God Is Not Running Payroll

Hi, I'm Rev. Sam, pastor at University Lutheran Church (UniLu) in Palo Alto, a small, queer-affirming, Stanford-adjacent congregation that takes the Gospel seriously and itself not so seriously. We're deep in the Season of Creation, still reckoning with who we've made God into, and this week Jesus handed us a vineyard, a very strange payroll line, and a handful of tired, annoyed workers. By the end, all of us were sitting there with fingers on our own pulse, which turned out to be a good move.

The Imagined Cosmic Payroll Office, where some assume the books are being kept | Source: FSA/OWI Collection, Library of Congress

based on Matthew 20:1-16 and Jonah 3:10-4:11 (with Genesis 1, Exodus 16, and Philippians 1:21-30)
​for the Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost, Season of Creation, Year A

​
Let's start with the dirt. We are mud creatures, made of stardust. We don't just live in creation; we are the stuff of creation. At the start of this Season of Creation, I said we'd spend these weeks reckoning with God: with who we've made God into, and with what we've taught ourselves to expect. And that reckoning keeps circling back to one question. What kind of God have we made, and what kind of world does that God authorize?

Today Jesus tells a story that may expose just how badly we want God to run payroll. Here it is, fast: A landowner goes out at dawn to hire workers for his vineyard, and they agree on the usual daily wage, a denarius. He goes out again at nine and hires more. Again at noon. Again at three. Then at five o'clock, with barely an hour of daylight left, he finds people still standing around the marketplace and asks why they're idle. "Because no one has hired us." So he sends them into the vineyard too. Evening comes. Everyone lines up to get paid. And the landowner tells his manager to start with the last ones hired and work backward to the first.

Let's slow down right there.
Picture the line. The dawn crew is at the back: sunburned, sore, watching. The five o'clock crew walks up first and gets a full denarius. A whole day's wage for one hour of work. Notice where you feel that in your body. Your jaw? Your chest? A little tightening somewhere behind the ribs? You don't have to do anything with it.

Just notice.

And while you're noticing, a question. How many of us are so used to the logic of that line that we've simply come to accept it? Because, reality check: I spent a HUGE portion of my life simply accepting it. Earlier equals more. Longer equals more. More equals worthier. So let's grant the grumblers their case, because they have one. They worked through the heat of the day. Their bodies are tired. That is real. And let me be very clear: this is not a sermon bosses get to use to shush workers who want fair pay.

But listen closely to what they actually say. It isn't "we were underpaid." They got exactly what they agreed to. What they say is, "you have made them equal to us." Equality felt like a loss.

Same grievance, different text: Jonah famously ran the other direction (all the way into the belly of a fish), and in chapter 4 he finally tells God why: "I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love" (4:2). He knew. That was the problem. Mercy was going to land somewhere Jonah didn't approve of. So after Nineveh turns around and God relents, Jonah hikes up a hillside in the heat, sits down, crosses his arms, and waits to see whether Nineveh gets what's coming to it.
(We know that posture. Some of us perfected it in toddlerhood.)

Here's the thing, though. I don't want us to turn these grumblers into "those people over there." Merit is the water we swim in. We are very good at it. Some of us got here on it. Some of us are exhausted by it. This is us. Here. Us, who create right alongside God. So before anyone rushes in with "well, of course, we include everyone," let's let that sit. The lines are ours. The ledger is ours. Take a breath with that before you let yourself feel clean.

So, the God we've built? A God exceptionally good at accounting. A God who keeps the books on every person and has a very firm sense of who is in the black. Reckoning means asking whether that God is God, or whether it's just a version of us, with a really nice big office in the sky. Because Jesus isn't telling us the Reign of God is a better-run ledger. He's telling us it's a different creative ground entirely.


So let's go back to the ground. Literally. Genesis 1.
Something wonderful happens in that first creation story, and it's easy to miss if we've pictured God as a cosmic contractor delivering a finished product to spec. Creation participates in its own making. "Let the earth bring forth," God says, and the earth brings forth (1:11, 1:24). "Let the waters swarm," and the waters swarm (1:20). Creation isn't a product; it's a partner in the making, with and alongside God. And at each turn: good. Good before a single harvest. Before a single wage. Before a single résumé. Before anyone or anything had an opportunity to produce.

We can hear that "good" as recognition rather than a verdict. God doesn't stamp goodness on creation after a performance review. God looks, and sees what is already there. Worth isn't a grade. It isn't even a gift God hands out after determining our value, something that could be withheld if we don't measure up. It is simply part of being in the making together.

Nobody earned the ground, and the ground didn't "earn" the right to exist in fullness. Nobody was granted the fullness of the globe, or the skies. The soil, the shade, the stranger who wasn't hired, the water... you. All of it was already valuable and worthy in the very making with God.

Which means being passed over is not a verdict on anyone's worth. Not the five o'clock worker. Not abled bodies, not disabled bodies. Not the child, the elder, the caregiver nobody counts. Value doesn't need a productivity defense, and neither does joy, or rest, or belonging.

And that same logic runs at a much larger scale. The ledger that ranks people by output ranks land, water, and animals by output too. A ledger sees resources. God sees creation, and fullness of life. The thinking that says a person has to earn their place is the same thinking that says a creek only matters if it's useful. Merit thinking is the root of exclusion, and it is the root of extraction.

Look at how Jonah ends. While he sulks on that hillside, God grows a shrub to shade him, and Jonah is delighted. Then a worm attacks it, a scorching east wind rises, and Jonah is so furious he'd rather die. His body knew shade, and his body knew its loss. And God says, more or less: you cared about a shrub you never planted and never tended. Should I not care about Nineveh, that great city, with more than a hundred and twenty thousand people, "and also many animals"?

That's the last line of the book (4:11). God's final question isn't about Jonah at all. It's about a city, and its cattle. God's concern doesn't stop where Jonah's concern stops. And the book never tells us how Jonah answers. It ends on an open question and leaves it with us: Should I not care?

One honest complication: because I'm not selling you a greeting card. Creation includes loss and predation, the worm and the scorching wind. This is not a claim that nature is gentle or fair. It's a claim that worth is already here, in the middle of all of it.

So, before hands could harvest a grape, grade a paper, change a diaper, or earn a paycheck, there had to be stars, and all kinds of valuable elements. The carbon in your body was forged in earlier stars.

Take a second, right now, wherever you're reading this. Find your pulse at your wrist or your neck, or rest a hand on your chest until you feel your heart beating. You probably did not turn on the ignition on your body to earn your start today. Your heart isn't asking what you've accomplished today, or whether you've earned a whole day's worth of heartbeats. It's just here, alongside everything else that's here, highly valuable, keeping you alive.

Now, back to the vineyard, because I don't want to leave the grumblers out of this. The landowner calls the complainer "friend" (20:13). They are not thrown out for asking questions, or for pushing for what we might call fair labor and earnings practices today. But they are pushed to reconsider their perspective on value, and worth, and what that pay actually means.

And about that landowner: he isn't God in this story. What he is, is someone who blows the system's cover. He exposes the grumblers' biases and expectations. He exposes that a denarius does not measure what the grumbling workers had interpreted it to mean. And if worth is already there, then what we owe one another changes pretty drastically.

If worth isn't earned, then nothing about how we live together should be an entrance exam. The Reign of God looks like enough, for everybody, circulating, within the limits of a living world.

Think about what the denarius actually is. A day's wage: enough to live on. The answer to deprivation in this story isn't a promise that everyone can consume without end. Everyone gets the day's wage. Everyone gets what they need to live. Enough, and there is more than enough, and for everybody. That means shared sufficiency, with room for rest, beauty, and belonging, held within the limits of a living planet.

Scripture has a long memory about enough. In Exodus 16, God feeds the people in the wilderness with manna, and something strange happens. Those who gathered much had nothing left over, and those who gathered little lacked nothing. Whatever got hoarded overnight bred worms and stank. (Paul quotes this, by the way, when he's urging the Corinthians to share what they have, in 2 Corinthians 8:15.)

Nothing alive stays alive by holding. Water that stops moving goes stagnant. Manna kept overnight rots.
In God's economy, what is gathered is meant to move. And we have piles. In our pews, in this town, in this nation: salaries, equity, property, degrees. Not just "those rich people. out there" -- us, too.

So: what are we holding that's meant to be moving? What should be circulating, or returned, that is presently being held in the name of accumulation, propping up a ledger that serves a made-up system of valuation?

Let me say the environmental piece plainly: If our prosperity depends on someone else breathing the waste, bearing the heat, or losing the water while we keep accumulating, that isn't circulation. That isn't creating with God. That is holding. That is keeping ledgers at the expense of others.

Paul tells the Philippians to "live as citizens" worthy of the gospel (1:27). The Reign of God is a commonwealth, and we are practicing citizenship in it. And in a commonwealth, nobody is asked to prove their value, or prove that they belong.

Want proof? Look at the communion table. Nobody passes a test to receive communion (though I hear we Lutherans did used to do that for things like Confirmation...). Nobody's hands are checked for calluses. Hands open, nourishment lands in them. Nourishment for everybody.

I started this season talking about reckoning with who we create God to be: reckoning with the boundaries we build, with the interpretations that generate the entire world around us, which we then go on to call "God."

The grumbling in the vineyard and the sulking on Jonah's hillside reflect the same issue. Both are operating from the same core assumption, making the same complaint: somebody got included who we think wasn't supposed to be.

But in the Reign of God, the one that is heaven come near (always right here, and not here yet), we receive without earning anything. We live and enjoy life because of ground, water, stars, and so much more, creating our world right alongside and with God. No cosmic payroll. No ledger. Just being, together, with all of creation.

May we celebrate that truth, as we work to make it a reality for all: not just humanity, but all of creation.

with joy,
​Rev. Sam

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