute). Bless this food, we might say. Meaning make this food be good for us, keep us healthy, gives us energy for life. It doesn’t mean transform this food into superfood. When we ask for a blessing of some tangible thing, like a new house, we are asking that God make our time here good, that what goes on here be full of joy and not sorrow. Or bless this new endeavor, meaning make it go well, be prosperous, give pleasure to those involved.

When we do receive favorable outcomes, we say we are blessed. This church is blessed these days with lots of young children and new babies. I’ll talk about that in a minute, too.

Blessings are gifts from God. A blessing is a gift. That means you get it for free. You do not have to earn it. A blessing is not a reward for something. Not a reward for special service or for good deeds or for being a person of good character. Blessings are given by God freely and extravagantly. Thank God for that. You can do bad things, think bad thoughts, plan bad schemes, and still be blessed, still get a blessing.

It is annoying. At least it is annoying to the workers in the story we just heard in today’s Gospel reading. Some of the workers put in a full day’s hard work. Some of them put in a half day’s work. Some hardly worked at all. At the end of the day, the landowner pays everyone the same. Not the same per hour, the same total. It does not seem fair

It is clearly not fair. Fairness would be everyone gets paid according to his or her effort, or time spent, or grapes picked. The workers who work harder or better or longer deserve to get paid better. That’s what they think, and that’s what we think too.

The landowner says, reasonably, that each person had made a deal for a fixed amount of money. A deal’s a deal. That may be so, but arguing the legality of employment contracts is not what this parable teaches. What this parable teaches is that God is not fair. That what you deserve and what you get are unrelated.

God is generous. The complaint of the early workers is not that they got too little but that the others got too much. The first workers were the stars, the type-A workers, the ambitious ones. What they don’t like is that the later workers were made equal to them. They were treated the same. “You have made them equal to us,” they say. It is not right, they say. You have no right to pay the others what we got. You are too free with your blessings.

This giving of undeserved blessings is what the church calls grace. God’s grace is God’s blessings that we get just for being a person. A free gift. When we say “grace” at meals, we are thanking God for the gift of life and the food that makes it possible. The words in Greek—which is the language of the New Testament—the words in Greek for grace, for gift, for pleasure and joy, and for thanks all come from the same word.

This church is in the midst of lots of baptisms. Baptism is one of the two sacraments in most Protestant churches. The other sacrament is Holy Communion. A sacrament is not just something that is holy and spiritual and with which God is involved. Lots of things are holy and spiritual, and God is involved with most things in life. The official definition of a sacrament is something that has a physical element (like water in baptism and food in the Lord’s Supper), is something that Jesus said we should do (“go and baptize” he said, and “do this”—share this meal—he said), and it is a means of grace. This last phrase—means of grace—is church jargon.

Sacraments do not provide grace. This notion is central to Lutheran thinking. Sacraments are not something that people do to earn or merit God’s favor. A sacrament is not a transaction. People have God’s favor already. Baptism is not, therefore, a requirement to gain God’s favor, in this life or the next.

Sacraments are a vehicle for God’s blessings. In the sacraments we are made mindful of God’s gifts. The sacraments are like a spiritual UPS truck. They are “means” of grace as in “conveyance” of grace. They are especially good at delivering God’s grace, but they are not the only way. The sacraments themselves are a gift, a way—a means—for God to say: you and me? We’re cool.

In the sacraments God has promised to be especially available, so to speak. We conclude that to be true because Jesus told us we should observe these particular sacraments. Not because God requires it of us, but because we need them. Just as we need food or air. Without the sacraments we are not condemned, but we might go around hungry and short of breath.

Thinking that we can make God favor us by doing something that God likes is a way of hoping that we can persuade God to do what we want. It is a way of trying to control God. I’ll do this good thing that you want and then you, God, you’ll do this thing that I want. But first of all, it seems that God does not work like that. And second, what we want and what God wants do not always line up.

God favors justice. I’ll pay whatever is just, says the landowner. And when the workers complain, he says that he is being just. What the workers want is fair compensation, but fair compensation is not God’s interest here. God as often as not favors generosity. The workers are envious, which is the opposite—envy is the opposite of generosity. When God changes God’s mind, which happens from time to time in the Bible, the change is usually in favor of mercy. So Jonah in the first reading is annoyed with God because God has been generous to the Ninevites. I knew it! says Jonah. That’s why I didn’t want this job in the first place. I knew you were merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. God’s blessings can make us angry. But God chooses to give them anyway. You see with an evil eye, the reading says, what is good. “I want to do this,” God says.

Am I not allowed to be just? says the landowner. Is not God allowed to want mercy and justice? Am I not allowed to save the people of Nineveh? God asks Jonah.

We judge others by our standards. But fortunately for us, God listens to us about as well as the landowner listened to the workers and as well as God listened to Jonah. They complain that God is unfair.

God is unfair. Where we would be envious, God is extravagant. God is free with blessings because God wants to bless us. We are favored just because we are. It is God’s grace.