September 25, 2011
The Perils of Being A Morning Person
By The Rev. Dr. Baron Mullis
Morningside Presbyterian Church, Atlanta
The Perils of Being A Morning Person
Matthew 20:1-16
Morningside Presbyterian Church
Rev. Dr. Baron Mullis
September 25, 2011
The Perils of Being A Morning Person
Matthew 20:1-16
Morningside Presbyterian Church
Rev. Dr. Baron Mullis
September 25, 2011
One of the trinkets that I have held on to from one call to the next is a button that my head of staff at Second Presbyterian Church in Indianapolis gave me as I was departing to begin my ministry Trinity Church in Charlotte. Joan handed me this button and said, “Think of this like the warning on the pill bottle, the directions for taking. Your new congregation will benefit from reading it.”
I looked at the button in my hand. It read, “Not a morning person doesn’t even begin to cover it.”
Now, had she given me the button in the morning, I probably would have taken offence, however since she had the good sense to wait until the afternoon, I was able to judiciously receive it.
It was, after all, the truth. Through the years, I have mellowed with age so that I have downgraded from positively surly to merely non-communicative. It pays to know thyself, and I do indeed know myself in this regard. If you need someone to keep the night watch with you, I am your man. But morning? Morning is the time for gradual entry into the day, buffered by coffee and a hot shower.
I wish that I could tell you that I aspire to be a morning person as the world does indeed appear to be run by morning people, but the truth is I consider it borderline unnatural that anyone can be chirpy at 7:30 in the morning.
I realize that I may have offended all of the morning people in the congregation, but in my defense, it’s only 11:30.
The funny thing about the stories that Jesus used to teach his followers is that it seems that we can, almost invariably find ourselves in them. For instance, in the story of the prodigal son, another of Jesus’ parables, I think we know our part in the story. We might be the older son, the younger son, or even the parent, and on occasion some of us may feel like the fatted calf, but I think we can find our place in the story. And it has always been an easy thing for me. I can usually find a flattering role in the parable to play, I can go on at great length about being the older brother, or the person who came to the banquet appropriately attired, but if art follows life, in this instance, in the instance of the parable of the laborers, I know which one I would be. I would be the person who was hired later in the day.
When we see ourselves in the story, though, I do think a certain amount of humility is called for – a certain amount, but not too much. If we fall off at either extreme, self-judging or self-glorifying, we don’t see ourselves rightly.
If we take these stories as a stick with which to beat ourselves, we risk failing to see ourselves as God sees us, and God takes no delight in it. We are sinners, to be sure, because none of us lives up to the full humanity for which God created us, but we’re still God’s good creations. We’re still God’s much loved, much valued people.
And if we fall off on the other extreme, if we take the self-glorifying route, well, we commonly identify that as hypocrisy. And even the finest people among us have our flaws. We’re still sinners in need of redeeming.
So as we identify ourselves in the parables of Jesus, the right amount of humility is called for, not too much nor too little. In short, an ounce of self-awareness goes a long way.
It pays to know thyself, because in knowing ourselves we can come to an understanding of God and God’s grace that is life-giving, life affirming, and transforming.
That really is the purpose of the church, as far as I can discern it, to help people come to an understanding of their place in the created order that is life giving, life affirming and transforming.
But the nature of knowing one’s self, the nature of coming to understand our place in the world is such that people arrive at the point of grace, the point of the knowledge of God’s love at different times of their lives, sometimes not at all. And depending on when we come to a right understanding of God, or perhaps more accurately, a more right understanding of God, because none of us will ever fully know God this side of the kingdom, depending on when we came to that knowledge, we might identify ourselves as the all-day laborers, the half-day laborers, the late-comers, and the half-hour laborers!
What we’re talking about in this parable is the grace of God.
I have a working definition of grace that I love. I’ve told you before and I’ll tell you again that grace is the undeserved, unmerited, unconditional love of God.
Think about that: undeserved. God doesn’t owe us love, God chooses love because that’s who God is. Unmerited: none of us did something special that made God decide to love us, God just loves us. It’s that simple. And unconditional: there’s nothing we can do to make God love us less.
That’s a pretty straightforward definition, and based on it we may draw a number of conclusions about how we relate to God and to each other.
And it also is an understanding of God that has the potential to scandalize folks just a bit.
The characters in the story were certainly scandalized: and I think perhaps what scandalized them the most was that if the landowner represents God, then God had the audacity to flaunt what would more appropriately be chastely presented. If God had simply had the good taste to love the hard workers more, the whole brouhaha about the wages could have been avoided. It’s not that the hard workers weren’t happy to see that their fellow laborers had been paid well, it’s just that they were miffed they weren’t paid more. It all could have been avoided.
But God doesn’t work that way.
God doesn’t love some of us more and some of us less because of what we do.
That’s the scandalous part of grace.
I have heard sermons that suggest that the point of this parable is that you have to get in the vineyard. It doesn’t matter whether you come at nine in the morning or five in the evening so long as you get in the vineyard. Baptized in the Jordan or deathbed conversion, as long as you get in the vineyard, you’re good to go.
But if we look strictly within the limits of the text, there’s nothing to support that reading. This isn’t a story designed to limit the scope of salvation to those who get the message. To make this a story about who is in and how is out, is to miss the point. Indeed, the landowner is identified only as generous.
But if you are a morning person, how does that make you feel?
Indeed, it seems to me that if this is the sort of master we serve, that it is indeed a perilous thing to be a morning person, to work in the heat of the day for the same wage as everyone else. It’s hard work, and a reasonable person should avoid hard work if the wage is the same!
That’s the scandal, I suppose, that God has the bad taste to love everyone equally. Because this isn’t a story about money or work, it’s a story about generosity and love.
And that is what makes it a story of grace.
God doesn’t dupe unsuspecting followers into a drudge of service for the sake of taking advantage of some only to reward the latecomers with equal measure of goodness. Goodness is what God wants for us all.
It makes me think of that old hymn, “softly and tenderly, Jesus is calling. Calling to you and to me. Though we have sinned he has mercy and pardon. Pardon for you and for me. Come home, come home. Ye who are weary come home. Softly and tenderly, Jesus is calling. Calling, O sinner, come home.”
The calling of God into the life of God’s love is a gentle call, a tender call. It is not indentured servitude. Likewise the calling is to rest in the assurance of God’s love.
Grace offends our sense of justice, to a certain extent. Things aren’t so different now from when Jesus told this story. Don’t we expect to work hard and get ahead?
That’s where it is useful to remember that this story is a parable. Like all analogical language, it breaks down if pressed too hard, or pressed to answer the wrong question. The question that this story seems to ask isn’t one of how to run a business, though perhaps it is tempting to think of it that way. The question that this story seems to ask is whether God will live up to our standards or whether God has God’s own standards for behavior.
That is where our thinking about God goes wrong: when we try to make God out to be like us, only better. And that just isn’t who God is.
God isn’t like us, only better. God is God.
God is God, and God is love. This isn’t parable about money or work, it’s a parable about God, and that’s why this story unfolds this way.
Wouldn’t it just be easier if God would pay a little more attention to the harder workers, just a bonus? That certainly is the intelligent business model: you make sure your high producers are happy.
God doesn’t do that. It’s not that God loves the hard workerless, it’s just that God won’t love the others less.
And do you know what’s wrong with that? It requires trust. To live with a God of grace, a God of love requires trust. Otherwise, you better be out there first thing in the morning, everyday, all the time, breaking your back, earning what you get.
Have you ever known someone who was trying to earn God’s love? Did you ever want to just ask them, “are you tired yet?”
Because Jesus calls are who are weary and carrying heavy burdens to come to him and rest.
That may seem a foolhardy, even risky thing for a preacher to say, a preacher whose job is to motivate volunteers and galvanize giving, but I’ve come through my years of ministry to the realization that work that is done trying to earn God’s love will burn you out and work that is done because you know God’s love will build you up.
That’s why this story is so unequivocal. That’s why there is absolutely no room for an alternative approach to God’s grace, a merit based pay scale of love, because that approach is toxic to the core.
God is love and that’s why this story unfolds this way. That’s why this story can’t unfold any other way.
Grace is God’s gift to us, unmerited, unconditional, undeserved love. If it is any other way, it’s not grace.
Grace is the reality that God, who is so completely other from us that all language about God must be analogical or risk doing violence the reality of who God is, that very same God, is nearer to us than our own breath.
Anne Lamott puts our resistance to grace beautifully:
“Jealousy always has been my cross, the weakness and woundedness in me that has most often caused me to feel ugly and unlovable, like the Bad Seed. I’ve had many years of recovery and therapy, years filled with intimate and devoted friendships, yet I still struggle. I know that when someone gets a big slice of pie, it doesn’t mean there’s less for me. In fact, I know that there isn’t even a pie, that there’s plenty to go around, enough food and love and air.
But I don’t believe it for a second.
I secretly believe there’s a pie. I will go to my grave brandishing my fork.”[1]
Friends, I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions about what to do in business. I trust smarter people than me to make my financial decisions, and I believe Jesus does have some opinions about how we earn our money and go about our running our lives, but this isn’t a story about business. It’s a story about God, and with God, there’s no need for jealousy. There’s no race. There’s no marketplace. There’s no meritocracy in the kingdom. There’s no peril to being a morning person. There’s no peril in being a latecomer. There’s only God. There is only love. That’s what we’re acknowledging in baptism – when we bring an infant to the font, an infant who has made no decision, who is helpless to defend himself against the covenant that we’ve wrapped around him. We’re saying it is not about you and what you’ll do in your life. God’s love won’t ever be about what you did or did not do. You didn’t choose God, you’re too young to choose God. God chose you. God is the one who acts. Everything we ever do can be nothing more than reaction.
There’s no competition. There’s no scarcity. There is only God. There is only love.
That’s enough. That’s enough.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, Amen.
[1]Anne Lamott, Grace Eventually
The Perils of Being A Morning Person
Matthew 20:1-16
Morningside Presbyterian Church
Rev. Dr. Baron Mullis
September 25, 2011
The Perils of Being A Morning Person
Matthew 20:1-16
Morningside Presbyterian Church
Rev. Dr. Baron Mullis
September 25, 2011
One of the trinkets that I have held on to from one call to the next is a button that my head of staff at Second Presbyterian Church in Indianapolis gave me as I was departing to begin my ministry Trinity Church in Charlotte. Joan handed me this button and said, “Think of this like the warning on the pill bottle, the directions for taking. Your new congregation will benefit from reading it.”
I looked at the button in my hand. It read, “Not a morning person doesn’t even begin to cover it.”
Now, had she given me the button in the morning, I probably would have taken offence, however since she had the good sense to wait until the afternoon, I was able to judiciously receive it.
It was, after all, the truth. Through the years, I have mellowed with age so that I have downgraded from positively surly to merely non-communicative. It pays to know thyself, and I do indeed know myself in this regard. If you need someone to keep the night watch with you, I am your man. But morning? Morning is the time for gradual entry into the day, buffered by coffee and a hot shower.
I wish that I could tell you that I aspire to be a morning person as the world does indeed appear to be run by morning people, but the truth is I consider it borderline unnatural that anyone can be chirpy at 7:30 in the morning.
I realize that I may have offended all of the morning people in the congregation, but in my defense, it’s only 11:30.
The funny thing about the stories that Jesus used to teach his followers is that it seems that we can, almost invariably find ourselves in them. For instance, in the story of the prodigal son, another of Jesus’ parables, I think we know our part in the story. We might be the older son, the younger son, or even the parent, and on occasion some of us may feel like the fatted calf, but I think we can find our place in the story. And it has always been an easy thing for me. I can usually find a flattering role in the parable to play, I can go on at great length about being the older brother, or the person who came to the banquet appropriately attired, but if art follows life, in this instance, in the instance of the parable of the laborers, I know which one I would be. I would be the person who was hired later in the day.
When we see ourselves in the story, though, I do think a certain amount of humility is called for – a certain amount, but not too much. If we fall off at either extreme, self-judging or self-glorifying, we don’t see ourselves rightly.
If we take these stories as a stick with which to beat ourselves, we risk failing to see ourselves as God sees us, and God takes no delight in it. We are sinners, to be sure, because none of us lives up to the full humanity for which God created us, but we’re still God’s good creations. We’re still God’s much loved, much valued people.
And if we fall off on the other extreme, if we take the self-glorifying route, well, we commonly identify that as hypocrisy. And even the finest people among us have our flaws. We’re still sinners in need of redeeming.
So as we identify ourselves in the parables of Jesus, the right amount of humility is called for, not too much nor too little. In short, an ounce of self-awareness goes a long way.
It pays to know thyself, because in knowing ourselves we can come to an understanding of God and God’s grace that is life-giving, life affirming, and transforming.
That really is the purpose of the church, as far as I can discern it, to help people come to an understanding of their place in the created order that is life giving, life affirming and transforming.
But the nature of knowing one’s self, the nature of coming to understand our place in the world is such that people arrive at the point of grace, the point of the knowledge of God’s love at different times of their lives, sometimes not at all. And depending on when we come to a right understanding of God, or perhaps more accurately, a more right understanding of God, because none of us will ever fully know God this side of the kingdom, depending on when we came to that knowledge, we might identify ourselves as the all-day laborers, the half-day laborers, the late-comers, and the half-hour laborers!
What we’re talking about in this parable is the grace of God.
I have a working definition of grace that I love. I’ve told you before and I’ll tell you again that grace is the undeserved, unmerited, unconditional love of God.
Think about that: undeserved. God doesn’t owe us love, God chooses love because that’s who God is. Unmerited: none of us did something special that made God decide to love us, God just loves us. It’s that simple. And unconditional: there’s nothing we can do to make God love us less.
That’s a pretty straightforward definition, and based on it we may draw a number of conclusions about how we relate to God and to each other.
And it also is an understanding of God that has the potential to scandalize folks just a bit.
The characters in the story were certainly scandalized: and I think perhaps what scandalized them the most was that if the landowner represents God, then God had the audacity to flaunt what would more appropriately be chastely presented. If God had simply had the good taste to love the hard workers more, the whole brouhaha about the wages could have been avoided. It’s not that the hard workers weren’t happy to see that their fellow laborers had been paid well, it’s just that they were miffed they weren’t paid more. It all could have been avoided.
But God doesn’t work that way.
God doesn’t love some of us more and some of us less because of what we do.
That’s the scandalous part of grace.
I have heard sermons that suggest that the point of this parable is that you have to get in the vineyard. It doesn’t matter whether you come at nine in the morning or five in the evening so long as you get in the vineyard. Baptized in the Jordan or deathbed conversion, as long as you get in the vineyard, you’re good to go.
But if we look strictly within the limits of the text, there’s nothing to support that reading. This isn’t a story designed to limit the scope of salvation to those who get the message. To make this a story about who is in and how is out, is to miss the point. Indeed, the landowner is identified only as generous.
But if you are a morning person, how does that make you feel?
Indeed, it seems to me that if this is the sort of master we serve, that it is indeed a perilous thing to be a morning person, to work in the heat of the day for the same wage as everyone else. It’s hard work, and a reasonable person should avoid hard work if the wage is the same!
That’s the scandal, I suppose, that God has the bad taste to love everyone equally. Because this isn’t a story about money or work, it’s a story about generosity and love.
And that is what makes it a story of grace.
God doesn’t dupe unsuspecting followers into a drudge of service for the sake of taking advantage of some only to reward the latecomers with equal measure of goodness. Goodness is what God wants for us all.
It makes me think of that old hymn, “softly and tenderly, Jesus is calling. Calling to you and to me. Though we have sinned he has mercy and pardon. Pardon for you and for me. Come home, come home. Ye who are weary come home. Softly and tenderly, Jesus is calling. Calling, O sinner, come home.”
The calling of God into the life of God’s love is a gentle call, a tender call. It is not indentured servitude. Likewise the calling is to rest in the assurance of God’s love.
Grace offends our sense of justice, to a certain extent. Things aren’t so different now from when Jesus told this story. Don’t we expect to work hard and get ahead?
That’s where it is useful to remember that this story is a parable. Like all analogical language, it breaks down if pressed too hard, or pressed to answer the wrong question. The question that this story seems to ask isn’t one of how to run a business, though perhaps it is tempting to think of it that way. The question that this story seems to ask is whether God will live up to our standards or whether God has God’s own standards for behavior.
That is where our thinking about God goes wrong: when we try to make God out to be like us, only better. And that just isn’t who God is.
God isn’t like us, only better. God is God.
God is God, and God is love. This isn’t parable about money or work, it’s a parable about God, and that’s why this story unfolds this way.
Wouldn’t it just be easier if God would pay a little more attention to the harder workers, just a bonus? That certainly is the intelligent business model: you make sure your high producers are happy.
God doesn’t do that. It’s not that God loves the hard workerless, it’s just that God won’t love the others less.
And do you know what’s wrong with that? It requires trust. To live with a God of grace, a God of love requires trust. Otherwise, you better be out there first thing in the morning, everyday, all the time, breaking your back, earning what you get.
Have you ever known someone who was trying to earn God’s love? Did you ever want to just ask them, “are you tired yet?”
Because Jesus calls are who are weary and carrying heavy burdens to come to him and rest.
That may seem a foolhardy, even risky thing for a preacher to say, a preacher whose job is to motivate volunteers and galvanize giving, but I’ve come through my years of ministry to the realization that work that is done trying to earn God’s love will burn you out and work that is done because you know God’s love will build you up.
That’s why this story is so unequivocal. That’s why there is absolutely no room for an alternative approach to God’s grace, a merit based pay scale of love, because that approach is toxic to the core.
God is love and that’s why this story unfolds this way. That’s why this story can’t unfold any other way.
Grace is God’s gift to us, unmerited, unconditional, undeserved love. If it is any other way, it’s not grace.
Grace is the reality that God, who is so completely other from us that all language about God must be analogical or risk doing violence the reality of who God is, that very same God, is nearer to us than our own breath.
Anne Lamott puts our resistance to grace beautifully:
“Jealousy always has been my cross, the weakness and woundedness in me that has most often caused me to feel ugly and unlovable, like the Bad Seed. I’ve had many years of recovery and therapy, years filled with intimate and devoted friendships, yet I still struggle. I know that when someone gets a big slice of pie, it doesn’t mean there’s less for me. In fact, I know that there isn’t even a pie, that there’s plenty to go around, enough food and love and air.
But I don’t believe it for a second.
I secretly believe there’s a pie. I will go to my grave brandishing my fork.”[1]
Friends, I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions about what to do in business. I trust smarter people than me to make my financial decisions, and I believe Jesus does have some opinions about how we earn our money and go about our running our lives, but this isn’t a story about business. It’s a story about God, and with God, there’s no need for jealousy. There’s no race. There’s no marketplace. There’s no meritocracy in the kingdom. There’s no peril to being a morning person. There’s no peril in being a latecomer. There’s only God. There is only love. That’s what we’re acknowledging in baptism – when we bring an infant to the font, an infant who has made no decision, who is helpless to defend himself against the covenant that we’ve wrapped around him. We’re saying it is not about you and what you’ll do in your life. God’s love won’t ever be about what you did or did not do. You didn’t choose God, you’re too young to choose God. God chose you. God is the one who acts. Everything we ever do can be nothing more than reaction.
There’s no competition. There’s no scarcity. There is only God. There is only love.
That’s enough. That’s enough.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, Amen.
[1]Anne Lamott, Grace Eventually
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