Homily: The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost [September 24, 2017] Trinity, Santa Barbara

            The great Leonard Cohen—singer, songwriter, poet--died at age 82 last year on November 7, one day before the presidential election. Whether it was out of grief at his passing or terror of the election results, I spent most of November re-listening to the Leonard Cohen songs I have loved all my adult life. In the bleak days of November 2016 and beyond, I have found his particular combination of biblical allusion, Zen practice, and mordant wit somehow deeply comforting. 

One of my favorite of Leonard Cohen’s songs is “Everybody Knows”, released in the dystopian late Cold War Iran-Contra year 1988. When introducing “Everybody Knows”, Cohen said, "Here's a terrible new song. Yes, it embodies all my darkest thoughts...”

Here is one verse that’s suitable for reading aloud in church:

Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died
Everybody talking to their pockets
Everybody wants a box of chocolates
And a long-stem rose
Everybody knows

            Something about this song captures the double-whammy of our shared human senses of feeling both guilty and aggrieved at the same time. It’s not only that we’re often selfish and self-serving; it’s also that we’re enraged that there are others in the world who are better at being selfish and self-serving than we are.

            A sense of the doubleness of our moral dilemma emerges in today’s gospel reading as well (Matthew 20: 1-16), the tale Jesus tells we conventionally call the parable of the laborers in the vineyard. A landowner hires laborers at five different times during the day: early and mid-morning, noon, mid-afternoon, late afternoon. When it is time to pay up, the last receive their wages first. And when the first—those who had “borne the burden in the heat of the day”—come to collect their pay, they receive the same pay as everybody else. The first laborers are understandably angry: the landowner has treated the long-timers and the newcomers equally. When they complain, the landowner replies, “I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. Are you envious because I am generous?”

Those who write biblical commentaries will say first that this parable is really about the equality of Jews (those who have been faithful for centuries) and gentiles (those who have just recently joined up) in the church. While I’m sure there is some truth in this analysis, I don’t find the longtimer/newcomer tension the most interesting aspect of the story. To my mind, the parable of the laborers in the vineyard tells us many things about ourselves, most importantly something about the layers of self-deception which keep us from seeing ourselves and others clearly. We all manage somehow to feel both guilty and aggrieved. We all talk into our pockets. We all want a box of chocolates and a long-stemmed rose.

It is not an accident that Jesus uses the idea of money here to reveal and diagnose our spiritual problem. Money is the medium our culture has invented to represent value. As the poet Wallace Stevens said, “Money is a kind of poetry.” These vineyard workers are upset about their wages because their wages represent their time, and time (and remember, “Time is money”) is something we value. The landowner messes with the workers’ usual equations by assigning the same value to differing stretches of time: 3, 6, 9, 12 hours all receive the same pay. Hey, I gave you more of my valuable time. Don’t I deserve more than those others? Everyone thinks they have good reason to feel aggrieved.

I thought about this parable and the paradox it embodies earlier this year when I read a provocative op-ed piece in the New York Times [Richard V. Reeves, “Stop Pretending You’re Not Rich”, New York Times, 6/10/17] by Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution. It was called, “Stop Pretending You’re Not Rich”, and it was one of the few things I’ve read recently that made me stop and re-examine my own social and economic situation in relation to others. Like many fellow progressives, I have bought into the 1% versus 99% language used to describe economic inequality. But Reeves’s point is that the true measure of wealth disparity in America is not between the top 1 and the bottom 99 but rather between the top 20 and bottom the 80. As he says,

This favored fifth at the top of the income distribution . . . has been separating from the 80 percent below. Collectively, this top fifth has seen a $4 trillion-plus increase in pretax income since 1979, compared to just over $3 trillion for everyone else. Some of those gains went to the top 1 percent. But most went to the 19 percent just beneath them.

Reeves goes on:

The rhetoric of “We are the 99 percent” has in fact been dangerously self-serving, allowing people with healthy . . . incomes to convince themselves that they are somehow in the same economic boat as ordinary Americans, and that it is just the so-called super rich who are to blame for inequality.

Youch! If Reeves is right (and I think he is), I have a perceptual problem. Here I have been spending all that energy blaming Bezos, Gates, Buffett, and Zuckerberg (the 1%) and their superwealth and imagining myself in the same boat with those who are really up against it (the 99%). My perceptual problem turns then into a moral problem. It turns out that I really have more in common with the fat cats than I’d like to imagine. And not only that: as one of the top 20% I can continue to reap the benefits of affluence and still complain about not being in the heady reaches of the top 1%. As Reeves concludes,

There’s a kind of class double-think going on here. On the one hand, upper-middle-class Americans believe they are operating in a meritocracy (a belief that allows them to feel entitled to their winnings); on the other hand, they constantly engage in antimeritocratic behavior in order to give their own children a leg up. . . . For the upper middle classes, regardless of their professed political preferences, zoning, wealth, tax deductions and educational opportunity reinforce one another in a virtuous cycle.

Thus, like the laborers in the vineyard, I manage to have it both ways: I am guilty and aggrieved. I benefit from all kinds of generosity which I confuse with my own achievement. As the late great Ann Richards once said of the first President Bush, “He was born on third base and thought he hit a triple.” As Paul says in 1 Corinthians, (1 Corinthians 4:7) “What have you that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift?” As my friend Harvey Guthrie says, “We’re all on cosmic welfare.”

            Jesus’s use of the symbols of money and time in this parable points us to a profound truth about ourselves. Whether we’re in the one percent, the top 20 percent, we are all recipients of enormous cosmic and social generosity. This is not a story only about the longevity of church membership. It is a story about our awareness of our own privilege and our need to extend that privilege to others. As long as we allow ourselves to claim a false solidarity with the poor, the marginalized, and the oppressed we will continue to do more to advance our own interests than to help realize theirs. As a white, straight, relatively affluent male, it is always tempting for me to put myself in the same discriminatory boat with people of color, women, gays and lesbians, and the poor. As a follower of Jesus, my job is not to claim membership in the community of the oppressed. My job is to make common cause with them and work together to undo the structures of oppression that have given me the leg up that I think I so richly deserve.

            Going through life feeling both guilty and aggrieved is not an attractive stance toward life. We are all the recipients of so much more generosity on the part of others and God than we usually acknowledge. It is easy to find yourself born on third base and think you hit a triple. It is easier still to lament that the triple should have been a home run. In our gospel for this morning, Jesus invites us to see ourselves and others in a new way. All of us have been given so much more than we could have earned on our own. We should not confuse our own good fortune with moral worth.

            In Leonard Cohen’s words, each of us wants a box of chocolates and a long-stemmed rose. In God’s economy, we cannot hoard life’s blessings to ourselves. In God’s economy, we must strive to make chocolates and roses available to all. Very few of us are the super-rich; very few are the real poor. Affluent or struggling as we may be, we are called to do what we can to extend our unacknowledged privileges to those who have few or none.

It is no accident that Jesus begins his Beatitudes by saying, “Blessed are the poor.” God’s justice is broader and more expansive than any so-called fairness you and I could concoct. We need to stop fooling ourselves, finding shelter in self-serving ideas of fairness. This is the way Jesus’s universe works: we all--the innocent and the guilty—finally deserve and receive the same reward. Are we willing to work to make our world like Jesus’s? Or will we remain envious because God is generous? Amen.