Sermon Copy
2023 Convention Eucharist Homily
Friday, February 3, 2023, 5:00 pm, St. John’s, Johnson City
Matthew 20:1-16
Dr. Alison Barton
There’s a word that, in recent years, we Americans have adopted from the Germans – a word we lack in the English language, but one that speaks to a feeling we so closely identify with, here as much as in Europe, that we are willing to work our lips around the unfamiliar syllables and even spit a little as we use it. It’s a word that describes a feeling we also often see in biblical passages, from the Psalms all the way into the New Testament.
That word – is schadenfreude. Its meaning is a composite from the two words that it’s made of: schade, or “harm,” and freude, or “joy.” Put together (and those of you who are fans of racy puppet musicals will already know this), schadenfreude means, “Happiness, or joy, at the misfortune of others.”
I’m bringing this word up for a couple of reasons. The first is because I just heard some advice that we should cross out whatever title our biblical editors have given each gospel segment, because these titles will taint your reading of the passage with the editors’ own interpretation right off the bat. The advice, instead, is to give each passage your own title.
Traditionally, our gospel reading for today has been titled something along the lines of, “The Laborers in the Vineyard.” I’ve heard other, updated and excellent suggestions that this parable be retitled, “The Generous Landowner.” And perhaps that’s a far better title than the one that’s come to mind for me when I consider this parable. For me, perhaps flippantly, I think of this parable’s title as, “Schadenfreude Denied.”
Because look at it – the workers who were in the field all day get in line to be paid. They are told to stand at the back of the line – so naturally, while they wait, they’ll witness what the 1-2 hour workers are getting paid. They probably expected to see those late-day laborers being paid a pittance, and may have experienced some mild shock to discover they were instead paid a full day’s wage. But even when this happens, the all-day laborers take solace in the logical presumption that THEY will get paid more. They worked more. They are above, not equal to, those people who stood around idle all day.
They are ready to feel superior by being paid more. And researchers of schadenfreude have found that it’s a way of feeling better about your own group by enjoying the misfortune of another group. Just look at how the full-day workers respond when they are paid the same amount: “You have made them equal to us!” That is not at all how they want to be perceived.
Even before B.F. Skinner came along and put a theory around rewards and punishments for behaviors, our gospel laborers intuitively understood the same thing that makes us uncomfortable with this parable: If you reward minimal behavior, that’s all you’re going to get from now on. Paying people who sat around all day and then worked for the last hour or so shouldn’t be rewarded for this behavior. If they are, then they are less likely to be assertive about starting work early on subsequent days.
For those of you who don’t know much about me, I’m an educator at ETSU. What I teach about is teaching – and the psychology of teaching, so I spend most of my waking days talking about teaching and learning – to my students, to other faculty, and lately, to those who hear my sermons at St. Paul’s. Which can mean only one thing: You’re going to hear something about teaching tonight; it’s the lens through which I see the world.
Just last week I gave a workshop to some instructors at ETSU about fair grading practices. We start by exploring why some traditional grading practices turn out to be inequitable, and the first practice we examine is that of giving zeros for missing work. For starters, an issue with zeros is that a zero is likely NOT representative of what a student actually knows about a subject, so it’s not communicating the truth of what a student has learned. But perhaps more egregiously, if you’re averaging grades and using a 0-100 grading scale, where an F is 59% or below, a zero disproportionately weights the failure to a point where student success can be eliminated by one missing assignment.
We then examine a case where a student has made several As but one zero for a missing assignment. We hypothesize: What might have happened to cause this missed assignment – if this was a low-income student? – or, if the student was a non-traditional, single parent? – or if the student was a first-generation college student?
It turns out we can think of many reasons why a deadline might be missed…because we’ve often been there ourselves. And so we begin to see giving zeros in a new light.
The detriment with a zero is that it can become a hole that students feel they cannot climb out of. One zero might lead a student to give up, even if success were still possible – because they cannot see it from here. They might not try as hard or might simply check out for the rest of the semester. If the class was one for their chosen major, they might decide the major wasn’t for them, or that college isn’t for them.
There are a number of radical solutions to the problem of zeros, but one of the simplest is this: Minimum grading. All Fs below a 50%, including zeros, get no less than a score of 50. Calculating case examples shows that this method helps those who have just a few missed assignments – those who generally performed well but needed a little grace. Earning a 50 instead of a zero is still an F – but it’s a recoverable F, where the F only carries a weight of 10% of the score range (now from 50 – 100), instead of the 60% weight it carries in a 0-100 score range.
Some faculty are still resistant. Is it fair, they ask, to give someone 50% for work they didn’t do? Is it fair to the other students who did the work?
They are grumbling on behalf of the vineyard workers.
What this practice does is give people hope. And that’s what the generous landowner did for the workers in the vineyard. Give them more than they were expecting. Keep them from utter despair.
But let’s come back to our original concern about this gospel: Paying a full day’s wage for those who worked just an hour or two is rewarding those who are lazy, idle, taking advantage of the system. But was that true in our parable? Even the landowner presumes it is in his question to them at 5:00 that day – “Why have you been standing here idle all day?” Notice that their response isn’t, “Oh, we didn’t feel like working in the hot sun,” or, “We slept in because we were tired.”
It was, “Because nobody hired us.” So, who gets hired last? Probably, it’s those who have early-day conflicts, getting to the job pool late, or those who have other challenges. So, perhaps these late-day hires were caring for another at home before they could go find work for the day, or did not appear to prospective employers as physically capable of the labor needed, or were otherwise considered undesirable. I think it’s noteworthy that the landowner kept going out to find people to help in the vineyard, and that he was willing to hire those who were likely deemed least capable of work – to not only come and help out, but to earn the same as those who were fortunate enough – yes, fortunateenough – to be seen as employable in the first wave.
And this observation helps me out with an issue I have when I think about applying this parable to today’s world. Because, as a woman, it rankles me to think that this parable might be suggesting I should be happy that men are paid as much as women, when women do more of the work. (Now technically, men and women work equivalent hours but women are paid $.83 for every dollar earned by men. So when you flip that around, it means that women work more to earn the same amount as men.) Is this parable suggesting that those of us who, in this society, have been marginalized in hierarchical structures should be content with this inequity?
Now I can say that it’s the opposite: If women, or people of color, were paid the same as white men who’ve been able to work all this time, who have been seen as more capable, more employable in the first wave, then it’s possible some men – but certainly none of those present! – might grumble and say, “You have made them equal to us!” Yes, exactly.
In the end, it’s our perceptions and biases that keep us from seeing others as equal. We don’t know what service the 5:00 hires did for the landowner, but perhaps it was the work nobody else wanted to do, or was too tired to do by the end of the day. Perhaps it was none of these things and instead their paycheck was entirely unmerited – by our standards. The point is that God sees the merit in everyone.
Bishop Brian was kind enough to give me a lead in his sermon that he gave at St. Paul’s a couple of Sundays ago: It’s not whether God calls us or not – we are ALL called by God to work in the vineyard; it’s WHAT God calls us to do. Paul makes this clear in the excerpt we read tonight from his letter to the Corinthians – we are all called to be ambassadors of Christ, it’s just that we each are ambassadors in our own way.
The grace of the vineyard owner isn’t really in the pay the workers received. It’s in the call each was given, a call to have the opportunity to work on behalf of the landowner, who went out again and again to give this call to as many as could be found, including the overlooked and the outcast. They were all called to be part of the mission of tending the vineyard, each in the ways they were able. And they were each rewarded equally.
While the lessons found directly within the story of a parable are instructive, we can also learn a lot from the outcomeof a parable. What are the outcomes of this one? Well first, it seems that giving grace –especially grace perceived as unmerited (which is possibly ALL grace) results in resentment toward the grace-giver. I don’t think those full-day workers were appeased by the landowner’s explanations, and neither are people today when policies suggesting grace are proposed. Look at the angry counterarguments that arise when we talk about amnesty for immigrants, debt forgiveness for those with college loans, or – dare I even mention it – universal basic income. We tend to think that “those” people deserve less than us, particularly if we went through some hardship to get it, and we’ll resent the party that gave out a “freebie” to the undeserving. Corner me at our social hour this evening, and I’ll tell you how giving grace can result in being mildly assaulted with a shopping cart.
And that leads to another outcome we might infer from this parable: Handing out grace can cause division among people. Grace suggests we are equals, whether we perceive it that way or not – and most of the time, we don’t. This parable really pulls back the curtain to reveal who we truly are – and who we are called to be instead.
I said earlier that I had two reasons for bringing up the word schadenfreude, but so far, I’ve really only talked about the one.
The second reason I brought it up is because you can find a lengthy explanation of schadenfreude in Wikipedia, …but you can’t find any entry for a counterpart to it. Originally, no such word existed in German, or anywhere else in the Western world – the feelings it encapsulates is just so rare. It turns out there is one now, but it’s a German pseudoword created by people who felt the lack of it: Freudenfreude. Happiness at the good fortune of others.
I might suggest that in addition to the comfort we can receive from this gospel in knowing that God will continually seek us out and call us to be Christ’s ambassadors in the ways we are best able to do so, we are also challenged to change – to become new. Part of that call, part of being Christ’s ambassador, is to begin learning the ways of freudenfreude. Perhaps it’s time to learn how we can turn to our neighbor who has unexpectedly been given a stroke of good fortune and, rather than be envious of them or resentful that they’ve received what we worked or waited for, we can instead celebrate them as equals and share in the joy that they, too, are part of our vast and diverse family of God.