Lancaster First United Methodist Church
June 27, 2010
Deuteronomy 24:14-15 & Matthew 20:1-16
Rev. Robert McDowell

“Puzzling Parables – The Laborers in the Vineyard”

Today, we conclude our sermon series on puzzling parables of Jesus. And today’s puzzling parable is one that may be less puzzling than it is annoying!

I think we understand what Jesus is saying plainly enough. We just don’t LIKE what Jesus is saying! To my way of thinking, Jesus is bringing up a sore subject and it challenges my worldview and my way of thinking which is, as we have discovered, one of the main purposes of parables. They are meant to get us to think, to change, and to see things the way God sees things.

Picture this: You go to one of those big stores to get some shopping done; you know the kind with 20 checkout lines across the front of the store? You gather all of the items you need. The store is crowded, and you have made your way up and down the aisles, avoiding the other carts, and all the people.

Then you get ready to pay and leave. Only there are only four of those twenty checkout lines open! Each one has a long line of customers who are all waiting to pay.

You quickly scan each line to see which one looks like it will move the fastest, which carts seem to have the least amount of stuff, which checkout clerk is getting customers through faster, which customer look like he will not ask a zillion questions, need a price check, or take five minutes looking for exact change.

You sigh to yourself, knowing it doesn’t make any difference, because you always pick the slowest line anyway!

So you get in one of the lines. They all move painfully slow.

You wait.

And you wait some more.

More people get in line behind you. The lines are growing longer.

But finally you are third in line.

Then it happens. It ALWAYS happens!

A clerk opens up the line next to yours. He turns on the light to aisle 13 and says, “I can help someone over here.”
He never says, “I can help the man who is next in line in aisle 12.” Oh no!

And before you can even blink, four latecomers from the back of your line, who have waited the least amount of time, have shoved their carts into aisle 13.

Saying something will never change anything. So, you bite your tongue, and grit your teeth, and you wait some more.

The last will be first, and the first will be last! “Yeah, you could’ve just kept that one to yourself, Jesus,” as you shake your head.

Today’s parable about the workers in the vineyard has that same effect on us. It makes us mad, because sometimes life seems so unfair!

A man who owns a vineyard has a lot of work that needs to be done. He needs to hire some day laborers to work in his fields.

So, he goes to the marketplace early in the morning. He sees some laborers, and they negotiate with the landowner to receive the usual daily wage for the day’s work. They are hired and they go off to put in the day’s work in the vineyard.

Perhaps the landowner realizes that he hasn’t hired enough laborers to complete the work that has to be done. So he goes back to the marketplace at 9 a.m., noon, and again at 3 p.m. to hire more workers to go work in his fields.

Finally at 5 o’clock, when there is only one hour left in the workday, he sees some laborers who are still standing around in the marketplace. He says to them, “Why are you standing here idle all day?”

What would you think if you saw a group of men -- day laborers -- who were still hanging around the parking lot outside of Lowes at 5:00 P.M.? Why would you think they are still there?

…Why, they’re probably lazy! They just didn’t care enough to get up early like the other people who were in need of work. They probably don’t have any ambition or desire, anyway…

They said to the landowner, “Because no one has hired us.”

They too are hired, with no mention of terms, and go off to work the final hour of the workday in the fields.

The work day ends and the landowner tells his manager to hand out the pay. He tells him to start with the workers who started last, and work his way back to the workers who started at the beginning of the day.

The last ones hired line up, and they receive a full day’s pay, for only one hour of work! They must have been elated! “There will be some food on our table tonight! I won’t have to face my family empty-handed!”

This must have created a stir in the line among the other workers, who probably believed that they would receive even more than they’d bargained for, since they had worked longer.

But one by one, each worker receives the exact same amount—one day’s wage.

Those who had been hired first, grumbled. They complained to the landowner. “We have worked the entire day. The sun was hot out there! We are sunburned, our backs are sore, and our muscles are tired from a full day’s work. But you paid the ones who only worked a little bit the same amount as you paid us!”

The landowner replied, “friend…”

One concordance in which I was doing some research said that the word used here is not the usual word for “friend” in Greek.

Although the word is usually translated as “friend”, it doesn’t mean “friend” in the personal sense. It is more like the word “mister” when used without a proper name. The word is found only in Matthew in the New Testament, and it is always used by a superior to a subordinate who is in the wrong.

So, the landowner replied, “Mister, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage?”

The landowner dismisses the last of the day laborers, telling them they are just envious because he is generous with his own money.

What do you know about day laborers? Does this just sound like an aggravating first-century parable?

Hiring people to work for the day existed in the labor economy of first-century Palestine, and it exists in the twenty-first century United States.

In the first century, the usual day’s wage was one denarius for those who were hired to do manual labor. This was barely enough to allow a family to live at the subsistence level. Roughly, we might equate someone who earned a denarius in the first century, to a laborer earning minimum wage or slightly above today.

Here are a few facts about Day Labor today that I learned from a study done at UCLA in January 2006. The study is entitled “On the Corner: Day Labor in the United States.”

Each morning, at hundreds of open-air hiring sites in cities throughout the United States, workers and employers meet to arrange employment for the day. These sites are day-labor markets where workers gather in the early morning hours, eagerly awaiting prospective employers to hire them to complete short-term clean-up, gardening, painting, demolition and other manual-labor projects. The day-labor site is a spot market where workers and employers meet to negotiate the terms of employment, including job tasks, wages and length of the work day. Daily assignments are mainly for work in the construction and landscaping industries, though day laborers are also hired as farm workers, cleaners and movers. Their employers are usually residential construction contractors and homeowners who need immediate help with work projects.

Day laborers are primarily employed by homeowners and construction contractors. Their top five occupations include construction laborer, gardener and landscaper, painter, roofer, and drywall installer.

Day labor pays poorly. It is unlikely that their annual earnings will exceed $15,000, keeping them at or below the federal poverty threshold.

Day laborers regularly suffer employer abuse.

The day-labor workforce in the United States is predominantly immigrant and Latino.

Wage theft is the most typical abuse experienced by day laborers. Nearly half of all day laborers have been completely denied payment by an employer for work they completed in the two months prior to this study’s survey. Forty-four percent were also denied food, water and breaks. Twenty-eight percent were insulted or threatened by the employer. Twenty-seven percent were abandoned at the worksite. And eighteen percent were subjected to violence.

Worker centers have emerged as the comprehensive response to the challenges associated with the growth of day labor. Community organizations, municipal governments, and faith-based organizations have created many worker centers to reduce worker’s rights violations, advocate on behalf of day laborers, and serve their needs.

In 2004 a good friend of mine had the chance to discover first-hand, the experience of a day laborer at one such work center up in Henry County, in Northwest Ohio.

He was half-way through the ordination process. His Supervised Year’s group of seven men and women planned a mission project to experience ministry in a setting that would be a very different experience for them. They chose to learn what ministry was like among migrant farm workers.

They made arrangements through Rural Opportunities, Incorporated (now known as Pathways) to live and work at the Migrant Rest Center in Liberty Center, Ohio for one week. The Migrant Rest Center is a place where migrant farm workers can come and find up to two weeks of shelter while seeking to be hired on as laborers at an area farm. The Migrant Rest Center also offers services to individuals and families in areas such as education, health services, domestic violence prevention, and help with abuse and/or addiction issues.

My friend learned a lot during this experience.

He learned that most migrant workers are hired within two days of arriving at the center.

He learned that the working conditions varied greatly between area farms for migrant workers. Some offered sparse and utilitarian, but clean and safe living environments for their migrant workers. Others made their migrant workers live in horrible living conditions with no running water, jerry-rigged electricity, in spaces not much larger than the sheds that many of us have in our backyard for storing garden equipment.

My friend and his group spent one morning working in the fields to see what that was like. On that day, they were picking cucumbers that were still small; they were being shipped to a pickle factory. They dressed in long-sleeved shirts, long pants, and hats because of bugs, prickly things, the sun, and pesticides. That made it extremely hot for them!

Cucumbers grow on vines close to the ground. You have to constantly stoop over looking behind leaves for cucumbers that are just the right size to pick. It wasn’t too long before they started feeling back pains.

My friend got a green plastic basket about two feet deep to hold the cucumbers he was picking. After working for one hour, his basket was about half full. For each basket that is filled, a worker receives 33¢. The experienced laborers can fill about 3 baskets per hour; no one is getting rich doing this work.

One of the most interesting things my friend learned was the demographics of the people who were migrant workers, and the reasons they did this kind of work. He went with the assumption that they would all be illegal immigrants working under the radar. He also went with the assumption that they would all be doing this work because they could find no other kind of work to do.

He told me that he met a second-generation, Mexican-American family who chose to be migrant farm workers because it allowed them to stay together, and work together all day, everyday, as a family. This is a cultural value they hold very dear. The mother said, “I would never want my husband to go one way, me to go another, and our children to go another, every day. This way we work together, share our daily meals together, and are a family together.”

He met two young men who were working as migrant farm workers for the summer. Both were Americans of Hispanic descent. Both of them had just gotten out of the Marines, and wanted to work outdoors that summer while figuring out what they wanted to do next with their lives. One of those young men had about two years of engineering school under his belt.

He met many individuals who work the summers heading north from state to state as a variety of crops consecutively need to be harvested. Usually they spend the end of the summer in Michigan picking there, before heading back to the homes they own in Brownsville, TX to work on the citrus crops during the winter.

My friend’s pre-conceived notions had been wrong. His eyes and his mind were opened to a very different reality than he had supposed.

Unfortunately, not every preconceived notion was wrong. He witnessed a lot of bigotry toward the migrant farming community in the stores and restaurants around Liberty Center. He saw people who looked Hispanic, or who spoke Spanish being treated rudely or having insulting things said about them in a local Wal-Mart.

But the real kicker was one evening when his group of seven took four people they met, who were staying at the Migrant Rest Center, out to dinner with them as their treat. When they walked into the restaurant and asked to be seated, one group got up without finishing their meal, and walked out of the restaurant.

My friend and his group were seated, but after an hour of no one coming to wait on them, it became very clear that most of the wait staff was refusing to serve them. My friend had never seen or experienced such bigotry first-hand.

What was truly surprising to him about it all was how much the local people in Northwest Ohio depend on Migrant Farm Workers for their local economy. Their crops of produce would rot on the vine in their fields without them. Their economy would literally collapse without them. But they seemed blind to that—oblivious to that fact.

Locals and migrants.

All-day workers and one-hour workers; it’s really about insiders and outsiders, isn’t it?

“Don’t take a job away from me---even a job I don’t want.”

“Pay me for the work I’ve done fair and square. Base it on merit. Don’t make someone equal to me who is not equal to me.”

This parable, and they way you perceive it, depends a lot on who you see yourself as in the story.

I’d guess that ninety-nine percent of us see ourselves as the workers who arrived at the marketplace at 6:00 a.m. We’re the early birds wanting to catch the biggest worm. We believe in hard-work, rolling up our sleeves, and putting our nose to the grindstone.

We believe in fairness. Not equal treatment for everyone.

But what if you aren’t one of the ninety-nine percent? What if you got up early, arrived at the marketplace by quarter to six, eagerly hoping to get offered a day’s work?

How would you feel when the first round of people looking for work were hired and you were left behind? How would you feel at 9:00? Noon? 3:00? Quarter to 5:00?

You’d be worried about the empty stomachs your kids would go to bed with that night. You’d be worried about the bills that need to have a payment made on them. You’d dread the look on the face of your spouse when you come home empty-handed. You’d feel rejected by the world. No fault of your own. Unwanted. Discarded.

And then you find that someone does want you after all. Someone needs you.

And then that someone calls you from the very end of the line. He invites you come right up to the front of the line. He presses something into your hand, and it is far, far more than you deserve or ever hoped to have.

When you are the one called from the last place in line to the very front of the line, this parable becomes good news.

And those who were at the front of the line? They don’t have anything to complain about when you think about it. They negotiated what they would receive. They worked out what they would get. And they got exactly what they asked for.

They just didn’t know that they might have gotten so much more if only they had let the landowner be the generous giver that he is.

I know a preacher who preached on this parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard one Sunday morning in church. While shaking hands with people as they were leaving the service that day, a lady said to him, “Where do you get these stories that you use in your little talks?”

He said, “Stories? I guess, from my church where I was raised in South Carolina.” She said, “I was really offended by the one today.”

He said, “Offended?” She said, “Yeah. That’s not the way people should be treated. The people who worked all day should get more than the people who just showed up at the end.”

The preacher said, “You know, that story is not original with me.” Out of curiosity, he asked her what her church background was, just hoping that she wouldn’t say, “United Methodist!






She said, “Presbyterian sort of.” And he said, “Well, of all the people who have complimented me on my sermon today, I think you’re the only one who really got what that parable is all about. If you’re leaving church today feeling offended that God’s grace is being extended to all people, even to those who we think deserve it the least, then you have understood the point of today’s parable better than most of the people who come here week after week.”

I hope this sermon series on the puzzling parables of Jesus will continue to help us to allow the bible to do its thing with us. To challenge us. To confront us. To reshape our worldviews. To make us think. And at times, to even offend us.

If we allow the Bible that kind of authority in our lives, then we are well on our way in being the disciples of Jesus Christ that God is calling us to be.

Actions Steps/Thoughts for the Week

1. At the beginning of this sermon series, a parable was defined as, “Stories that are used to help us hear a spiritual truth that we are often times not willing to hear through more straightforward literary means.” How can this definition of a parable help you to discern the meaning of puzzling parables?
2. God’s grace goes beyond the limits and the boundaries that we often set up because of our misconceptions of who God is. Before reading a passage of scripture, invite the Holy Spirit to pierce through any predetermined thoughts that might prevent you from a deeper understanding of who God is.
3. Today’s parable gives us a deeper appreciation for the plight of low income workers and those who live in poverty. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism emphasized that God calls us to not only serve the poor, but to be in relationship with the poor. In what specific ministry to the poor is God calling you to participate and offer your gifts?