The Unearned, Amazing Grace of God

The 17th Sunday after Pentecost, Year A

Sermon for September 20, 2026

My friends, I speak to you today in the name of one God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.

Good morning, Church of the Epiphany. Our collect of the day this morning, found on page 5 of your bulletins, felt especially fitting for me yesterday: “Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly; and even now, while we are placed among things that are passing away, to hold fast to those that shall endure.” It’s a good one, but it’s especially good at a funeral.

Yesterday, I had the privilege to lead a brief graveside service for Leslee Leins, Doug’s ex-wife who passed. A few of you were there. It was my ninth funeral service as your priest; I’m getting all too familiar with that liturgy. But there are few things like a funeral, few things that make us consider our own mortality, that of our loved ones, few things that remind us “we are placed among things that are passing away,” while holding close to those things “that shall endure.”

One of the most common songs at funerals, you might know, one of the most popular songs throughout all of Christianity, really, is the song “Amazing Grace.” We’ll sing it together at Rosie’s funeral in a few weeks. It’s not just a funeral song, of course, but it is just so beloved, many feel like it fits in that last service of life particularly well. President Obama famously sang it at the funeral service for Clementa Pinckney, one of the nine killed in June 2015 by a white supremacist in Charleston, South Carolina. His rendition, sung after a 15-second pause, maybe considering whether or not he was brave enough to sing, it brings people to their feet, brings smiles to their faces and tears to their eyes.

It’s just that sort of song, in part because we can all identify with needing grace, right? We all need to know we are loved and forgiven, that we are welcome in God’s presence, that love is there for us, even when we have done wrong, when we have not measured up. God’s grace for us, that saved a wretch like me, how sweet the sound, it is amazing. There is nothing else like it in our lives, nothing like the abundant love and grace of God.

This morning’s gospel reading reminds us that there is nothing like amazing grace, that we cannot understand it, and that in truth, this sort of amazing grace is offensive to us, it is scandalous, it makes no sense, it breaks our understandings of right and wrong. Over the last few weeks, we’ve talked about how following Jesus should make us uncomfortable, we cannot operate the same way if we know Christ; how forgiveness knows no bounds, we forgive again and again, endlessly. This week’s parable takes those themes and refines them, and it does so by first forcing us to disagree with our God.

This week, Jesus gives us the parable of the workers, the laborers in the vineyard. We hear of a kingdom of heaven where a landowner hires people at 9 am, at noon, at 3, and again at 5 pm, and then pays them all the same day’s wage at 6 pm. The worker who worked 9 hours, from 9 to 6, gets the same as the worker who worked just one hour, from 5 to 6. This is very clearly not fair. In my prayer at City Council the night after Labor Day, I echoed the motto of the American Federation of Labor, “A fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay.” I think the AFL and other labor unions would probably hate this parable; they’re writing up lawsuits against the landowner on behalf of those first workers now.

It cannot be fair, this cannot be just, this landowner giving the same amount to all the workers. The workers tell him such, throwing in the details about the scorching heat, letting us know they suffered all day, and for what? They could have sat by the side and started working at 5 pm too. The telling of the story, of course, puts us in the seat of those hired at 9 am; we feel their grumbling, their perspective makes sense to us. We don’t consider it from the perspective of those hired at 5 pm, who were probably overjoyed to be hired at all, who are certainly overjoyed to be paid more than they deserve. We hear it instead from the position of those who have been, in their view, “wronged.” And if we’re being honest, if this were not in our Bibles, said by Jesus, we would not give the landowner any credit either. If he’s going to give those newcomers a full denarius, he better give the others a bonus, right? Probably a denarius per hour, that’d actually be fair.

If we’re being honest, we should probably admit that we still live by the 9 am workers’ understanding of the world far more often than the landowners’ view. We still want to live under the rules of getting what we deserve, of earning our keep. Many of us would say we side with labor unions over billionaires, in today’s economy, at least; the minimum wage hasn’t risen since the end of the George W. Bush administration, but we like to think we support workers. Or if we’re anti-union, we’d at least demand to be paid for what work we do, trusting the free market to pay us appropriately for our labor. We assign chores to our kids, and maybe not often enough. We believe in paying your dues, in putting in the work to achieve results. This is just a common-sense position.

Buckle up… we even do this in the church sometimes, right? We don’t elevate the visitor to the vestry on their second Sunday, we don’t let just anyone preach, that’d be “silly.” We understand there are steps to take, hoops to jump through; we need time with people before we trust them. We especially need them to learn who we are first, we need other people to understand “how we do things around here.” “That’s not who we are.” We lean on our traditions, our understandings of God, because they work for us, they’re who we are… though if we were being honest there, our indigenous friends might point out our spiritual traditions were established here after violent conquest, dismissing their spiritual traditions completely… but we’ll ignore that for now. We need everyone to put in their time, and then they’ll be allowed to join the pecking order, to climb the ladder. Respect your elders, maybe at church you’ll even get to lead a committee! Who knows… many of those churchy examples don’t work at Epiphany, do they? Yet maybe some still do.

If we’re being honest, we build all of our lives around this common sense, this sort of transactional view of the world: you do something, you get a reward. You get what you deserve. You earn your keep. You put in your time. You do the work. This makes sense to us. This is so foundational a part of our society, it is the air we breathe, it is the water we swim in whether we even realize we’re swimming. It is not really up for any debate.

And in today’s parable, God throws it out completely.

Grace, grace is not amazing if it is earned. In Christianity, we do not have a transactional God like other religions do, like might make sense to us, where we have a list of rules, a moral way we try to follow, and then a judgment, a reward at the end if we do our best. We may think we do, that may be some of our experience with church in the past, but friends, that is not Christianity.

Instead, we are given the opposite of that, we are led into a relationship with the triune God of the universe. Relationships are not built on merit. They are not based on a to-do list checked off appropriately. Think of your relationships, your spouse, your friends, your children… is your love for them based on what they do and what they fail to do? I hope that it is not; it wasn’t always so. No, relationships are based in love, and we have that love with, from, and toward our God. Today, we have a landowner who says, “am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?” as if we all belong to him… and we do. This morning, we have a relationship with this landowner, we belong to him, and he is loving and generous, more generous than we can imagine. Our God loves us.

Friends, God’s amazing grace is more amazing than we can possibly believe. It extends beyond those who have been working since 9 am to those who just embraced it at 5 pm; let us not be envious because God is generous. This grace is for all of us, this love is for all of us, and it is what makes us different here and now. All are welcome to embrace it. All are welcome to be loved. All are welcome to love without condition.

Thanks to this amazing grace, we cannot earn God’s love, we need not worry about doing so, and others should not be asked to earn ours. We are simply invited to love. May we love with the generosity of the landowner this morning, forsaking merit. May we love abundantly, and may we daily live in grace-filled relationship with each other and with our God.

Amen.