A Fourth Church Sermon by Dana Ferguson

September 18, 2005 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Cruel or Unusual

Dana Ferguson
Executive Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Exodus 16:4–12
Psalm 105:37–45
Matthew 20:1–16

“Or are you envious because I am generous?”

Matthew 20:15b (NRSV)

In Christ’s vineyard, in contrast to every other vineyard we know,
our degrees and seniority, our distinguished service,
our titles are irrelevant to the overriding question:
Is your discipleship exercised from a community founded
to conceal the wounds caused by the conceit of birthrights,
the arrogance of racial identities,
the disparities of privilege rooted in gender—
indeed, all of our pathetic definitions of success
reflected in status, income, residence, and luck?
These distinctions dissolve in the vineyard of Christ.

James W. Crawford
Minister’s Manual

A number of years ago, Bruce Springstein made a stop in Chicago along his Reunion with the E Street Band tour. In case you don’t know—and I’m sure at least one of you doesn’t, because my mom’s here today—Bruce Springsteen is, in my humble opinion, the present king of rock and roll. I’ve bought his “Greatest Hits” album at least three times: cassette, CD, CD again. He is one of the few poets that I find accessible. Yes, I believe him to be a poet. Maybe there’s some connection between the redneck Mississippian and the blue-collar New Jerseyian. So I wanted Springsteen tickets for that tour. This then new mom of twins wasn’t up for an all-night campout downtown at Ticketmaster. But I heard they would be selling tickets at the Dominick’s in Oak Park. So I decided I’d give it a try. Even it was a slight one, I still thought there was a chance I might get lucky and score tickets at the corner grocery store. My husband doubted it seriously.

I gathered in line with the other suburban parents not yet willing to talk about how many decades ago we’d bought our first Bruce album. Nine o’clock came, and the tickets started to sell. The line wasn’t moving quickly enough. I was sure I was out. None for me. Then I got closer, tickets continued to be exchanged for cash, and I was hopeful. And then, lo and behold it was my turn. I plopped my cash down. “Best seats left,” I said. And they came back and they weren’t great, but they weren’t nosebleeds.

I raced home to gloat to my husband who had laughed at my thought that I could actually procure Springsteen tickets at the corner grocery store. I walked through the door and fanned out my four tickets on the coffee table.

“That’s great, honey.” He wasn’t impressed enough. “Brad called,” he continued.

“And?”

“He got tickets.”

“What!” I couldn’t believe it. Brad didn’t camp out. He didn’t stand in line. “How did he get tickets?”

“He got online with some Ticketmaster in Ohio. I guess no one thought to go there for Chicago tickets.”

I was devastated. I stood in line. I waited. I did my duty, and Brad just waltzed in at the last minute and got tickets. “He has two sets.”

“Two sets? You’ve got to be kidding.”

“No. One’s in the risers and one on the floor.”

“What. Risers? The floor?”

“He and Mary invited us to go along and use whichever one’s we want. He’ll probably even sell the ones you bought on eBay for you.”

A mix of emotion. I was outdone and not happy about it. Someone else put in far less time and energy and got better. But in the end it was OK with me, because I landed in great seats.

It’s not totally—but a little—like what happens in the parable today. Early in the morning, the owner of a vineyard hired laborers for a whole day for an agreed-upon wage. In the middle of the day and later in the day, he hired more. When evening and time to settle with the laborers came, he first paid the last workers to arrive and consecutively down the line so each group could see what the others received.

Cruel and unusual, doesn’t it seem? Not only did he pay them the same, he showed off that he paid them the same, having those who arrived first watch as he paid those who had arrived after them the same amount. Looking on, each group thought they would receive more. But something very different happened. They all received the same thing. It’s seems cruel and unusual, almost scandalous. It challenges our sense of justice, our sense of right and wrong, our concept of rewards—that what we do and are, are rewarded accordingly.

It’s where we go wrong and where many popular preachers, past and present, have gone wrong. It’s what has often been called the gospel of prosperity: the belief that if you just improve your attitude, keep your chin up and work hard, God’s blessings will rain down on you. Bruce Wilkinson promoted it in the Prayer of Jabez, and it’s what now-popular preacher Joel Osteen promotes. He says, and I quote,

You have to start believing that good things are coming your way, and they will! The secret is to enlarge your vision. Are you satisfied with that little house you’re in? You shouldn’t be. You should want the sort of mansion the Osteens live in. You should expect people to go out of their way to help you—then they will. (Jayson Byasse, “Be Happy,” Christian Century 12 July 2005)

As my colleague Calum MacLeod said a month or so ago from this pulpit, “Where’s that in the gospel?” Where does it say we should expect fancy houses or fancy cars? Where in the gospel does it say that God’s job is to rain down special blessings upon us simply because we ask and think it will happen? Where in the gospel does it say that we ought to be more concerned with others going out of their way to serve us than we are to serve them? Certainly not in this parable. In fact, this parable tells us the opposite, that we all get the same thing. We all get God’s love and mercy and gift of salvation. That’s what is scandalous to us: that none of us is more important than the other. It’s not so much that it’s cruel. It’s just unusual. What’s usual and sometimes can even be cruel is that we often view things in terms of who we are and what we have and who gets what. Our position and our reward or lack thereof clouds our judgment.

John Buchanan told me this past week about an editorial by Charles Madigan in the Chicago Tribune. There was a special connection, because, like John, Madigan grew up in Altoona, Pennsylvania, and their fathers both worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad. I asked for a copy. He could figure out why. He gave it to me with one stipulation, “You better tell ’em they may well hear it again.” But you’ve seen that happen before. I got the first chance, and I’m taking it!

Madigan writes

I have been watching the same little 10-second report showing looters in New Orleans for quite a few days now. Maybe you have seen it, too, three kids, bouncing out of a store with bundles of T-shirts. I can’t condone it. It’s just wrong. And I do believe the people who have turned to violence, the gun thefts and shootings, should face justice at its most severe level. But there’s a difference between violence and taking sneakers. (“Confessions of a Looter,” Chicago Tribune 6 September 2005)

He goes on to claim his own theft story. Seems that the Pennsylvania Railroad was “fabulously successful at wasting everything,” and somehow lots of it ended up in his family basement. He says, “For many years, I thought all tools had ‘Property of PRR’ engraved on them, that all tomato stakes looked suspiciously like hickory brakeman’s clubs, and that it was just natural that our basement steps were covered in the very carpeting that once graced the floors of Pullman cars.” “The railroad is just throwing it away so why let it go to waste,” was my father’s thought about it.

Madigan confesses that he tried his own version of larceny once with one of his friends at a local, out-of-business construction company. They played on the heavy equipment until one of them pushed the wrong pedal and a big crane bucket plunged twenty feet into the top of another vehicle. The police came. “I didn’t do it,” he lied. “It was ugly,” he says.

But they were kinder times. Instead of being nabbed, the cop just sat in front of our house. “We’ll just wait until your father gets here,” he said. And he did. He knew my dad, yet another untimely Knights of Columbus connection, I suspect. “Gerald, the boy . . .” he said. Then he told the story, said what we did was dangerous, and hopped on his motorcycle and left.

“Why am I revealing this?” Madigan asks. “I am worried,” he writes,

that the first inclination of TV viewers of these events might be to say, “It’s all those black kids. They just don’t know how to behave,” and so on, as though there were some kind of racial component to misbehavior. I’m here as an old white guy with baggage to say don’t go there. It’s not about race. It’s about where you come from in life.

Why has the media wasted so much of our time focusing on that folks have stolen T-shirts and diapers and food instead of spending more media energy helping us think about the fact that those people may well be desperate or hungry, afraid or angry. It seems to me that in this world, there are far greater things to be concerned about. We look about a nation that has been devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Lives lost, families separated, communities destroyed. And we look upon a world suffering greatly from the affliction of global poverty. Now that’s something to be concerned about—hungry and homeless people in a world of plenty.

There is a popular U2 song—yes, U2 is a rock band (others may promote poetry and literature from this pulpit; I’m the rock-and-roll preacher today). The song goes, “I can’t believe the news today but I can’t close my eyes and make it go away.” It’s often what we feel in the face of world hunger, the AIDS epidemic, or overwhelming natural disaster. The news is hard to hear. But the fact is, as Christian people we shouldn’t close our eyes. Instead, we should make it go away.

U2’s lead singer, Bono, is now better known as the promoter of the One Campaign. The campaign, founded by such well-known relief organizations as Oxfam America, Save the Children, and World Vision, calls for individuals and governments to join in an urgent movement to help countries around the world reach the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. The goals include eradicating extreme poverty, of which one in six of the people in the world live. Extreme poverty is defined as living on less than one dollar a day. The Campaign is titled One because it calls on the U.S. to dedicate an additional one percent of the federal budget to helping the world’s poorest people help themselves and thereby halving global poverty by the year 2015.

Jeffrey Sachs, in his book The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time, contends that it is possible to end the devastating poverty known in Africa. He “insists that in the continent-sized poverty trap we know as Africa”—his words—hat if only the rich world would help with a few essential ingredients, the continent could be set on a path to eradicate poverty (Bill McKibben, “Poor No More,” Christian Century 31 May 2005). That path involves moving people to “moderate poverty,” an average income between one and two dollars a day. Here’s the interesting part. He argues that these basic needs could be met by transferring 31 cents a day per extremely poor person from the rich nations. a total of 0.6 percent of the total income of the rich world. That’s not 6 percent; that’s six tenths of 1 percent. He argues that an easy way to achieve that is simply by repealing the Bush tax cuts for people making over $500,000 a year. Now that’s not a road I’m going down in this sermon today, but you get the picture of the achievability he argues—that there could be an end to poverty.

Whether we agree with Sach’s evaluation or the Campaign One strategies isn’t the point. The point is that the world has a problem and there are solutions. The problem isn’t that some of us have more than others. The problem is that some of us have next to nothing or simply nothing. And the issue is that as Christian folks, we are to be about the business of making that different. Whether or not we believe in the strategies proposed isn’t the question. The question is whether or not we believe in the parable today, the gospel of Jesus Christ that there is plenty enough for everyone and it’s our job to dispense goodness and mercy just as God has—freely and without regret. It’s unusual, but it isn’t cruel. It’s what Christ calls us to do in the very parable of the vineyard.

“To be a Christian,” writes Bishop Will Williman, former chaplain of Duke University, “is, in part, to be reminded, on a weekly basis, that we are meant to look at the world with different standards of judgment than those that operate in the world” (Will Willimon, Pulpit Resource, September 2005). He goes on to tell of John Westerhoff, professor of religion at Duke, who was called to consult with a school for Native American children. One of the teachers confessed that she was shocked by the lack of morals among the students. “They cheat constantly,” she said. “We can’t make them stop.” So he sat down and talked with the kids and asked why they looked at each others’ papers. “If someone in the tribe knows, he should tell everyone who doesn’t know it. If someone in the tribe does not know, he should go ask someone who knows.”

Am I suggesting today that stealing and cheating are good things? No. I’m suggesting that oftentimes our status or our cultural influences are what shape our ideas of what is right or wrong. But the reality is that God decides what is right and wrong. In God’s vineyard, what is right is that all of us are cherished and loved equally. God has freely poured out for each and every one of us God’s love and forgiveness, goodness and mercy. That is the standard we are to reflect. What one teacher described as a lack of morals among the Native American students is exactly the kind of morals we are to have: If someone has something, they should share it. It isn’t the gospel of prosperity. It isn’t the reward system. It isn’t cruel, but it is unusual. It’s the gospel of Jesus Christ, and it’s what we are called to live and what we are called to share.

So go now into the world to live in unusual ways. Go now more concerned not that someone else has more than you but that someone else might have less. Go now to the volunteer tables to make this a different world. Go now not to be the first but to indeed be the last. All to God’s glory and honor and praise. World without end. Amen.