Sermon on Matthew20:1-16

Pastor Jennifer Garcia

“I didn’t get what I deserved.” His voice rang through the warehouse that had been filled with folding tables and chairs and decked out with orange tablecloths and paper turkey decorations.

On the day before the Thanksgiving holiday at the Orange County Conservation Corps, the nonprofit I worked for before going to seminary, program participants would scramble out of the vans from their work sites, ignoring sore muscles and sweaty brows, eager for an early dinner of turkey, mashed potatoes, and Costco-sized pumpkin pies.

But silence fell over the warehouse when one of the field supervisors stood up and said, “I didn’t get what I deserved.”

Some of the people in our parable today didn’t feel like they got what they deserved.

There’s a way the world works, you know. That’s how it is now and how it was back in the first century.

People who are rich are powerful, and things in the world go their way. People don’t say no to people like that.

Except Jesus.

Right before Jesus told this parable, he had had an encounter with a young man who asked him what he needed to do to have eternal life. Jesus told him to keep the commandments, and the man said he did. Okay, sure.

So, Jesus told him

·       to sell his possessions,

·       give the money to the poor,

·       and then follow Jesus.

And the young man left sadly because he had a lot of possessions.

Then, Jesus told his disciples the infamous, difficult statement that it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for rich people to enter the kingdom of God.

The disciples knew how the world worked: people don’t say no to rich people. So, they were stressed out, worried that if this rich guy couldn’t be part of the Beloved Community, “then who can be saved?”

Jesus reassured them that all things are possible with God and that those who make sacrifices for Jesus’ sake will be part of the abundance of the Beloved Community.

Then, Jesus told the parable we just read, which closes with “the last will be first, and the first will be last.” There’s a reversal here, an upending of expectations.

The disciples had expectations about what people deserved based on how the world generally operates.

And the first workers in the story had expectations about what they and their fellow workers deserved. It wasn’t just that they thought they should get more. They were offended that they were made the same as the workers who had only worked for an hour, saying, “You have made them equal to us.”

They didn’t just want more than they were given. They wanted others to be treated as less than them.

It had become an “us” vs. “them” situation. The issue was that those lazy people over there are not like “us” and shouldn’t be equal to “us.”

But in the Reign of God, there is no “us” and “them.” There isinstead unity and wholeness.

In this parable, the landowner kept going out to find more people. The people who didn’t get hired the first or second or third time.

It wasn’t their fault that they hadn’t been hired. They had been sitting there since the early morning. When the landowner finally hired them, I’m sure they expected to earn what they “deserved”: about an eight of a denarius, because they had worked one hour instead of eight like the other workers.

But the landowner did something surprising and upside down: making sure that they also had enough to feed themselves and their families regardless of how long they had a chance to work. The landowner collected workers throughout the day, including those who had been left out and gave them more than they “deserved.”

God, too, collects people who have been left out.

And so does the Orange County Conservation Corps.Participants in the program were called “at-risk” young adults: 18-25-year-olds who had dropped out of high school, or had been incarcerated, or were unhoused, or had gotten into unhealthy relationships with drugs, or were young parents, or were emancipated foster youth—any combination of circumstances and choices that kept them from the futures we hoped for them.

This motley assortment of young people held their breaths as the supervisor started giving a speech before the Thanksgiving meal was served.

“I didn’t get what I deserved,” he began. “I thank God that I didn’t get what I deserved.”

He went on to say that he had deserved more time in prison, that he didn’t deserve the opportunities that had been given to him. He had been a program participant—one of those who had been left out—before being hired as a staff member.

He could have been hardened and embittered by all that had happened in his life. Instead, he responded to incredibly challenging circumstances with gratitude.

God gives each of us more than we deserve.

None of us live 100% in the life-giving way God wants for humanity. We hurt ourselves, each other, and the world around us—often grievously.

But God gives us grace, forgiving us every time, journeying with us as we learn to reconcile with and love our neighbors better. God invites us into the Beloved Community, full of left out misfits like us, where we get to love and be loved, regardless of whether we deserve it.

None of us gets what we deserve—thank God!

Instead, God lavishes us with more than we could ever hope for.God provides for us above and beyond what we deserve.

And out of gratitude and the assurance of our belonging to God, we get to share that love and abundance with those around us. We get to love other people more than they deserve. We get to forgive as we have been forgiven. We get to feed people body and soul. Thanks be to God!