Biblical scholar C. H. Dodd defined a parable as follows: “the parable is a metaphor or simile drawn from nature or common life, arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness, and leaving the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application to tease it into active thought.”¹ I think Dodd’s description about sums up today’s parable of the laborers in the vineyard. It’s got vivid images of common life covered. We can all picture the day laborers-poor, disenfranchised people with no means of subsistence but their physical labor, standing around the marketplace, dragging toes through the dust, hoping for a day’s work to buy a day’s food. Our minds can see the workers bent and sweating in the field, and of course that line up at day’s end, with clean and rested new arrivals standing alongside a hunched, filthy and exhausted crew that had been working since dawn. How about strangeness? Absolutely. A boss deliberately overpaying workers-that qualifies as strange in my book any day. No wonder the workers grumbled. That goes against everything we understand about compensation. And Dodd’s final descriptor? Doubts about a parable’s precise application tease the mind into active thought.

It’s that image of teasing the mind that haunts me in thinking about today’s parable. What is the precise application of this parable of the laborers in the vineyard? What does this strange and vivid story mean for us? Whatcha say we ask the experts. Going back aways, let’s start with Thomas Aquinas. According to Aquinas, this parable says that we should be like the hired workers and spend the whole day working for God. John Calvin focused on the first line, with God as the householder who can “call whoever and whenever God desires,” but another John, John Wesley focused on the last line of the story-ironically, the last becoming first-and interpreted this to mean that the most recent Christian converts would rank highest in God’s realm. Matthew Henry, famous for his Biblical commentary dedicated to practical applications for the scriptures, declared that this parable was about Jews and Gentiles, that the Gentiles, who joined the Christian community after the Jews, should be accorded just as many rights and privileges. Then, of course, we should probably move beyond the 18th century and consider some more contemporary commentators. They have made the case that this parable is communist and capitalist, a call to hard work or a statement of God’s grace even to the laziest among us, a case for earthly justice or an abstract view of heaven.² Thinking and studying about this parable is like being on CNN’s Crossfire-eight different opinions in rapid-fire exchange, conflicting and competing, each one somewhat reasonable and compelling, yet none quite satisfactory. Teasing the mind into active thought-indeed!

Given this broad stretch of possibilities, let me offer one window of reflection for today-not by narrowing the field, but by introducing a transversal, a line of thought that intersects these various trajectories. This weekend we will celebrate Labor Day. Despite our usual associations with the end of summer, Labor Day is supposed to give us a break from our labor in order to reflect on its meaning in our lives.

It originated from the labor movement at the end of the 19th century as a day set aside to honor the contributions of working people. The Labor Day holiday asks us to think about the many hands and bodies that run the world-plumbers and electricians that keep home and office running smoothly; cooks and waitstaff who prepare and serve food; doctors and nurses and nursing home workers who care for our families and friends when they are ill and infirm; teachers and daycare workers who guard and guide our children; janitors and groundskeepers and street-sweepers who keep the world around us clean and beautiful; secretaries and tellers and mailroom employees who organize and process our most important documents and transactions; police officers and firefighters and security guards and military personnel who risk their own lives for our safety; cashiers and mechanics, bus drivers and customer service reps, computer technicians and garment workers, insurance salespeople and middle manager, not to mention the mothers and fathers and grandmothers and grandfathers who work tending homes and nurturing children, without a weekly paycheck. In the words of famous labor leader Samuel Gompers, “Labor Day...is devoted to no [one person], living or dead, to no sect, race, or nation. [It is] the day for which the toilers in past centuries looked forward, when their rights and their wrongs would be discussed...that the workers of our day may not only lay down their tools of labor for a holiday, but upon which they may touch shoulders in marching phalanx and feel the stronger for it.”³ This holiday draws a giant circle around all people who labor, calling for universal solidarity among all who seek to contribute to the world through meaningful work, and rely upon the fruits of that labor to support themselves and their families. Labor Day lifts up the beauty and value of all human work, and calls for dignity, just wages and fair treatment for all workers.

This parable is also about those things. The laborers in the vineyard call to mind in particular their contemporary companions, like migrant workers whose back-breaking labor keeps cheap food in our stores and on our plates, or the day laborers of our own era, the invisible immigrants who arrive at the temporary employment office each morning to wait in line for a day’s job doing construction or landscaping, needing a day’s pay to feed their family that night or pay the rent that week. But like Labor Day itself, this story is not just about one kind of worker, however much that worker’s plight is worthy of our attention. In this story, Jesus invites us to think about God’s ideas of justice and fair treatment in this vineyard workplaces and in all workplaces, including our own.

And what is it that we get to thinking about? Why do they all get paid the same? How is that justice? What is God doing? As Dodd says, it teases the mind-because no matter how we come to understand or interpret it, we cannot get rid of the fact that in the end of the day in this vineyard, everybody goes home with a denarius, the usual day’s wage, akin to a living wage today-just enough to adequately care for your family for one more day. It doesn’t depend on how hard you worked or how skilled you are, or even if you worked that day at all. And that just bothers us. It pokes at our sensibilities and irritates our sense of fairness. At the heart of this parable, no matter how you interpret it, is this point of agitation. Like the disgruntled laborers who’d worked since dawn, this parable prickles us with the reminder that God doesn’t play by our rules, but offers forgiveness and grace equally abundant for all. God doesn’t respect our earthly status-whether you are a CEO or a fast food employee, have an MBA from Harvard or are still struggling for your GED, your work is equally important and valuable in God’s eyes, and no one gets higher wages or special privileges. It’s one denarius apiece for all of us.

So what are we to do with our discomfort? What is it saying about God’s realm and your work and mine this Labor Day? Clearly this parable says something about God’s grace and justice equally given to all. But when we come to church, we don’t want an abstract theory of justice or conjecture about labor. How does that apply in precise and practical ways? Well, the treasure of the parables is their inability to be pinned down. However, this openness and imprecision in the parable creates exactly the gaps and pathways that God traverses to speak to our hearts. In that spirit, I would like to invite you to join the ranks of the great theologians who have found numerous, varied applications for this parable. There is room in this parable for God’s Word to come to each of us in our own situation-a word of comfort, a word of challenge, a call or a consolation. It’s like a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book-except that instead of pursuing the ending we want to find, we invite the Holy Spirit to choose us, to lead us to the Word God has for our hearts, in whatever circumstances we find ourselves.

I invite you right now to spend a few minutes in quiet reflection on this parable and your own life and labor. I will offer a series of questions to get you started, but for the rest of this sermon today, I am actually going to encourage you to stop paying attention to me whenever you so desire. I mean it, ignore me. There is one condition for this exercise-you do have to promise me you’ll return to your regular full attention next week when Carl is in the pulpit. We can’t have him thinking I told everybody they didn’t need to listen to sermons anymore-but for today, go ahead, let your mind drift, follow a thought or question wherever the Spirit leads. We’ll conclude with a time of silence, the space for reflection we don’t often get in the midst of our busy labors. Sit back, relax, you can even close your eyes if you want to. Open your heart to God and let your mind be teased by the story.

What is God saying to you in the parable of the laborers in the vineyard? Which character are you most like in the parable? Do you feel like one of the laborers who began work at dawn? Are you exhausted from work and dissatisfied with your paycheck? Maybe this parable speaks a word of consolation, because like the laborers, you too are struggling with low wages or job insecurity, but hear God’s promise of equal rewards for all in the end. Or maybe the parable speaks a word of challenge, because you do have enough for you and your family, but grumble when you see what others are receiving, or because you believe you deserve extra. Are you currently unemployed? Perhaps you respond to the laborers waiting in the marketplace, yearning to be useful, worried about surviving, knowing just how important finding meaningful work is to our souls. Do you hear a comforting message that God is a generous landowner, who has work enough for everyone and fair wages even for you? Some of you may even be like the landowner-employer. How does this parable speak to you about paying employees fairly and treating them with dignity? Does it challenge you to go against the prevailing wisdom by becoming more concerned with workers’ needs than the bottom line?

Maybe none of these characters apply so neatly, but the Spirit compels you to learn more about worker justice across the world, and become involved as a person of faith in the struggles of workers. Some of you might discover you’re out laboring in the wrong vineyard-the story might call you to enter the service of a new boss, and begin work in God’s vineyard today. Perhaps you feel unworthy or unproductive or inadequate in some aspect of your life-is the spirit reminding you that God’s grace and justice does not depend on your success or even your effort, but is a free gift whether or not we are deserving?

Let the Holy Spirit move you to hear God’s word for you today. Hold it close to you this Labor Day approaches, and some time amid the barbecues and fall preparations, stop again and reflect upon this parable in light of your own labor. Let the story continue to tease your mind, but be confident that, like the laborers, God’s generosity, grace and justice extend to you always.

Thanks be to God.
 

¹ C.H. Dodd, The Parables of the Kingdom, p. 5.
² All commentaries can be found through links at www.textweek.com <http://www.textweek.com>.
³ <http://www.faithandvalues.com/channels/labor-day.asp>

“For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard.  After agreeing with the
laborers for the usual daily wage, he sent them into his vineyard.  When he went out about nine o’clock, he saw others standing idle in the
marketplace, and he said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard, and I  will pay you whatever is right.’  So they went.  When he went out again about noon and about three o’clock, he did the same.  And about five o’clock he went out and found others standing around; and he said to them, ‘Why are you standing here idle all day?’  They said to him, ‘Because no one has hired us.’  He said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard.’  When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, ‘Call the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first.’  When those hired about five o’clock came, each of them received the usual  daily wage.  Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more, but each of them also received the usual daily wage.  And when they received it, they grumbled against the landowner, saying, ‘These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.’  But he replied to one of them, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage?  Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you.  Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?’  So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”