Sep 20th - Your Vocation and Your Vineyard

Your Vocation and Your Vineyard

Focus: Jesus comes to us to give us the riches of His New Creation.

Function: As Christians, we serve in our vocations to give the gifts of God.

The owner of the vineyard was a strange businessman. It’s fall, it’s harvest time, and it’s time to pick grapes to make into delicious wine. So the businessman goes to the town square at 6 in the morning to hire himself some workers for the harvest. He gets the best, strongest, hardest working men and hires them for a denarius, or the wage for a 12-hour workday. But then he goes back to the town square at 9:00 in the morning and hires more workers and promises them a fair wage. And then he goes back again at noon and hires more workers, and then again at 3:00 in the afternoon to hire more workers. Now, you might remember picking teams in gym class at school, and maybe, like me, you were the one picked last? Well, the owner goes out to the town square again at 5:00pm, when there’s only one more hour of work left in the day, and he hires more workers for his vineyard! And you’ve got to imagine, these are the guys who slept in, lazy, weak, and kind of pathetic, and he hires them! Not only that, but an hour after he hires them, he has all the workers line up to get their pay, and he pays the guys he hired last first and he pays the guys who worked for an hour a denarius! A full day’s wage! If you’re the guy who started working at 6:00am, you’re tired, you’re sore, and now you’re doing the math! If those guys got a full-day’s wage for one hour of work, you’re about to make bank! You’ve been working twelve hours, and you’re about to make 12-days’ wages! And yet, when they walk up to the vineyard owner, they each get one, lonely denarius dropped into their grubby, calloused palms.

What gives?! We hear this today, and we squirm. The vineyard owner must be a socialist! He’s taking equal pay too far! Those poor workers need to form a union! And isn’t that the way we think about our vocations? Each of us have many vocations. Vocation is the holy obligation and responsibilities you have in your relationships: husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, grandparents, uncles, aunts, friend, employee, employer, pastor, church member, neighbor, driver, police officer, garbageman, citizen, politician. You even have a vocation as a polite customer toward the clerk when shopping at the grocery store! But we often think about vocations in terms of what we gain out of them. Just like the workers in the vineyard wanted money, as employees we want a fair wage (or an unfair wage, if it’s in our favor!). As citizens, we want better living conditions for ourselves. As family members we want to be valued and respected. As church members and pastors, we want our church to do things our way. The vineyard workers who had labored all day begrudged the owner’s generosity—literally it says that they had “evil eyes” toward the owner. People with “evil eyes” devote their hearts to the things of this world. And too often, we have evil eyes in our vocations: we crave status, riches, and happiness. We use our vocations and our relationships, the vineyards we are called to work in, for our own gain.

But, did you notice that there were not one, but two vineyards in Jesus’s parable? Of course, the vineyard owner hired workers to harvest the vineyard of grapes. But did you notice that the vineyard owner was busy working all day long, while his workers worked in the vineyard? The vineyard owner was out harvesting in a different vineyard, hiring workers so that he could give them freely from his generosity. The owner was working in the vineyard of the people who needed a day’s wage. And he went out harvesting again and again and again. I imagine that at the end of the day, the vineyard owner wasn’t going to make much of a profit off his grape vineyard because he was so recklessly paying the workers—even the ones who only worked an hour! I don’t think the vineyard owner was in it for profit, and it wasn’t just that he wanted everything harvested in a day. He was in it to be generous to the workers.

Jesus told this parable as a picture of the Kingdom of Heaven. The Kingdom of Heaven is God’s gracious reign and rule in our world through Jesus. It’s the end-times reign of Christ breaking into our present world. And just as the vineyard owner went out again and again into the presence of the workers who needed a day’s wage, Jesus came to this world into the presence of sinners in need of salvation. We are the vineyard that Jesus harvests for His Kingdom. And He freely gives us from His generosity the riches of His grace, forgiveness of sins, and a place in His Kingdom forever. The end of the world is the ultimate harvest of a new creation, where we will get to enjoy the generous fruits of heaven on earth, where Jesus, the ultimate Vineyard Owner, will reign on this planet forever! Jesus isn’t in it to have us be workers who earn a place in His Kingdom. He’s not in it to give us a fair wage (thank goodness!). He’s in it to give us what we don’t deserve and never could earn. He’s in it to be radically, recklessly generous to you.

So, as workers in the vineyard of Jesus, we aren’t in it trying to earn heaven. Maybe it’s easy to sometimes think that way, because vocations can be hard. We can get greedy, and other people can be greedy. We come face to face with our own sinful temptations, and we can get taken advantage of ourselves. In the vocations we are called to, we can have relationships go sour, relationships where we get hurt, relationships where you really hope there’s a nice reward in store for you for putting up with it! Working in the vineyard can be hard, messy, scary work. And yet, Psalm 27:1 reminds us: “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?” We aren’t in it for what we get out of it. Evil eyes are in it to gain the things of the world. The Lord is our light and our salvation, the Lord is the stronghold of our lives. We are called to have good eyes in our vocations, to look with generosity on the needs of others. That’s what vocation and working in the vineyard of the Lord is about. The workers in the vineyard learned a lesson that day from the owner: the point wasn’t a hard day’s work; the point was that the vineyard owner was being generous to everyone. It’s the same for us. In our vocations, we want to serve like Jesus, to go out again and again and again with radical, reckless generosity, because we know that Jesus has already promised us a reward, and we want to share that reward. Husbands and wives show each other the love and forgiveness of Jesus. Parents raise their kids knowing God’s promises for them. Employees witness in their jobs by working as if they were working for Jesus Himself. As citizens, we use our votes not to make our own lives better, but to make others’ lives better. Whatever your vocation is, whatever vineyard you are called to work in, you are in it to give the good gifts of God to others, that they enjoy the harvest of the New Creation to come. In Jesus’ name, amen.