| "Goodness!" "Gracious!" Now, according to my dictionaries, these exclamations are interjections of surprise, or relief, or alarm, or dismay-currently somewhat old-fashioned.
Wouldn’t you know it? My old-fashioned mother used both of these interjections a lot. In fact, she almost always put the two words together to form one great big exclamation: "Goodness gracious!" Now, when my mother was happily surprised, she would say, "Goodness gracious!" [INFLECTED APPROPRIATELY] And when she was dismayed or alarmed, she would say, "Goodness gracious!" [INFLECTED APPROPRIATELY] And whenever her moments of dismay had something to do with me, as was too often the case, she'd add my name to it: "Goodness gracious, Byron!" [INFLECTED] Have any of the rest of you ever heard "Goodness gracious!" in one or both of those intonations? Etymologists tell us that when the word "Goodness" is used as an interjection it is often a euphemism for the word "God." For example, "Thank goodness!" is a non-offensive way of saying "Thank God!" So my mother's "Goodness gracious" was her way of saying, "Gracious God!" When she was pleasantly surprised, she was saying "Gracious God!" [INFLECTED] or "God is gracious!" And when she was alarmed or dismayed, she was saying, "Gracious God!" [INFLECTED], which was sort of like the more contemporary expression, "Good God!" [INFLECTED]. Now, this linguistic discourse of mine does have something to do with our two scripture lessons for the morning, believe it or not. In our First Lesson, from Exodus 16, God provides food for the people starving in the wilderness, and the people respond something like: "Goodness gracious!" [INFLECTED], "God is gracious!" But in the parable that Jesus tells in our Second Lesson, when the landowner gives the various laborers their wages at the end of the day, those who have worked twelve hours compare their pay with that given to those who have worked one hour, and they respond something like: "Goodness gracious!" [INFLECT THESE], or "Good God!" I have to admit that whenever I hear Jesus telling this parable about the landowner and the laborers in the vineyard, I often feel like saying: "There he goes again! Another one of those outrageous stories of his! There’s no justice at all in paying those who work just one hour, in the cool of the day, the exact same wage as those who work twelve hours, much of that time in the brutal sun! Even your average kindergartner has a better grasp of fairness than Jesus seems to have!" Now, the truth of the matter is that all of Jesus's parables contain, by design, something meant to shock us. But most of those shocks go unrecognized by us because the cultural gap between 1st-century Palestine and 21st-century America is just too vast and wide. I mean, how is someone today supposed to understand that Jesus's original audience thought all Samaritans were bad, that there was no such thing as a good Samaritan? And how is someone brought up in a modern city supposed to know that it was bad shepherding to expose ninety-nine safe sheep to such great danger by leaving them to chase recklessly after just one single lost sheep? But the shock factor in this morning's parable, about the landowner and the laborers, cannot be missed, even by the most modern of us. For the principle of equal pay for equal work remains today a hallmark of economic justice, just as it was in Jesus's day. For example, you members of our Youth Group, sitting way over there in the back-Tara, Jeffrey, Robin, Adele, Cherise, José-let me ask you to imagine yourselves a few years from now in this kind of situation. You're working at the McDonald's at 71st and Broadway. You've put in a long, hard day-slinging hamburgers, taking orders, cleaning equipment, sweeping floors, scouring bathrooms, coping with crabby customers. In fact, you've wound up working from 11 in the morning until 11 at night because every time you're about to leave the manager begs you to stay on, saying, "We're so busy, and I'm really short of help." At 10 p.m., you notice that a new worker has finally come in in response to one of the manager's desperate phone calls. His name is Jim, and he has started to mop the floor. At 11 p.m., you're finally done, and you pick up your pay envelope before heading out. As you're leaving, you notice that Jim is also walking out since the manager now has enough help and doesn't need him any more. As Jim is leaving, you hear him exclaim a modern version of "Goodness gracious," namely "Cool!" You look down at his hand, and in it he's holding not one, nor two, nor even three, but four crisp, new $20 bills. You're stunned! The manager has given him 80 bucks, for working just one hour. Wow! Well, you begin to imagine how much there must be in your pay envelope since you've worked twelve hours, not one. Let's see, 12 x $80 = Ummmmmm! But when you rip open your envelope, inside you find one, two, three, just four $20 bills-the same lousy 80 bucks that Jim got! You run inside and shout out to the manager, "Hey, Ms. Jones, what're you doing? How come Jim got the same pay as me?" Ms. Jones, never even looking up from her work, replies, "You agreed to work for $6.65 an hour. Twelve times that is 80 bucks, right?" Your face turns red as a beet, and as you head for the door you spit out, loud enough for Ms. Jones and everybody else to hear, your quite modernized version of "Goodness gracious!"-a version that I’m not going to repeat here in church! What is God trying to teach us through Jesus's shocking parable? Well, perhaps the key to understanding lies in recognizing this. In this competitive society of ours-with its system of work and wages-we tend to measure a person's worth by her take-home pay. And too often that person herself falls into the same trap. Too often she, too, measures her worth by how much she's paid. But the situation would be quite different were we to live together in a non-competitive community with God, a style of community shown to us in today’s First Lesson. There, God tells the people of Israel to harvest just enough bread for each day and not to compete with each other for surplus. God will make sure that everyone has enough, that no one will have too little. Our story offers us a model of a community of faith organized trustfully around these two principles: not competing for the gifts of God, and living in trustful equity with our neighbors. When we live in trustful, non-competitive community with God and each other, persons' worth has nothing at all to do with how much we're paid. When we live in trustful, non-competitive community with God and each other, persons' worth is equal, for each of us has accepted the same gracious invitation, the invitation to become a member of God's household-not hired help, but family members equally precious in God's sight. The great 20th-century theologian Paul Tillich once observed (in The Shaking of the Foundations): "Do not seek [competitively] for anything [from God]… Simply accept the fact that you are accepted. [For i]f that happens…, we experience grace." On all who accept God's gracious invitation to become part of God's non-competitive community, on all who turn to God-no matter how early or late in life-God bestows the same generous gift: the dignity and worth of being a member of God's household, the exact same dignity and worth given to everyone else who accepts God's indivisible gift of grace and eternal life and love. You see, the simplest, most direct meaning of Jesus's parable is this: on all who accept the offer to become part of the non-competitive community of God-no matter how early or late in life-God bestows the same amazing gift of grace-the gift of dignity and worth that we call salvation, the gift of life and love that we call eternity. God is gracious! Gracious God! Goodness gracious! From our normally competitive human perspective, it may seem unfair and unjust that we gain no extra measure of merit by joining God's community early-in-life rather than late-in-life, that we gain no extra measure of merit from the fact that we are just now sitting here in worship today, that we have not postponed our decision to worship God for say another 5, 10, or even 15 years. From our normally competitive human perspective, it does seem unfair and unjust that we gain no extra measure of merit by joining God's household early-in-life rather than late-in-life. But, of course, Jesus is calling us to view the matter from God's perspective. And in God's non-competitive order of things, salvation is indivisible, and eternity is indivisible. There's no such thing as partial salvation; there’s no such thing as only half of eternity! Everyone who accepts God’s offer of a place in the community of God, everyone who accepts God’s offer of salvation, receives the exact same generous gift-the whole of eternal life. The "extra" that we receive by becoming part of the community of God early-in-life rather than late-in-life is simply the extra joy that comes to us here and now, not at the end of life-it's the blessing that we derive here and now from not missing out for a single moment on present experiences of God's love; it's the comfort and joy we receive here and now from participating in worship today, from working with God today, from knowing ourselves today to be securely in God's family-not as hired hands but as beloved members of the household. Worshiping and working with God today contains within it its own reward, here and now, quite independent of what lies beyond the veil of death. Jesus reveled in God's gracious magnanimity toward all. And those who worship the God made known to us in Jesus are asked to imitate God's generosity, not begrudge it. I suspect that persons who begrudge God's grace toward those who only late in life answer the invitation to become part of the household of God-I suspect that those who begrudge God’s grace wrongly think of worshiping and working with God as duty or perhaps even pain rather than as joy and pleasure. Goodness gracious! Can you imagine such a thing? Why, goodness gracious, worshiping and working with God offer unequaled joy and pleasure right here, right now. Yes, God's grace is an amazing thing, something that confounds our all-too-human minds. But as the landowner says to the twelve-hour laborers at the end of Jesus's parable, "I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?" Yes, God is generous! God is gracious! Goodness gracious! Let us pray: Amazingly gracious God, to work with You through life is joy; to worship You always is comfort; to receive Your gift of worth is to be reborn; to experience Your generosity is to know the fullness of love; to come to You at death is to delight in the company of all Your saints, however tardy any of us may prove to be. We praise You, O God, for Your goodness that is gracious. Amen. |
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