They say a prophet is never well-received in her hometown. Well, personally, I had an amazing experience this past weekend preaching in Grand Forks. So, maybe I'm not much of a prophet after all! This past Sunday, the young adults at Calvary Lutheran Church in Grand Forks put together a wonderful justice-focused action event called "Do Something Now." Over $3,000 was raised to help do something about global causes like building wells for families in the world who have no access to clean water, weekend meals for students in need in Grand Forks, and de-parasiting & fluoride treatments for people in Honduras.
It was my honor to preach about justice this Sunday in coordination with the appeal to Do Something Now. It was my hope to highlight the ways in which God's justice is different than our sense of what is fair. Thanks to a special request from my cousin Ashley, I've posted the text of my sermon below.
Enjoy!
TSP
It's not fair!
How many of us remember saying this phrase as
kids? How many of the kids here have
said this already today? How many of us
have suppressed the urge to shout this lately even though we are supposed to be
more grown up than that?
Lovely. I can't wait to have kids so that I can tell
them this. It's like hazing. We all experience injustice in our lives and
want to scream about it, but when we grow up, we learn to deal with it. And when we have kids, we get to pass on this
agonizing yet true sentiment. The
world's not fair.
All of us are born with some sort of instinctual
sense of what's fair and what is not fair.
We want the same portion of the pizza as our brothers and sisters. We want an equal slice of everyone's
attention as others receive. We want to
be paid a wage that's fair according to our experience and qualifications and
time put in on the job, not a salary that is different because of our gender or
race or age. And we all want to get what
we deserve when it comes to our merit…if we wrote a better paper we should get
a better grade, if we are more competent at our jobs we should get a raise or a
promotion or at least be safe from being laid off, if we helped to bake the
cookies, we should get the first warm one when they come out of the oven.
It's not fair!
Our keen sense of what's fair can be a positive
thing for the world. Our childhood
whining can grow into a mature sense of justice on behalf of those who are
being treated unfairly. It may lead us
to see with the eyes of justice as the young adults who have organized the Do
Something Now event taking place this morning have seen.
With such eyes we can see that it's not fair
that Children in Uganda, orphaned by HIV, have nowhere to sleep. We can see that it's not fair that one in
eight human beings in the world don’t have access to clean drinking water. We can see that it’s not fair that some who
attend that hunger meal today will be served a half a slice of bread while
others will eat all they’d like until they’re full. And we can see that it’s not fair that hunger
statistics in the world mirror this great difference between plenty and not
enough.
The problem is that, more often than not, our
idea of "justice" becomes about, as Pastor Roger mentioned last week:
just us. We worry most of all that
things are not fair for me. We see most
clearly when I am not being treated fairly.
And when someone gets, not what they deserve, but much more than they
deserved, we find ourselves exclaiming, "It's not fair!"
The workers who worked all day, in the blazing
sun, were certainly whining in these or very similar words. "It's not fair! We worked all day, we got more done, we were
here from the start, we endured the heat, we are exhausted. They hardly worked at all, they just
got here, they didn't contribute as much, they didn't suffer as much, they
certainly don't deserve as much as us."
It wasn't the workers' understanding of fair
that was off. It was their understanding
of the one who was in charge. The owner even
agrees with them to some extent, "Sure what I'm doing isn't fair; it's
more than fair. It's generous. Is it not my prerogative to be generous? Have I not still treated you fairly? I paid you what we agreed, and what I pay
these others is really none of your business."
The vineyard owner gave out of his own
generosity, not paying on the basis of what any of the workers deserved.
It's not fair.
It's not fair indeed, it's grace.
Through this story and beyond it in our lives,
we get to know our God who gives based on God's merit, not on ours
This
means that what we think is fair is not always what God thinks is fair
The
laborers in the vineyard, the older son in the parable of the Prodigal, the
grace given just the same to those who were baptized and will never show up to
teach Confirmation or lead on Church Council, or give an offering to support
the ministry of the Church
We
tend to think that justice is getting what we deserve
But
God's justice doesn't fit our worldly understanding of what is fair.
God
blurs the lines between justice-getting what we deserve, mercy-not getting what
we deserve, and grace-getting much more than we deserve.
This is Good News for us…
This
is always Good News for us
For
as redeemed sinners, we continue to be sinners still, and we need the kind of
justice of our God who is a gracious and
compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love
There's
only one problem, this justice, full of mercy and grace is not about just us
It's hard for us to swallow God's unreasonable
mercy shown to others
Jonah
found out how hard it can be to understand the way God shows mercy and justice.
He
had been sent out from his homeland to the city of Nineveh to proclaim the
coming wrath for this sinful city. And
they were the worst. In fact, so bad
that Jonah tried his darnedest to get out of the job. You probably know how the story goes…Jonah
runs from God, by way of ship, a terrible storm comes up and the sailors demand
to know who has upset God and caused such a storm. Jonah confesses and volunteers himself to be
thrown overboard. He should have
drowned, but instead God sends a giant fish to save him of all things. Within the belly of the fish, Jonah waited
three days, praying to God for salvation.
Finally, the fish coughs Jonah up on the shore, and God sends him in the
original direction again, to Nineveh.
Jonah proclaims, half-heartedly I’d imagine, God’s coming wrath to these
his enemies. And something miraculous
happens, those nasty sinners turn from their ways, they repent and fast and wear
sackcloth…everyone, down to the last cow in town.
Now
we find Jonah, who ought to be elated as the only prophet who ever really
succeeded in getting anyone to repent.
But instead he’s upset, and rather dramatic. And he cries out to God, in what I imagine to
be a very whiney voice…
" O Lord! Is not
this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to
Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful,
slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from
punishing.”
He
knew it. He expected it. He tried to escape it.
But
Jonah had been sent to be a prophet, to warn of God's coming wrath, when all
along he knew that wrath might well turn to mercy
And
in the end he basically says he'd rather die than have God be merciful to them
Jonah
had to face the reality that God loved those who were his enemy
Those
who even threatened his life and the life of all of Israel as Nineveh was the
capital of the Assyrian empire that would one day crush his people and send
them into captivity
Still,
God loved them
He
showed them mercy
He
gave them the same favor thought to be reserved for those who lived
"good" lives, those who did the right thing, those who go to church
each week, those who had "earned" their share of God's mercy and
grace
It's
not fair!
Perhaps
God is modeling for us in the story of Jonah a higher good than fairness, an
ethic of mercy, a philosophy of grace, a call to live a life that bursts forth
with radical justice, full of the abundant love of God. And in the story of the workers in the
vineyard, Christ breaks our “just us” measuring sticks for fairness and lays
out instead a pattern of generosity that goes beyond our judgment of what we or
others deserve.
Christ
pours out for each of us much more than we deserve, grace upon grace. And as much as we tend to think that we’ve
earned it somehow, the truth is that God has done for us what only God could
do. God has given out of God’s generosity,
not our merit. In Jesus we have been
freed from the grip that sin and death had on our lives. And this freedom, this
grace, isn’t just for those who get it right all of the time, or even most of
the time. It’s for those who are sinful,
those who mess things up, those who get it wrong over and over again. That is to say that it’s for all of us. We may wish that God were more fair, that our
actions would count for something with God, but what a mess we’d be in if this
were the case. We’re all lucky that God
doesn’t judge fair the way that we do—or we’d all be surprised to find out what
we really deserve. Instead here we are, the undeserving recipients of mercy and
grace.
Of
course Jesus is the only one who can really deal out this kind of true justice,
leveling the playing field in which all of us find ourselves living and working
and making us equals in every way. Christ’s
work of justice and salvation is making all things new. In the meantime, since the world is not fair,
we are called as Children of the Kingdom to see matters through the eyes of
Christ. We are called, as those who have
much, to ac, to strive for true justice on behalf of those who are
marginalized. We are called, as those
who have access to the rule makers and the resources, to speak for those whose
voice has no power in our world.
It’s
not fair.
The
world as we know it is not fair. And the
good news is that Christ’s Kingdom isn’t fair either. It’s more than fair. It is full of unmerited grace, undeserved
mercy, relentless forgiveness, and true justice that has been given for you
today by the Lord, our gracious God who is merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in
steadfast love.
So we
might say, Thanks be to God that it’s not fair.
Amen!
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