Grace Abounds

Matthew 20:1-16; Jonah 3:10-4:11

September 24, 2017

Water – as everyone knows from that first liquid dynamics class or from making a back-yard dam after a summer rain – water seeks its level. Because of this fundamental fact of nature, the same ocean that shapes the shores of the Carolinas rolls also into the coast of Africa. As Pete Seeger used to sing, “one blue sky above us, one ocean lapping all our shores ….”

It doesn’t matter if you get to the beach at sun-up or if you are the last to arrive as the sun goes down, there’s going to be plenty of water when you go down to the shoreline, or when you come to the font.

If baptism is a sign and seal of God’s grace – and that is the claim at the heart of the sacrament – then it is also a sign and seal of this truth: the water never runs dry.

“Water is life,” the water protectors at Standing Rock reminded us. It’s true. Where there is no water, life as we know it is impossible.

Where there is no grace, life as we know it is unliveable.

That’s the lesson in both the text from Matthew and the story of Jonah. Where there is no grace, life is unliveable. Indeed, where there is no grace life is unimaginable – it is beyond imagination, or, perhaps, it is before imagination.

Jonah, that most self-centered and reluctant of prophets – which is to say, that most human of prophets – finally does what God asks of him and then complains about the results. Jonah, who runs away from the call of God just as surely as did the citizens of Nineveh, doesn’t mind when God spares his own life, but he’s grievously wounded when God spares Nineveh; just like the workers who arrive in the morning are aggrieved that the latecomers get the same pay they did. Jonah simply cannot imagine a world in which God is not an angry, merciless, harsh judge blindly exchanging one eye for another. Neither can the first batch of workers.

Jealousy, it seems, is pretty much universal. Imagination, on the other hand, is too often in too short supply. Indeed, while the workers hired in the morning were jealous of the workers hired in the afternoon, the workers hired in the afternoon were probably pretty jealous of the ones who got jobs first thing in the morning, too. Neither group can imagine anything beyond an economy of scarcity – scarcity of money, scarcity of time, scarcity of work. Indeed, if you’ve ever been unemployed chances are you felt pangs of jealousy for those who had jobs. As my dad, who spent decades in youth employment work, was fond of saying, “finding a job is the hardest job you’ll ever have.”

Now it may – or may not – be true that “time is money,” but it’s clearly true that both time and money are fairly easy to count. Meanwhile, these two texts rest on a truth that scripture insists upon often: not everything that counts can be counted. Indeed, the things that can most easily be counted may count for very little in the eyes of God, while the things that we cannot measure well at all seem to count, well, immeasurably in the economy of the kindom of God. God’s imagination is clearly infinitely greater than our own.

Take baptism, for example. How do we measure this sacramental moment? We do not believe what the church for so long insisted upon: that eternal salvation – whatever that means – is dependent upon being baptized. God is bigger than that, and is God not allowed to do what God chooses with all that belongs to God?

We baptize Ellie as a visible sign of an invisible grace that is there whether or not someone has put water on a baby’s brow. Moreover, we also baptize adults who didn’t get baptized as infants. Should those adults be jealous of others who were baptized as infants?

Grace is limitless. It flows out in all directions. Like water, it is life giving and life sustaining. It is there at our borning cry. It will be with us throughout our life’s journey whatever shore we wash up on. It will be with us to the day we die, and beyond that day into the time beyond time – into the immeasurable beyond the imaginable.

Friends, grace abounds. Imagine that! Amen.