Deserving

Do you think people get what they deserve – their just deserts – what they earn, or are owed, or are entitled to? Or do you think that most of our fate is based on luck, not good management - being in the right (or wrong) place at the right (or wrong) time? Of course, it’s not all one or the other, but what’s the mix, the balance, according to you: 50:50, 80:20, 20:80?

The lectionary gives us this parable to preach every 3 years, conveniently in fall harvest time: “the workers in the vineyard”. Although I haven’t worked in an agricultural rural church since 1979, I have preached in some places where people were recruited for casual farm day labour.

In the early 1980’s, I preached this in the downtown eastside of Vancouver, when national unemployment was over 10%, and so was inflation. Guys hanging around Pigeon Park on East Hastings could hope to get a day picking fruit up the Fraser Valley. Those guys knew it was unfair to not be picked, or picked late, and to be paid what the temp agency chose.

In the early 1990’s, when national unemployment was over 10%, but inflation was less bad, I preached it in South Parkdale. Cube vans, with little windows and no seatbelts, left Queen St or King St pickup spots, heading to mushroom farm buildings, or out to Niagara to join Caribbean ‘guest workers’ whose visas let them pay UIC, but not collect it.

People closer to the world of casual labour, in harder times, know that it is not always just deserts if somebody isn’t working, or not making as much money. Unemployment, or under-employment, is not a fair reflection of ability or effort, especially in recessions, like those of the early 1980’s or early 1990’s. In good times, in our middle class, we can forget that.

It was harder for me to retell the parable in the early ‘naughties’, in a middle class crowd in the Beach, where we didn’t identify with casual labourers. However, the dot-com collapse in the stock market had affected us, so I retold the story and have dusted that version off for today, after a confusing week in the financial news:

The CEO of ‘Nortelus.com’ went to market early in the boom times. He wanted some stakeholders, to build the business – which he liked to call the Big Corporate Enterprise (the BCE for short) – creatively structuring all relationships as win/win, with promises of participation in the unprecedented yield of All But Comical Paperwork (ABCP) financing.

Some regulators and fund managers ‘bought in’ from these early days to do the hard work of contributing their time and resources, at the beginning of this promising season of realizing the potential of a new economy and new technology. They were sure of a fair return, securely set at the going rates, with an unprecedented bull market to bless them!

The CEO went back to the market a bit later, looking for more of us to share the emerging dreams of ‘Nortelus.com’ (the BCE). He assured those he met that they would realize a fair return through their mutual funds in various tax sheltered forms.

Again and again, in boom times and wartimes, the CEO went to market, and recruited more marginal ‘stakeholders’, offering cheap mortgages, credit lines, credit cards, or vehicle leases. He kept coming: at the midpoint, and even, in retrospect, after the boom was more than half over, or clearly heading for trouble.

Even last week, the CEO of ‘Nortelus.com’ (the BCE) came to market, and asked us why our resources were so idle, and had not maxed our RRSP room and credit pre-approvals. He convinced some to bail out banks with public funds, and left others to swallow their short positions taken in anticipation of worse outcomes.

Soon after, the boom day ended, and all gathered around to share the spoils. The CEO of ‘Nortelus.com’, (the BCE), called the last to join first. He paid them a share of the spoils (such as they were). It was far less bad than they had feared, or had a right to expect.

Again, those who joined the mad market late, or midway, or early in the boom cashed out, and each received about the same size share of the spoils as the last ones in – especially once the pain was distributed through the public purse, exchange rates and prices.

Those first in thought they should still have done best of all, used to bonuses, stock options, pensions, seniority, severance – for verily they had gotten in on the ground floor, had hung in longest with unrealized estimates of returns, and cardiac or ulcer conditions to prove it.

But with gas prices up, house prices down, jobs soft for their kids, global markets and global warming changing the context, they were in the same boat as everybody else.

Unfair! They cried.

But the CEO of ;Nortelus.com, the BCE’ said ‘I have done no wrong – take what you got and go – I choose to pay out all the stakeholders this much: rich, smart, regulators, fund managers, pensioners, small investors, homeowners, workers, self-employed, and consumers. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or do you have an evil eye because I am so generous?

And so it is said: the first will be last, and the last first.

A parable is not an allegory, where the landlord is God, the workers are those converted early or late, and the moral of the story is that the world is fair, and so is the faith. A parable is not a fairy tale or fable. It’s a prism, a way of shaping a conversation, making us look at the world in different ways, and challenging our assumptions and righteous certainties.

The CEO of ‘Nortelus.com’ (the BCE) defies deification, or at least I had hoped that he would. The parable challenges the rights of property (‘I own’), just as it does the claims of labour, (‘I worked’), or any of our just deserts claims (‘I earned’, ‘I need’, ‘I’m entitled’, or ‘I deserve’). Jesus, and the biblical tradition, does not treat the market as divine, but as open to question.

George W. Bush’s opponents early in his political career in Texas used to say that ‘W’ was a guy ‘born on third base, thinking he’d hit a home run’. The same thing could be said of me, or of any of us in our churches. We were born lucky, loved, into this generation, in the ‘first world’. We didn’t earn or deserve it – we just belong to the ‘lucky sperm club’ of chance affluence.

Gregory Baum, the Roman Catholic social ethics scholar, introduced me to the ‘social wage’, or ‘original sin, socially transmitted’: an infant’s fortune and life expectancy are largely determined by the household and community into which she is born. Public health, education, infrastructure, social welfare and services are not universal.

Brody, the baby we baptized today, was born lucky. His status among us, and in this world, is based on providence and grace, not on anything he has thought or done. Providence is far more generous and influential than our prudence in response – though Brody’s family are doing a great job of prudently caring for this providential gift of God, and we’ve promised to help now.

Yet each of us is temporarily employed, able bodied, mentally competent, or even alive – all of us are in the same boat, in the same game. Some are dealt a great hand, and some a poor hand. When you get a bad hand, you’re quick to complain – but in all the history of Casino Rama, has anybody, dealt a straight flush, said ‘I can’t play this hand, it’s not fair to the others’?

Do you think people get what they deserve – their just deserts – what they earn, or are owed, or are entitled to? Or do you think that most of our fate is based on luck, not good management - being in the right (or wrong) place at the right (or wrong) time? Of course, it’s not all one or the other, but what’s the mix, the balance, according to you: 50:50, 80:20, 20:80?

We tend to emphasize the issues of deserts and prudence over those of providence and fortune. You go to the company doctor with a workplace injury, and he asks if you smoke. Students are warned that their lives hinge on grades and SAT scores. Jobs and promotions do not always follow merit or worth. In our zeal to be blameless parents, we deny our kids their own failures and successes. We’re living in a culture of social Darwinism, and it is evil and false.

If you’re blessed with a good marriage and family, don’t think you deserve it – most of the time, most of it is dumb luck and their gift to you – which you, hopefully, have learned to give back.

The myth of meritocracy is not Christian, though we sure bought it in suburban United Churches. I kept going to school, doing great – then noticing law school was full of rich white guys, and that economic success was not fair. My brain and hard work were only partial factors in success. I was driven increasingly to study our faith tradition, rather than social sciences, for analysis.

Douglas John Hall, the United Church theologian, wrote in Thinking the Faith, in response to Roman Catholic Bernard Lonergan’s classicist understanding of culture as normative, universal, and permanent, that:

Theology – as we have put it in perhaps a too facile way – is forced to become contextual where the universal assumptions of a previous age become visible as assumptions, where experience no longer conforms to the familiar patterns, and the ‘world’ becomes a ‘strange land’, calling for a new rendition of the Lord’s song.

Those who blithely blame the ‘Protestant work ethic’ on our religion have little knowledge of either the Protestant tradition, or Tawney’s original thesis ‘Religion and the Rise of Capitalism’. Our prayers and hymns and congregation celebrate grace and providence: we pray as if it were all up to God. Only then do we turn in confidence to play our hand prudently: we work as if it were all up to us. Our part matters – but only as our small gift back to a more generous God.

After some experience of recessions in less privileged communities, and of boom times in more privileged communities, I am a ‘90:10’ guy, believing that most of our circumstances are given, not chosen, attributable to providence, not prudence. One of our wiser elders corrected me on the way out, saying that even 95:5 gives us too much credit and blame. So I’ll end with our opening prayer for grace this day, and our prayers of thanks and asking later in worship:

God of the first, as of the last,
God older than the hills, God younger than the life in Brody,
here we are again, as if for the first time - God forbid for the last time.

We’re here because we own it here.
We’ve long since claimed it, earned it, we are entitled to it –
like Brody, never knowing a time we did not belong,
surrounded by your people, our people,
knowing who we are, and whose we are…

And we’re here because we need it here –
we’ve doubted and denied it, felt outside it, beyond the pale.
We’ve lingered in perpetual childhood, arrested adolescence here,
uncertain who’s the gatekeeper, or what are the rules, of being ‘us’ or ‘them’…


Some moments we settle in complacent comfort,
sure of our merit, our worthiness, our giftedness,
but as often we are unsettled, anxious, antsy,
as if imposters, hypocrites, our ignorance exposed.

Assure us now that we won’t just get what we deserve,
but far better than we can ask or imagine.
Re-assure us that our welcome is unmerited,
gracious, generous, forgiving, inviting…

In the silence, we hear the echoes around us,
of how our world measures and keeps score,
how we are driven, to own, or earn, or work, or buy,
to be good enough, thin enough, pretty enough.

What will you tell us, now,
about how you measure and keep score,
you who made us as we are, then left us free to choose?

You know our demons of envy and pride –
and of despondence and shame.

When the world seems unfair,
and the wicked prosper,
and the righteous suffer,
and religious people justify the status quo, the way it is,
give us a hint now, of how it might be.

For that’s not all there is, he said,
and he staked his life on that claim,
and listening to him,
we find we can’t leave him
to pay that price alone.

And so hesitantly, cautiously,
we entertain another hypothesis,
that you are God, and we are not,
and that your word might take flesh and dwell among us
mostly in your outrageous abundant providence,
inviting our modest prudent response,
if only we had ears to hear…
speak, then, for your people listen.
Amen
So the last will be first, and the first will be last – and providence gives us the circumstance and context, and prudence is our response to the freedom that remains, so we pause, to give thanks, and to inquire of God, and say our prayers of thanks and asking, before we go:

God of providence and order, God of grace and freedom, thank you now,
for all that we are given, unearned, before our and beyond our best efforts
Entrusted to us but never controlled by us,
The outrageous abundance of creation’s glory

For every breath we take, we give thanks,
never more than when we’ve lost our breath
And gasped and strained, and found relief again
For every beat of our hearts, we give thanks
After our first stroke, our second heart attack
We feel that pulse with renewed gratitude and awe
For what is automatic, but never again taken for granted

For the company we keep, we give thanks
Not only for those we have chosen, in romance or aspiration
But for those we were given, who chose us,
Despite ourselves, and because of what they hope for in us
Friends, neighbours, colleagues, family –
Who are hard to love, as we are hard to love
Who demand more or different than what we offer
And make us who we are becoming…

God of providence and order, God of grace and freedom,
Thank you now, for life and breath, and company to share it

In the rhythm of our breath, the steadying pulse of our hearts
We resonate with rhythms and pulses beyond our own
In relationships, in communities, in nation and creation
And we give thanks, that we are not alone
That we are called to be the church,
to celebrate your presence, to live with respect in creation,
To love and serve others,to seek justice and resist evil

And we pause to imagine what that might mean
For each of us, and all of us together,
In this moment, this week and this season
If you’re not finished with us yet
If work awaits our hands
If choices set before us matter –
To make things better, or less bad, for us or others

In the midst of a federal election campaign,
Our prayers begin with listening and watching
Assuming a disposition and attitude,
Testing the claims and the spirits of partisans
Taking sides, with passion and compassion
Without slowing our charitable caring
We ask questions of justice, for the least, the last, the lost
For this too will pass, and the last will be first…

We are surrounded by prayers –
Those written in our prayer book and bulletins
Those written on our hearts –
In the end, we join our prayers in common words
As we were taught to sing them together…