February 16, 2003
By Jerrod Heugenot

Every once in awhile, I listen to a radio show on a local public radio station. Produced in England, this show gathers a few persons who have that wonderful sort of dry wit we associate with the British. Droll yet sophisticated, the program revels in the talent of persons who know how to use the English language so well. The highlight of each show involves two of the panelists taking a common saying and telling a story in which the saying is the punch line of a story. For example, a person is given the saying “Blood is thicker than water.” So, he launches into a long story about how his daughter never minds him at home. She always has a way of outsmarting her father, often in ways that outwit him long before he realizes that she is several steps ahead of the game. The man concluded that it just goes to show that “Dad is thicker than daughter.”

Thankfully, in this morning’s reading, Jesus does not resort to such pun-driven humor, but the effect is the same. Jesus takes a commonplace proverb (“The last will be first, and the first will be last”) to answer Peter’s question about what recognition disciples receive for their giving up of self and possession. He sets this parable of the vineyard owner around this saying so well that the story ends just as it does with the British radio storytellers, driving home the proverb’s meaning with such flair that it makes one realize that there’s something going on than just a mere story. Indeed, there is something significant being revealed about the very nature of the Reign of heaven.

Jesus tells this story about day laborers, folk with no other recourse but a hope that somebody will hire them just for one day’s labor. Usually intense, unrewarding work, these people eke out a living when they can and loiter around waiting for tomorrow to bring the same amount of luck. It’s the same as going to a “temp” agency around and seeing the lines form at five or six in the morning, waiting to be first for whatever jobs have been made available. It’s not much of a way to make a living to say the least.

So a vineyard owner arrives and begins haggling with the first people. He needs workers and agrees on a price that gives him a full day’s labor out of these persons, but it isn’t a wage that will leave much on the dinner plate. So, off goes the first round of workers to the field.

Then later, the vineyard owner returns and selects another batch. Then a few hours later, another round of workers is hired. And so on and so forth, until it gets to be about an hour before closing time. Again, the vineyard owner arrives to hire workers and finds a group of the laziest, no good types lounging around. When he asks why they weren’t already at work today, it’s a painfully obvious exchange between this owner and the last batch of workers. These aren’t the people who were left over; these were the people who didn’t really care to work. But, somehow a deal is made that entices these folk to come along to the vineyard, even if there’s merely a hour left in the workday.

An hour later, the whistle blows and everybody puts away their baskets and trudges toward the vineyard owner. People whose clothing stained with perspiration from the heat of the day walk beside the people who barely broke a sweat. The people are called forward to receive their day’s wages one by one, and the people who have put in a full day’s work sit tiredly on the ground waiting their turn. They perk up when they see one of the last hour workers carrying off a shiny new denarius. If that’s one hour’s wages, just think of what a full day’s wages will be like! Must be a pretty good vineyard if the last get so much. Just think how much we will get in the end!

But when their names are finally called, the vineyard owner doesn’t just hand each of them a bag of money. No, he reaches into the bottom of a rather empty looking bag and pulls out an old coin for each of them. It’s not what anybody expected. One coin for the whole day’s work! What an insult, especially after they worked themselves to the point of utter exhaustion.

Grumbling about this inequity, the workers demanded to know why the vineyard owner was so seemingly unfair. The response is remarkably cavalier. “Friend, I’m doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous? [In other words, don’t give me that evil eye, pal!]”

Then Jesus said, “So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”

You can understand why things got so quiet.

A few years ago, I led a campus religious group at Ottawa University. Given a variety of circumstances, I inherited some long serving board members with long-term faith experience, people who were practically born in the church. I also inherited an equal number of brand new leaders who were also fairly new to the faith or at least to being involved in a ministry of some sort. The old hands were involved in campus religious life the moment they got to campus. The other half of the board was comprised of a different sort of folk, people recruited by the campus minister over the past year to become involved in campus ministry. He had developed relationships with each of these persons, most of whom had left their faith at some point early on and were now being encouraged to explore faith once more.

Our board met once each Tuesday evening with the idea that we would plan events and create opportunities for religious life on our campus. In retrospect, I can see now that these meetings really needed a therapist rather than an agenda. There was a great deal of conflict between the members of the board, and I didn’t have the common sense to see the fracturing, the tribalism, the “us vs. them” going on in our discussion, body language, and attitudes. We couldn’t plan a bible study without getting into each other’s way. We disagreed about biblical interpretation, squabbling about questions of faith and practice, doggedly holding to our varying conservative and liberal understandings in a way that could not have been confused with grace for a second. I took to muttering some not so very Christian things underneath my breath by midpoint in each meeting.

We had so much in common: all undergraduate young adults, all interested in making faith relevant to our peers around campus, but we missed that we were all of ‘one faith, one baptism, and one Lord’ (to use Paul’s phrase). It even became a sore point with some members that others on the board did not have the lengthy list of church stuff to their credit. You know, the gold star for perfect attendance in Sunday school when you lived back home or the great honor of being the most likely to get out of bed on Sunday morning to go to church while at college.

If Jesus would have shown up at the meetings, he might have just looked around and muttered, “The last will be first, and the first will be last.” That would have been the most pastoral word that our board could have heard that year.

Two years ago, my wife and I studied in England and used the opportunity to travel around Europe. Before term began, we traveled around parts of Italy, looking at all of the wonderful sights, especially for me, the cathedrals and even the Vatican. (Ironically, I visited the Vatican and Canterbury Cathedral long before making it to Valley Forge and seeing the American Baptists’ headquarters, the circular office building referred to as ‘the Holy Doughnut.’ What sort of American Baptist am I?) We were overwhelmed by all of the marble used to build the churches, the great masterpieces like the Sistine Chapel walls and ceilings, the statues and paintings lovingly crafted by the great masters. But, I couldn’t say that I was overwhelmed by the holy until the day I saw a dirty old robe.

This robe was in a remote corner of a basilica in the hilly countryside between Rome and Florence. Just an old brown robe, ripped and stained, quite ancient, simply spread out under glass for any whom cared to look at it.

The robe purportedly was worn by St. Francis of Assisi. Francis is that great monk who heard the call to live a life of poverty and help God rebuild the church, even as it was crumbling away under apathy, and ecclesiastical power plays. He heard that call and literally stripped off naked to put on a coarse brown robe; legend claims he wore it until his death. But, Francis shouldn’t have turned out that way. Francis had lived the first part of his life as the son of a powerful family with little worry other than singing around Assisi to charm the ladies. Indeed, if anyone who knew the young Francis was asked, I doubt they would name him as the most likely candidate to go down in history as the town’s saint. Perhaps town drunk, village idiot, or black sheep, but most certainly not saint.

Yet, this lazy good-for-nothing was whom God chose to reinvigorate the lagging faith of the Church. As you stand in front of that robe in Assisi, you revel in the plainness of this holy relic. You wonder why God works through such people as Francis, who was not on the path to sainthood on his own. The robe just lays there, its worn-out appearance quietly witnessing to any who care to look at it, “The last will be first; the first will be last.”

Two years ago, I attended a book signing for Garrison Keillor’s most recent tales of what’s going on in Lake Wobegon, Minnesota. Based on his weekly radio show monologues, Keillor tells tall tales of life in a small town that doubles for any other small town. This time round, Keillor tells these stories from the perspective of being a teenager in 1950s Lake Wobegon. It’s a bawdy little tale, filled with all of the frustrations of being an adolescent growing up in a conservative Brethren home in a town full of almost as conservative Lutherans and Catholics. Keillor’s young self worries constantly about upsetting his family’s rigid beliefs and values when his hormones are raging and rebellion is just part of being young. I found it hilarious that young Keillor sat on the porch supposedly reading Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, of stories of the Protestant group called the Huguenots, my forbearers, being martyred in 17th century France when in reality he has a magazine tucked inside his book, reading something less holy and let’s just say more hormonal.

Throughout the novel, Keillor imagines brief little scenes set in heaven as Keillor’s grandfather looks down at what’s going on below with a bit of disgust and distaste for his loved ones’ seeming moral laxity. These are amusing bits in the book as Grandpa grumps about the fallen nature of the ones still living and Jesus is sitting right beside him, telling him to lighten up a bit. When Keillor receives a typewriter (a long-time dream come true for a boy yearning to write), the scene shifts to heaven for the response from above. Keillor imagines,

Grandpa is looking out the window of heaven, and Jesus is standing beside him. Grandpa says, “Jesus, why did you give an Underwood typewriter to a boy who thinks dirty thoughts all the time?” Jesus says, “Well, we’ll see what he does with it.” (excerpted from Lake Wobegon 1956)

Keillor’s own life story is that of a person who has always been a Christian, but the type of Christianity he grew up around always made him feel as if he weren’t forgiven, just merely on parole. One thing that the Sanctified Brethren were not known for was their flexibility. Therefore, Keillor’s little narrative side trips to heaven with Grandpa and Jesus take on an important role. Grandpa gives the harsh answer that we haven’t worked hard enough and Jesus gives an answer similar to the one in Matthew. In fact, Jesus eventually tires of Grandpa’s criticism and tells him “to take it easy and to come away from the window and get back to the singing and hallelujahs and the no-tears policy.” In his novel, Keillor finally realizes that the rigid faith of feeling always on the edge of destruction isn’t what the result of belief ought to be. Instead, he works into his narrative the Jesus who can say, “The last will be first; the first will be last.”

So, as we get to the end of the parable or any of these stories I have shared, the result is still the same. We who are gathered here are among the most faithful, but the point of the parable is that we might just all be eleventh hour additions to the vineyard. Early birds and late-bloomers are treated just as well by the grace of God. Like the vineyard owner, God is blessedly cavalier when it comes to settle with the workers. After all, God is beyond human proclivities about holiness and righteousness. Whether we have grown up with an ardent faith or just now got around to belief, God treats us all the same.

Most certainly, the last will be first and the first will be last. Praise be to God.

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Jerrod H. Hugenot, B.A., M.A., M.Div., is an American Baptist serving in a variety of Free Church tradition faith communities as a pulpit supply preacher and facilitator for adult Christian education. His book reviews appear in the American Baptist Quarterly and Review and Expositor. He resides on the Central Seminary campus in Kansas City, KS, with his wife Kerry Shermer, a M.Div. Student. He is regularly found at the CBTS Cokesbury Bookstore, selling books as part of what he refers to his ministry in the “Bringing Literacy to the Baptists Project.”

During 1999-2000, Jerrod served as Minister-in-Training at Crossroads Church as part of Central Seminary’s practice of ministry course requirements. He was ably mentored by the Rev. Sally Baehni and the Rev. Gary Harris, Interim of Crossroads Church at that time. After his time with Crossroads Church, Jerrod studied with Kerry at Spurgeon’s College in London during Spring 2001 and completed his seminary studies in May 2002, receiving the H.E. Dana Award for Excellence in Writing.

Denominationally, Jerrod is a member of the American Baptist General Board, serving on the Board of Educational Ministries and the Committee on Christian Unity. He also serves as on the board of directors for the American Baptist Churches of the Central Region as well as the Roger Williams Fellowship, a denominational grassroots group.

To comment on this sermon, feel free to correspond via email to: reverendbubba@juno.com