Homily for the 25th Sunday of the Year
Some people claim that the entire human race
can be divided into two types of people:
Those who dichotomize, and those who don’t.di
(Those who dichotomize…and those who don’t. Get it?)
Well, I heard an interesting dichotomy not long ago.
Someone claimed that that are two basic personality types:
One group is represented by a woman in a supermarket.
She picks up a pack of hamburger and puts it into her shopping cart.
She leaves the shopping cart in the center of the aisle
and walks to the dairy section for a pack of cheese.
Shethen rushes back to her cart
to get it out of the way of other customers,
chiding herself for being so inconsiderate of other people.
Another shopper, on the other hand,
leaves his shopping cart full of groceries
in the center of the aisle
and walks to the beer cooler.
He, too, hurries back to his cart but for another reason:
because, by God,somebody might have taken an item from his cart!
How could he have been so foolish to let his stuff go unattended?
Two types of people:
Those who are other-centered and those who are self-centered.
______
That’s one way to categorize the human race,
but there are many others.
We categorize people all the time:
Rich and Poor
Christians and Non-Christians
Young and Old
Texans and Those-who-wish-they-were-Texans
With that in mind,
I wish to draw your attention today
to one particular verse
that occurs near the end of today’s gospel parable.
After the owner of the vineyard
pays each of his workers
the usual daily wage…
no matter if they worked 10 hours…or just one hour,
we hear the complaint of those who toiled the entire day.
They say to the owner:
“You have made them equal to us.”
“You have made them equal to us.”
In a world that likes to dichotomize;
in a world that likes to draw lines and create divisions,
it can come as a bit of a surprise
when we realize that,
from God’s angle, we are all the same worth.
Sometimes, this is hard to see.
Sometimes, if we’re stuck—really stuck—in seeing the world
in terms of US and THEM,
it is hard to swallow.
Let me share an example of this
from an article that appeared in the Texas Observer.
The article opens with these words:
Lots of stuff on Fox Newsgot Chuck Gilbert worked up.
Murderous cartels were operating just four-and-a-half hours from his home.
Job-stealing illegals, drug-runners, cartel thugs, terrorists—
they were all exploiting the Texas-Mexico border
and the federal government wasn’t doing jack.
“I decided I wanted to go down to the border and kick some ____,” Gilbert says.
“I’m your typical angry white male. I’m conservative. I’m former military.
And I’m don’t back down when it comes to the good of my country.”
Let me stop here and say that, in part, I can identify with this guy.
I’m not former military,
But I am concerned about the border.
For instance,
my home state of Ohio happens to be the epicenter of the opiodeepidemic.
These days, coroner in the City of Dayton
rents refrigerated trucks because his facilities aren’t adequate
to accommodate the number of people dying from overdoses.
Most of that heroin and most of that fentanyl comes from Mexico.
[Of course, we normally don’t talk about why our society
is hell-bent on using narcotics for entertainment.
We seldom talk about how we, as a society,
have exchanged the nobility of self-restraint for the idolatry of self- indulgence…
always easier to blame someone else.]
Still, the issue of the border is a serious issue.
I am friends with a family
who had a relative in Mexicokilled by the cartels.
Believe me,
you don’t want to know the details.
What I am saying is this:
Fear is a very effective tool
when it comes to drawing lines
and driving wedges.
But, let’s get back to the story
about this guy name Chuck Gilbert.
Soon, Gilbert was spending every spare day in South Texas,
looking for bad guys crossing the scorching brushlands.
Over the next three years, he invested at least $10,000 in equipment.
His garage is filled with the stuff:
camo gear, two-way HAM radios,
$3,000 worth of night-vision equipment,
a camo Polaris ATV, a Yeti cooler with a bumper-sticker reading
“Extremely Right-Wing,”
books on tracking and avoiding ambushes.
For three years, Gilbert
devoted almost all of his free time
to chasing down undocumented immigrants in South Texas,
a weekend warrior with a call of duty
to secure the border.
But Gilbert saw something in the brush
that he hadn’t expected—ordinary human beings
struggling, surviving and dying.
Sure, there were the sketchy men with MS-13 tattoos.
There was the Arabic dictionary that they found.
But mostly he encountered a parade of humanity,
desperate people at the mercy of Border Patrol,
the heat, the coyotes and American men in dressed camo.
In those three years,
more than 300 immigrants died in his county---
—a human toll that weighed heavy on Gilbert.
“You can set up here and watch Fox News and say
‘these alien ______!. We need to shut the border down.’
But what I saw coming through Brooks County was humanity.”
In the article,
he goes on to describe coming upon
a pregnant woman in the desert
who gave birth two days later in a detention center,
an eight-year-old abandoned by his coyote,
the body of a young man leaning against a tree,
his eyes plucked out by buzzards.
“Apparently this country was worth dying for,”
he remembers thinking.
“I had a hard time not feeling profoundly upset by that.”
Eventually, Gilbert left the militia
and formed a humanitarian “search and rescue” group,
a group focused on saving lives
instead of chasing people down.
Let’s step back from thissgtory, now, and return to the gospel story.
You have made us equal to them.
This statement isn’t about minimum wage polily.
It is not about labor policy.
It is not about immigration policy.
It is about God’s salvation policy.
He created us in His image and likeness.
We are His sons, His daughters.
And He sent us His Son,
His only Son
to deliver us from sin and death.
To die for us all.
For all of us…
for each one of us.