Soul, work, worth

 

Matthew 20: 1-16
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
September 24, 2023

Photo of the cover of the Ladybird edition of The Little Red Hen and the grains of wheat.  The red hen is walking down the street away from the baker, who is waving, and she is carrying with her beak a freshly baked two-tiered loaf of bread in a netted sack.

This is one of my favorite parables. It reminds me of one of my own (bad) jokes.



Why are morning people in charge of almost everything?

Because they got up before everyone else.



This parable also reminds me of another story, one with a completely opposite meaning, The Little Red Hen and the grains of wheat.



You know the story. Once upon a time, there was a little red hen who lived in a farmyard.

One day the little red hen found some grains of wheat.

She took them to the other animals in the farmyard.

“Who will help me to plant these grains of wheat?” asked the little red hen.

“Not I,” said the cat.

“Not I,” said the rat.

“Not I,” said the pig.

“Then I shall plant the grains myself”, said the little red hen. So she did.

And the story continues in the same way when the hen needs to cut the wheat, when she needs to take the wheat to the mill to be ground into flour, when she needs to take the flour to the baker to be made into bread. No one will help so she does it herself.

We know the ending too.

When the bread was baked, the little red hen took it to the other animals in the farmyard.

“The bread is now ready to be eaten”, said the little red hen. “Who will help me to eat the bread?”

“I will”, said the cat.

“I will”, said the rat.

“I will”, said the pig.

“No, you will not”, said the little red hen. “I shall eat it myself”. So she did.



The story is an American fable that first appeared in print in 1874. It was intended to teach children the value of hard work and the importance of personal initiative. Over the years it has been adapted to suit different purposes. When he was seeking the presidency, Ronald Reagan used this story in a speech in which a farmer declares that the hen is being unfair and so forces her to share the bread, thus removing her incentive to work and causing the farm to fall into poverty. In another version the hen promises a slice of bread to each of the animals if they make the bread but she keeps the biggest slice for herself even though she didn’t do any of the work. In yet another version the hen is praised because she kept the fruits of her labor.



Jesus tells his parable of the workers in the vineyard because he’s talking about the kingdom of heaven and the extravagantly generous heart of God. There is no landowner, there are no workers, except when we read this, they absolutely exist. With both stories, with any story about work, or about rest for that matter, we react viscerally. Generations of work before us have trained us to react this way. We’ve witnessed this in the reactions to affirmation action and its demise, student loan forgiveness, and the animosity directed at so-called ‘welfare queens’. We equate work and productivity with worth and with morality, ultimately with the purpose of life. We don’t want to work ourselves to the bone but we don’t want to see someone else getting more for doing less.



We expect fairness in a system rigged against workers in a nation that was built with enslaved people. Since 1973 hourly wages have increased only 9.2% while productivity has increased by 74.4%. For the same time period, housing costs have risen over 100%, not to mention food, healthcare, and education. And yet we still hold onto the myth that with enough hard work and personal initiative, if you put enough muscle into hauling up those bootstraps, anyone can achieve the American dream. And among the core values of the American dream are property ownership, self-sufficiency, independence, while the values of the kin-dom are mutual care, interdependence, and the sufficiency of enough.



We started to learn these lessons at the beginning of the pandemic. In 2020 the U.S. government provided three rounds of cash payments to tax filers, totaling $3200 for each tax filer and $2500 per child—essentially a temporary version of universal basic income. Not only that, the expanded Child Tax Credit that recently expired lifted nearly 4 million children out of poverty and restored food to their tables. It turns out that a lack of money can be solved by giving money to people who need it.



Yes, we say, but only because it was an emergency, but what else would we call millions of children raised in the trauma of poverty? What about disabled workers who are still paid on average 26% less than non-disabled workers? What of many in this present generation who cannot afford to buy, let alone rent, their own home at a similar age to when their parents purchased a home? Additionally, we’ve linked the ability to work with health insurance, retirement programs, and even the ability to feed ourselves. And many people are working themselves literally to death.



Which is why we have a commandment to observe the sabbath, to have a day of rest, a day of our lives given over to the Source of life. Yet even then there are times we turn the ministry of the Church into tasks and work to be done. I keep reading article after article about why people are leaving church, or at least not participating as much, when I think for many folx it is as simple as a deep need for rest, recovery, and restorative time spent with family and friends.



Whether we consciously acknowledge it or not, our bodies, our minds, our souls are responding to the collective trauma of the past three and half years. Devon Price in their book Laziness Does Not Exist writes, “When you lose power over your own life, you don’t have much reason to stay energized and motivated. So, you protect yourself emotionally by checking out and giving up.” Church is not the place where we want to reinforce this feeling of not having power over our own lives but the people with whom we want to experience and work for deep connections and liberation.



What is the work your soul must have? What is it about Church that your soul must have? What is the work of this church that its soul must have? What is the soul of this church, of our life together? Jesus says that God is generous with all of us. How can we be generous with ourselves and each other, each in our own way? Generous with our imaginations, generous with our time, generous with our resources, generous with rest, generous with our expectations, generous with forgiveness, generous with love.



In the words of the poet Jay Hulme,


i.
Love everyone as if everyone is holy,
as if everyone’s intrinsically worthy,
as if the streets are strewn with Christ
taking naps in empty doorways.

ii.
Love yourself as if you are loved,
as if you were never an accident,
as if everything you were meant to be
waits for you to claim it.

iii.
Love the world as if it were a gift,
as if you were made as part of it,
as if you were meant to tend to it —
every inch of earth is Holy Ground.

iv.
Love justice, and kindness, and truth,
as if everything depends on it,
as if everything depends on it.
Everything depends on it.

v.
You were given a gift, and trusted.
Love it all, love it all,
love it always.

?.
Know this, if you know anything at all:
Life is no challenge, nor test;
life is love.

∞.
Reflect it back in abundance.

Benediction - Jay Hulme


iii.
Love the world as if it were a gift,
as if you were made as part of it,
as if you were meant to tend to it —
every inch of earth is Holy Ground.

iv.
Love justice, and kindness, and truth,
as if everything depends on it,
as if everything depends on it.
Everything depends on it.

v.
You were given a gift, and trusted.
Love it all, love it all,
love it always.

?.
Know this, if you know anything at all:
Life is no challenge, nor test;
life is love.

∞.
Reflect it back in abundance.