September 26, 2010 | 8:00 a.m.

God’s Generosity

Sarah A. Johnson
Minister for Congregational Care, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 146
Matthew 20:1-16

If there is any good news that is truly good news for everybody, and not just for a few somebodies, it is this: God is greater and more generous than the best of those who profess to know and serve him. This is the radical nonconformity with the conventional wisdom that Jesus both proclaimed and exemplified, and alas, it cost him his life. Will we hope to fare any better, as disciples of his nonconformity?”

Peter Gomes
The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus

“Amazing Grace” is perhaps one of the most beloved and well-known hymns of all time. Even if you don’t regularly attend church, you are still likely to know the tune and even the words to the first stanza:

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound
that saved a wretch like me
I once was lost but now am found
Was blind but know I see.

We Americans seem to be programmed to sing this hymn at the drop of a hat, and usually with a good bit of emotion. But I often wonder if we realize that what makes this grace so amazing is the extravagant generosity of the God from which it comes.

The hymn is not about grace in the abstract. It was written by former slave trader John Newton, who offered it as a testimony to the grace that had literally saved and redeemed him from the doom of his life as a trafficker in human chattel. The story goes that while on a homeward voyage of the slave ship Newton captained, he encountered a violent storm, and as he attempted to steer the ship through the waves, he called on God for mercy and experienced what he later referred to as his “great deliverance.” After that fateful night, Newton remained in the slave business for a few more years before he quite going to sea all together and began studying theology. Newton would later become an Anglican pastor and mentor to William Wilberforce, who through his own faith conversion would lead the campaign in Britain to abolish the slave trade all together.

It is a song that testifies to a truth that we as people of faith hold dear. Namely, that God’s grace is a free gift that, as Peter Gomes puts it, saves us “ordinary wretches from our lesser selves” (Peter Gomes, The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus, p 126). We don’t deserve it; we cannot earn it, control it, or confine it to the limits of our own expectations. All we can do is simply receive it gratefully, in all its abundance, and live faithfully in response.

God’s free grace, not ours. God, whose very character is far more gracious than you and I can ever hope to be. God, who can offer God’s grace to whomever God would like and not just to whom we think ought to get it or not.

In the story of the workers in the vineyard, which we read from the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus wants to remind his disciples of this very thing.

The story, simply put, is that those workers who arrive late to work in the master’s vineyard are paid exactly the same as those who worked all day. When the owner is questioned about his business practices, he replies, “Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you jealous that I am generous? So the last will be first and the first will be last.”

At first glance we might be tempted to think that this story is simply about power. The owner, after all, declares that it is his right to do what he wants with what belongs to him. “I am in charge here; the money and the vineyard—they are mine. I can do with them whatever I please.” This much makes sense to our capitalist sensibilities.

But when we look closer, we realize that the parable is not about power but about generosity. There is perceived in the owner’s theory of compensation not a totalitarianism but a dangerous extravagance: what will happen to the order of things if people don’t get what they deserve or, in this case, get more than they deserve?

After all, did you notice the nuance present in the workers’ objection to the vineyard owner’s actions? Those who worked all day do not object to the owner’s generosity outright. They say nothing when the owner offers the other workers more. It is only when that generosity exceeds the limits of their understanding of how things ought to work that they object. Seeing that those who arrive late given more than deserve, the others presume that they too will be given more. It is only fair, only just; equal pay for equal work. Or in this case, equal generosity for equal work.

It is only fair that those who showed up to work faithfully at the beginning of the day, did as they were told, followed all the right rules, believed what they knew to faithful, should expect the kind of strict economic justice that we all value in our lives.

Theologian and Harvard professor Peter Gomes tells a story about a friend of his, an English bishop, who was going to sit for his portrait. Friends of the bishop said to him, “I hope the artist does you justice,” to which the bishop surprised them by replying, “At my age and at this stage, I ask for mercy not justice.” Strict economic justice may have been what Jesus’ parable called for, but instead the owner demonstrates an unsettling generosity and grace.

The point is that God is far more generous, far more hospitable, far more gracious than we are.

The story of the workers in the vineyard blatantly resists any human temptation to place limits or boundaries on God’s grace. Rather it invites reflection on the sovereignty of the good God, the One with whom there can be no bargaining because he is the creator and the sovereign Lord of all and, likewise, whose grace cannot be cannot be presumed, calculated, expected, or doled out to those whom we think deserving or not. At that point it is no longer grace. God’s grace is always, as John Newton wrote, amazing.

The great German theologian of the twentieth century, Karl Bath, built much of his theology concerning the Doctrine of God on the freedom and otherness of God. Barth wrote extensively about God who has decisively revealed himself in the person and work of Jesus Christ and yet is wholly other and resists any attempt to be captured by us. Barth knew that a theology that forgets that we know God without fully comprehending God is in danger of speaking of something other than God.

It is what John Calvin speaks of when he refers to the sovereignty of God and what Catherine LaCugna means when she says, “One finds God because one is already found by God. Anything we would find on our own would not be God.”

In her book Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, Kathleen Norris wisely writes, “I take refuge in God’s transcendence, continually giving thanks that God’s ways are not my own.“

It us just as poor Jonah discovers as a prophet to the people of Nineveh. God tells Jonah to tell the people to repent, and in essence Jonah replies, “What is the point? They will repent, you will forgive them, and my prophetic career of announcing justice will be over here.” The people, of course, repent of their ways, God forgives them, and Jonah says, “It is just as I feared. . . . I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, long suffering, ever constant, always ready to relent and not inflict punishment. Now, take away my life, Lord; I should be better dead than alive.”

Jonah would rather die than allow God’s mercy to prevail over his own sense of justice. Not a shining moment for one of God’s prophets, but at least in his admitting his narrowness we can applaud the fact that Jonah knew the character of God and knew it to be greater, more capacious, and more loving than his own.

It is something that we people of faith often have trouble with. Having experienced the extravagant grace of God ourselves, we have hard time believing that same grace might be extended to someone else, especially someone who does not fit inside the limits of our own understanding of God in this world. I can admit to more than once trying to overcome the prevailing urge within me to say to another not “Jesus loves you,” but “I told you so.”

When we dare to speak of God, we do not speak boastfully or competitively, but humbly and hopefully. Humbly, knowing that God is God and we are not. And hopefully—that is full of hope—that the generosity of God is greater than our capacity to imagine or experience.

As Peter Gomes puts it, “If there is any good news that is truly good news for everybody, and not just for a few somebodies, it is this: God is greater and more generous than the best of those who profess to know and serve him.”

When I think of the future, of the afterlife, of what happens at the end of the age, I think of the loving, generous, gracious God in whose hands all things rest, and I am glad that God is more generous than many of his most ardent worshipers and preachers. We need a God who is bigger than the conventional wisdom of our sometimes little faith.

With such a God we need fear nothing that the future has to offer, and before that times comes, we might dare to emulate that extravagant generosity of God in the conduct of our own affairs.

All thanks be to God. Amen.