Daily Bread

Photo of the Rev. Canon Sue Sommer by The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer

One of the constants in my life as a child was Saturday bread-baking. My mother, formed in the frugality of farm life in the Depression, made 5 loaves of bread each week. It was always worthwhile for my brother and me to drop whatever we were doing around 3 in the afternoon in order to lurk near the kitchen as Mom took the loaves from the oven. She’d slice off the heel from one of the loaves, spread butter and sugar on it, and give us each a half. When I think of what heaven must be like at 3 o’clock on any given day, I’m pretty sure it involves a slice of freshly baked bread with butter and sugar.

In fact, the only problem with the whole arrangement was the inevitable bickering. Wise woman that she was, Mom decreed that one of us got to cut the slice in two while the other got first choice. Everything I ever learned about the principles of mathematical precision, I learned in my mother’s kitchen! We each got as close to an equal portion of bread as we could manage, but to my mind, it still wasn’t fair. The thing was, I had done kitchen chores all morning long. I had helped to make that bread and I had washed up all the baking utensils while Tom was off somewhere reading comics and eating bonbons (or so I was pretty sure anyway).

So if you’re like me, you too might find yourself identifying more with the poor schlubs in the parable this morning, who bore the burden of the day and ended up getting paid the same amount of money as the guys who loafed around for most of the day. Nothing wrong with the landowner choosing to be generous, but hey, would it kill him to spread that generosity around? Maybe throw in a bonus for the 12-hour laborers?

We’ve been set up, of course, as we always are with these wonderfully subversive parables. The red herring in today’s passage is the notion of wages being paid for labor provided. This is a pretty intentional feature of the parable because, after all, we do have a tendency to think of our relationship to God in terms of transactions. I do this for God, God does that for me. I lead a righteous life, and God responds with manifold blessings. You get what you deserve and you deserve what you get. It was the prevailing theology in first century Judaism. By the time of Jesus, this prevailing theology excluded a sizeable portion of people from religious life. If you were poor, if you were ill, if you were unclean, if you were handicapped in any way, pathways to worship were closed off to you. Clearly you didn’t deserve God’s favor because clearly you had sinned in some way. So not only were these people in economic jeopardy in a world where laborers were hired by the day – where of course the strongest and most fit were hired first -- they were also in spiritual jeopardy as well. The unintended consequence of a religious system built on righteousness was that those who were most in need of being included were excluded. Meanwhile, the insiders indeed bore the burden of maintaining their worthiness, of obsessively obeying the Law, of guarding their privileged status.

Jesus turns the whole enterprise on its ear. Chapter 19, which precedes today’s reading, reveals how Jesus frames discipleship in opposition to virtually every bit of conventional wisdom. Patriarchal family structures and expectations, the role of obedience to the Torah, the role of wealth and inheritance – Jesus radically reinterprets all of it through the lens of discipleship.

He sums it all up in this equally radical parable about the Kingdom of Heaven. And let’s remember: in Matthew’s gospel, the Kingdom of Heaven is a present reality, not a future promise. In other words, Jesus is not talking about a heavenly reward in the sense of an afterlife. Rather, he is talking about God’s economy, God’s vineyard (as it were) in the here and now. Viewed through the inclusive lens of discipleship as Jesus defines it, of course the Land Owner continually rounds up every laborer he can find. The Land Owner seeks to be in covenantal relationship with everyone and he will not stop until he has engaged everyone who up until now has been excluded.

And everyone who engages in covenantal relationship with God receives grace  because it is the Land Owner’s good pleasure to give us what we need most. Little wonder Jesus refers to the usual daily wage. The usual daily wage would buy enough bread to feed a typical family for the day, and only for the day. And it’s about at this point that we should be hearing echoes of the reading from Exodus: how God rained down manna every day to feed the hungry Israelites. Everybody gathered the bread of heaven, everybody ate, everybody was satisfied. In this way, everybody relied completely on the graciousness of Yahweh to give them their daily bread, both literally and figuratively.

Which brings me back to Saturdays when I was a child. The measure of my mother’s love was not whether I ever got a bigger piece of bread than my brother, but rather the skills and the wisdom she taught me, the foundation she gave me, the bonds of love she nurtured in our shared kitchen labor.

We live in a world of transactions. We live in a world of quid pro quo. We have for centuries. And yet we worship a God in whose topsy-turvy economy, there is only grace, divine compassion, and forgiveness, meted out to all whether we deserve it or not. What is revealed through the lens of discipleship, is the truth of our human condition – that all that any of us ultimately can lay claim to is our needful humanity. What unites all of us vineyard folk is our common need for God’s grace, our daily bread.