Harvest

Propers: The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 25), A.D. 2017 A

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Parenthood has beaten nearly all the kindness out of me.

When we had one child, it was an easy and a pleasant thing to be kind. I would see something that reminded me of our son, some opportunity that he would enjoy, and we would do that for him. We would take him to the restaurant or the movie or the park. We would read to him his favorite book, time and again. We would buy him the toy. We would do so purely out of kindness, purely out of love.

But with three children, this has proven well-nigh impossible. We can no longer be casually kind, because any action, any gesture, any purchase made for the one is met with howls of protest from the other two who think themselves unjustly snubbed. Thus every kindness must be calculated, must be equitably distributed, and since they don’t all like the same things, a great storm of niggling and haggling accompanies even the slightest appearance of favoritism.

We can no longer just do something nice. We can no longer bend the rules for the one, whether it be out of simple kindness for our child whom we love, or out of a concern for specific and mitigating circumstances. No. From now on, whatever we do for any given one, we must do for all, without exception. And so we see how mercy is so often murdered by our uncompromising demands for fairness, for justice, for equity. We can never be happy for our neighbor because we’re too busy demanding more for ourselves. I want what’s fair for me.

And yet—when we are traveling across the county to visit family—when we drive the length and breadth of Minnesota to gather for Thanksgiving or other events at Grandma and Grandpa’s—I marvel at the hundreds and hundreds of miles of rich, abundant harvest, rising and falling like the sea, stretched far out to the horizon. And I think to myself, “Thank God not everything is justice. Thank God not everything is fair. For the mercies of God are superabundant, and without that ocean of unmerited forgiveness, all would surely be lost.”

See, most of humanity throughout most of history have been farmers. The agricultural revolution, brought about by the twin blessings of bread and beer, transformed our species. It tied us to the land, producing in abundance, allowing for specialization and trade and the birth of civilization. And we have gone from strength to strength, domesticating new crops, discovering and devising new methods of husbandry, from crop rotation through irrigation to genetic engineering. And now, for the first time in history, a tiny percentage of the population—some 2% in the United States—can produce more than enough food to feed the entire world.

So much food, in fact, that most of it goes to waste, for want of a way to share it and ship it.

I look out on those farmers’ fields, hundreds of thousands of acres stretching on beyond my comprehension, and I marvel at how the sweat of their brows and the work of their hands provides every single meal I have ever eaten or ever will. They produce in ridiculous superabundance so that the rest of us may become teachers or pastors or soldiers or secretaries or anything else. And I am humbled by that.

Our entire civilization rests upon the work of farmers, who do their jobs so insanely well that the great crisis of our society today is not hunger—but obesity. And let me tell you, if you have grown up not knowing hunger, not even in times of famine or drought, disaster or war, then you are amongst the most privileged of human beings in all of recorded history. And that’s not fair. That’s grace.

Now, the human desire for justice, for fairness, is surely good and right and true, in and of itself. But in our fallen state, living amongst the ruins of this broken world, our desire for justice has become disordered. We fall into the trap of thinking that justice must mean fairness, whether of opportunity or of outcome, and we attempt to enforce this by any means necessary: “I want what you have! Give it to me!” You get a toy, I get a toy. And so throughout the twentieth century, murderous regimes have gleefully churned through scores of millions of their own citizens all in pursuit of an ideal of justice that has been twisted into a demon of unflinching equality. Justice murders mercy.

But God has a very different conception of justice—the right conception. In a rightly ordered world, God provides for all superabundantly. To quote the Catechism:

God has given to me and still preserves my body and soul: eyes, ears, and all limbs and senses; reason and all mental faculties. In addition, God daily and abundantly provides shoes and clothing, food and drink, house and farm, spouse and children, fields, livestock, and all property—along with all the necessities and nourishment for this body and life. God protects me against all danger and shields and preserves me from all evil. And all this is done out of pure, fatherly, and divine goodness and mercy, without any merit or worthiness of mine at all!

Every good thing in this world is a gift. Every heartbeat, every breath, is pure kindness, pure mercy. We haven’t earned any of it. We don’t deserve to be here. Yet here we are—with our problems, yes, with our brokenness and our struggles. But the very fact that we exist proves that we are loved, for every moment that we are is a moment poured out for us by the great I am. It is all of it mercy, all of it love.

And justice, in the eyes of God, is nothing more than to share in this abundance, to pass along the infinite mercies showered out upon us, so that we are filled to bursting with the love of God, and we then open ourselves that this same love might be poured out upon all the world around us!

Justice, for God, is not some abstract ideal, some chart or graph or list of laws. It cannot be measured by income or tax bracket or the Gini coefficient. Justice, for God, is always personal, always human, always one-to-one. For justice is none other than the sharing of His mercies—allowing ourselves to be conduits for God’s love rather than blockages along the way.

That’s the whole point of the Book of Jonah, which we read this morning. God wants to show mercy; God wants to grant forgiveness; God wants to pour out His lovingkindness upon even the most wicked of men. It is Jonah who wants vengeance, which he mistakes for justice; Jonah who would watch the Assyrians burn, even if it meant his own death! He demands equality of punishment even unto the grave.

Moreover, this is the point of the Parable of the Workers, who are each of them given a full daily wage, everything they need, from a vineyard owner who never had to hire them in the first place. The harvest is his gift to them. And when the workers who labored throughout the day see that they are paid no more nor less than those who arrived only in the final hour—they demand justice! They demand fairness! They demand more.

And Jesus says to His disciples, though sideways through the parable: “Can I not do what I will with mine own? Or are you jealous because I am good?”

We are a broken people, my brothers and sisters, living within a broken world. From where we stand, we often make the mistake of thinking mercy and justice to be opposed to one another, with mercy unfair and justice unkind. But this world that God has made good does not operate on such false dichotomies. The harvest provided by our Lord is superabundant; we need not squabble over scraps. The ocean of God’s mercy is poured out upon us, fruitful and ripe, stretching out beyond the horizon.

And justice is nothing more than letting that mercy flow.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.