There are some places in New England where simply living somewhere does not necessarily mean you are from there. I was born in the Houghs Neck section of Quincy. My family lived in the Neck for more than sixty years, but I am the only member of my immediate family who was actually born there. That means I am the only one who can properly call myself a “Necka.” Sixty years apparently was not enough. You had to be born there.
If you have spent any time in an old New England community, you understand this. We have wonderfully complicated rules about who is actually from somewhere. You can live in a town for thirty or forty years and someone will still introduce you by saying, “Well, he’s not originally from here.” We know whose grandparents lived where, which family owned what, who remembers the old school before they built the new school, and who moved into town sometime around 1987 and therefore remains something of a newcomer.
Most of the time, we can laugh about it. There is something endearing about communities with long memories and deep roots. History matters. Knowing where we came from matters. People who have spent decades caring for a church, a town, or a neighborhood carry memories that ought to be treasured.
But sometimes history becomes seniority, and seniority can become entitlement. Somewhere along the way, “I have been here longer” can quietly become “Therefore what I say matters more.” And that is not exclusively a New England problem. It is a human one.
State Representative Joan Meschino has a saying that she attributes to her father, and it seems particularly appropriate for those of us living this close to the ocean: “You might have just washed up on shore, but you are here now.”
I love that saying because it changes the question. Instead of asking, “How long have you been here?” it asks what it means that you are here now. You might have been here for generations. You might have arrived yesterday. You might know every story about this place, or you might still be figuring out which door to use. But you are here now.
And if you are here now, perhaps the question for the rest of us is not whether you have accumulated enough history to belong. Perhaps the question is whether we are willing to recognize you as our neighbor.
Jesus tells a story about some people who have been there from the beginning and some others who have, quite literally, just shown up.
A landowner goes out early in the morning looking for workers for his vineyard. He finds some, agrees to pay them a denarius for the day, and sends them to work. Then he goes back out around nine o’clock and finds more people standing around, so he hires them too. He goes back at noon and again at three. Then, remarkably, he goes back once more around five o’clock, when there is barely any working day left.
There are still people standing there, and the landowner asks them, “Why are you standing here idle all day?” Their answer is one of those little sentences in Scripture that is easy to pass over but deserves our attention: “Because no one has hired us.”
Jesus does not tell us why. He does not tell us they were lazy or that they slept until four in the afternoon and finally wandered into the marketplace looking for something to do. They are simply there at five o’clock, still waiting, because no one has hired them.
Perhaps everyone else looked at them and decided somebody else would be a better choice. Perhaps there was something about them that made them less desirable as workers. Perhaps they were strangers. The text does not tell us, so we should be careful about filling in the blanks.
What it does tell us is that the landowner went back. Again and again, he went back. He could have decided at noon that he had enough workers. He could have decided at three that anybody still standing around was somebody else’s problem. Surely there was no point going back at five, but he went back anyway.
And when he found people still waiting, he said, “You also go into the vineyard.”
At the end of the day, the landowner tells his manager to pay the workers, beginning with those hired last. The five-o’clock workers come forward, and each receives a denarius. Then the people who have been working since sunrise see what happened, and they begin doing some quick calculations. If those people got a whole denarius for one hour, imagine what we are going to get.
But when their turn comes, they also receive a denarius, and they are furious. The landowner has not cheated them. They agreed to work for a denarius, and they received a denarius. The problem is not that they received less than they were promised. The problem is that somebody else received the same thing.
Their enough stopped being enough when somebody else also had enough.
And that is where this story gets uncomfortable.
A denarius was not a fortune. For an ordinary laborer, it represented roughly what a day’s work could provide. This is not a story about the five-o’clock workers suddenly becoming wealthy. It is a story about people who had stood all day waiting for work being able to go home with something for the household.
The workers are asking, “How much did each person earn?” The landowner seems to be asking a different question: “What does each person need in order to live?”
Those are not always the same question. And perhaps this is where the vineyard begins to sound a little like the wilderness.
When the people of Israel wandered in the wilderness, God gave them manna. They gathered what they needed for the day. Some gathered more, some gathered less, but there was enough. When they tried to hoard it, it spoiled. Nobody became manna-rich. Every morning, the lesson began again: receive what you need for today and trust that there will be bread tomorrow.
“Give us this day our daily bread.”
The wilderness teaches a difficult lesson because most of us would rather have a warehouse than daily bread. We would rather know that we have enough for today, tomorrow, next month, and preferably enough left over to make sure nobody else ever gets ahead of us.
But God keeps teaching enough. And the tension in the wilderness may be that God keeps giving us enough while we keep looking over our shoulder to see whether somebody else got more.
When my brothers and I were growing up, we rarely came home alone. There always seemed to be another kid or two following somebody through the door, and my mother would make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for whoever happened to be there.
Now, I should tell you that she hated to cook. She would probably object to my suggesting that making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches constituted cooking at all. But somehow there was always enough.
I do not remember her stopping to count how many kids were actually hers before she started making sandwiches. I do not remember her asking who had been in the house longest. Nobody received more peanut butter because they had arrived an hour earlier, and I certainly did not get a bigger sandwich because I could establish hereditary rights to the kitchen.
If you were at the table, you got a sandwich. Everybody got enough.
Maybe the kingdom of heaven looks a little less like a ledger and a little more like a kitchen table where nobody is asked how long they have been there before the bread is passed.
That does not mean history is meaningless or labor does not matter. The people who worked from sunrise really did bear the heat of the day. Their work mattered. Their faithfulness mattered. The landowner does not take anything away from them. But their years in the vineyard do not make them more valuable than the person who arrived at five.
And that has something to say to the church.
Some of you have been part of this congregation for decades. You have worshiped here, raised children here, buried people you loved here, served on committees, taught Sunday school, balanced budgets, repaired things, worried about this church, prayed for this church, and carried it through seasons that newcomers know nothing about. That history matters, and it should be honored, remembered, and treasured.
Someone else may have walked through the door for the first time this morning. Those stories are not identical, and the Gospel does not ask us to pretend they are. But neither does the Gospel permit us to conclude that one person is therefore more beloved, more worthy, or more entitled to the grace of God.
There are no preferred shares in grace.
And perhaps this reaches beyond the walls of the church. We are very good at drawing distinctions between those who are from here and those who are not, between people whose families have been here for generations and people who arrived recently, between lives we understand and lives whose journeys are very different from our own.
But the person standing before us is not an abstraction. They are our neighbor. They may speak differently, worship differently, love differently, or carry a story we do not completely understand. They may have arrived on this shore by a road we have never had to travel.
But they are here now, and Jesus has quite a lot to say about what we owe our neighbors.
Perhaps that is why the landowner keeps going back into the marketplace. God is not satisfied with the people already safely inside the vineyard. God keeps going out looking for the ones who are still standing there, the ones nobody has chosen, the ones everybody else has passed by.
Even at five o’clock, God goes back.
Paul writes to the Philippians from his own kind of wilderness. He is in prison, his future is uncertain, and he does not know whether the road ahead leads back to his ministry or toward his death. Yet listen to the strange arithmetic Paul uses: “For to me, living is Christ and dying is gain.”
Paul has stopped using the ordinary ledger. Freedom would be good, but imprisonment cannot take Christ away from him. Life would allow him to continue his work, but even death cannot separate him from the love of God. The usual categories of gain and loss no longer get the final word.
That does not mean suffering is good, any more than the vineyard means poverty is good or the manna means hunger is good. Paul is not romanticizing his chains. What he has discovered is that circumstances do not get to determine his faithfulness. He does not need everything to become fair before he can live faithfully, and he does not need to know how the story ends before he can trust that God is present.
So Paul tells the Philippians, “Live your life in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ.” Whatever happens next, live as people shaped by the Gospel. Live differently because grace has changed the way you measure things.
That is wilderness faith. It is trusting God when the measurements we have depended upon stop working, when we cannot see very far down the road, and when we do not know exactly what comes next.
Years ago, preaching this same parable, I said that God is a lousy bookkeeper. I still think there is something to that, although perhaps I would say it a little differently now.
God is not keeping the books we think God is keeping.
We keep track of hours, and God keeps going back for people. We keep track of seniority, and God keeps making room. We keep asking who deserves what, and God keeps asking whether everyone has enough. We keep asking, “Who was here first?” and God keeps saying, “Yes, but they are here now.”
That is the tension Jesus leaves us with when the landowner turns to those who have worked all day and asks, “Are you envious because I am generous?”
Maybe the question for us is whether we can rejoice when the person who washed up on shore yesterday discovers that there is a place for them too. Maybe it is whether we can receive our daily bread without resenting the bread placed into somebody else’s hands. Maybe it is whether we can stop measuring the worth of our neighbors according to how long they have been standing beside us.
Because the kingdom Jesus describes is not a place where those who arrived first get a larger portion of grace. It is a vineyard where God keeps going back, a wilderness where there is manna enough for today, and a shore where the newcomer becomes a neighbor.
And maybe, sometimes, the kingdom looks like a crowded kitchen table where another kid has just come through the door. My mother reaches for the bread, the peanut butter, and the jelly, and nobody asks whether that child has been there long enough to deserve a sandwich.
There is a place at the table, and everybody gets enough.
Amen.
