September 20, 2026 (Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost) - Fr. Steve Moore

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The grace and peace of God our Father, the love of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.

As most of you know and have observed, I have four children ranging in age between twelve and four years old. And every Sunday night at dinner, most weeks, we do the allowance.

We thought that this would be a good idea to help them learn about earning things and doing chores. And so each one has a chore chart. And if they click off certain things, they get credit. And then they make their money at the end of the week.

But we have a range of ages. And so it was originally set up that the older kids would get five dollars a week. But Monica, being four years old and only being capable of doing certain chores—very little chores, actually—would get two dollars a week, which is a lot for a four-year-old.

Or so I thought, until Monica got wind of the fact that she was getting less money. At which time she became very irate that this was unfair, to the point that now she, too, gets five dollars a week.

Sometimes you've got to give.

But that's the feeling I get when we come to Scripture like this, this parable that we hear today. A lot of people feel like this isn't fair. Why should people who have worked all day long get the same pay as those who only worked an hour?

We can get this way that life should be fair. And if it's not fair, it's not right.

But I hate to break it to you: life is not fair. I'm not even sure that it was really designed to be fair, even though we think it should be.

For those of you who are partnered or married or in any close friendship, you know that it's not always fair. Now, I'm not saying that one person should carry the friendship or do all the work in the partnership. But there are times when one person does more and another person does more. And if you continue to think, well, it has to be fifty over fifty, you're bound to be disappointed.

There is so much in life that isn't fair.

We've heard a lot about our tax system, and for many of us who live paycheck to paycheck, we can't afford accountants and lawyers who can find us all the loopholes. And so many of us end up paying a lot more in taxes than people who are billionaires, who are even approaching being trillionaires.

That is patently not fair.

We think about all the other ways in which we experience our world, in our life, as not fair. So many people are judged by aspects of their personality, their race, their sexual orientation, and automatically meet barriers and prejudice. And it is blatantly not fair.

Throughout so much of life, there are multiple things that are not fair. And it rightly might make us angry, but it also calls us—requires us—to ask the question: Is God fair? Is life supposed to be fair? Are we fair to one another? Where did we get this idea?

Now, I don't know where Monica got her idea that she should get five dollars like her brother and sisters. But so many of us walk through life thinking that it should be fair.

Where this parable turns that on its head.

Now, there have been all sorts of interpretations of what this might mean, that those who are called later in life get into heaven just like everyone else. Or it's been read as an allegory, traditional in our church, that the people who came first were Abraham and Moses and so on and so forth. And the people called later in the day were the disciples, and then the Gentiles. And they all get called into the kingdom of God.

Okay, fine.

It's been used for antisemitic purposes, which is not fine. And so we have to be careful in the ways in which we look at Scripture and the ways in which we wrestle with these things, because when we come to easy answers, we can often use these words to harm rather than to help or to heal.

I would like to suggest to you that it's not as simple when we look at this Scripture.

It's possible that the people hired later in the day were people who were less able to work, and so they would not be hired first off. That's possible.

It's possible, too, that the landowner was already constricted, confined because it is the tradition to go along with the norm. So he couldn't have given those who were hired early more because that would go against local custom, and you weren't allowed.

Some people look at this as a union, a union-busting move by the landowner because the people would not organize and get together because they would all disagree about what they should be paid.

The reality is, I think most of us can come to our relationship with God, and we take two basic kinds of views.

Some of us try to get God off the hook for everything, and so we take that, if not in theory and practice, the clockmaker view of God—that God created everything and kind of set things in motion and we're left to figure it out. I don't know that that's exactly true.

Other people have this close personal identification with God or the Spirit or Jesus, and feel like God is even helping change the traffic lights for them. But when bad things happen, that God becomes a little difficult because God made that happen too. I don't know.

But we are.

I would like to suggest something kind of in between.

I'm not saying that God isn't intimate and personal and that God didn't create everything. But to put God in some sort of box, as if we know how God would act or perceive every situation, is a problem.

One of the examples goes like this.

Imagine you are in a cemetery and you come across a grave.

Marion Jones died 1995.

You walk to the next and you see:

Harold Jones died 1970.

Then a little bit further:

Margaret Jones died 1954.

On to Maude Jones, died 1932, and so forth, until you see the family history go even into the 1800s.

But if you were to look down at the cemetery from an airplane or from a bird's-eye view, you would see it all at once.

And so couldn't that be that God has a multitude of perspectives?

And like any good parent who knows that our kids are different and need different kinds of love and attention, while it might not always look fair, God comes to each of us in our own personal and unique ways to help lift us up.

And that God, who is a generous God, meets us where we are, no matter what time of day we encounter that God.

And that point of view we give because we are grateful. Because we have been given so much by a generous God.

Now I could end the sermon right there and it'd be pretty okay, right?

Maybe I will.

No.

But we have to take it that next step.

Because if God is generous in giving with us, we are called to do the same.

If you want an answer to the cynicism of our age, it is that we become generous and grateful people. It is that we live out of this love and care for one another in the ways in which we experience God's care for us.

And I can't tell you what this looks like for your life personally, but I can tell you that when you are generous with your love and your time, it makes all the difference.

So for the student at SLU, it might be that you've got to give yourself a break and not take six classes next semester.

Or it might be that once a week or once a month, you come down to our Wednesday night supper or the food distribution or something to help remind you that you're connected to the world and not stuck in the ivory tower of academics and all the drama of student life.

Perhaps, perhaps as the school year begins and you look at your schedule, you might recognize that you have a free night or two and wonder, what can I do with that extra time?

Perhaps you're lucky and recognize, when looking at your bank account, that you have a few more dollars. Although with our economy, that's—I know it's a long shot, but maybe.

And so you think, what can I do with this excess money rather than just simply saving and give to a cause that I think is worthy and needs more assistance in another time of life?

Generosity might look like pulling back and giving of your time to take care of a family member or a loved one who's in need, or maybe even take care of yourself because you're becoming burnt out and life has been difficult.

I can't tell you what generosity looks like for your personal life, but what I can tell you is that when we live lives of generosity based in gratitude, we find ourselves spreading the love of God into our community in ways that perhaps we had not recognized as possible.

Too often we are caught in the illusion of our culture that only big and grand gestures make the difference.

Until we connect with someone and recognize that that personal encounter, that way of connecting and loving, has made all the difference for that person.

Today, our Jewish brothers and sisters begin Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement for them and the continuing celebration of their Jewish High Holy Days, one of the most beautiful teachings of Judaism that I'm going to mispronounce because I did horrible in Hebrew in seminary is Talitha come.

Basically, to save one person is to save the world.

You and I often become so focused on what we can't do that we forget that in our generosity, what we can do might make all the difference.

And we don't do this out of some sort of idea that we have to.

We do it because we have been given so much.

The Benedictine monk and solitary brother, David Steindl-Rast, put it this way:

It's not happy people who are grateful. It's grateful people who are happy.