Jul 12th: Stretched By Grace, with Rev. Dr. Steven Koski.
You’re invited to explore that with us this Sunday, online or in person at First Presbyterian Church in Bend. Come as you are, bring your questions, and sit with a community that’s learning how to see and care for one another.
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Rev. Dr. Steven Koski
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Stretched By Grace with Rev. Dr. Steven Koski. Series: More Than You Think: Discovering the Parables of Jesus A Spacious Christianity, First Presbyterian Church of Bend, Oregon. Scripture: Matthew 20.1-16.
Ever feel like life just isn’t fair, or like you’re always picked last or overlooked? This week we’re talking about a different kind of world, where worth is not something you earn and everyone gets enough, including you. A world where grace, not scorekeeping, has the final word.
You’re invited to explore that with us this Sunday, online or in person at First Presbyterian Church in Bend. Come as you are, bring your questions, and sit with a community that’s learning how to see and care for one another.
Transcript:
Steven: There’s an old story about a man on his hands and knees under a street lamp, clearly for searching for something. A passerby stopped to help. What are you looking for? My keys, the man says. I lost them. Where did you have them last? Well, back there, he says, pointing towards a dark alley. Then why are you looking here? Well, because there’s more light here. We like the light, we like the easy answers, the familiar ground, you know. We like the place where, where someone agrees with what we already think we know, you know. It’s far more comfortable searching under the lamp post than entering dark alleys. The longer I walk the spiritual path, the more I discover how much I don’t know, and Jesus, as a teacher, seemed almost entirely uninterested in keeping people under the lamp post. He kept sending people back into the dark alley, not to leave them lost, because that’s usually where the thing worth finding actually is, and that’s what a parable does. You know, the word parable means something, something thrown alongside, you know, not a fable with a neat moral kind of at the end, not an allegory decoding into a lesson that you can neatly tuck away. A parable is a ball tossed slightly off to the side of where you’re standing, so that if you want to catch it, you actually have to move, you have to stretch. Jesus didn’t tell these stories so people would walk away with with the correct belief, the correct doctrine. He told these stories to stretch our imagination, to loosen our grip on what we’re sure we already understand about God. So, something wider, stranger, more, more generous might slip in. Today’s parable asks us, you know, to stretch further than almost any other parable Jesus told. A landowner goes out at dawn, at sunrise, and hires workers for his vineyard, agreeing on the usual daily wage, and this landowner goes back at nine in the morning, at noon, at three, and at 5o’clock nearly quitting time, and each time he hires more workers, telling them only I’ll pay you what’s right. When evening comes, the landowner pays them all the same, the same wage for 12 hours of scorching labor, and for one hour of standing around. No, the ones who worked all day under that scorching sun grumble, this isn’t fair, and it isn’t. It isn’t there, and that’s the whole point. Now, by the time Jesus tells this story, the, you know, the disciples, the followers of Jesus, have given up everything to follow Him, homes, families, the comfort of their daily routine, and they look out at the, at the crowd who, who keeps showing up, the crowd who keeps gathering day after day into the crowd, hoping to receive something, healing, bread, a kind word, forgiveness, people who hadn’t followed Jesus for years, people who hadn’t sacrificed anything at all, they just showed up hoping, and Jesus welcomes them exactly the same as He welcomes the 12 who left everything, so Peter, Peter being Peter, finally says what they’re all thinking. Surely, Jesus, we’re worth more to you than than they are, right? Surely we’ve earned something that they haven’t, and Jesus answers with that story. He answers with a story about a God who runs the vineyard nothing like we run our own lives. Now, honestly, we run on an economy of merit. Prove your worth, earn your keep. You know there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, even when nobody has handed you boots. We sort the world into winners and losers, deserving and undeserving, first and last, and most of us assume quietly that we belong somewhere near the front of that line. You know, now we’ve even built our national policies on this logic. I mean, look at how we talk about immigration in this country, debating merit-based systems, asking what a person can contribute before we ask what they need? It’s the language of the marketplace applied to human beings. I mean, prove your worth, and then maybe you’ll be lit in. No, I understand why nations wrestle with with policy and borders and and law, real complicated questions, and people of good faith land in very different places, but notice how naturally we reach for merit as the measuring stick, the measuring stick, even for who gets to belong.
That instinct doesn’t start at the border. It actually starts in our own hearts. It starts in the quiet score keeping we do every day about who deserves what and who doesn’t, and this parable challenges our assumptions. The landowner never asked the 5o’clock workers, you know, the worker is still there at the end of the day, he never asks the 5o’clock workers what they have to offer. The landowner asks why they’re still standing there unchosen, and then he chooses them anyway. Now the wage the landowner is talking about, the wage isn’t a, isn’t a fortune, a denarius, which is a day’s wage, just enough, just enough to feed a family that night, you know, it’s the same thing Jesus taught us to pray for, give us, give us this day our daily bread, not abundance enough, give us enough, everyone, everyone in the story goes home with enough, the landowner isn’t running a meritocracy, he’s running a household where nobody, nobody goes to bed hungry, which means the question this parable throws alongside us isn’t, is this fair? The question is, what kind of world do we actually want? I mean, one where everyone gets exactly what they’ve earned and not a drop more or one where everyone, especially the ones standing idle, because nobody’s chosen them, a one where everyone gets to eat tonight. You know, I think about the last workers hired still standing in the square at 5o’clock The landowner doesn’t ask, “Want to make some quick money? He asks, “Why are you still here? And they answer, “Because no one has hired us. Nobody wanted them. I had a friend growing up, Tom, who was he was the one we all have, a friend like this, the one who has always, always chosen last for kickball, tall, uncoordinated. He actually didn’t really care about sports, but gosh, he wanted more than anything. Be picked he wanted more than anything to belong and I can still see his face while the rest of us got called one by one and he stood there waiting hoping hoping a friend whose daughter had Down syndrome told me she reads this parable differently than most people do. I know what it, what it is, what it is to watch my child, my child be the one left standing. She said the one still there at 5o’clock aren’t lazy. It takes everything you have just to keep hope alive when you’re the one who keeps being passed over. When the landowner finally says to them, you, you also go into the vineyard, that’s not a business transaction, that’s a declaration of worth to people the world has already decided are expendable, that’s saying to the invisible ones you are needed, you’re not invisible to me. Let me ask you something. Take a moment before you answer it. Has there been a time in your life when, when you receive something, love, forgiveness, a second chance, simple kindness, or maybe somebody, someone just simply saw you, a gift that you know you hadn’t earned, a gift undeserved, no strings attached. You know, I know something about what that feels like. Several years ago, when my wife spent a month in the ICU, and then another month in rehab, never once, never once did anyone from the church mention family leave, or what it says in the Personnel Heinbook. They just knew what they knew I was where I needed to be, and when we finally came home, you know, after two months, I was, I was completely depleted, wondering how well, how is possibly going to go back to work, and before I could even ask, they saw my need before I did. A member of the church leadership took me for coffee and said, You cared for Laurie. Now it’s time to care for yourself. We’ll see you in two months. I hadn’t earned that. I couldn’t have it, was sheer grace. and the grace itself turned out to be the healing, that’s what turned out to be the healing I needed more than the rest ever could have been on its own. Father Greg Boyle says it this way: imagine, imagine a world where we stand in awe of the burden people carry, rather than standing in judgment of how they’re carrying it. That’s what this parable is really after, not a lesson about labor policy, or even immigration policy, Dota has something to say to both. It’s an invitation to imagine a different way of being in the world, where we stop measuring who deserves what, and we start noticing what people need, where the question shifts from what have I earned to who is still standing in the square, from is this fair to does everyone have enough. We can’t make life fair. We were never promised that, but we can stretch towards something better than fair. We can let God’s extravagant, unreasonable generosity and. To loosen our grip on what we think we’re owed and open our hands to what we might give away instead. The last will be first and the first will be last, not as punishment but as an invitation to stop counting altogether and finally see who has been standing there all along hoping to be chosen, may it be so.
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