“Generous to Everybody!” Matt. 20.1-16 Pent. 17A, Sept. ‘26

 

1.      Grace to you and peace from God our Heavenly Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. The message from God’s Word on this 17^th Sunday after Pentecost is taken from Matthew 20:1-16, it’s entitled, “Generous to Everybody!” Dear brothers and sisters in Christ.

2.      They all got paid the same. Did you catch that? The men who showed up at six in the morning and broke their backs in the heat all day got paid the same as the fellows who wandered in at five o'clock, worked one hour, and went home. If that happened at your job tomorrow, you wouldn't call it grace. You'd call your union rep. It offends something deep in us — this idea that hard work and lazy timing could end in the very same paycheck. We are wired, from the cradle, to believe that people should get what they earn. More labor, more reward. Less labor, less reward. That is simply how the world runs, and most days, it runs that way for good reason.

3.      So when Jesus tells this parable, he is not describing good economic policy. He is describing something far stranger and far more important: how God deals with sinners. Remember what led up to this. A rich young man had just walked away from Jesus, unwilling to give up his wealth to follow him (Matthew 19:16–22). Then Peter, watching him go, essentially raised his hand and said, "We left everything for you — so what do we get?" (Matthew 19:27). It's a fair question, and an old one. It's the question every one of us asks, if we're honest: after all I've given up, all I've done for you, Lord, what's in it for me?

4.      Jesus answers with this story of a landowner who goes out again and again through the day — at six, at nine, at noon, at three, even at five — hiring workers for his vineyard. To the ones hired first, he promises a denarius, a fair day's wage. To the later ones, he simply says, "Whatever is right I will give you" (Matthew 20:4). And at the end of the day, he pays the last first and the first last — and everyone gets a denarius. The early workers grumble. Wouldn't you? "These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us" (Matthew 20:12).

5.      And here is the line that should stop us cold: "Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?" (Matthew 20:15). That is a terrifying sentence if you think about it for more than a moment. God does what he wants with what is his. Everything belongs to him — the vineyard, the wages, the workers, your life, mine. "The earth is the LORD's, and the fullness thereof" (Psalm 24:1). "Every beast of the forest is mine," he says, "the cattle on a thousand hills" (Psalm 50:10). "None of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself... whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's" (Romans 14:8). We are not owners here. We are workers standing in someone else's vineyard, and he owes us nothing.

6.      That ought to humble the old Adam in each of us, because if we're honest, we secretly believe our labor in the vineyard should count for something extra. Some of us have been in this vineyard a long time — baptized as infants, catechized, confirmed, faithful in worship and giving for decade after decade. We've borne the heat of the day. And we don't mind, really, when the Lord brings in latecomers — the adult convert, the friend who finally showed up after years of invitations, even that person we hear about who came to faith on their literal deathbed. We're glad for them... we think. But part of us wants to know: surely I get more than they do? Surely a lifetime of faithfulness outweighs a five-o'clock conversion?

7.      The Lord's answer is no. Not because your labor doesn't matter, but because your wage was never actually earned in the first place. Isaiah warns us plainly: "my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways" (Isaiah 55:8–9). God's economy runs on a different currency altogether — not merit, but mercy.

8.      Because here is the truth underneath the parable: even our best work in the vineyard is stained with sin. We've served with pride mixed into our devotion, resented other workers in our hearts, kept score even while singing hymns about grace. If God actually paid us what we've earned, none of us would want that wage — for "the wages of sin is death" (Romans 6:23). We don't want justice from God. We need something else entirely. We need what the landowner offers instead: undeserved generosity.

9.      And that generosity has a name and a face — Jesus Christ, who himself entered the vineyard at the darkest hour and paid a debt that was not his own. St. Paul, writing from prison, could say, "For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain" (Philippians 1:21), because he had staked his entire life on this scandalous generosity rather than on his own record. This is a Christ who fed five thousand with a boy's lunch and had baskets left over (Mark 6:35–44); who ran to embrace a son who had squandered everything (Luke 15:20); who looked at the men driving nails through his hands and said, "Father, forgive them" (Luke 23:34); who turned to a dying thief who had done nothing to earn it and said, "Today you will be with me in paradise" (Luke 23:43). That thief was hired at the very last hour of his life, and he received the very same paradise promised to every faithful saint who came before him. That is not injustice. That is the gospel.

10.   And this same generous God is still doing what he wants with what is his — right here, right now, in your midst. In Holy Baptism he poured his forgiveness on you before you had done a single thing to deserve it. In his Word he speaks that same forgiveness over you again during our worship service. In his Supper he does not ration out a stingy portion; he gives you his own body and blood, the full wage of eternal life, freely and generously, to first-hour saints and eleventh-hour saints alike.

11.   So what do we do with a God like this? We stop keeping the ledger. The workers who complained are described as casting an "evil eye" on the owner's goodness (Matthew 20:15) — envy is what happens when we measure grace like a paycheck. Instead, rejoice that God's math doesn't work like ours. Rejoice that your standing before him was never about your hours logged in the vineyard, but about the death and resurrection of the one who hired you. As the Formula of Concord reminds us, we ought not to judge these things "according to our reason, or according to the Law," but instead "listen to God's revealed will" (FC SD XI 26) — the will made known to us in Christ, who has made known "the mystery of his will" (Ephesians 1:9) and brought it to light through the Gospel (2 Timothy 1:9).

12.   They all got paid the same. Thanks be to God that includes you. Go back into the vineyard today — not to earn your wage, for it is already secured — but to labor freely, joyfully, and generously, because that is what workers do when they finally understand just how generous their Master really is. Now the peace of God that passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, until life everlasting. Amen.

 

 

“Rooted in Christ- Forgiven People Forgiving People” Pent 16A Matt. 18.21-35 Sept. ‘26

 

1.                Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. The message from God’s Word on this Christian Education Sunday is taken from Matthew 18:21-35 and Colossians 2:6-7, it’s entitled, “Rooted in Christ-Forgiven People Forgiving People,” dear brothers and sisters in Christ.

2.                Another school year has begun. Backpacks are packed, pencils are sharpened, and somewhere in this congregation this week a child cried at school drop-off — and maybe a parent cried in the car afterward too. As we launch into this new year together as a congregation and a school family, St. Paul gives us our school year theme, which is “Rooted in Christ.” In Paul’s letter to the Colossians, he writes: "As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith" (Colossians 2:6–7). Rooted. Built up. Established. Not rooted in a curriculum, not rooted in a schedule, not even rooted in this church building — rooted in Christ Jesus the Lord. That is the soil our children, and all of us, need to grow in this year.

3.                But roots take time, and roots are tested. And nowhere are they tested more than in the ordinary, grinding work of forgiveness — which is exactly where our texts from Holy Scripture plant us today. Our Old Testament reading from Genesis 50 finds Joseph's brothers still afraid, years after Joseph had already forgiven them from selling him into slavery and telling their father a lie that he was dead (Genesis 37). Their father Jacob has just died, and the old terror resurfaces: "It may be that Joseph will hate us and pay us back for all the evil that we did to him" (Genesis 50:15). Notice something painfully human here — Joseph had already forgiven them back in Genesis 45. He wept over them, kissed them, spoke kindly to them. And still, years later, they doubt it. They send him a message, possibly even inventing a deathbed command from Jacob, because they can’t quite believe forgiveness that thorough could be real.

4.                How many of our own people — how many of us — live this way? We confess our sins, we hear the absolution spoken plainly over us, and still we walk around bracing for the other shoe to drop. Joseph's answer to his terrified brothers is theology, not just sentiment: "Do not fear, for am I in the place of God? As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good" (Genesis 50:19–20). Joseph will not play God over his brothers' sin. He hands the verdict back to the Lord, and the Lord had already turned their evil into the salvation of many. This is a root system growing beneath the surface long before anyone can see the fruit of it.

5.                Where did Joseph learn to forgive like that? Psalm 103 shows us the source. The Lord "forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit" (Psalm 103:3–4). "He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities" (v. 10). "As far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us" (v. 12). Before Joseph could forgive his brothers, he himself had been forgiven — by a God who is, in the Psalmist's words, "merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love" (v. 8). This is always the order in Scripture. Forgiveness flows downhill from God to us before it can ever flow sideways from us to our neighbor. You can’t hand out a fruit you have not first received from the root.

6.                St. Paul, in Romans 14, addresses Christians squabbling over food and holy days — matters of conscience, not core doctrine. "Who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another? It is before his own master that he stands or falls" (Romans 14:4). "Whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's" (v. 8). A congregation rooted in Christ does not need to uproot the neighbor's conscience to feel secure in its own. When our identity is planted firmly in Christ and not in being right, or being in control, or being vindicated, we are freed to welcome the weak in faith rather than quarrel with them.

7.                And then the Gospel drives the nail all the way through. Peter thinks he's being generous — "as many as seven times?" (Matthew 18:21) — and Jesus answers, "seventy times seven" (v. 22), which is to say: stop counting. Then the parable: a servant owes his master ten thousand talents — a debt so vast it is functionally infinite, something like hundreds of thousands of years' worth of wages. He cannot pay it. He never could. And the master forgives it all, out of pure pity and mercy, with a word.

8.                That servant walks out the door and finds a man who owes him a hundred denarii — a few months' wages, a real debt, but a molehill next to the mountain that was just erased from his own account — and he seizes him by the throat. "He refused" (v. 30). And the master's judgment falls hard: "Should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you?" (v. 33).

9.                Martin Luther, the great Protestant Reformer, preached on this parable with characteristic bluntness. He said that a Christian who will not forgive his neighbor has, in effect, torn up his own certificate of forgiveness — he has taken back into his own hands a debt that Christ already nailed to the cross. Luther's Small Catechism teaches us to pray "Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us" — and in the explanation he reminds us that God forgives us "not because of our own worthiness," so that we, in turn, would "heartily forgive and readily do good to those who sin against us." Forgiveness is not a transaction Christians negotiate. It is the family trait of people who have been forgiven an unpayable debt.

10.             This is why Colossians 2:6–7 is exactly the right verse to plant over a new school year. Notice Paul does not say "achieve Christ" or "perform for Christ." He says "as you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him." Receiving comes first — the way a root receives water it did not manufacture itself. Everything after that — the walking, the being built up, the being established in the faith, the forgiving of debts a hundred denarii or ten thousand talents — grows out of that received gift, or it does not grow at all.

11.             Parents, teachers, students, saints of every age: this year you will be sinned against. Someone will say something careless in the hallway. A grade will feel unfair. A friend will let you down. A brother or sister in this congregation will hurt you, and you them. And on that day, the question will not be whether you have the willpower to forgive. The question will be whether you are rooted — whether, like Joseph, like the Psalmist, like Paul, you have already received so much mercy that a hundred denarii looks small next to it.

12.             You have. At the baptismal font, God buried your old self of sin and raised you new in Christ Jesus your Lord. At this altar, our Lord Jesus hands you His own body and blood "for the forgiveness of sins" — not a metaphor, but a gift you can taste. And from that absolution spoken over you moments ago, the Holy Spirit sends roots down into ground that will hold in any storm this school year brings.

13.             Do not fear. You are not in the place of God, and neither is the one who wronged you. As you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him this year — rooted, built up, and established, forgiven people forgiving people. Amen. The peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.