In these stories we have listened into from scripture, the nature of God comes to us ,and confronts us.

Can God be God in your world?  Can God be God, and not what I imagine or project?   Or even what I need God to be?

Can I let God be God?

A few weeks ago I was talking with a minister who had received a phone call from somebody who was troubled by a sermon.   This young person said something like “You seem to be saying that God loves us just as we are; that we don’t need to do anything to get it: but just receive it?  And this  minister said, “Exactly.”  The young person then said “Well that’s not true: that’s not the gospel: we have to confess our sins continually, and continually work for the kingdom.  Your Gospel is wrong.” And she hung up the phone.

For this young person, their understanding of the Gospel beings in Genesis and a theology that starts with original sin, rather than Original Blessing.

Can God be God?

In our two great stories today: Jonah and the Parable of the vineyard wages… God is God.

it’s good to be reminded that in God’s request for Jonah to go to Ninevah and proclaim God’s salvation, Jonah’s readers would have experienced Assyria as the “Rod of God’s Anger” upon them, and as Theologian Andrew Marr highlights, “Jonah’s readers would not likely be in a sweet enough mood to imagine God forgiving those ruthless invaders.”  Perhaps Jonah is saying to himself, ‘Why should we share God’s warning and invitation with them … they hurt us’.

But the message in Jonah  is to love the enemy.   This God we follow, is a God of love: God’s love is a love of Mercy.  Life giving Mercy.  Unmerited.  And Abundant.  And beyond what we can manifest ourselves: yet calling us to something more: and calling from us something more too.

And even when, despite Jonah’s hijinks and running in the opposite direction of God’s call: and even in his reluctant obeying of God’s call for him to share the Good News of salvation with the people: even then, when he sees the city turn from it’s ways and towards God… even then, Jonah is not in awe.  Jonah is not happy with God or the outcome of God’s loving salvation to the people of Nineveh.

Andrew Marr goes on to say, “Jonah’s story ends quietly with a bit of comedy. A bush grows to give him shade, but then the bush withers the next day. Jonah grows angry about the bush that had given him comfort only to die and leave him unsheltered in the sweltering heat. God then asks Jonah: “Should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?” (Jonah. 4:11)”

As we hear this story in this Season of Creation, I hope you can hear that the call is not only to the peoples; but to all creation.  The heart of God asks of us heart-work, and a growing realisation that we rely on the planet, and are responsible for and to it.

So too, when we come to this parable about payment for work: we get transactional with the wages for the last being paid the same as the wages as the first for the day labourers.  I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a workplace like that: I have… and it leaves a bitter taste.  I discovered a Jonah in me, sulking out the back…

But God is God.  The sun and the rain fall upon all of us… And we are called as disciples of Jesus, to walk in his ways: live into and living out this abundant grace and love and forgiveness and healing.

D Mark Davis, of his blogspot, Left Behind and Loving It, notes that Rev. Dr, Pablo Jiménez, a Latino theologian, makes much of the last labourers of the day. Many biblical commentators say these left over workers are lazy, the last to step up for work: but Jiménez disagrees:  “…seasonal workers usually have to attend several “work calls” during the day. They go from job site to job site until they are hired. They may even go to a new job site after completing an assignment. In short, [he says] these sad [commentary] remarks advance one of the main tenets of the ideology of the powerful: the idea that the poor are lazy.” Jiménez draws our attention to the poor being dislocated from their land, their families, and the villages, that sees them standing in the town square looking for work: this is the economic structure of the oppressive Roman Empire, disenfranchising these workers from their land and their people.

And although the text doesn’t exactly read in this scenario, it certainly helps us not assume that the market forces we know are the same as in the world of Jesus’ time.  As Mark Davis says ‘The text does not necessarily depict the workers as “idle” if that means lazy or non-industrious. The text does not offer reasons why the workers were not seen by the homeowner in his first few rounds of going to the marketplace. The text presents the unemployed workers’ excuse without judgment.”

And in the parable the last are first: God is God: and that should continue to disturb us in a good way.  Good. Different!

Andrew Marr, the theologian, mentioned earlier, draws parallel with this parable and Jonah:  He says “Our strongest resistance to forgiveness is that it just isn’t fair. It blows apart everything we think we know and believe about the economics of life. We think everything has a price, or should. We instinctively keep a tally of what we owe and what is owed us. Usually the latter is much higher than the former. This tally makes up a huge amount of our identity, an identity that forgiveness shows to be totally false.”

And he says, “The Parable of the Vineyard Workers speaks to this resistance. The workers who worked all day grumble when they get only the day’s wage they agreed on after the workers called in at the last hour of the day got the same day’s wage. I think all of us identify with the grumbling workers. The master sees the problem and seems to shrug his shoulders and say with a divine smile: “This is how I operate. Get used to it.” God’s economy takes a lot of getting used to. We are wise to start practicing now.”

On Thursday I had the honour of meeting 3 of the candidates for ministry, who will be awaiting placement.  These 3 people, all, coincidently from a Pacifica cultural background, offered me a window in to what saying ‘YES’ to God means for them.  Two of them: the two women who are mid-family rearing, comforting the ‘shock’ of becoming a minister, a female minister- with that cultural overlay: they were the ones who said “We will go where the church sends us.  We trust God.  We, as family, have talked this through. We have Prayed.  We have Discerned.”  The other candidate is saying YES, having just got married; and is also saying YES, realising that the Call of God has profoundly changed what he had ever seen ministry to be.

In the Uniting Church, there is no ‘head body’ who decides where ministers are to go: rather congregations and candidates meet for conversations to see if the Spirit is at work with them: and to imagine what they could do together if they came into minister together.  But these 3 candidates ‘YES’ is a good reminder of the Jonah that lives in each of us.  And an opportunity to re-reflect upon our own calling.  Can we hear God?  What does it mean to live the Gospel in our time?  To be the bearers of the Gospel in our living, working and loving?

The parable reminds us that our own claims at legitimacy; or claims that we were once hard done by in any setting we agreed to participate in, are worthy of a re-examination.  This ministry here in this congregation,  is profound.  The Call to is all is real and true, if we think we have a Gospel to share: and if we believe that God is up to something with us.

In this Season of Creation, these stories open to us things to consider.

How do these stories highlight for us our own complicit actions or ways in the world?  

How do we live this life-giving Grace for all peoples?

Are we a church for ourselves, or a church for others?

And if we are to live out BIG GRACE like the parable tells us, and if we are to live the Call of Jonah,  how can we not roll our eyes the next time we are asked to “take action” something: but really get behind what we are learning, and live that Grace out?   And let God be God, as we continue to live this Grace in Christ.