Sept. 21, 2014
Matthew 20:1-16

“But, dad, it’s not fair!” “Mom, why do I always have to do it?” …Have you heard those words before? I used to say them to my parents all the time. It drove me crazy that nobody else in the house was ever called upon to take out the garbage. I had two sisters who never did it. They actually had harder jobs, and I knew it. But I didn’t care. To me it was a justice issue. “This is so not fair!”

My dad would always say, “Tim, who ever told you that life was fair?”

I hated that response, and I vowed never to say it to my own children. But, of course, I do.

When I was in seminary I took a course called “Topics in Theology: Calvin and Barth.” Though John Calvin and Karl Barth lived a few centuries apart, they are often paired with one another as representatives of (and leaders in) this Reformed tradition of Protestantism that we are a part of in the UCC. Barth considered Calvin his primary partner in dialogue and looked to him for thoughtful consideration of theological themes. Both are well known for their ideas about divine election and predestination, which are also themes that often raise questions about the fairness of God. If God chooses the saved before they are even born, how is it the fault of the damned that they are damned? Doesn’t that make God unfair?

I think so. John Calvin on the other hand did not. We came to Karl Barth who was thoroughly convinced of divine election though radically contrasted to Calvin in thought. Barth wrote, “In the beginning,…God anticipated and determined within Himself…that the goal and meaning of all His dealings with the as yet non-existent universe should be the fact that in His Son He would be gracious towards man, uniting Himself with him.”^[1] In other words, God elected Jesus Christ so that all people would be saved through him.

One girl in the class objected. “Wait a minute. Here I am trying to live a good life and Barth is telling us that sinners and people who do terribly wrong things will end up in the same place as me. That’s not right. That’s not fair.”

I understood her point but couldn’t help thinking that she sounded like an 8 year old who had been asked to take out the garbage. That’s not to gloss over the evils that people have experienced or committed. I DON’T think that God ignores these things. Actually, the opposite is true. Rather than giving up on sinners and leaving them to their just punishments God is working for the salvation, that is, the wholeness, of all people. God is less concerned with punishment and retribution than with redemption and transformation.

Though this may not be fair, if we think about it, it’s an injustice from which we all benefit. The question is not, why would God seek the well-being of someone like that person over there? Rather, it’s why would God seek the well-being of a person like me?

And the answer is grace. It is the freely-given though unmerrited love of God who would rather suffer and die than allow even the most wayward of souls to remain forever lost.

Our gospel lesson today comes in the middle of a fairly lengthy section in which Matthew paints a picture of the new type of community that is to exist in fellowship with the risen Christ. He tells about whiney children being welcomed at the lap of Jesus despite the impatience of proud disciples. He contrasts a camel’s inability to walk through the eye of a needle and Christ’s ability to grant a wholeness and newness of life to God’s sinful people. And he talks about laborers in a vineyard all of whom receive a day’s wage though not all worked the whole day. Those who completed the entire shift are angry that those who worked just part of the time have been made, in a sense, equal to them. The NIB writes, “They have what they have by justice; others have been made equal by grace.”[i] And when the former complain Jesus seems to respond, who ever told you that grace was fair?

Will Campbell grew up on a farm in Mississippi in the late 40’s and 50’s. He went to seminary in the northeast and after graduating he became director of religious life at the U. of Mississippi.   However, when the school found out about his liberal views on integration he was fired. He soon found himself in the thick of the civil rights battle. Most of his fellow “Christians” refused to let people of other races into their churches and resented anyone tampering with laws favoring white people. Ironically, Campbell found allies among agnostics, socialists, and a few devout northerners.

One of these allies was a man named P.D. East who viewed white Christians as the problem and could not understand Campbell’s commitment to his faith. One day P.D. asked Campbell to sum up Christianity in 10 words. Campbell responded, after a moment to think, “We are all sinners (bastards) but God loves us anyway.”

Later, having clung to this definition, P.D. put Campbell to the test. One of Campbell’s friends, Jonathan Daniels who was a 26 year old activist from the north who had come south in response to Martin Luther King’s call for support, was shot by Thomas Coleman, a deputy sheriff from Alabama. “Daniels had been arrested for picketing white stores. On his release from jail he approached a grocery store to make a phone call to arrange a ride when Coleman appeared with a shotgun and emptied it in his stomach.”

P.D. approached Campbell about his God. “Let’s talk about your definition. Was Jonathan a sinner (bastard?”)

Campbell replied that though he was one of the most gentle guys he’d ever known, it’s true that everyone is a sinner and falls short of the goodness of God.

“All right. Is Thomas Coleman a sinner (bastard?”) That question, Campbell found much easier to answer. You bet the murderer was!

Then P.D. pulled his chair close, and he asked Campbell, “Which one of these two sinners (bastards) do you think God loves the most?”

Campbell writes, “Suddenly everything became clear. Everything. It was a revelation. I walked across the room and opened the blind, staring directly into the glare of the street light. And I began to whimper. But the crying was interspersed with laughter. It was a strange experience. I remember trying to sort out the sadness and the joy. Just what I was crying for and what I was laughing for. Then this too became clear.

I was laughing at myself, at twenty years of ministry which had become, without my realizing it, a ministry of liberal sophistication…

I agree that the notion that a man could go to a store where a group of unarmed human beings are drinking soda pop and eating moon pies, fire a shotgun blast at one of them, tearing his lungs and heart and bowels from his body, and that God would set him free is almost more than I could stand. But unless that is precisely the case then there is no Gospel, there is no Good News. Unless that is the truth we have only bad news, we are back with law alone.”

Phillip Yancey, who conveys this story in his book, What’s So Amazing About Grace, reflects, “What Will Campbell learned that night was a new insight into grace. The free offer of grace extends not just to the undeserving but to those who in fact deserve the opposite: to Ku Klux Klanners as well as civil rights marchers, to P.D. East as well as Will Campbell, to Thomas Coleman as well as Jonathan Daniels.

This message lodged so deep inside Will Campbell that he underwent a kind of earthquake of grace. He resigned his position with the National Council of Churches and became what he wryly called “an apostle to the rednecks.” He bought a farm in Tennessee, and spend as much time with Klansmen and racists as with racial minorities and white liberals. A lot of people, he decided, were volunteering to help minorities; he knew of no one ministering to the Thomas Colemans of the world.”[ii]

Grace is the unique blessing of Jesus Christ. It offers the church its greatest gift, its greatest assurance of God’s goodness, while also challenging us to the amazing call of being a gracious people. Though the task may at times feel unthinkable, we are assured that for God all things are possible. Thanks be to God.

 

^[1]P. 101. Church Dogmatics, The Doctrine of God.

[i] V. VIII, p. 394

[ii] Page 145