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
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.
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