“Pay Stub Panic”

Homily for the Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost       24 September 2017
The Rev’d John R. Clarke, Rector

"Are you envious because I am generous?”  Matthew 20:15b

Instant poll. The subject is “Real Estate.” Choose one of the following options:

Behind Door #1: You could live in a 4,000 square-foot house nestled among 6,000 square-foot homes.

Behind Door #2: You could live in a 3,000 square-foot house among 2,000 square-foot houses.

Reminder: You only have two choices: a 4,000 square-foot house or a 3,000 square foot house. You might prefer by far a 6,000 square-foot monster or a 2,000 square-footer, but the poll gives you only two choices. And the criterion for your selection is the home you prefer in relation to your neighbors’ houses.

So, given its size in relation to the neighbors’ homes, which house would you prefer? Door #1: The lone 4,000 square-footer among the 6,000 square-foot McMansions?

Or Door # 2: The 3,000 square-foot house in the neighborhood with 2,000 square-foot homes?

These were the parameters of a recent Cornell study designed to understand decision-making. The winner? Door #2: The 3,000 square-foot house among the more modest 2,000 square-footers. That’s because, for those polled, the 3,000 square-foot house had more relative value compared to its neighbors.

And why not the sizable 4,000 square-foot house nestled among McMansions? “Relative deprivation.” As a phenomenon, it reflects an observation made by Karl Marx. Now, I don’t often refer to Karl Marx in public, although a parishioner once called me a Marxist. On his way out the front door.

But I digress. Marx said that a house may be large or small, but as long as the neighboring houses are small, that’s probably satisfactory.

Complication: A neighbor builds a palace next door, and the house — whatever its size — shrinks in perception to a shed. And what do the house-owners, now shed-dwellers feel? Relative deprivation.

Relative deprivation. That’s the set-up for Jesus’ parable about sliding wages. Not!

To recap: A vineyard owner needs cheap labor. Sun-up, he trolls the outer fringes of what passes for the local first-century Home Depot parking lot to hire strapping go-getters eager for work. Then he returns periodically to tap more labor: 9, noon, 3PM and 5, with just about an hour to go before the day is shot and the pickings in the able-bodied department get pretty slim.

At pay-out time, it’s not “first in, first out.” Meaning: The boss makes the most-worked wait the longest and consequently forces them to see what everyone else — originally in line behind them — gets paid.

And what do these early-hires witness? The boss gives every single worker the same wage. Whether they’ve put in 12 hours or 1 hour, doesn’t matter. Whether you’re the pumping-iron first-hires or the scraping-the-bottom-of-the-barrel last-hires, doesn’t matter. Same compensation across the board: a full day’s wage.

The first-hires squawk “relative deprivation”! Or more like, “Boss, if you’re going to give those other guys ─ who are underemployed for a reason! ─ the same pay we got, we deserve a bonus. Fair is fair.”

“No deal,” the boss counters. “Check our agreement. Fair is fair.” Meaning: No union. No arbitration. No appeal.

But that’s the boss. Can Jesus ─ soft-hearted Jesus ─ help out the first-hires here?

Or, writing ourselves into the parable: When people don’t work as hard as we do … or don’t play fair … or are cut deals … or get more than we think they deserve … or get what we think we deserve ─ in other words, if we feel short-changed ─ relatively-deprived — can we count on Jesus to right the balance?

Don’t hold your breath … because, how does Jesus weigh in? Sounds like, “You whine ‘deprivation’? I’ll show you deprivation!”

That is, if he had his way, the least-working, last-hired, least-qualified would get even more than the first, highly-prized workers. In God’s dream economy, he intones, “The last will be first, and the first will be last.” Not helpful to the early-hires if Jesus’ topic of the day is fairness.

But what if the topic of the day is something else? What if the topic of the day is generosity?

Well, it clearly is, because Jesus punctuates the parable — not with a statement about compensation-gone-haywire — or even fairness (which is another way of dressing-up relative deprivation) — Jesus punctuates the parable with the landowner’s — read: God’s — generosity as counterweight to the workers’ envy.

“Are you envious,” Jesus charges the early-hires, “because I am generous to folks who don’t make the A Team?”

But who are the targets of the A-Team types' envy? They’re the people, for example, Hubert Humphrey targeted for generosity: “Those who are in the dawn of life, the children. Those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly. And those who are in the shadows of life: the sick, the needy, and the physically-challenged.”

“Are you envious of them,” Jesus needles, “because I choose to be generous with them?”

That’s envious as in "crank-crank-crank": the lingering, simmering, gnawing suspicion that less-deserving people out there ─ somewhere ─ are getting what is rightfully ours.

The whip-up-the-base solution to envy of this magnitude? “Ship them out. Deny them healthcare. Let them stew in their own juices. Build a wall!”

Odd: That’s clearly not Jesus’ solution. Read Jesus’ lips. The solution is generosity, like God’s generosity. Generosity that’s based on need … not notions of fairness.

Now, key distinction: Jesus here isn’t equating generosity with generic giving. In fact, he’s pretty clear: As good as giving is, generosity — exponential giving — wins hands down every time. In other words, it’s not enough to give. To be like God — and that’s what Jesus insists we be — generosity is the high bar to clear.

In other words, Jesus makes the case elsewhere that we are designed to be good, as God is good. But, as he proves here, God is good not because God gives — a sliding scale for the workers would have proven that — but God is good because God is generous.

And the God-like generosity Jesus baits us with looks like the characters in an old rabbinic tale:

A farmer had two sons. When the father dies, the two sons work the farm jointly. Come harvest season, they divide the harvest equally.

Now, the elder brother remains a confirmed bachelor … with a fondness for show tunes. (No, that’s not in the story. I made that up! But he does remain a bachelor.) The younger brother marries and has a whopping eight children.

At harvest time, the bachelor thinks to himself, “My brother has ten mouths to feed. I only have one. He really needs more of the harvest than I do. This is what I’ll do. In the dead of the night, I’ll take a hefty chunk of my share of the harvest and put it into his barn.”

At that very moment, the younger brother is thinking to himself, “God has given me a loving wife and eight wonderful children. My bachelor brother hasn’t been so fortunate. He really needs more of the harvest for his old age than I do. This is what I’ll do. In the dead of the night, I’ll take a hefty chunk of my share of the harvest and put it into his barn.”

And so, that night, half-way between their two barns and under a full moon and cloudless sky, the two brothers bump into each other!

Suddenly, it begins to rain.

What can that be? The rabbis concluded: It was God weeping for joy because the two brothers understood that a spirit of generosity is the clearest way we can show we are made in God’s image.

From the late-comers in the parable, then, to folks we just might think aren’t A-Team timber … from immigrants to Dreamers … minorities to single mothers … welfare recipients to LGBQT neighbors who just want a wedding cake (a wedding cake, for God’s sake!): Are we envious because God is generous?

Our only option: Make God weep. Make God weep tears of joy.

Amen.

“Dream Act”

Homily for the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost       10 September 2017
The Rev’d John R. Clarke, Rector

"Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”                                                                                                               Matthew 18:20

“Like what you’ve done with the Neanderthal skeleton.”

That’s an opener if you walk into the office of Svante Pääbo, headline-generating geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Leipzig.

Why the skeleton? Pääbo is committed to sequencing the entire Neanderthal genome. In the process, he’s discovered that humans and Neanderthals interbred up to 30,000 years ago. And he’s proven that all modern, non-African humans ─ from the Chinese to the French to the indigenous peoples of the Americas ─ have between one and four percent Neanderthal DNA. In other words, he’s discovered where some of us humans and the Neanderthals converge.

However, what Pääbo really wants to find out is: Where do we diverge? Read: What exactly does it mean to be human?

Or, as Pääbo frames it, what makes modern humans so crazy, like venturing out on to a wide expanse of ocean where you don’t glimpse a speck of land? Pääbo calls this “madness.”

That is, in terms of shear self-preservation, it’s just crazy. You’d never encounter a Neanderthal acting so crazy. “What is it in our human genes that drives taking a risk like that,” Pääbo asks.

Or take another “crazy” human behavior: At the nearby Leipzig Zoo, evolutionary anthropologist Michael Tomasello notes, “Chimps do a lot of incredibly smart things. But at the zoo today, you won’t see two chimps carrying something heavy together. They don’t have the kind of collaborative instinct even human children have.”

In other words, the type of community that approaches solving our common problems together with creative risk ─ like two, three, four, or more embarking on a lonely sea or sharing the task of carrying burdens too heavy for just one ─ that type of community is uniquely human. Risky collaboration of that sort, it’s crazy, really. It’s madness. But it’s what makes us human.

And if we learn nothing else from the Gospels, it’s what made Jesus human.

Case in point: A issue lighting up our newsfeed that would undoubtedly draw Jesus’ attention. It's the daily battle were engaged in over the Dreamers. They’re roughly 800,000 of our neighbors, most of whom were under the age of seven when their parents — entering the country illegally before June 15, 2007 — brought them here in the very human hope of keeping their families intact.

The Dreamers. Once again, they’re our neighbors. They’re here, now, established among us … working … getting educations … serving in our military. They’re neighbors who dream of one day enjoying the rights and responsibilities all citizens enjoy, but whose aspirations are now not only in limbo, they’re also under threat with the Administration’s suspension of DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) due to go into full effect in less than six months.

Just a reminder: DACA allows these neighbors of ours to receive a renewable two-year period of deferred action from deportation. And it means they’re eligible for a work permit. And where there’s work, there’s health insurance, also pay: money earned for housing, food, education, a future. Where there’s work and pay, there are taxes. Dreamers contribute $1.6 billion in taxes per year. And — good consumers like the rest of us — they spend their earnings. It’s estimated that, if allowed to stay, Dreamers will contribute $433 billion to the economy over the next decade.

And yet, some want to ship them out of the country to return them to places they really have never known, places truly foreign to them, places where they will be lost.

Reality check: Why are we even entertaining thoughts of deporting them? Their plight — given Jesus’ own take on the issue (“When I was a stranger, you welcomed me”) — is a no-brainer for people who claim to follow Jesus.

The Christian option, then, is: Clear the Dreamers’ path to citizenship … here, where they have a clear sense of history and belonging … rather than pave their way out of the country to what? Utter uncertainty and, especially for LGBT Dreamers, certain discrimination, or violence, even death.

Under the circumstances, however, where there shouldn’t be, there’s debate. It’s a debate about two choices: The craziness of community (thinking of neighbor, working for neighbor, working with neighbor) … vs. inhumanity. Inhumanity: Doing only what’s best for yourself … and yourself alone. Looking out for your own economic interests or — or, especially if you’re a politician — the interests of your racist base. Yes, racist base. Because who dares deny that we wouldn’t be having this stimulating conversation if, let’s say, 79 percent of the Dreamers in question were from Norway … and not Mexico? (Credit goes to economist Paul Krugman for that observation.)

Which response, then — eventual citizenship or summary deportation — is the more Neanderthal? And which the more human?

Neanderthal: “I’ve got mine because my parents (or immigrants in my family before them) got it legally, so what do I care about Dreamers?”

Human: Fair play and decency. The craziness that looks a lot like Jesus’ own take on community: "Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”

Was ever God’s personal stake in community more clearly stated?

Or, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, “What life have we, if we have not life together?”

That means that the “we” that makes up the “we” when we say, “We believe in one God” and so on … or the “our” of “Our Father, who art in heaven” … that “we” is a community of twos and threes and fours and how ever many there are of us here today and every Sunday … pointing us to a key question: What is the purpose of this church?

Answer: The purpose of this church is community. To bring us together as a people gathered in Jesus’ name, all being healed of our divisions and differences and issues so that each of us might heal others and reconcile them to God and each other, all of us.

Community: To make us — together — so radically welcoming that every stranger who walks through our open doors (or into our neighborhoods or wider community … into this country) isn’t ignored or just tolerated, but made to feel genuinely at home, respected, and accepted.

Community: To press the “mute” button on our own voice so that we might hear other voices: God’s voice … or our neighbors’ voices, their stories, their needs, their answers to the questions that stump us.

Community: To suspend our own blinkered agenda so that we might be free to explore God’s agenda for this country, for St Paul’s … an agenda that may be light years away from ours.

Community: To make each of us fully human, the way Jesus was fully human. Willing to be right here among us, contributing and benefitting, learning and evolving … even when only two or three are gathered in his Name.

And, when we remember how blessed we are to be alive, housed, fed, employed, and able-bodied to venture out on a wide sea of opportunity so that our neighbors might do more than just dream?

Community.

It’s madness.

It’s human.

Just crazy!

Amen.