The Comma

IT’S NOT ABOUT FAIRNESS; IT’S ABOUT LIFE

(Matthew 20.1-15)

A sermon preached by Peter Ilgenfritz and Dave Shull

Plymouth Congregational United Church of Christ

Plymouth, New Hampshire

The Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time: September 21, 2008

 

PETER: It is a gift to be here.  A gift to be home with family to New Hampshire.  A gift to be with a congregation that had the courage and faith to become the first Open and Affirming UCC church in this state.    It is only because of the courage and faith of churches like yours that Dave and I could live out our call to be pastors.  It is only because of the courage and faith of churches like yours that gays and lesbian Christians and their family members and friends can find places to worship where God’s all-embracing love is fully known.  Thanks be to God for you.

 

DAVE: There is a chant from the French community of Taize which I would like us to sing together.  The words are Ubi caritas et amor, ubi caritas Deus ibi est.  Where charity and love are, God is there.  Let us sing it through several times.  If you don’t know it, please join the rest of us as you learn it.   

 

PETER: The Gospel reading for this morning is from the 20^th chapter of Matthew.  It appears in your bulletin.  Let us listen for the Word of God. 

 

DAVE:  Jesus said to his disciples, “The kingdom of heaven is like the owner of an estate who went out at dawn to hire workers for the vineyard.  After reaching an agreement with them for the usual daily wage, the owner sent them out to the vineyard.

            “About mid-morning, the owner came out and saw others standing around the marketplace without work, and said to them, ‘You go along to my vineyard and I will pay you whatever is fair.’  At that they left.

            “Around noon and again in the mid-afternoon, the owner came out and did the same.  Finally, going out late in the afternoon, the owner found still others standing around and said to them, ‘Why have you been standing here idle all day?’

PETER: “‘No one hired us.’

DAVE: ‘You go to my vineyard, too.’

            “When evening came, the owner said to the overseer, ‘Call the workers and give them their pay, but begin with the last group and end with the first.’  When those hired late in the afternoon came up, they received a full day’s pay, and when the first group appeared they assumed they would get more.  Yet they all received the same daily wage.

            “Thereupon they complained to the owner,

PETER: ‘This last group did only an hour’s work, but you’ve put them on the same basis as those who worked a full day in the scorching heat.’

DAVE: “‘My friends, I do you no injustice.  You agreed on the usual wage, didn’t you?  Take your pay and go home.  I intend to give this worker who was hired last the same pay as you.  I’m free to do as I please with my money, aren’t I?  Or are you envious because I am generous?’” (The Inclusive New Testament, published by Priest’s for Equality, 1994).

PETER:  I try to imagine myself standing in the crowd listening to Jesus tell this story.  He finishes it talking about the owner’s generosity.  But after Jesus leaves, and my fellow listeners and I talk about what he said, I don’t think we’ll be talking about generosity.  I think we’ll be talking about what a bumb rap the workers who were hired first got.  We’ve worked all day in this hot Mediterranean sun before.  We know what it would be like to see people who only worked an hour get paid the same as we did for when we worked all day.  And Jesus wants to emphasize that.  He says the people who were hired last will be paid first.  It’s like he wants the people who worked all day to know how unfair life is.  

       

            You hear it in school playgrounds, in homes, in any setting where kids are present.  “That’s not fair!”  “You’re not playing fair!”  And though most of us adults might not use those exact words or that exact tone of voice, we feel the same way.  We’re raised in this country to believe life is fair.  If I work hard, if I play by the rules, I’ll get what I deserve.  I’ll be treated fairly.  

DAVE:  There’s only one problem.  And we know it. Life isn’t fair.  And God isn’t fair either.  Many people stop believing in God when a tragedy happens. Because we think God should have prevented it.  But where does this belief come from?  The Bible is filled with stories of unfairness.  In the story of Job, God makes a deal with Satan.  God brags about how faithful Job is.  And then God lets Satan do whatever he wants to Job except kill him.  Satan drives Job to anguish and despair.  No fairness here.

 

On the other hand, the Bible is filled with stories about people who break God’s laws. If life were fair, these sinners would be punished.  But instead God showers them with love.  Take the Adam and Eve story.  God tells the first couple, You can eat anything you want here . . . except the fruit of this one particular tree.  Eat that, and you die (Gen. 2.17).  So of course they eat that fruit.  Their eyes are opened.  They realize they’re naked.  They feel ashamed.  If life were fair, Adam and Eve would receive the punishment God had promised them.  But fairness is not a big part of how God operates.  God knows their nakedness makes them feel ashamed.  So before God sends Adam and Eve out of the Garden, God makes clothes for them (Gen. 3.21).  Instead of treating them fairly, God restores their dignity.

 

And where in the Gospels do we see any sign of Jesus being treated fairly?  So as his followers, why do we expect anything different? 

I know God never promises life will be fair.  But I know I still expect life to be fair. 

 

PETER:  I expect life to be fair.  And maybe you do, too.

What happens when we live our lives expecting life to be fair, and realize it isn’t?  

DAVE: One thing we can do is become be-gooders.  We can become people who try to be really, really good.  In the hope that if we’re good enough, people will love us.  If we’re good enough, we’ll get what want.  We’ll get what we think we deserve.

PETER: Or we can feel like we’ve been treated so unfairly that we become a victim.  We feel like we never get the breaks other people do.  We expect to feel misunderstood, judged, discriminated against, and lonely.  

 

DAVE: When Peter and I started looking for a church job in 1991, we knew we had to be really, really good.  Churches like yours had done the hard and holy work of becoming Open and Affirming.  But in 1991, no church of any denomination had ever hired a gay couple as pastors.  We knew pastor search committees weren’t exactly going to be lining up to call us.  

We got lots of rejections.  I mean, LOTS of rejections.  Over a hundred of them.  We even got rejected from churches we didn’t apply to!  It was like a pre-emptive strike.  Somehow search committees found out we were applying.  So they were kind enough to let us know we didn’t need to expend any energy applying to them.  

For some reason I didn’t understand, Peter felt like we needed to save all those rejection letters.  But he didn’t file them away in the back of the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet.  No.  He filed them in the front of the top drawer.  So every time I opened that draw to file away a phone bill or pull out a copy of our church application materials, there it was.  That file of rejection letters that each week looked more and more like the Hindenburg.  

 

For a while, seeing all those rejection letters gave us the drive to work even harder to get a church to call us.  It inspired us to be be-gooders.  We believed if we were nice enough, and flexible enough, and open enough, and willing enough to put up with anything, some church would hire us.  That’s what we deserved for being so good.  That’s what was fair.

 

And being be-gooders almost worked. 

In the summer of 1992, a search committee of a UCC church in Columbus, Ohio, became really interested in us.  I was excited.  I’d lived in Columbus for three years after college, and still had very good friends there.  My parents live 90 miles from there.  I was really excited.  Peter and I put everything we had into that call.

 

PETER: But the congregation voted us down.  And what they said they didn’t like about us was that we were gay.  Their actions reflected that sentiment.

We led worship on the Sunday the congregation was going to vote on us.  Dave stood at the door of the church welcoming people.  And about every fourth person who came in refused to shake his hand.  When Dave called the children forward for the children’s sermon, none of the parents let their kids come forward.  

We flew back to our home in Chicago that night.  Having tried to be so good.  Having believed that if we were good enough, God would reward us by giving us what we’d worked so hard to get.  That was only fair, right?

 

After Columbus, we stopped trying to be be-gooders.  We were way too angry and hurt for that.  So we went to another place people go when they expect fairness and don’t get it.  We became victims.  If you’ve felt like a victim at any time, you know what it’s like. 

 

There can be a certain pleasure in seeing yourself as a victim.  No one likes me.  No one understands me.  We concluded the world hates gay people.  The Christian church, especially, hates gay people.  No one understands us.   We shut down. We stopped going to church for awhile because it was too painful.  We didn’t want to be in the pew.  We wanted to be up in front leading worship. 

It would have been so easy for us to get stuck in being victims.  But as we held onto our being victims in our clenched hands, we realized we were dying.  

 

DAVE: If we let go of the need for life to be fair, what might we receive?  If we unclench the hands that cling to being be-gooders and being victims, and open our hands to God, what might God place in them? 

            If we let go of our need for fairness, we make room for life.  New possibilities, new beginnings.  We make room for life.

 

            Writing 10 years ago, a Benedictine monk describes this process: 

            Every moment is more brightly precious than we can possibly understand. . . . We did not bargain for most of what we get in this life, but life itself is worth holding onto, and worth valuing.  It is a great loss if we greet every day with clenched hands stuffed with our own devices.  We will never know what is out there waiting for us if we don’t extend an empty hand to the world and wait for the wonder to happen (Radical Hospitality, p. xxxvii). 

 

            Writing almost 800 years ago, the Muslim poet Rumi also invites us to imagine the ife that comes from unclenched moments.      

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.

This is what Jesus is talking about when he says, “I have come that you may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10.10.  It’s what Paul is talking about when he writes, “I am convinced that nothing in all creation nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8.39).  

 

The monk, Rumi, Jesus, Paul: they’re all trying to tell us, It’s not about fairness.  It’s about life.  So unclench your hands.  Receive life.  And live.

 

PETER:  A couple months after being voted down by the church in Columbus, Dave and I began to do this.  In some mysterious way, God’s grace gave us the strength and healing and imagination to do this.  Something shifted.  We began to open our hands.  And Jesus began to lift from us the being good and the being victim we’d been clutching to.  As he lifted these from us, our hands were emptied of our deadening need for life to be fair. 

 

And I felt something new placed in them.  I knew we still needed to keep applying to churches.  We still wanted to be pastors.  But it wasn’t about getting a job at all costs.  The most important thing was to knock at the doors of those churches.  And force those search committee members to read our application.  And wrestle honestly with their fears and hopes.  And discuss faithfully whether they feel like calling a gay couple as pastors is anything like what being Open and Affirming means to the church they love.    

When we let go of our need for fairness, what God gave us was life.  It was incredibly empowering and strengthening.  Life in the form of a new call to knock at church doors.  And see what happened.

 

DAVE:  Not long after receiving this call to new life, a letter from a church search committee landed in our open hands.  It was a rejection letter.  But it wasn’t like the hundred others that still lived in the top drawer of our filing cabinet.  It didn’t say, “We’re sorry that your gifts don’t match our needs.”  This rejection letter started with the words, “Your application brought our search process to a halt.”  The letter went on to say the committee thought Peter and I were almost exactly what they were looking for.  Then they wrote, “With sadness, we confess that the sin of homophobia remains in us.  So we cannot consider you any further.”  And they blessed us on our search. 

 

PETER: Which ultimately was successful.  And which is why we’re here this morning.  On June 12, 1994, University Congregational United Church of Christ in Seattle, called us to be their pastors.  And we served there together for 11.5 years.  A couple of years ago, Dave moved on to other ministries.  I just began my 15^th year there.

DAVE: It’s not about fairness.  It’s about life.  Open-handed, lying down in the grass, abundant, nothing-can-separate-us-from-the-love-of-God life.  It’s not about expecting fairness.  It’s about expecting God’s love and Christ’s presence to be with us always, no matter what life brings.  Always God calls us out into that open field.  To open our hands to new life.

 

PETER:  Horace sat in the front pew at University Congregational United Church of Christ.  Right below the pulpit where he could make comments on the pastor’s sermon. He was most cantankerous of the 24% of the church that had voted not to call us.  One Sunday, I met him at the back of the sanctuary – right at the end of the postlude he boomed, “I don’t think you two have done a damn bit of good since you got here.”  That was Horace.

Later that year, Horace was dying.  I went to visit him.  He made a surprising connection.  He talked about how his college had prevented him from joining a fraternity because he was Jewish.  And then he went right on to say, “I said some stupid things about you two before I even got to know you.  I didn’t give you two a chance.” 

            When I was a be-gooder, I tried to be who others wanted me to be.  When I was a victim, I hid my strength.  Horace shows me how God calls us to be authentically ourselves.  And know that is enough.

 

DAVE:  These days, as I try to keep my hands open to new life, I find myself drawn to the wisdom of people who have lived on the edges of life.  People who have lived in very different places and ways than I have.  

            One of those wise people is a woman I’ll call Jackie B.  Jackie B. is an African-American woman in her 40s.  And she’s one of the most beautiful spirits I know.  I met her last year through my work at the Recovery Café in Seattle.  The Recovery Café helps homeless people in recovery from drug and alcohol addiction learn how to build healthy relationships.  Jackie B. lives with addictions to alcohol and cocaine.  When you ask, “How are you doing today, Jackie B.?”, she almost always replies, “I’m blessed!” 

            In a group I facilitate, a middle-aged man said, “I’m starting to feel hopeless.  All my life I’ve been beaten down by people.  They call me stupid.  Loser.  Failure.  God’s mistake.  No-good.  Addict.”

            Jackie B. looked at him with her loving, wide-open smile.  She said, “I’ve stopped answering to all the names other people call me.  Now I only answer to the name I’ve been given: God’s beloved child.”

            When I was a be-gooder, I couldn’t believe God could love me just for being me.  I needed to try to earn that love.  When I was a victim, I felt like God had rejected me.  So talking about God’s love made no sense.  Jackie B. shows me we can believe the names others call us, and the names we learn to call ourselves.  Or we can open our hands to life.  And believe our only true name is God’s Beloved.

 

            We can imagine new life when we open our clenched hands and let go of the ways we think life is supposed to be.  Or the ways we think life has to be.

 

            Michael was a 10-year-old at University Congregational United Church of Christ.  Ours was the first church he attended.  He’d gotten to know Peter and me.  And he’d gotten to know our other clergy colleague, Gail.  Then a new pastor, Don, arrived.  One Sunday after Don had been at the church a while, I was talking with Michael and his parents.  Michael was looking like he was thinking really hard.  He said, “Don’s a pastor, right?”  His parents said, “Yes.”  “And Don’s married, right?”  “That’s right.”  More silence.  More intense brain work.  Finally a look of enlightenment.  “Oh,” Michael exclaimed, “I thought you had to be a woman or gay to be a minister!”

 

PETER: So much is possible when we live with open hands.  So much is possible when we let Christ free us from the prison of expecting the world and life and God to be fair.  We did not bargain for most of what we get in this life, but life itself is worth holding onto, and worth valuing.  It is a great loss if we greet every day with clenched hands stuffed with our own devices.  We will never know what is out there waiting for us if we don’t extend an empty hand to the world and wait for the wonder to happen. 

 

            May wonder land in our open hands . . . and take our lives where we never thought to go.  Amen.