I HATE math! I always have. For as long as I can remember math has gotten the best of me. In school, from first grade to that blessed day when I didn’t have to take another math course, math has been my nemesis. Ask me about literature, history, sociology, psychology, music, art, or languages and I’m way above water. Ask me about math, about algebra, or geometry, and I’m sunk. I wouldn’t know a logarithm if it jumped up and bit me. The thought of a matrix makes me break out in hives.

It is been reassuring to learn there is a bonafide malady affecting some people in the world – “math phobia.”  If I would have been diagnosed as such, my teenage years would have been spared serious fear, anguish and dread.

A few years ago, putting together disaster health kits for Hurricane Katrina victims here at church, we ran out of band aids because I couldn’t figure that five band aids per kit, times 50 kits equals more than I bought at the Dollar Store. Facing-up to the shortage, Linda, always quick to my defense, said, “Fred must have been in charge of the band aids. If there’s math involved don’t give it to him.” Church Trustees and the Administrative Council will tell you I’m totally lost reading financial reports. Never let me near a check book.

Sometimes I joke with people saying I’m in pastoral ministry not just because of a still small voice or the Spirit tugging at my heart but because I needed a vocation which assured me of the absolute minimum of math.

Much to my dismay, even the gospel has math. But it is a very special math. The gospels, like what we heard from Matthew today say Jesus had a very different way of reckoning people and things. This new math turns the world’s formulas and figuring upside down.

Examples of this gospel math abound. There’s the shepherd Jesus told about, the one who risked leaving 99 sheep “in the wilderness” in order to look for one gone astray. What kind of arithmetic is that? You leave 99 sheep to the “loins and tigers and bears, oh my,” and when you get back, even if you have been successful enough to find the one, that may all that’s left of the 100.

Or the woman with a quart of fine perfume in the fancy jar. The gospel story says the perfume was worth a year’s wages. And this woman pours it on Jesus’ feet. On his feet! I bought Jessica Simpson and Paris Hilton perfume for my daughters one Christmas. Do you know how tiny those bottles are? Can you imagine how many of those little bottles it would take to wash feet? And how much that would cost? Yet, this woman wastefully pours all that perfume all over Jesus’ feet. And Jesus praises her! Go figure.

Another time Jesus watched people, financially comfortable people, making a big show of their offering as they dropped bags of money in the temple treasury. In Jesus time or nowadays, a bag of money is a bag of money. Lots of money. But when a poor widow comes along and drops one single penny into the same temple offering box, Jesus said she had given more than all the others. How does that add up?

This Sunday’s parable is the topper. A farmer hires people to work in his vineyard. Some arrive at dawn. Some arrive at mid-day, and some others arrive one hour before quitting time. At the end of the day, this eccentric farmer calls the whole labor force together, paying the last to get to work first and paying everybody the same wage. You bet there was grumbling. By what method of calculation do you reckon one hour’s work is worth one denarius and twelve hours worth of work is worth the same?

Note the common theme running through the parables of Jesus. The way do math, one plus one equals two – always. But in Jesus’ new math, one may be equal in value to 99. Or one little coin is worth more than a big bag of money. Or it’s OK, even exemplary to “waste” expensive perfume on someone or something precious in God’s sight.

Hearing Jesus’ story about the farmer who hires the servants to work in his vineyard most of us identify with the ones who worked all day long. No wonder they grumbled, we think to ourselves. They started at sun-up and got the same wage as those who worked for one stinkin’ hour. No wonder God made labor unions.

It is understandable for us to identify with those who worked all day. Here we are “in the vineyard,” so to speak. We are those who have been in or around church most of our lives. To be told that someone who shows up just one hour before the end of the day gets the same as us – well excuse me. We deserve better than that, we reckon. Anger, envy and resentment bubble-up. It’s not fair. If a person can’t expect God to be fair, who can you expect to be fair?

Yet, if we could get over ourselves for just a moment, if we could hear this parable from the standpoint of the persons who were picked at the end of the day, the ones who because of a disability, lack of training, education, class, race, sexual orientation or not knowing the foreman – if we could hear this parable from the standpoint persons passed over all day long, receiving the same wage as those who have been there the whole day – well then, we might at least appreciate there’s something to rejoice about.

Craig Kocher, director of religious life at Duke University says the late-in-the-day hires, the ones passed over all day are like a familiar childhood scene on the playground. Remember choosing teams? “I’ll take her. I want him. Since you’re all that’s left, I suppose you’ll have to do.” Some were picked while others waved their hands shouting “Pick me! Pick me!”  We’ve all been there. And it hurts to feel like you have nothing to offer, to be looking in from the outside. 

So, there is this prime number running through so many of Jesus’ parables. Call it grace.What mathematical value could we possibly give God’s grace? Infinity? Grace. Not mushy grace, or warm fuzzy niceness, kindness, or common courtesy. Not cheap grace. Amazing grace. What Jesus wants for God’s people is not the formula of standard calculation, bean-counting, or number-crunching. What Jesus is forever talking about is a matter of God’s extravagant, generous amazing grace.

Most of us are unaccustomed to such math. We think to ourselves, “As far as God is concerned, if I do this or that, then I’ll get what I want.” But what if our relationship with God is not a matter of what we do, or the way we figure it, the way we keep score, but a matter of who God is, what God does, a matter of the way God figures.

Here’s the good news. The way God figures in this parable is less about wages or timing and more about the relentless coming and going of the master/farmer who keeps-on coming – early the morning, again at noon, at three, gain at five, then again at dusk. This master/farmer, Jesus’ stand-in for God, is bound, bent and determined to get everyone he can get his hands on off the streets. This God must have had a special place in her heart for the unemployed. The people that never got picked.

The math of the gospel is extravagance, generosity, effusiveness which defies and refuses calculation by normal methods of reckoning. As Jesus said on one occasion, “God makes the sun to shine on the good and the bad and the rain to fall on the just and the unjust.”

We say that we want to live in a world of quid pro quo, where doing this gets that, where one plus one equals two. And yet, it appears God created the world in such a way that it is divine to be gracious. There is room for people who have been given everything. There is lots of space available for those whose lives don’t add up to much of anything. Small numbers like one sheep, or one insignificant person – all the women, social outcasts, and unclean people Jesus was forever touching become very large in the way God does math. The good news is God is willing to risk everything for the one who is lost, not only for the sake of the lost one but because all the rest of the flock doesn’t add up to complete without that one.

Still, somewhere, deep down in us, this parable is a formula for frustration about unfairness. I have never preached this text and not had someone say what my heart is already grumbling: “What Jesus says here isn’t fair and not only don’t I like it. And I don’t agree with it.”

John Claypool, a Southern Baptist preacher turned Episcopal priest says that in the final analysis there are only two realities in life: love and fear. Love is the confidence that there is enough and fear is the suspicion that there is not. Live your life out of a sense of scarcity, then you’ll likely busy yourself with getting, be prone to stinginess, feel victimized and at times resort to violence. But, a life lived out of a sense of enough, of the abundance of God and the fullness of creation – the very the heart of the biblical vision and basis for God’s mathematics – one can’t help but be generous. One realizes God created the world and formed you and me (who might never have been) out of utter abundance. We are made in the image of the God, the generous one. We are supposed to be chips off the old block, Claypool says.

There’s a way to look at this parable by the numbers, as a formula for frustration about unfairness. There’s also a way to look at this parable as the definition of amazing grace. Do the math. Figure this way, Jesus says.

The Rabbis tell a parable: Once there was a farmer who had two sons. As soon as they were old enough, he took them into the fields teaching them everything about crops and livestock. When he got too old to work, the sons took over the work of the farm. When he died, the sons decided to keep their partnership, each doing what he could and each sharing equally what was produced.

Now across the years, the elder brother never married nor had children. The younger brother did marry and had eight children. Some years later, after the harvest, the old bachelor brother thought to himself, “My brother has ten mouths to feed. I have only one. He needs more of the harvest than I do, but I know he is too fair-minded to renegotiate our understanding. I know what I’ll do. In the dead of night, when my brother is asleep, I take some of what I have in my barn and put it in his barn.

At the very time the older brother was thinking this, the younger brother was thinking to himself, “I have been so blessed with children and family. My brother has not been so fortunate. He needs more of this harvest for his old age than I do, but I know that he is too fair-minded to renegotiate our understanding. I know what I’ll do. In the dead of night, when my brother is asleep, I will take some of what I have in my barn and put it in his barn.

And so, one night, when the moon was full the two brothers came face to face with each other’s grace and generosity. But it was funny because even though there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, the parable says it was raining. Why? Because God was weeping with joy because two more of God’s own were cured from being mathematically challenged.

This same God welcomes us home from summer sojourns into a new season of old routines. This same God welcomes new members to our community and rejoices in all of us here – with glad embrace. Whether we’ve been here since the cradle and crack of dawn or sun down, whether we are overpaid or under paid, secure and insecure, inside the circle and crying out “Pick me! Pick me!” God is looking for you and me. And God will not quit. Even if it costs everything. 

Amen.

Rev. Alfred T. Day, III
Historic St. George's United Methodist Church
September 21, 2008