Homily for Proper 20, Year A

St. Mark’s Episcopal Church

With thanks to many of you who have checked in with me about how I’m doing this first year outside of academia, I will acknowledge that it is both strange and wonderful to be living life beyond a syllabus-driven academic calendar.  I don’t miss having a stack of papers to grade every night.  I do miss my students, particularly the newness and enthusiasm of my doctoral students who were always eager to dig deeply into the questions they had come to this program to explore.  Many of them, like me, had spent time in social work practice and what drew them towards a research career was a nagging question that couldn’t be put to rest. They would come to their first research classes hoping to study and find The Answer.  I was always there to reassure them, with love, that the best kinds of research questions actually don’t lead to answers, but to more questions.  Hopefully, the initial questions lead to what I refer to as “The Question Behind the Question” which I’d term the “QBQ”  Getting to the QBQ is like striking gold: it helps us move beyond to the superficial, to get to the heart of what is important and meaningful that often stands in the way of the status quo that we’ve been observing.

Nothing goes to waste with God, so this week it was those memories of past fall semester research class lectures and discussions about the QBQ that seemed to come up for me again and again.  And as I read this portion of Jonah that comes after the famous whale incident, and then again as I listened to the parable that Jesus conveyed, I began to see a pattern emerging.  So, I invite you to a journey to the question behind the questions offered up in today’s readings.

Let’s start with Jonah.  Oh my friend Jonah.  The story most of us remember is that the prophet Jonah was called by God to go to Nineveh, a city that was at enmity with the Hebrew people. Instead of going to Nineveh, though, Jonah bought himself passage on a ship to Tarshish, hoping to be “away from the presence of the Lord.” Good luck with that, Jonah. God makes it known through wind, sea, storm, sailors who try to turn the boat around and eventually through a giant fish that Jonah needs to pay attention to this call from God. Perhaps grudgingly, Jonah goes to Nineveh after God calls to him a second time after the whale adventure, and he delivers the message of rebuke and repentance. The people and leaders respond to the message: they repent, they change their ways and they look to God.

All this brings us to today’s reading: God, who was the One who called the prophet Jonah to them out of love, sees their actions and removes the calamity that was to befall them. God recognized with love even the enemies of God’s chosen people; God sent a messenger and a message; when invited, they responded with open hearts. 

But Jonah is MAD.  In his anger, he directs a string of questions to God: “Didn’t you hear me when I told you from the beginning I didn’t want to go? Don’t you understand that these are evil people and that’s why I fled?” Jonah’s unspoken question to God is: “why don’t you just destroy them?”

And God responds to Jonah with a divine QBQ: “Is it right for you to be angry?”

Jonah doesn’t answer that question.  He is still angry.  And so, the process repeats: Jonah goes to a hill outside the city and builds himself a booth, still hoping to see God smite the people he loathes.  While he sulks, God provides a bush for shade and Jonah is happy, at least for the moment. He becomes angry again when a worm attacks the bush and a hot wind unsettles his front-row view of anticipated retribution.  In response, God poses the Question behind the Question more specifically to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?” And Jonah answers with a toddler-tantrum reply that is funny because my friends, we’ve been there too: “Yes, angry enough to die!”

God, the loving, patient teacher sees hope not only for the people of Nineveh but also with this prophet who has fled and failed in so many ways. And thanks be to God, that means God the patient and loving teacher sees us beyond our own angry utterances, too. I see what comes next as God handing Jonah the answer key as a study guide instead of marking his failure with a red pen: if you care so much about a bush you didn’t even plant as to be angry about it withering, then why wouldn’t I care about this city filled with the lives of people and animals? 

Jonah never responds to that question in the Biblical text.  Perhaps it’s because God’s question gets to the heart of the matter which he cannot escape: God’s mercy and grace extend far beyond our human capacity to love and understand. True for Nineveh. True for Jonah. True for us, even when we’re at our angry worst.

Our Gospel lesson offers us a second case study in the divine QBQ, in the form of a parable.  If I were taking an anonymous poll at the end of this parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard, I might force a response by asking a yes/no question, “was the vineyard owner just in his actions?” I won’t ask for a show of hands. Instead, I might invite us to listen to the discord that we feel in our bodies and minds when forced to answer “yes” or “no” to that question, especially when the parable begins by saying, “the Kingdom of God is like…”  Of course God is just so we want to say “yes.” But this parable, as it lands on our ears, doesn’t seem like an example of justice as we know it.  Instead of tossing out the question or passing over this parable, sitting in our discomfort helps us to see the QBQ emerging: How have we come to understand “justice?” Is our sense of justice based on a theology of God’s abundance? Or is our sense of justice derived through the culture in which we live?  Maybe that brings up yet another question: are there assumptions within our culture that are so much a part of the water that we swim in that like fish, we don’t even recognize it?

Perhaps speaking some of those cultural assumptions out loud will help us here: does longer, harder work make us more worthy? Are people who do less work less worthy than people who do more work? Should all wages be based on labor? Is observed idleness the fault of the people who aren’t working?  Are we right to be angry and feel  wronged if someone who does less than us makes more than us? 

These cultural assumptions lead to deeper questions, too:  Does money define our value, and should it?  Is what we earn really “ours”?  Are merit and deservedness the best ways to determine how we distribute money entrusted to us, either through work or through charity?

Sometimes seeing the water we swim in makes our eyes sting a little.  

What if, like Jonah, we’re so busy swimming in the water of who-deserves-what that we find ourselves fleeing away from God’s mercy and grace because it is so lavishly generous that it seems unfair?

We don’t always see like God sees: we see from our own perspectives and our own vantage points and our own cultural norms.  If we’ve been working hard, we want to see hard work valued.  If we see ourselves as one of the good ones, we want to see the bad ones…often, the ones not like us…punished.  We can quickly assign our daily frustrations with a person’s actions to a group to which that person belongs or an identity that they hold which is how prejudice forms.  We can begin to see the world through a series of binaries: yes/no; good/bad; deserving/undeserving and fail to see the beauty and complexity in every human being.

What if the Vineyard owner knows something we don’t?  What if the laborers in the marketplace at mid-day tend to be those who were caring for family members and couldn’t get there first thing in the morning?  What if those at the end of day were the ones who never got offered work because they weren’t the “right” gender, or age, or size, or shape or color or personality?  What if the end of day had some particular tasks that were just right for those whose neurodiversity or uniqueness helped them see what others had missed?  What if we had never even noticed the pitifully low wages of day laborers in the first place, let alone the differences between their daily wages? What if and what if? 

At the end of his parabolic lesson, Jesus also gives those who are listening the answer key for further study.  It begins with the Vineyard owner’s question to the upset laborer: “Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?” which the hearers and all the rest of us can shrug off with a superficial, “sure, of course…that’s what money and power gets you.” 

Astutely, Jesus the teacher moves the story from that superficial question to the Question behind the Question: Or are you envious because I am generous?

That is the question on which we’re invited to study, too. An encounter with the realm of God knocks apart the cultural assumptions of worthiness and possession that we carry like burdens in this world. God who is generous with grace and abundant with mercy sees us in the fullness of our potential rather than the limitations of our lives.

God’s generosity cuts across the divisions that we draw, the limitations that we see, the biases and prejudices with which we are inundated and which keep us from seeing the fullness of God through the fullness of all of God’s people. Being present  in the realm of God makes our cultural assumptions irrelevant, because there is no room for that kind of division in an economy of abundant love and grace.

Whenever we celebrate the sacrament of baptism, we get a chance to put our study guide into practice in a kind of group oral exam: Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself? Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being? The answers that we are invited to give…you can even pick up the BCP and find them on pp. 304-305…are the foundations of our new life in Christ: “I will, with God’s help.”

And each time we come together for this holy meal, our Holy Eucharist of transformation from our individual selves to becoming the Body of Christ, we are brought into the realm of God’s abundant grace, mercy and love. We are not the owners but rather the caretakers of our lives, our work, our possessions, our neighborhoods, our communities, our world: with God’s help. 

God’s vision is beyond our own; God’s mercy exceeds our judgmentalism; God’s grace is so lavish and abundant that we ourselves and all others are seen and loved far beyond our faults or the worst thing we’ve ever done, to paraphrase activist and Just Mercy author Bryan Stevenson.  If we’re still at the end of the lesson asking who is worthy…or even who is right…we are still stuck on the superficial questions. But we have the study guide, the lessons, the Holy Word. We are invited through these stories and many others to be transformed by our loving God’s ultimate QBQ, our invitation to life in Christ: will we open our hearts to the unfathomable magnitude of God’s love and grace poured out for us, and for all?

We’re invited to that table, and to that holy transformation.