Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, talks about the phenomenon of Canadian hockey: at all levels of play, from grade school through NHL, Canadian hockey is a strict meritocracy. You get what you deserve; you can’t buy your way onto top teams or into the best training facilities; it doesn’t matter who your parents were or where you went to school. The top opportunities in Canadian hockey leagues go to the best players.
Or so everyone thought, until a psychologist named Roger Barnsley noticed a very strange fact: an overwhelming number of players on championship teams were born in January, February or March – if you were born in January, you were 5 times more likely to be on a championship team than if you were born in November. This effect was true for all levels of hockey, from grade school to the NHL.
It turns out that training for Canadian hockey begins at the very youngest age: when kids first start to school – and the cutoff birthdate for joining a league is Jan. 1. At very early ages, a few months’ difference in age makes a big difference in ability. But coaches, not recognizing that, started pegging the bigger, stronger, faster players early on, and lined them up for more specialized training and higher-ability leagues – and the effect snowballed from there, so that even in professional hockey, birth months are noticeably skewed toward the beginning of the year. In fact, even at the professional level, this matrix holds true: 40% of players are born in the first quarter of the year, 30% in the second quarter, 20% in the third quarter, and only 10% in the fourth quarter. A sport that is rigorously arranged to reward people based strictly on merit turns out to give strong preference to people based on a mere accident of birth.
Which is interesting, because so many of us credit ourselves for our achievements – and rightly so, because we have worked hard. But think about that hard-working, 6-year old hockey player born in January, looking at his November teammate and thinking, he works hard, but he just doesn’t have what it takes – I deserve these higher honors. Yet it’s partly based on an accident of birth, a 10-month difference in birthdates.
I think back on my academic achievements and wonder, how much of my good grades in school could be traced back to the accident of being born to a mother who loved to read, and who started teaching me to read and write at a very young age, so that for me, reading was not something that meant schoolwork and testing and sitting in hard uncomfortable chairs. It meant sitting on my mother’s lap, with her arms around me, and her voice reading me the perfect cadences of Dr. Seuss – and she and Dr. Seuss made reading inextricably associated with love and happiness for me. And how much of my achievements were made possible by a father who believed that his girls could do anything any boy could do, and by being born in a time and place where our culture had more or less arrived at the same conclusion?
So often we fail to recognize how the things we receive, and achieve, are partly due to the care of other people, the accidents of birth, the circumstances we find selves in – even, by God, the grace and generosity of God. We’re like Bart Simpson at Thanksgiving, praying: “Dear Lord, we paid for all this stuff ourselves, so thanks for nothing. Amen.” Yet we’re surrounded by things that have come to us through what we call “grace”: the free gift of circumstances we did not deserve or work for.
Living in the kingdom of God means recognizing God’s grace in our lives. The miracle of the manna in the wilderness is an illustration: God leads the people of Israel out of slavery in Egypt into freedom, yet they find themselves in a wilderness, desolate and uncertain, and begin to yearn for the familiar certainty of being slaves, where at least Pharaoh gives them food, as a subsistence investment in the labor he can get in return. Newly arrived in the kingdom of God, they yearn for the kingdom of Pharaoh instead.
Yet God, having birthed this new people, shows them what the kingdom of God is: God gives them each day just enough manna to feed them for one day. If they hoard it, it will spoil. So the newly birthed people of Israel must learn to live according to the discipline of grace: living in certainty that God will provide for their daily needs, but not looking beyond, not hoarding, not taking more than needed, not taking more for one person than the next – everyone has enough, none of it is deserved.
We Americans who were raised on Aesop’s Fable of the ant and the grasshopper, where the ant is rewarded for working hard and storing up food for the winter, while the grasshopper is on his own after having fun all summer, have trouble with this kingdom of God – and like the Israelites, we may yearn for the kingdom of Pharaoh instead. But somehow this story tells us what God wants to give us – undeserved grace.
I read that if you go to the Sinai desert, you can see manna to this day. There is a certain insect there that secretes a white flaky substance which is pure sugar and carbohydrate – it is secreted as liquid overnight, and dries by morning in a flaky white crust over all the ground – perfectly edible to humans. On one level, you might say, well that’s not a miracle, that’s a natural phenomenon.
On another level, you could look at that manna in the wilderness and see God’s hand in it – God who led the people of Israel to the place that provided what they needed. And God who creates the world–why would it not be a miracle? After all, everything we eat, everything we wear, everything we build, comes from the earth; even our own lives; it is God who makes the whole natural world available to us. There is a Jewish prayer: “Days pass and years vanish, and we walk sightless among miracles.” We live among miracles, and give credit to ourselves.
If we start believing, like Bart Simpson, that we have done it all for ourselves, we become like the laborers in the gospel parable today, measuring the grace we think God, or the world, owes us, and grudging the grace given to others; living in a world of resentment, the kingdom of Pharaoh, hoarding what we think we deserve, instead of in a world of gratitude, the kingdom of God.
Today’s gospel is one of Jesus’ parables – and a parable is not like Aesop’s fables – we’re not supposed to get a tidy little moral for how to live like “Slow and steady wins the race” or whatever the moral was in the ant and the grasshopper story – "I got mine, you’re on your own," or something like that. What a parable does is surprises us – it opens our eyes to a new way of seeing. To understand a parable, you have to look first at how Jesus uses it. This is another in a long string of parables that begins: “the kingdom of heaven is like….” In this one, Jesus draws a picture from ordinary life that is familiar then and now – day laborers waiting on a corner for a job, a landowner who comes by in a pickup truck to hire a few laborers, five different times in one day. These are day laborers who start the day in uncertainty, not knowing if they will have food to feed their families at end of day, or if their children will go to bed hungry. Being hired is a moment of grace for them, manna in the wilderness of unemployment. This landowner who hires them makes sure that everyone has enough.
And we are surprised, as Jesus always surprises us in parables, because the landowner’s generosity takes into account not what the workers deserve, but what the owner wants to give: enough for everyone, manna for that day. The kingdom of heaven is like a God who gives grace to everyone – a beautiful lesson for us to learn.
But Jesus is realistic about human nature, so he tells us: the kingdom of heaven is also like a group of folks who begrudge that grace to others they think don’t deserve it - who would rather hold onto God’s blessings for selves. Having received everything they need, they would prefer to deny it to others.
I think in a parable, we can learn a lot by asking: where do we see ourselves? Do we see ourselves as the laborers hired early in the day? Late in the day? The landowner? Maybe some of us would identify with the laborers hired late in the day – we are conscious of giving little and receiving much grace from God in return. But most of us would probably identify with the laborers hired early in the day. Here we’ve been faithful Christians, gone to church, gone to school, held a job, taken our obligations seriously, supported our families, given and worked for the kingdom of God. We’re like Canadian hockey players born early in the year. We've worked for what we have achieved.
But what if Jesus sees us differently? What if we’re the late hires, the ones who didn’t deserve what we were given, but God gave it to us anyway? One of the truths of God’s kingdom is that we are all the late hires – no one deserves the amazing grace of God’s kingdom – nothing we could ever do could earn the gifts God gives us – but we receive them nonetheless. And like laborers in vineyard, we’re asked to share them willingly with others.
In the kingdom of heaven, things don’t work like they do in the kingdom of Pharaoh. In the kingdom of Pharaoh, we get what we deserve, punishments and rewards both – but we are also slaves. In the kingdom of God, all grace comes undeserved, along with freedom. We have to choose which kingdom to live in.
If we are going to live in the kingdom of God, Jesus asks two things of us: to understand what God has shared with us, and to share that grace with others. We can live with resentment, we can live with grace, but we can’t have both.
So here’s what I think Jesus calls us to do today and this week: ask ourselves two questions. What has God given you in abundance? It could be comfort, enough for each day, family, money, love, a difficult past that we learned from, and we are grateful for what we’ve learned; it could be eternal salvation and a place in kingdom of heaven. Take a moment and think about it – what are your greatest blessings?
Now, here’s the second question to think about today and the rest of this week: how is God calling you, today, tomorrow, and for the rest of your life, to share those blessings with others?
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