September 2, 2007 Sermon

Labor Pains
Matthew 20:1-16

We do good works because we’re saved. We do not work to earn salvation. We work because Jesus has already saved us.

Jesus had to work to teach his followers the truth about heaven and salvation. We cannot imagine eternity. We cannot get our minds around heaven. And we cannot live pure enough lives to deserve eternity in heaven. Yet we have this stubborn need to believe that we can earn God’s love. We want to feel good about ourselves. We want to control our eternal destiny. We prefer to see ourselves as God’s partners, rather than God’s petitioners. But we cannot work to earn salvation. We work because we’re already saved.

We just encountered one of Jesus’ many teachings about heaven. A careful reading shows that this particular teaching has less to do with heaven itself, and more to do with how we get there. Jesus spoke of men waiting at the town square to get hired for a day’s labor. This was a common sight in that time and place. His audience would immediately have thought of the men in their villages who had no regular jobs, the men who depended on the big land owner to chance by and offer them work.

We like to think we can control our own fates. But we do not own the land. God owns the land. We therefore depend on God to offer us a deal. In this parable the deal was that the men would work for a silver coin for a day’s labor. The first group of men, hired early in the morning, cheerfully goes out into the vineyard to pick the owner’s grapes. Later in the morning, as Jesus told his story, the owner hires more men. He repeats this process several times until finally he engages with the last few men loitering around the town square to go out into his vineyard. The hour is about five o’clock. Quitting time, to our way of thinking.

When the men all finally return to the town square, the owner has his assistant pay them. He starts with those who began working last. To everybody’s surprise, they get a silver coin, a full day’s pay. At this moment, as Jesus told it, the men who had worked all day must have felt a thrill. They had worked ten times as long. Surely they would get paid ten silver coins. But as each group of workers steps forward, each man gets the same one coin—no matter how long he has labored. The ones who worked the longest complain. They worked far more, and through the heat of the day, no small matter in Israel.

But the owner of the vineyard has no use for their whining. “Look,” he tells them, “you got what I promised. You got what you expected. Stop being jealous because I gave the last ones to start working as much as the first.” To understand this parable we must remind ourselves that it is exactly that: a parable. Jesus told an intentionally unsettling story in order to get a point across. No fair employer pays people who work only one hour a full day’s wages. But the owner in this parable stands for God. The wages he pays stand for the gift of eternal life in the kingdom of Heaven. God does not care when people come to Christ. If we confess our faith in Jesus as Lord and Savior as teens around the fire at church camp, or if we confess our faith on our elderly deathbeds, it does not matter. What matters is only that we do confess our faith.

Every person in Jesus’ parable who goes out to work in the vineyard gets paid that silver coin. In the same way, every person who comes to a saving faith in Jesus Christ enters the Kingdom of Heaven. We must get over our limited, human notions of whether this is fair. We must also get over our idea that we somehow earn our way into heaven through living a good life. No one deserves heaven. No matter how early in life we come to Christ, no matter how much good work we do in His name, we do not deserve heaven. We all sin. We all fall short of the glory of God, the owner of the vineyard. When God pays us that silver coin anyway, when God welcomes us into the kingdom of Heaven anyway, we need simply to say a sincerely joyful, “Thank you.”

But does that mean we need not work? One member of the Tuesday morning Bible study laughed as we finished reading the passage and said its message was, “Hold out as long as you can.” If we’re smart, in other words, we’ll time it just right. We’ll start working for Jesus just before sundown, just before the end comes for us. That way we still get the silver coin while doing as little as possible to earn it. But the fallacy in that half-serious attitude becomes clear when we remember the central point. We do not work to earn salvation. We work because we’re saved. We work to express our gratitude to God, who saves us despite ourselves.

Business and church administrators know the 80/20 rule. Roughly eighty percent of the work gets done by about twenty percent of the people. On a committee of ten, two will do almost all of the work. In a youth group of 30, six will always show up for service projects. In a congregation of 100, which is about the size we were when we built our first building, about 20 will show up often enough to be classified as regulars on the job site.

People work, or do not work, for many reasons. Maybe they have, or do not have, the time. Maybe they have, or do not have, the model of hard-working parents and/or mentors to follow. Maybe they have a driven, or a laid-back, personality. But many faithful church workers in that twenty percent category show up to do eighty percent of the work because they feel tremendous gratitude to Jesus Christ for saving them. We knew a woman at the church we served in California. She had reached her seventies. She had lost her hearing. Her husband still served as a judge, sitting in a state court so many miles south of our town he had to live there eight months a year. Yet Kit (her real name) ran their working farm and volunteered relentlessly at the church. She led a women’s circle. She helped with the Junior High youth group. She rarely missed a church grounds cleanup day. She served on the worship committee, always one of the busiest groups in any church.

I doubt I ever asked Kit why she worked so hard at church. I did not have to ask. I knew the reason. Kit had a vibrant, living faith in Jesus Christ as her Lord and Savior. She was profoundly grateful to God for her belief—and for her confidence in her place in heaven. She obviously gained tremendous energy from her faith. She exuded joy. She worked because she knew Jesus loved her and had died for her.

Soon we will start working on our new building. I cannot wait. I eagerly anticipate having that space to use for Christian purposes, but I cannot wait for a deeper reason: the work itself will rejuvenate my faith and deepen my relationships with brother and sister Christians. Every person who worked on this building remembers its impact. The work was hard, dirty and long. For the faithful few who showed up virtually every night (after working full time all day) it got to feel like we might never finish. But all of us remember how it felt to labor together. We came to understand that our work was an expression of thanksgiving to the God who has saved us. It created a bond between us, the bond the Holy Spirit of God forges between those who serve Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.

Work for Jesus. Work not to earn his love, for you already have that. Work, instead, to say thank you to the God who has already saved you. Jesus, the only Son of God, worked in the vineyard. He was born as one of us. He labored long and hard to teach and to heal. He died a death He did not deserve: crucifixion as a supposed liar about God. The truth was that God had planned his death as an act of sacrifice, meant to earn our devotion. God has already earned our gratitude. We need not work to earn God’s love. We work to express our thanksgiving that we already have it. Work on the building, work with youth, work however God calls you to work. Work to say, “Thank you!”