Bible Stories You Probably Didn’t Hear in Sunday School: Our World is GOD’S Village

This week at the Village, we continued our series of Bible Studies You Probably Didn’t Hear In Sunday School. And, stay tuned for next week’s one, cause we’re going to cover some of those scriptures that use to say that you can’t be gay and Christian. Because here at The Village we believe you can be gay and Christian and sometimes people wonder if we’ve thrown out the Bible. We have not. So next week, Cheri’s gonna deal with some of those sticky biblical passages.

But today, it’s the story of God’s generosity, and God’s sense of fairness, and the idea that this world is God’s Village, it all belongs to God; we are just tenants. We are not really privy to all the reasons why things are the way they are. And sometimes our idea of fair is not God’s idea of fair. And guess what? That’s ok. And anyway, it’s God’s world so God gets to decide.

Our Story in worship today was from Matthew 20, the story of the Vineyard and the workers. In today’s story, a parable by Jesus on the Kingdom of God, an owner of a vineyard sends his estate manager out to hire workers. He goes to the town square, where you hire day laborers. At 7 AM, he hires a bunch of laborers, promising to pay them a $1 a day (in “The Message” paraphrase version anyway). He goes down again several times at 9 AM, Noon, 3PM and finally at 5 PM. Each time, they are promised a dollar for their labor. At 6 PM, the owner has the line up and the manager begins paying them, last hired to first.

The last hired get their dollars, and the first hired get excited. If they’re getting a dollar for an hour worked, we must be getting more. But wait, they all get a dollar. They start grousing. The owner’s response, “15Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?’ 16So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”

We usually read this story from the standpoint of the worker who worked all day, in the hot sun and only got the one dollar they agreed to in the morning. Instead, maybe we should switch to the person who came in and worked for an hour and still got the days wages. What a gift that would be. Imagine the feelings you would have, joy, relief, gratitude? Also imagine what reasons the workers who came at 5 PM might have had for coming then - e.g. they just lost another job, they had trouble getting going, they had transportation problems, they have a disability, they were drunk, but decided they needed to turn their life around. Can you imagine how blessed you would feel.

Compared to the rest of the world, we in this country do get a whole day’s worth of blessings in an hour. Our family is even more blessed than most in America, which is easily demonstrated by a day a week ago. Our kids go to private school, privilege number one. We have two cars, privilege number two. Cheri was driving them the about seven minute drive home and Jamie began repeating his favorite phrase of late, “I’m bored”. Cheri’s reaction was, as is mine lately as well “you have a Ninentendo DS, a Wii, and Xbox and a netbook waiting at home, along with a pile of toys, you’ll survive”. Forget Haiti, there are tens of thousands of people in Toledo who are not as fortunate as we are, a church planter and a do gooder lawyer with student loans I’m still paying.

To understand just how blessed we are in this country, our kids read a book today describing the world as if it were a village made up of 100 people. Love books that make statistics that easy to understand. So, repeating that in worship was great for me. Cheri read us just a few of these stats. So, if the world were a village of 100 people, only 30 would have enough food to eat. 20 would be severely malnourished and 50 would not have reliable sources of food and be hungry at sometime. Of the 100, 83 would have access to safe water in their homes or within a short walking distance; 17 spend a large part of the day just getting safe water. Of the 100, 57 have access to adequate sanitation, public or household sewage; 43 do not and of the 73 people over age 15, 64 can read at least a little, but 17 cannot read at all; of the 36 school aged villagers only 30 of them attend school. If the money in our village were divided equally, each person would have about $9000 US a year. But it is not divided evenly. The richest 10 people in the village have over half the money; the poorest 10 people have only about $1 a day.

Some of us hearing the sermon or reading the blog are struggling to pay our bills. We may have lost jobs; we have overdrawn our bank accounts, had to cut back on spending. Some of us may have lost our homes to foreclosure; or may be unemployed right now. And I don’t want to minimize that. And yet, compared to some other places in the world, we still live in a country where there is clean water, and public sewers. There are shelters where you can stay warm in the winter. They may not be nice, but we don’t have many cases of folks freezing to death in Toledo. We have schools, they are not great, but at least we have them. WE ARE THE GUY IN THE STORY WHO WORKS ALL DAY AND GETS PAID A FAIR WAGE. And sometimes we may get “ouchy”, when someone who does not seem to be deserving, gets some generous gift, but really, we need to get over ourselves, we could have it so much worse.

The Vineyard owner in the story, and his actions, are a sign of how God turns our expectations of fairness upside down. It’s like God wants to keep us off balance, just a bit. Because God is in charge of what’s fair. It’s not for us to decide when God can be generous. We never know when we might be on the receiving end of God’s generosity. So it’s also not our place to judge others when they are on the receiving end of that generosity. And when God puts us in a position to bless others, I think God smiles when we do so without question and without judging whether the person is deserving of our help.

Isn’t it wonderful to be on the receiving end, and to get more blessing from God than we deserve. God loves to give us better than we deserve. It’s called grace. God’s way is the way of generosity. So if we are followers of Jesus, then we are also called to be generous. We can’t worry about what’s fair. God decides what is fair. We are so blessed. So now, as a faith community called The Village Church, how will we respond?

We have the value of service in our community, and the value of showing compassion for people living in poverty. What is your passion? We are ready to form some ministry teams to serve in our community. We have already being doing some ministry – at St. Mark’s with their community meals; and with Family Promise and their meals and overnight housing for families. We have begun talking about some summer work trips. It’s time for us to form some ministry teams, to get some plans on the table, some dates on the calendar and some feet on the ground. We won’t worry about who is deserving – we will just concern ourselves with giving our time to help others.

One of the ways to discover where your passion is for ministry is to ask yourself this question: what breaks your heart? We are so blessed and there are many people out there in the world that are hurting. We can’t help them all so we need to focus our work. We’ll need to choose some particular projects as a starting place. Sometimes asking the question: what breaks your heart – is a way to focus. Is it children? Hunger? Healthcare? Homelessness? Addiction? Human trafficking?

Take some time right now, you’ve got a minute, you’re reading a blog for crying out loud, and think about your dreams for how we might be in ministry in our community and beyond in the next few weeks, months, and years. If you want to, share as a response to this, what you are willing to do, only share the things that YOU ARE WILLING TO DO, not what you want other people to do.

As for me, I’m going to help get a new faith community that believes it’s obligation is to change the world, off the ground. I’m going to train people to do the powerpoints and sound. I’m going to train people to do marketing and outreach. I’m going to train people to greet others at worship. Then, I’m going to help be parts of teams that feed the hungry, restore homes in broken parts of the world like New Orleans (yes, they’ll be rebuilding for years more) and Haiti (ditto). What’s your way of spreading the generous gifts you’ve been given?