Another Sermon

March 30, 2009 by djackson.

This is the sermon I preached yesterday at my church, Windsor Park Baptist here in Corpus Christi. Regular readers of this blog (both of you) will recognize the conclusion as a lightly re-worked version of an earlier piece. So sue me.

Knuckleball Economics
Matthew 20.1-16

Introduction

Let’s talk baseball for a minute. Might as well; after all, most of you are already thinking about basketball. Specifically, I want to talk about pitching. As far as I can tell, there are really only three distinct species of pitches in baseball: the fastball and the curve being the most prominent.

Yes, I know all about two-finger and four-finger, splitters and cutters, but those are just variations of the fastball. And the change-up is just a fastball that’s not in a hurry, while the slider is a curve ball that is.

The only remaining pitch that is truly distinct is the knuckleball. You throw a knuckler by gripping the horsehide with the first knuckle of your index and middle fingers or, more commonly these days, with all four fingertips, and just sort of launching it at the plate. Done properly, this puts the ball in motion with virtually no spin, so its motion is determined by wind, sunspots, signs of the Zodiac, a butterfly beating its wings in a Brazilian rain forest . . . well, you get the idea. The pitch’s unpredictability makes it hard to hit, but it also makes it hard to catch, and you don’t hit the strike-zone with any consistency. Listen to what some ballplayers have said about the knuckleball.

“It’s like trying to catch a fly with a chopstick.” ― All-star and Gold Glove catcher Jason Varitek, Boston Red Sox

“Throwing a knuckleball for a strike is like throwing a butterfly with hiccups across the street into your neighbor’s mailbox.” ― Hall of Famer Willie Stargell

“I always thought the knuckleball was the easiest pitch to catch. Wait’ll it stops rolling, then go to the backstop and pick it up.” ― broadcaster and former catcher Bob Uecker

But my favorite quote comes from Dodgers manager Joe Torre, a former catcher himself, who said, “You don’t catch a knuckleball, you defend against it.”

Now I want to make a baseball analogy to the Gospel of Matthew. I think Jesus throws about three basic pitches in this account of his ministry, just like in baseball. First of all, there is straight-forward teaching. I think this is the fastball – Jesus throwing the high, hard heat, ninety-five miles per hour and belt high but nobody can hit it. There’s a lot of this in Matthew. In fact, Matthew constructs his gospel on a framework of five big blocks of teaching, leading some scholars to speculate that he intends it as a sort of new Law, completing Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, numbers and Deuteronomy with Our Lord as the new Moses.

And we need this teaching: “Turn the other cheek,” “Go the second mile,” “Forgive unto seventy times seven.” The problem with teaching is not that we don’t understand; the problem is that we do!

Then there are narrative sections, stories about Jesus’ interaction with people, mostly his opponents, the religious establishment. Between each chunk of teaching we get these narratives. Here, Jesus tends to throw the curve: unexpected responses to impertinent questions, things that nobody saw coming. “Jesus, should we pay our taxes?” The Pharisees are crowding the plate, giving Jesus no room to maneuver. Say yes and you’re a law-abiding citizen but a traitor to your people. Say no and you’re a patriotic Israelite but a dangerous rebel against the empire. Jesus throws ‘em a curve: “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22.21). Matthew reports that after this “they went away,” slunk from the batter’s box back to the dugout with another “K” on the scorecard.

Again, the problem isn’t that we don’t understand. It’s just that we only understand after this trick pitch makes us look like the fools we probably really are after all. We don’t like it, but we get it. In fact, we don’t like because we get it.

The remaining material in Matthew is the parable – the knuckleball. Parables start off alright – they leave Jesus’ mouth on a predictable pattern. The rabbis also told parables – morality tales to back up popular interpretations of Scripture. “A man had two sons,” to use an example from Luke’s gospel (Luke 15.11ff). And everyone thinks, “Oh, we get this: the loyal, hard-working boy stays home and makes good and the wastrel winds up hip-deep in hog slop and the moral is, ‘You teenagers cut your hair and pull up your pants and make good grades and go to church without complaining and don’t smoke or drink or have sex before marriage.’” But wait! A stray puff of air catches this knuckle-parable just before we get our bat on it. The next thing we know the white hats and black hats are on all the wrong heads and the father violates everything James Dobson says in Dare to Discipline.

See, to paraphrase Joe Torre, you don’t interpret the parables of Jesus, you defend against them. And that defense is a losing proposition because their unpredictable movement gets inside your guard from so many directions that before you know it you’re nose is bleeding and you’re racing for the backstop as the runners advance.

And not just a knuckleball; the parables are left-handed knuckle balls! The Anglican theologian Robert Farar Capon rightly refers to the parables of Jesus as a form of “left-handed power,” southpaw preaching that dips and wafts and corkscrews under and through and around all of our analysis. I can almost see Jesus, tired of throwing heated teaching that no one can refute but no one seems to get, arm-weary from slicing curve-balls that silence but do not convert his opponents, stepping from the dugout and signaling to the bullpen: Send in the leftie! Gimme the Torah, kid; it’s just not your day.

So what about this parable, the Knuckleball of the Laborers in the Vineyard? Let’s see how we do defending ourselves against it.

This parable goes off the rails when we come to payday, when the boss tells his tool-pusher to blow the whistle, summon the crew, and pay off the men. Everything up to that point has made perfect sense: the early bird catches the worm, you snooze you lose, early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise – and we’ll settle for one out of three as long as it’s the one in the middle.

Then one split second before the satisfying crack of connection – just before our personal preferences smack the sweet-spot of Jesus’ instructions – a stray puff of words blows the whole thing right out of our wheelhouse. To our dismay we discover that the God we claim to believe in and the god we actually serve are not the same at all! The logical linear relationship, of input to output, of pain to gain, breaks down in the face of a crazy Kingdom grace. We suddenly feel like all those conscientious home owners who didn’t buy houses they couldn’t afford, scrimped to make their payments, lived within their means only to discover that the feds are now in the business of bailing out deadbeats. Why did I go with the three-bedroom ranch in Flour Bluff when I could’ve sprung for the Ocean Drive McMansion and let someone else take the weight? What’s going on here?

Matthew gives us a few linguistic clues that key us into some other passages in his Gospel. Taken together, I think they can help us here. As we examine the final conversation between the owner and the early birds, I think we discover the twin truths that the kingdom of heaven is all about relationships, and that a focus on rewards ruins kingdom relationships.

The Kingdom of Heaven is all about Relationships

Notice how the boss addresses the shop steward for his disgruntled employees. “Friend,” he calls him in v.13. That isn’t a happy word. It is the cultural equivalent of saying to someone, “Hey, buddy,” or “Say, pal.” Nothing good ever happens after a conversation opens that way.

As far as I can tell, this particular word occurs only three times in the New Testament, all of them in Matthew, all of them in the mouth of Jesus, and all of them in situations of strained relationship. The king uses it in Matthew 22 when he’s getting ready to have his bouncers eighty-six a guy out of the reception for refusing to put on a tie (in Matthew 22.12), and Jesus uses it to Judas at the moment that disciple betrays him (Matthew 26.50). In all three of these situations, what we find is a previous relationship that now has been broken. And in all three cases, it is a relationship with God.
Then look at the landowner’s defense: “I am doing you no wrong.” But literally he says “I am doing you no injustice.” Or, to turn it around: I am being just.

That’s worth noting. Because there’s no doubt that what the boss is doing isn’t fair. “Fair” treatment means everyone gets what she deserves; “fair” means equal. If one hours’ work is good for one days’ wages, then one days’ work should cash out at twelve days’ wages. But the biblical concept of justice – the Old Testament concept from which Jesus draws – is not about fairness; it is about wholeness. It doesn’t ask about what people deserve but about what they need. It is less about earning than about yearning.

The ultimate embodiment of this mindset is the year of jubilee (Leviticus 25). God basically says to let the free-market economy operate for a half-century and then to shake the Etch-a-Sketch, wipe out all the debts and let everybody start out all over again. This is important in a couple of ways. First of all, this concept of justice-as-wholeness occupies a large place in the Bible as a whole. There are four words in the Bible, two in the Old Testament and two in the New, that should be translated “justice.” Together they occur 1,060 times. By contrast, all words for sexual sin combined appear 90 times. Now, I’m no good at math but I checked this one with a calculator and that’s more than ten times as many references to justice as to sexual sin.

I read the other day about a nine year-old girl who aborted the twins she was carrying. She was nine years old. She weighed 80 pounds. The doctor said neither she nor the babies could have survived delivery. The Catholic church ex-communicated the girl and the doctor, but not the stepfather who impregnated the child by raping her. “Rape is bad,” the local bishop explained, “but abortion is worse.” A lawyer for the diocese explained, “It is the law of God.” See, we’re addressing the result, the symptom – sexual sin – and it isn’t working and we can’t figure out why because we don’t realize that we haven’t addressed the underlying cause of injustice.

Secondly, this concept of justice-as-wholeness was very important to Jesus. For instance, in what Luke records as the inaugural sermon of Jesus’ ministry, Our Lord takes his text from Isaiah 61 and proclaims “the favorable year of the Lord,” in essence, full-time jubilee from this point forward! No more fairness, no more getting what you deserve, no more quid-pro-quo. Instead, giving what you can and helping everyone get what she needs.

And the real problem is that a failure to embrace God’s justice over our fairness means that we choose to be out of relationship with God. I said that the word “friend” here implies a strained relationship. I should add one other thing: it can also imply a complete lack of relationship. It was a word you used when you didn’t know someone’s name. That’s why the boss uses it here, and the king in Matthew 22 uses it in talking to one of the hoard of homeless swept off the streets and into the Waldorf-Astoria for the social event of the season. And remember that Jesus uses this term to Judas, as if to say, “I don’t even know you anymore.” Remember what Jesus promises to say to those who choose fairness over righteousness in the face of the poor? “I never knew you” (Matthew 7.23).

How does this happen? Well, look at the strong “us-and-them” language this guy uses. “These last men have worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us.” And in fact they don’t even say “these men” but literally, “these latecomers.” They deny them the dignity of being people and define them only in terms of their relative merits. Instead of thinking about what was righteous, how everyone could have enough, how everyone could be in relationship, they thought about how to distinguish between “us” and “them.” When they set themselves apart from the other workers, they set themselves apart from the one who hired the workers.

In Jesus’ day, the principle religious category was not justice but holiness, understood as separation, keeping the good away from the bad, purity, cleanliness, us-vs.-them. That’s also where we put a lot of our religious energy.

I read just today about a hospital in Minneapolis, Minnesota. This is a part of the country settled by Northern Europeans, people with absolutely no melanin in their skin, people so white as to be almost diaphanous – you can read through them. Not long ago, the city had two hospitals: one for Swedes and one for Norwegians, two ethnic stocks who did not get along because of a bad history of wars fought back in the old country. Now they are dealing with an influx of immigrants: not just Hispanics but Somalis, Laotians, Hmong from Viet Nam, Bosnians and others. The article spoke of how these hospitals are hiring interpreters and struggling to adapt to the cultural norms of these various people-groups. They don’t ask, “Are you here legally? Do you have a green card? Can you pay?” They ask, “Where does it hurt?”

Religion in Texas used to be like that. We were all either Baptist or Methodist and we had our own churches and our own hospitals and our own softball leagues. Now, it occurs to me that in the postmodern meltdown of our kaleidoscope culture we must learn a lot of cultural languages so we can speak the gospel to everyone. And we must stop asking, “Are you my kind of person? Do you pass my religious litmus test?” and instead start asking, “Where does it hurt?” then telling them about the Good Physician.

So the kingdom of heaven is all about relationships. Now let’s look at the second idea I mentioned, that a focus on rewards ruins kingdom relationships.

A Focus on Rewards Ruins Kingdom Relationships

The boss makes it clear that his disgruntled workers have no remedy in law. We had a contract and I paid off. Furthermore, you’re on my land. I own the means of production and I can dispose of it as I see fit. That’s clear enough, but look what he says next: “Is your eye envious because I am generous?” Literally he asks, “is your eye evil.”

Now that’s a phrase I’ve heard before in Matthew’s gospel. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus warns us that, since the eye is the body’s lamp, a clear eye means a bright life, but “if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness.” It’s the same phrase: “if your eye is evil” (Matthew 6.22-23). And don’t miss the context of that remark: it comes right after the paragraph about storing up treasures on earth, and right before the line about trying to serve both God and mammon. So what gives us an evil eye? A fixation on this world’s rewards. Take it a step farther: Remember I said that the third time Jesus calls someone “Friend” is at the moment Judas betrays him? And what was Judas’ motivation? Money! He sold out his Lord for what he could get.

Then the lesson here isn’t that we shouldn’t work because the rewards are all by grace. The lesson is that we shouldn’t think about the rewards at all! You may recall that in John 10.12-13 Jesus has some harsh things to say about hireling shepherds who are in it for the shekels. We don’t work so we can become rich; we work so that everyone can be in relationship.

See, as long as we’re asking what’s in it for us, we’ve missed the point. Last week, President Obama went on Leno to explain why we have to bail out all these giant corporations. He likened AIG to a terrorist with a bomb strapped to his torso. We don’t care about him; in fact, we’d like to take him out. Problem is, if the sniper takes the headshot, this guy’s thumb slips off the button and we all go up together. It is in our best interest, the president said, to get AIG out of hock.

That may be good economic sense; I don’t know – I don’t understand economics. But it isn’t kingdom sense. This landowner doesn’t pay big bucks to the best workers because he can’t get his crop in without them. He pays bonuses to the bozos at the back of the line (and even moves them to the front!) because he’d rather meet needs than make money, rather put his wealth into people than into his pockets.

Never fail to remember that God does not save us because he needs us. He doesn’t need anything – that’s one of the perks of being God. As trinity, he can live in perfect love without us. As omnipotent, he can accomplish all tasks without us. That’s one reason we can’t earn our salvation: we don’t have anything God needs in the first place, or even anything that doesn’t already belong to him. So if our other relationships truly operate out of our relationship to God, then we’ll work the same way.

Conclusion

“Take what is yours and go.” That’s where the owner leaves it because that’s all that’s left. All these men had invested in this relationship was the payment of a contract so, since the contract had been paid, the relationship was over. And don’t miss the tragedy of that last imperative. “Go” is literally “go away.” It’s a common enough word, shows up all over the New Testament, but I want to look at some specific places where we find it.

Jesus uses it only a few verses later to describe a father instructing his sons to “go work today in the vineyard” (Matthew 21.28). The issue there is not pay, since they are his sons, but relationship. The question Jesus asks is not which one earned the most but “which of the two did the will of his father?” (v.31) He uses the same command in this story, once for the early shift (v.4) and once for the late-comers (v.7). So it works in this story as a relationship-word: because we are in relationship, obey me.

But Jesus also uses it to dismiss the devil (Matthew 4.10) and to dismiss Peter when he’s acting like the devil (Matthew 16.23). And what, by the way, had the devil been offering Jesus? Rewards, quid-pro-quo, worship me and get this. And what was Peter really urging Jesus to do? Be a hireling, leave the sheep and flee when the wolf comes and you must lay down your life.

So the choice before us as Christians hearing this parable is which command we will heed. The command to “go into the vineyard” because we are in relationship with the Lord of the Harvest, or the command simply to “go” because we’ve gotten everything out of God that we want, or at least everything we know how to get, and there was no relationship in the first place. And, terrifyingly enough, the answer to that question depends on whether we care deeply about helping all of those around us to have the fullest life possible.

Now, to make an immediate application of the parable, consider this. We tend to read this as a story about Heaven: “Everyone who trusts Jesus will be saved and go to Heaven whether they trust him early and spend their lives working for him or trust him on their deathbed after a life spent in sin.” True, but not the only lesson this parable slips through the strike zone.

Jesus doesn’t mention Heaven; he talks about “the kingdom of heaven,” which is something different: the rule of God both here and now and in the life to come. So the point is that right now, with stuff as mundane as money or our daily work or our home life, we need stop thinking about whether we are being treated fairly and instead think about how we can contribute to everyone’s wholeness.

I’m going to wind this up with a basketball analogy. What the heck? I’ve already done baseball and J. D.’s not here anyway. Shane Battier of the Houston Rockets is my new favorite basketball player. He shouldn’t be flattered: I didn’t have a former favorite basketball player. I don’t follow basketball. But I may now that I know about Battier.

Rockets GM Daryl Morey, who recruited and signed the power forward, has this to say about his acquisition: “He’s, at best, a marginal N.B.A. athlete.” “Shane can’t create an offensive situation.” “He can’t dribble, he’s slow and hasn’t got much body control.”

High praise indeed. And the numbers (remember how they don’t lie?) back Morey up. The stats insist that Battier doesn’t score many points, blocks few shots, seldom steals the ball and makes few assists. And his salary reflects these numbers – relatively low for an NBA starter.

Oh, but there is this: with Battier on the floor, the Rockets win. Houston went on a rampage last season and reeled off a string of twenty-two straight victories, the most ever in the league with the exception of the ‘71-’72 Lakers. For exactly half of those games either Yao Ming or Tracy McGrady rode pine due to injuries. The Rockets player with the most floor-time during the streak was Battier. The season before he joined the franchise, Houston went 34-48. The next year, 52-30 and the year after that, 55-27. Nor is this an isolated fluke. The Memphis Grizzlies drafted Battier out of Duke, then went from 23-59 his rookie season to 50-32 in his third year. Battier is a journeyman, a competent workman at best, yet as one sportswriter puts it, “every team he has every played on has acquired some magical ability to win.”

So what’s the deal? Battier is, says Morey, “the most abnormally unselfish basketball player he has ever seen.”

Battier does things that help the team win. He makes few rebounds, but the team snags far more of them when he is in the game, because he knows how to position himself to free a teammate to get to the boards. He doesn’t score a lot of points, but knows the trick of feeding his pals when they are in position for an easy shot. He swats the ball away as an opponent takes it from waist to shoulders; doesn’t count as a blocked shot in the N.B.A., but prevents the hoop all the same. He routinely guards the best shooters in the league, and their scoring averages dip against him. In fact, the data reveal that with Battier on him, Kobe Bryant actually becomes a liability; the Lakers would score more if they took him out of the game!

“I call him Lego,” Morey explains. “When he’s on the court, all the pieces start to fit together.” Or, as his high school coach Kurt Keener notes, “he had this incredible ability to make everyone around him better.”

So why isn’t he famous?

Shane Battier might be able to make mor money if he paid more attention to his own statistics, to his own box score, but he would rather see his team win. Jesus’ parable reminds us to stop thinking in terms of box scores and individual stats and instead ask how we can help those around us.

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