THE FOURTH CHURCH PULPIT

TOO MUICH GRACE?
November 14, 1999 ~

John M. Buchanan

“Conversion is frightening to oneself, and to others, precisely because it can seem
like a regression. One’s adult certainty about the world is shaken, and this can feel
like being sent back to square one. Gradually, however, one learns to discern the
adult command behind Jesus’ saying ‘whoever does not receive the Kingdom of God
as a little child will never enter it.’ (Mark 10:15) This is not an exhortation to
become childish, or to nurture one’s inner child. Instead, it reminds us that the
grace of childhood lies in being receptive, with an open mind and with gratitude for
the seemingly limitless nourishment that has come your way.

Kathleen Norris
Amazing Grace

FOURTH
PRESBY
TERIAN
CHURCH
A LIGHT IN THE CITY

Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago
126 East Chestnut Street, Chicago, IL 60611-2094
(312) 787-4570

TOO MUCH GRACE?

JOHN M. BUCHANAN, PASTOR
FOURTH PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
November 14, 1999

Matthew 20:1-16

“So the last will be first, and the first will be last.” (Matthew 20:16)

Startle us, O God, with your amazing grace, which is before us and behind us, above
and below us; your love that surrounds us while we are here and in every minute of
every day, even and especially moments when we are busy and not thinking about you.
O God, speak your word to us. Remind us of your love in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The late Henri Nouwen, Dutch priest and theologian, once said that, “The hardest thing
for us to understand is how God can love all human beings with the same unlimited love,
while at the same time loving each of them in a totally unique way...” Nouwen went on,
“Somehow, we think we can only fully enjoy our being loved by God if others are loved
less than we are.” (Lifesigns, p.46)

Every child, I suppose, wonders how it is that parents can love more than one child
equally and yet uniquely. God loves each of us, Augustine said, as if there were only one
of us to love. But it doesn’t often feel like that—in the context of family life. “You always
loved her more than you loved me,” the child says, sometimes in jest, sometimes in deadly
seriousness.

Phillip Gulley has written an essay, “The Second Child,” which illustrates how parental
love is experienced differently by different children. When the first child was born they
had to add a room to house his photography collection after three months. When a second
child came, after three months, the only photograph was the one taken at the hospital, the
one with the scrunched up face that looks like everybody else’s baby—and for all anyone
really knows, may be someone else’s. Gulley thinks there’s a factory somewhere cranking
out a dozen different goofy baby pictures, and the nurse just hands you one that resembles
your child.

First children have enormous wardrobes. Second children wear hand-me-downs. First
children are treated like porcelain, second children like tupperware. Gulley tells the best
one—which I’ve used before, but it fits here—“When your first child drops a pacifier, you
boil it for ten minutes. When the second child drops a pacifier, you tell the dog to fetch.”
(Front Porch Tales, p. 92-94)

It is difficult to understand that God loves all equally and each uniquely. It is not easy to
accept the fact that my enemies are not also God’s enemies, or that the people who so
flagrantly abuse the standards of integrity, faithfulness and justice, to which I am
committed, are somehow loved by God, as I am.

It must have been late in their life together, near the end in fact, when one of his disciples
finally said what they all had been thinking. They had followed him up and down Galilee
for three years. They had walked away from their families and jobs, away from the
comfort of home and routine. They had gone hungry, slept on the ground, been cold and
wet and tired. And now, at this very moment, it appears that he’s decided to go to
Jerusalem, and they’re not sure they'll get out alive. His enemies will be waiting for him
and them. They’ve'given quite a bit, actually, sacrificing everything for him, for his love
and grace. And they’ve observed over the three years how he has accepted into his
company people who were not really very acceptable; people who had not sacrificed
anything; people who, as a matter of fact, were not very good people. It didn’t seem to
bother him. He had continued to dine with tax collectors, dishonest, treasonous quislings
who worked for the Romans and got rich off their own people’s oppression, and
prostitutes, of all people. And so finally, I think Peter, surely it was Peter, or maybe John,
the beloved, or perhaps Judas, the bookkeeper, said what they all were thinking: ‘Surely,
Jesus, you don’t think as much of them as you think of us. Surely you don't love them as
much as you love us. Surely they, traitors and prostitutes, are not worth as much to you
as we are after all we’ve done for you. Where’s the fairness in that?’

And so he told a story. It is a story specifically for privileged insiders, for the very ones
who would ask that question. It is a disturbing story—about the radical nature of grace—
too much grace, in fact.

A landowner goes to the town square where laborers gather every day looking for work.
It’s a kind of labor market not unlike the system still in use where migrant workers follow
the harvest. He hires a group at sunrise, the official beginning of the work day—about
6:00 a.m. It’s a big harvest. Maybe it looks like rain, maybe there is a chill in the air and
a threat of a ruinous freeze. In any event, he returns to the labor market at 9:00 a.m. and
hires another group of workers. At noon and at 3:00 p.m., he’s back again, hiring a third
and fourth group. And at 5:00, not long before sunset, he hires a fifth group to help finish
the job.

Laborers are paid daily at sunset and the owner begins with the last group hired. To their
absolute delight, they receive a full day’s pay. I know who else is delighted as well—all
the other laborers who know that if these people who worked just a few hours received a
full wage, they, who worked all day, from dawn, through the blazing heat of midday, who
did most of the work, surely they will be rewarded appropriately. And so when their turn
comes to be paid, and they receive the same amount, the full amount but no more, the
amount they negotiated at the beginning of the day, they are offended. They complain and
the essence of their complaint is this: “You have made them equal to us.” It’s not just
money, it’s status, position, personal value. “We worked all day. They worked one hour.
We're sorry—that’s not fair.” And the owner responds—gently—‘Take what you have and
go... Are you envious because I am generous?’

This is not a business plan. A commercial enterprise that tried to operate on the basis of
equal pay for unequal work would soon be hard pressed to find anyone foolish enough to
work all day. My introduction to that kind of injustice, equal pay for unequal work, was

blunt. I worked for the city water and sewer department in the summer time during

college. It quickly became apparent that the college boys did the hard and dirty work
while the grizzled veterans slept on the truck or went for coffee.

The story is not an economic model, but it does dramatically overturn the conventional
way people think about God and about others. In his book, The God We Never Knew,
Marcus Borg suggests that the concept of God that most of us received in childhood was
God as record keeper, finger pointer, stern judge, meeting out punishments. Or, Anne
Lamott’s High School Principal leafing through your files and not like what he’s finding.
But in this strange story, God is not keeping score. God is not a celestial accountant
keeping books, making entries on the basis of merit accumulated. God's system is based
on something other than performance, on the infinite value of persons and it confronts and
contradicts everything we think we know about God.

I am always surprised to discover something new in these ancient texts. This time around
I found myself focusing on the last group of laborers.

“Why are you standing here?” he asks them. Not ‘Do you want to make some quick
money?’ but ‘Why are you still here?’ To which they respond: ‘Because no one has hired
us.’ We’re still here because nobody needs us, because there is no work for us. And when
the owner said, ‘You also go into the vineyard,’ it wasn’t so much a good financial deal as
it was a life-affirming, life giving affirmation of their worth. ‘I need you! I have work for
you to do! You are valuable to me.’ The owner cares about the unemployed, the marginal,
the left over people, more than he cares about his profit margin, apparently.

Tom Long says the owner cares about the ones the world forgets and marginalizes—‘“like
the left-over kids on a ball field whom nobody wants on the team.” (Westminster Bible
Companion, Matthew)

Do you know what that means? Do you know about an early childhood exercise in the
harshest market economics called a pick-up game of baseball? Here’s how it goes. A
group of children assembles to play a game of baseball. The first two to arrive, or the
biggest and strongest, or the ones who own the bat, designate themselves as captains.
They then engage in an elaborate ritual involving throwing and catching the bat to
determine who will have the first choice from among the other would-be players. First,
one chooses, then the other. The best players are chosen first. And with a dreadful and
inexorable market logic, the group of unchosen gets smaller as it gets more pathetic
athletically. And if there is an odd number of potential players—one is left and the two
captains have to decide who has to take him. That moral dilemma was resolved in my
childhood by the Sellers twins, who turned out fine as adults, but in their early childhood
were awkward and dreadful baseball players, who owned bats and balls and so were
always eagerly welcomed, but were so bad that they were always chosen last, one to one
team, the other twin to the other.

This owner cares about the marginal, the very ones the world overlooks and leaves
behind. This owner cares about personal value which results from being included. This
owner sounds a lot like the man whose hospitality reached out to include those society
routinely shut out: the unclean, the sinners, the traitors, the prostitutes, and whose

amazing grace ultimately softened and changed the hearts of even his closest friends, the
ones who were so sure they deserved and had earned their position in his kingdom.

But there is a question begging to be asked. Does this whole idea of grace undermine any

reason for trying to be good? If we all get equal pay, why bother working hard all day.
It’s a good question.

A simplistic theology of grace sounds like saccharine permissiveness. God loves all, all
are included, so why even bother being good and kind and faithful. And carefully and
thoughtfully it needs to be said that grace is costly: that grace cost the life of God’s son
and the life of grace turns out to be one, not of moral relativism, but devoted and
disciplined love.

William Muehl, who taught a generation of ministers at Yale Divinity School, once
preached a sermon “To Hell with Acceptance,” which demolished the simplistic idea of
grace as mere acceptance. The Prodigal Son, Muehl said, got up the morning after his
welcome home party and was expected to be at work in the field with his older brother.
The forgiven spouse is redeemed, not by receiving special treatment but when he/she is
expected to rejoin the marriage with all its responsibilities. A man knows that forgiveness
and reconciliation have happened, not when his wife treats him with sweet kindness, but
when she throws the dish towel at him and says, ‘OK, buster, it’s your turn to dry.’ The
laborers who were hired at five now have the opportunity to go to work the next morning
at 6:00 because the best news of all is that they are wanted and needed and valued.

Tribune writer Eric Zorn, wrote an unintended commentary on grace in his fine editorial
Thursday morning, about the young men who have been expelled from Eisenhower High
School in Decatur. There was a fist fight at a football game. Seven African American boys
were suspended from school for two years by the School Board—the sole African
American member casting the only dissenting vote. Jesse Jackson and PUSH are there
advocating for the seven students. Zorn said, correctly, I think, that school board policy
further marginalizes the youngsters and almost guarantees a life-time of dysfunction,
trouble, and inevitably, crime. Too often, mainstream society does just that—marginalizes
the already marginalized and then wonders why it doesn’t turn out all right; eliminates
Affirmative Action, for instance, and then pretends to be perplexed when racial balance
comes apart and racial separation appears again,

Eric Zorn’s eminently sensible proposal was that the seven not be accepted back, but put
back, given responsibility—to be there every day, to serve on an inter-racial council, to
make speeches to elementary schools—in effect, to be told that they have value, that there
is work to be done.

Eric Zorn, newspaper man, and William Muehl, theologian, understand Jesus: the purpose
of grace is not to allow us to accept the past, but to give us a future.

This is a difficult story that makes us uncomfortable. It challenges deeply held values and
opens up a whole new way of thinking about God and one another. And it is, finally, good
news—not only for the marginalized, but for all of us. At the end of the first volume of his

trilogy, Christian Theology in a North American Context, Douglas John Hall writes
simply and eloquently about the final religious mystery—“that God should love.”

That is the final mystery—that God should love—the expelled students in Decatur and the
ones who expelled them, the all day workers and the one hour workers, the devout church
member and the happy pagan home in bed on Sunday morning; the hard working banker
and the unemployed drunk; you and me when we deserve love and when we don’t deserve
love: you and me when we:are good and honest and faithful and productive, and you and
me when we’re not so good and not so honest, faithful and productive.

Author, Anne Lamott, became a Christian, a church person, after a very difficult life of
drug and alcohol addiction, disastrous personal relationships, essentially because she
discovered, through a remarkable little church, that God loved her, regardless of what she
had done. Lamott remembers a friend’s experience with a Catholic adoption agency for
special children. Inquiring perspective parents are given a questionnaire:

Could you adopt:

An addicted baby?

A terminally ill baby?

A mildly retarded baby?

A baby with a tendency towards violence?

God is an adoptive parent, Lamott proposes. God says, ‘Sure, I’ll take the kids who are
addicted or terminal. I’ll pick all the retarded kids, and of course, the sadists, the selfish
ones, the liars . . .So of course,” Lamott said, “God loves old ordinary me, even or
especially at my most scared and petty and mean and obsessive. Loves me: chooses me.”
(Traveling Mercies, p.255)

Most of us discover along the way, that the best of our relationships are based, not so
much on our wonderful! attributes, but on someone else’s patience, forgiveness,
acceptance, grace. And that whatever standing we have with God, likewise, is not, finally,
because we are so wonderful, hardworking, upright and righteous, but because God
somehow chooses to love us.

it is the final mystery and it is why when Americans are asked their favorite hymn, one is
by far the most popular choice. It was written by John Newton, captain of an English
slave ship. Tortured by the dreadful slave trade he was serving, Newton began to read
Imitation of Christ, by Thomas a Kempis, and gradually turned to Christ on the discovery
that nothing he had ever done changed the love of Christ for him. He became an Anglican
priest, and he wrote a hymn about his own life and about grace. I think we know about
grace because we hunger for it and long for it and maybe have experienced just enough of
it to know that it can save our lives by telling us that we matter, that we are of value, that
we are needed, that there is work for us to do—that there is one who loves us with an
amazing steadiness—an amazing consistency—an amazing tenacity—a truly Amazing
Grace.

Thanks be to God. Amen

November 14

Prayers of the People

O God, creator and ruler of the universe, “you have been our
dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were
brought forth, or the land and the earth were born, from

' everlasting to everlasting, you ate God (Psalm 90:1-2).”

When we rebelled against you refusing to trust and obey you, you
did not reject us, but still claimed us as your own. In the fullness
of time, out of your great love for the world, you sent Jesus to be
one of us, to redeem us and heal our brokenness (Book of
Common Worship).”

As a child is slowly formed in the waters of the womb, so you
transform our spirits by your Spirit. “Like a hen gathers her young
under her wings, you guard and strengthen us. Continue to carry
and labor over us, O God, until we are completely born into your
arms that embrace us from infancy to old age! "Fill us with
patience and strength to undergo the labors of love that give birth
to hope, “as we carry your love within us and bear our redemption
in Christ into the world.”

We are surprised, O God, when you do not act as we expect. You
challenge us to rethink what we take for granted. As we grow up
into Christ, help us to know what to leave behind and what to
preserve at all costs. As members of your household, we pray to
be a caring congregation ... “persons who struggle together with
complex issues, persons who try to be good stewards of the earth
and all of our resources, persons who risk reaching out, persons
who dare to share deeply with one another.” Keep us open and
growing, O God,

Fill us with your Holy Spirit, that we may bear each other’s
burdens. To those who are hurting this day, O God, bring relief.
To those with physical illnesses, grant “the kind of healing only
your spirit can give.” Touch with your “calming, settling hand
those in emotional distress and relational turmoil.” Grant renewal
to those who have lost a family member or friend, who have lost
their confidence or their direction. Bear wholeness to those who
face upcoming surgery, who must make hard decisions. Grant
satisfaction to all who hunger and thirst for food or justice, relief
to those engaged in conflicts or victimized by war. Deliver your
people from contempt that they may show mercy to neighbors and
adversaries may become allies. Lift up the depressed, befriend

those who grieve, comfort the anxious, stand with victims of
abuse and crime. Awaken those who damage themselves and
others through addictions. Grant them freedom.

“God of glory, you see how all creation groans in labor as it
awaits redemption. As we work for and await your new creation,
we trust that you will answer our prayers with grace; through

“Jesus Christ our Lord, who'teaches us ‘to say together when we
pray: OUR FATHER

Carol Allen