God is not "fair." Thanks be to God!!

I haven't been posting my sermons faithfully, and aim to do better, but wanted to share this one. I preached at St John the Baptist last week with my "other hat" on -- the one I wear as chaplain and spiritual care coordinator at William Temple House, where we serve low-income people.  St John's was doing a series on love, and I was pleased that they thought of the work we do at WTH as an expression of God's love in community.  

The lessons for the day:  Jonah 3:10-4:11; Psalm 145:1-8; Philippians 1:21-30; Matthew 20:1-16

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Some time ago, a Ted Talk by Frans de Waal was making the rounds. He's a Dutch primatologist interested in moral behavior in primates. The talk tells of a study which examined whether fairness exists in primates, and tells of an experiment being done with Capuchin monkeys.

The video shows a monkey in each of two cages side by side (Capuchin monkeys live in groups, so they knew each other) and they are given the same task to do and then given a reward if they do it, in this case a bit of cucumber.  They show themselves perfectly willing to do this task again and again. Then the study looks at what happens if one monkey gets a better reward than the other.

The piece of cucumber remains perfectly acceptable to the first monkey. Then the second one performs the same task, but gets a grape. The first one notices the grape, and in the video you can see her reaction. So now it’s her turn again to perform the task, having seen that second monkey get a grape. But she gets a cucumber again. She looks at it and hurls it through the hole in her cage at the researcher. Then she goes up and shakes the door of the cage and reaches her hand through and pounds on the table.  Essentially she’s miming, “that’s not fair!!” The audience laughs uproariously, and you know it’s empathy.

It reminded me of my childhood. As the middle child of five, scorekeeping seemed like a survival strategy.  There were never enough second helpings for all.  I never got picked enough to go to the cigar store with my dad—which always netted a piece of candy. I’m sure at times I acted like that monkey—rattling the cage, pounding the floor. I’m sure I whined:  “That’s. Not. Fair!!”

De Waal’s work shows that this fairness impulse is old, and deep in us--as old as our forbearers. It’s more than getting what we need, it’s a calculus we have adapted to living together, where resources appear limited, and we all have a stake.

Today’s lessons stipulate that basic impulse, and elevate it. They examine what fairness looks like in the context of God’s Shalom, or as Matthew expresses it, the kingdom of Heaven. What it means when we are consciously living as the image bearers we are, in Christ and with Christ, as opposed to living in a reductionist world of supply and demand, the deserving and underserving—where even altruism is a calculation.

I’m so glad we got to hear from Jonah today. Aren’t we all Jonah? Jonah’s sense of fairness is honed by his lived experience of what Nineveh, the great city to Israel’s east, represents to his people. Nineveh was known for its debauchery, but also as the capital of the Assyrian empire, which had conquered Northern Israel and sent its people into exile. When God calls him to Nineveh, Jonah flees to the west, possibly as far in the other direction as Spain. God appoints a fish to swallow him and lets him ponder his situation for three days, before the fish spits him out. Jonah then reluctantly goes to Nineveh to preach repentance. The Ninevites are so earnestly repentant that God does not follow through with his threat of their destruction. And boy, does this bug Jonah.

“I knew you were going to do that!” he rails. “That’s why I didn’t want you to send me.” Jonah knows God’s core values:  he can recite them!  But they don’t jibe with his sense of fairness. That the mercy of the one Jonah knows as the God of Israel would extend to a people this contemptible? Jonah whines. He sulks. He pouts. He builds a pity shack. And what is God’s response to Jonah: “is it right for you to be angry?” Frequently the Bible uses creation imagery as a leveler and perspective-giver when humans tend to place themselves at the center of the world. And so God employs a bush, a worm, a wind, the sun--to show Jonah all that is at God’s discretion and command. To show Jonah how tiny is his presumption of whom God cares about. God is the Lord of the earth and sea and all that is in them. God’s love and mercy is reflected in the ordering of ALL that is. Jonah is being schooled in seeing Nineveh through God’s eyes.  

Few words attributed to Jesus challenge our ethical calculations as much as the parable of the workers in the vineyard, which is found only in Matthew. In the prior verses, Jesus has told the disciples, “many who are first will be last, and the last will be first” – so this point serves as a bookend to the story. In this parable, the landowner seems to represent God. He has called the first workers early in the morning, another group at 9, then groups at noon, 3, and 5 p.m., telling the later groups that he will pay them “whatever is right” for their work—that being his to calculate. They have all agreed to the conditions under which they were hired. They don’t know what the others have agreed to. At the end of the day, the landowner has the first-hired paid last. So the full-day crew watches as the others are paid, and when they get to the front of the line, they must have been wondering if the rules had changed. Instead, they get paid what they were promised, aware now of what others, who worked fewer hours, were paid. They get the cucumber!! And the workers respond just as our monkey did – “That. Is. Not. Fair!!”

Their complaint is not that the agreement has been violated. It is that they arrived first, and worked harder--and yet have been treated the same. They say to the landowner:  “You have made them equal to us.” And the landowner says, “are you envious because I am generous?” It’s the same question that God asked of Jonah.  Literally the Greek is more like, “is your eye evil because I am generous?”

Much has been written about this lesson’s application to migrant workers and other day-laborers in our own time. And that is part of the picture. But its message is bigger. Taken literally, most unions, labor lawyers, or courts, would find this parable objectively unfair. Most boards would not tolerate a business run according to these practices. The stark contrast to how the world is organized is the very point of this parable. It asks us to imagine a kingdom subject to the law of love, and abundant grace, not the law of supply and demand, or market efficiency. To imagine concepts of justice and fairness grounded in generosity, in the worth and dignity and intrinsic value of all people, regardless of how they stack up as productivity generators in a socially engineered human system. And, as God offhandedly pointed out to Jonah—a kingdom that considers the “many animals.” The whole of the created order is God’s, and all is to be taken into account in this value system.

So these are God’s economics. God’s justice. An upside-down kingdom where the last are first, and first last. In this economy, God’s generosity is a thumb on the scale of justice on the side of the poor. God’s justice is rooted not in primitive notions of fairness as even Capuchin monkeys understand them. It is evolved from that – it is justice rooted in love, and mercy.  William Temple, archbishop of Canterbury and the one for whom the agency where I serve is named, once said, “the primary form of love in social organizations is justice.”  

The people we see at William Temple House are the ones who have not measured up in the world’s economy. Because of trauma, disability, discrimination, mental illness, addiction, cognitive deficits, in whatever combination, they have come to be last. They are the workers in the parable who remain unemployed while others have been taken.

That we may perceive them as late to the party -- undeserving, lacking in character, or work ethic, from cities or places we disdain -- makes some reluctant to help them. Helping Dreamers, for instance, has been seen as unjust to those of us who followed the rules, or were first in line. Health insurance for people who appear to not take care of their bodies seems unfair to us--we who have the means and wherewithal to care for our own bodies. “You are making them equal to us,” we protest. 

Such calculations of fairness work their way into policy discussions.  Like Jonah, we want to escape into these notions of fairness, escape from God’s call to show love and mercy for the ones God chooses, but we do not. Again, God asks us--“is your eye evil because I am generous?”

The apostle Paul, writing from prison, has a vision of what the kingdom looks like. Living IS Christ, he determines:  meaning that Christ’s spirit is here, working in the world, and God is asking us to join in it and embody it. To be a beloved community, animated by Christ, in the spirit of love and generosity--not in a future kingdom, but today. To live our lives as Paul calls the Philippians to do:  in a manner worthy of the Gospel—where first is last, and last is first. And here, when he says “living,” Paul chooses a verb rooted in the word polis, or city. He is implying a life of citizenship in Christ.  

We are called to be dual citizens. We are not immune to the laws of the world, but we are asked to do something where those laws fail too many. By the world’s standards, God’s extravagant love and generosity is inefficient. It rewards the wrong people. It follows the wrong rules. It’s not even fair. But these notions are small, and ours is a great God. A God whose love is infinite, whose generosity knows no bounds.  And so we do not pray, “Give me this day my daily bread”—and then calculate what’s left for others.  We pray with confidence, “Give us this day our daily bread,” trusting there is enough for all. We pray a prayer of citizenship with all whom God has given life and room in God’s kingdom. For God’s light to shine ever on our sight, that we may see the world through God’s eyes.

And then--live in generosity, and love.

Preached Sept. 24, 2017, St. John the Baptist Episcopal Church, Portland, OR.