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I do not like how God is handling a lot of things.
I want God to speak. God is not extraverted enough for my taste. I want God to just talk to me, the way God talked to Abraham and Moses and the prophets, and Jesus.
I want God to defeat my enemies. I am deeply troubled by bullies, and I admit I feel enraged when they get away with their abuse. I admit I sometimes want to put my foot on the neck of the guy who puts his foot on necks. Yes, I hear the irony in that. But why doesn’t God make it right?
I want God to clear the ashen skies, cool the roiling oceans, re-freeze the Arctic, filter the rivers until they sparkle, dispel the raging hurricanes, disperse the greenhouse gases, save uncounted millions from death and suffering caused by our climate catastrophe.
I want a vaccine. Why doesn’t God intervene somehow, to make developing a vaccine easier? Why does God allow viruses, full stop? A black bear could kill me but I understand why she’s here: she is beautiful and majestic; she is a fierce mother; she glorifies God in all of her terrifying splendor. But a virus? There is no glory or beauty in a virus.
Ultimately, I want God to make the world make sense. I want God to ensure free and fair elections, keep an elderly justice alive and healthy, and just generally control the universe the way I control the tropical-fish aquarium in my kitchen: I check and change the water, I separate aggressive fish from smaller and gentler ones, and I generally, well, play God with the little kingdom I have created. Why can’t that be how God runs the Milky Way galaxy?
God has heard all this before. Our friend Jonah is one of our most relatable forebears in the faith, and he is a prophet who confronted God with this same basic feedback: “I do not like how you are handling a lot of things,” Jonah says to God.
Jesus tells us a parable today that sounds these themes. But it’s a complicated parable, and it doesn’t yield its secrets easily. It’s worth some contemplation, to unlock its wisdom and insight.
“The kingdom of heaven is like…” Jesus begins. And what’s it like? It’s like a landowner who hires laborers over the course of the day, and pays them all the exact same wage at the end of the day, whether they toiled under the hot sun or just put in a quick hour at the end. That’s what the kingdom of heaven is like.
Let’s try to crack this parable open.
First, it seems natural to assume that the landowner in the story represents God. He’s the boss, it’s his vineyard, he’s got all the cards. But the landowner behaves in ways that seem not to be very God-like: the usual, accepted daily wage for laborers is actually not a lot of money, so nobody, perhaps not even the guys who only worked for an hour, nobody in the parable really gets treated lavishly by the landowner. So the landowner may not be God. (And yet—remember all the ways I am upset with God about how God handles things? Maybe this odd and complicated landowner is God. That tracks.) Either way, as we hear this parable, we realize that “the kingdom of heaven,” as Jesus calls it, is not a simple vision of safety and security, abundance and triumph for good folks, punishment for bad, everything and everyone tucked into a world that makes perfect sense. And even if you’re doing okay in the kingdom of heaven, no one person is going to think that it all makes perfect sense and is working out great.
Here’s a contemporary, 21st-century-American way of saying it. This week I learned a slang term: “Main Character Syndrome.” You could use this term when you don’t want to call someone a narcissist or say that they have a personality disorder, but you do want to express your concern that they seem to make every situation about them. They are the star in their own movie, which makes all the rest of us supporting characters, or walk-ons with no lines, or maybe just objects on the movie set.
If I were the main character at Grace, for example, then this congregation would need to make sense to me, at all times. I would need Grace to be mine. I need to decide how we pray, how we sing, who we are, what our mission is, what our future is, what we do with your pledges, and more. But Main Character Syndrome doesn’t stop with one scenario. If I am the main character here, then all the different dimensions of my life are supposed to be about me, too: my marriage, my career, my husband’s career, my dog, my colleagues, my neighborhood — mine. That’s “Main Character Syndrome.”
And that is the opposite of the kingdom of heaven.
So … Jonah. Jonah slips into Main Character Syndrome. The Ninevites don’t get what they deserve, and that’s wrong in Jonah’s eyes because he loses face. He warned them, after all, so if their city is not destroyed by God, then Jonah looks foolish. The world makes sense to Jonah only when Jonah and his needs are at the center.
The laborers who worked all day in the vineyard slip into Main Character Syndrome too. The landowner disrupts their expectations. He establishes an economy that doesn’t line up with what they think fairness is. They don’t realize that what they think is fair is only fair when they are the Main Character, when their concerns come first. The world makes sense to them only when their concerns come first.
But the kingdom of heaven is not like that. It is like this:
Lawyer and journalist Dahlia Lithwick wrote a tribute this weekend to a federal employee who never, ever presented symptoms of Main Character Syndrome, a tiny giant of a jurist named Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Lithwick writes:
“A few months ago, I had the greatest joy of my two-decade career: an opportunity to interview the notorious one herself, at the court, shortly before lockdown closed its doors. The project was about [Ginsburg’s] Harvard Law School classmates, and what it was like to be one of the first women to attend that law school and the barriers faced by anyone who wasn’t a white male. Throughout our hour together, I was asking the questions, but the justice’s eyes weren’t focused on me. Not really. Instead, she was frequently looking at our twentysomething staffer, Molly Olmstead, who had done the bulk of the research on the project and had come to know this Harvard class like it was her own. You couldn’t miss it; none of us in the room missed it. The Gen Xers were fine, sure, but it was the young woman to whom Ruth Bader Ginsburg directed herself. Always. She loved being an icon and a rock chick and a heroine and a tote bag, not because she loved the adulation … She loved it because she loved the idea that suddenly young people were reading her dissents, setting them to music, comparing her to rappers, and ingesting her into their cultural DNA. For as long as I watched her, she was, in turn, watching the generations that came after me. Because she always genuinely believed that they would finish the work she had started.”
Lithwick continues:
“Whenever she spoke, Justice Ginsburg was at pains to say that she stood on the shoulders of giants. … She saw herself as part of something bigger … [and while her death] is gutting and lacerating and brutally sad, her entire life and work has been in service to the idea that the rest of us are in fact capable of being allies and helpers and boosters and supporters, and also that the generations that are disconsolate tonight, for the lack of a hero, are themselves capable of stepping into her teeny-tiny, mighty, 3-inch-heeled, terrifyingly fabulous shoes and taking up the work she didn’t begin but merely inherited from those who came before.”
This is what kingdom of heaven is like: The main character is always someone else. Always, always, we gather here to live for and to serve the Other. God made me with delight, and my needs matter, but I recognize God in you. From my singular perspective, the world makes no sense. It only begins to make sense when I focus on you.
And that is how the world is saved. I come here first and foremost for you. You come here first and foremost for a newcomer. The newcomer reaches out to a long-time parishioner, who in turn reaches out to a ministry partner, who prepares meals for people in need. We all come here for the world beyond our doors. We all give to this church for them.
That’s how God saves Nineveh, and Jonah too, if Jonah is willing to be saved. That’s how the laborers and the landowner alike create a just economy. That’s how the world gets better.
Lots of times, God’s creation isn’t going to go your way, and it’s not about you, or me.
Are you still willing to lend a hand?
***
Jonah 3:10-4:11
Psalm 145:1-8
Philippians 1:21-30
Matthew 20:1-16
Artwork: Jonah is spewed out from the great fish, public domain.
Preached at Grace Episcopal Church, Bainbridge Island, Washington, on Sunday, September 20, 2020, Proper 20A.