Dollar A Day
Exodus 16:2-15; Matthew 20:1-16
September 18, 2011
I keep telling you that the Lectionary Guys are not predictable, perhaps because of the material they are promoting. The Spirit blows where it wills. So, all of a sudden, the Lectionary is dealing hard core with economics, how we earn our bread. It isn’t stewardship campaign time, but what they are saying clearly involves our value of how we see utilizing our money and assets.
Farmer Ken, with several sections of ripe and ready grain down in Richardson, woke up one fine morning and turned on the news to hear that an army of grasshoppers was advancing east from the Alberta border at the rate of 25 km an hour. “Oh my God,” he exclaimed, “Alberta grasshoppers – I’ll be ruined unless all that grain gets harvested today.”
Well you know Alberta – where everything is bigger and better. There are no rats in Alberta but the grasshoppers – they don’t have the 2, 3 or 4 inch Saskatchewan grasshoppers – they have the 1 foot and 2 foot Alberta grasshoppers.
Ken gets on the phone - he begs, borrows and steals every swather and combine and grain truck he can get his hands on – then he is off to the coffee shop by 7 to scare up a little help. He sends the guys off to work the harvest and turns on the radio to keep track of those Alberta grasshoppers! They are fast moving – so about 10:30 he is back at the coffee shop and he rustles himself up another group of workers. “Don’t worry” he says, “I’ll pay a good day’s wage. I have to get that grain in the bins before the grasshoppers arrive.”
At noon in the coffee shop over a burger and fries he hears that the darn insects are now in Swift Current – some guy didn’t act fast enough and lost a whole section to the Alberta grasshoppers – some of whom are now reported to be a meter in length!
Shoot! He goes to the local school and gets his boys, his nephews, his neighbour’s boys, and a couple of troublemaker boys the principal would like to get rid of for the afternoon. “I’ll pay good,” he says.
By 3 PM at the coffee shop over pie and coffee Ken hears those blasted Alberta grasshoppers are now in Mortlach! “Darn it,” and he heads for the local watering hole to pick up anyone standing and sends them off into the fields with the promise of a fair wage.
Around 6 PM after checking on the progress of the harvest – he is waiting on the meal to be delivered to the field when suddenly he remembers – the wife told him there was a big UCW meeting at the church with a potluck tonight.
He goes back to the house to make up some peanut butter sandwiches and turns on the TV. The CBC has a reporter in Belle Plaine – the grasshoppers are movin’ fast. He needs more help. So he heads off to the church and loads up the UCW ladies into the back of his pickup. Miss Bertha may be 95 but she can still drive and with a couple of pillows under her posterior she’ll be able to see over the hood of the grain truck just fine.
You can hear those Alberta grasshoppers chomping through the grain now to the west. It is a race against time. By 11 PM it’s all in the bin. The farmer is a happy man! The workers line up to get paid. What the heck – he doesn’t remember who he hired first, last or in between. He pays every last one of them for fifteen hours of labour! A day’s wage – even Miss Bertha! They should all be happy - but they aren’t!
They start to grumble, “I worked more hours than you. Why didn’t I get more money?” “How come a kid who worked half as long as I did makes the same amount?” “With all due respect Miss Bertha, you ain’t worth that much!”
So they start a petition – and of course they can’t agree on one petition, so there are several – depending quite naturally on the hour when the workers were hired and their own assessment of their value. And of course no one group signs another group’s petition! Did you ever hear of a labour dispute like this one?
The labourers are complaining because they have received the wage they were entitled to – Ken has to defend his right to pay more than was necessary. What way is this to run a business? Shouldn’t those hired first – who spent 15 hours in the blazing sun receive more than those UCW ladies? On the other hand, as those Alberta grasshoppers came closer and closer to his field – the farmer’s labour force became more and more valuable to him. Miss Bertha was worth every last cent! What’s the point of the story of the labourers in the vineyard who are all paid the same at the day’s end? Where is the fairness in all of this - a system in which the first are the last and the last ones in move on up to the front? Where hard work counts for nothing? Well, it’s what the Kingdom of Heaven is going be like. Far as I know, we’re all here together as a church – so get used to it.
Not that unrelated is the other older story about Israel wandering in the wilderness on the Exodus. It’s basically a church story, about a potluck with a bunch of empty pots. The water had been shut off, no meat was to be found out here in the inhospitable wilderness, and the bread had run out. What does a church do then, but instinctively complain and who do you complain against? The minister, of course, so Moses and his brother Aaron are in deep trouble for this is a rough crowd, murmuring all the time. God has a solution and provides that every morning on the ground would be found a flake-like substance that would prove to be an excellent bread. The people scooped it up and it filled them up, but no one knew what to call it. “What is it, what is this stuff?” We know it now as manna, which is simply the Hebrew expression for “what is it?” There’s a clue in the word, however. Manna is really two words – mah or ‘what’ and ‘na’ which is one of those curious particles in a language that indicates a question, but is never translated. So a good contemporary way to put it is – “What is it, eh?” Conclusive proof Canadians were wandering in the wilderness even back then.
The manna, the bread, kept appearing, by the way, for 40 years and it was only the day that Israel reentered the Promised Land that it stopped. Naturally, the church organized a bunch of committees to manage the manna: some to collect it, others to butter it in the mess tents, still others to distribute it to the rest of the people, especially the infirm, the very young and the ailing. Oh, there was one other committee, quite logical, who after the day’s meals, started storing the leftovers for another day. It never worked because by the following morning the saved manna was going moldy and wormy. Only the day before the Sabbath were they allowed to gather a double portion – and then none on the Sabbath itself – and that extra portion did not spoil.
This may sound weird and isn’t it considered sound management practice to save for a rainy day? What are pantries for anyway? Here, however, was a demonstration of a different way of economics. Nature and God only give you what you need for the day, people who tried to hoard were foiled. You receive ‘enough’ and never more than enough. Of course, there was more murmuring and griping because that committee charged with storing the manna for future consumption was out of a job. They could pretend to keep up with their job, but no one wanted moldy manna.
Remember we are a church and we operate by the grace of God which seldom operates by sound business practices. We are gathered here by the mysterious grace of God. We did not choose one another, God chose us. We are meant to be different, meant to be non-conformists to the rest of the world. When we keep trying to sneak in a little extra to satisfy our insecurity about the future, whenever we begrudge others getting enough to survive because we feel we have worked harder and better than they have, that we deserve God’s grace, we have lost grace.
Don’t ever think that God is fair. God is not fair! God does not intend to be fair. God is beyond fair. Don’t be misled into believing that God will give you what you deserve. This is the point of the whole gospel – God is not fair and God will not give you what you deserve. God will give to you – deserving or not. That is the definition of grace. And God is gracious – God will bless you and me, God’s gathered people. Oh, do we need to add, then you and I, we gathered people, need to go out and act differently, which means giving every person the same ‘enough’ as we have received. The economics have not changed – this is how we use the grace given us.
Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan