LIVING AND WAGES
Isaiah 55:1-2   Matthew 20:1-16
A Communion Meditation by the Reverend Odette Lockwood-Stewart

In the economy of biblical Palestine ... in the age of Roman rule ... in the days of Jesus ... those who owned land had both slaves and day laborers working for them.  Slaves were property.  Their lives were owned without wages to profit their owners.  Day laborers had no relationship and no guarantee of work or wages.  They might work one day with no work the next, ... or the next.  They stood in the marketplace ... or by the city gate... never knowing if their family would eat.

Jesus chose day laborers, those standing at the marketplace. Today - those standing on Fruitvale Avenue, or on Hearst and 4th street.   Jesus chose day laborers in a time of great unemployment in Galilee ... to compare God’s Kindom, the radical generosity and grace of God, the economy of the household of God, with common labor practices.  Jesus said that God’s Kindom ... God’s household ... is to be compared to an owner who hired a crew of day laborers at 6:00 a.m, set their daily wage at one denarius – and sent them out to work.  Perhaps he had hired the least number of workers needed to get the job done in order to cut costs and increase profit.  At 9:00 he found he needed more help, so he hired some more workers ... and then more at noon ... and then more at 3:00 ... and finally more at 5:00, just one hour before the end of the twelve-hour work day.  

The owner ordered his manager to pay the workers that day in accordance with the law that ensured workers daily bread.  He paid the last-hired workers first and the first-hired workers last and he paid them all the same wage.  Enough to feed a family.

This did not sit well with the first-hired workers who saw the last hired workers get paid the same amount for one hour that they got for 12 hours!  They thought that they were entitled to more.  They worked hard and deserved more.  They began to grumble to the owner.

He reminded them that they had received the wage they had agreed to, and what they needed and he asked, “...are you envious because I am generous?”

This is commonly known as the “Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard.”  It could also be called “The Parable of Surprising and Disturbing Generosity.”  Or we could call it “God’s economics 101.”

There is a Jewish table prayer that includes these words of blessing:  “Blessed art thou, Adonai our God, ruler of the universe, who feeds the whole world through your goodness.”  As Luise Schottroff writes, “Those who pray this prayer will not recognize God in the landowner... When God’s Torah secures the freedom of one who owns land, it does so only in order that life in this land may be blessed, as everyone – (slaves, prisoners,) women, foreigners –shares in the blessing.”

The life of the day laborer was ... and is ... vulnerable ... precarious.  One scholar pointed out that the laborers hired first had the best and easiest day ... because they knew from the very start that they would have money to feed their families.  Those who had no work until the very last faced the very real prospect of failure to find work and of their families’ unmet hunger.

This summer the Federal minimum wage increased from $5.85 per hour to $6.55 per hour ... California’s minimum wage is somewhat higher ... $8.00 per hour.  That means that in California a worker with a steady job ... 40 hrs/wk ... 52 wks/yr ... has a gross income of $16,640/year. Ponder the wages and pray for the living of day laborers ... not knowing what days, or hours, they might be paid.  Ponder the wages and pray for the living of workers in international markets who are inheriting the work shipped overseas by corporations who outsource to escape requirements of the American minimum wage.

What does it mean -- in God’s economy -- to proclaim that the purpose of freedom ... or wealth ... or gifts ... or land ... or blessing is so that all – the vulnerable, the foreigners – may share in blessing?

If we pray, look, ask, compare, and engage this parable, we might look at how God’s economy compares to our state’s economy – in which for-profit prisons and for-profit schools and for-profit health care are assumed as growth industries; in which 1300 homes are foreclosed every day, in which one company’s cutting 20,000 jobs was reported as “financial improvement,” and in which there still are children who go without food.

Imagine how God’s generosity and justice can transform our living and our wages.  Who is first?  Who is last?  Where is God at work?

Do we regard our lives as a wage earned?  Or do we understand our lives as gift to be shared?  

Imagine the surprise, the gratitude, the celebration of the laborers who had worried without hope for eleven hours, and then received what they needed to feed their families, far more than they expected, more than they could have earned, at the twelfth hour?  
 
In God’s economy we are never judged by how well the best and first are doing ... or by how well we are doing in comparison with others. Rather in God’s economy the standard is always how well the last are being cared for ... how well the whole is doing.

As we come to the table where all are welcome, we pay attention to wages ... how adequate what is earned may be for what is needed.  As we come to the table where all are fed, we pay attention to the lives that we are given ... and whether we are living so that the world ... the household ... that God has entrusted to us ... is a place where all share in the blessing of God’s economy.