Sermon: Are You Envious Because I am Generous?
This sermon was originally preached at the Iliff Preaching Conference (Preaching in an Age of Contempt) on September 16, 2026 in Denver, CO. While it was a preaching conference sermon, I elected to use the lections for Proper 20A - Track 2 (i.e. this coming Sunday): Exodus 14:19-31; Psalm 114; Romans 14:1-12; Matthew 18:21-35.
In my excitement to preach, I forgot to turn on my recording device. Oops! To make it up to you, I am going to post my sermon commentary tomorrow. The commentary is where I unpack the sermon and homiletical decisions that went into it.
Many, many thanks to Dr. Joy J. Moore for the invitation to preach!
Are You Envious Because I am Generous?
From 1934 to 1945, Fiorello LaGuardia served as the 99th Mayor of New York City. Nicknamed the “Little Flower,” LaGuardia famously read the Sunday funnies over the radio during a 1945 newspaper-delivery strike.
Occasionally, he excused a judge from the bench to hear cases himself. The story is told that in the winter of 1935, he sat on the bench in one of the hardest-hit wards of the Depression.
One of the cases that night featured an older woman whose crime was stealing a nine-cent loaf of bread. LaGuardia asked if she had committed the crime. Unable to meet his eyes, she acknowledged her guilt. She explained that her son-in-law had abandoned her daughter, leaving her two young grandchildren at home. They had not eaten for days.
The shop owner who brought the charges showed no indication of forgiveness or compassion. “This is a low-security area, sir. She must be punished to set an example for others.”
After considering the evidence, LaGuardia sighed and said, “I have to work in accordance with justice and obey the law. You have two options: pay $10 or serve 10 days.”
As he spoke, he took $10 from his pocket. He held it for everyone in the courtroom to see, saying, “This is $10 that I will now remit.” He put the money in his hat and handed it to the bailiff.
He continued, “In addition, I charge each person in the court 50 cents, which is the penalty for our indifference for living in a city where a woman has to steal bread so her grandchildren can eat.” He directed the bailiff to pass the hat around and collect the fines and give them to the defendant.
Astonishingly, the bailiff handed her $47.50. With $10, she paid her fine. The remainder was paid by other defendants, police officers, and even the shop owner from whom she had stolen the bread, was hers. Enough to buy 416 loaves of bread. She received it amidst the applause of all in attendance.
Justice had been done, but grace and mercy had won the day.
Those are hard words, grace and mercy.
Not because of what they mean, but because of how they work. Or what they look like when they work.
And when grace and mercy win, no one loses. Not even shop owners.
In the LaGuardia story, we are comfortable seeing ourselves as the grandmother. She receives grace by paying her fine with someone else’s money and leaves the courtroom with more money than she’s had in years. It makes us feel good. Faith in humanity restored.
We identify with LaGuardia, too. That magnanimous and mercifully wise judge. We see injustices in the world which we seek to remedy and rectify with Jesus Christ crucified. This is our Micah 6:8 moment.
But if we look closely at this story through the witness of Scripture, something different is unfolding.
Something unexpected.
Something altogether holy and uncomfortable.
Let’s pick up the lectionary thread with Jonah. Our passage from the final chapter requires some background work.
As a prophet entrusted with speaking the words of God, Jonah did not begin well. It wasn’t the words that troubled him but the location of his prophetic assignment.
Nineveh? Really, LORD? There? Those people?
Nineveh was the capital of the Assyrian empire.
It was godless and sinful.
Of course Jonah didn’t want to go there.
They didn’t even have Coke or SEC football. (IYKYK)
It’s actually worse than a lack of okra or cheese grits, though.
The Assyrians were bloodthirsty butchers.
They destroyed ten of Israel’s tribes.
They carted people away from their homeland, imported their own people, and destroyed national identity and religious expression.
And they thrived for centuries!
YHWH was not calling Jonah to people with whom he disagreed.
He was calling him to his abusers and tormentors.
Into the very heart of darkness.
In Sally Lloyd-Jones’ Jesus Storybook Bible, Jonah avoids and evades, saying, “One ticket to not Nineveh please!”
Not Nineveh.
Anywhere but there.
We all have a Nineveh in our lives.
Or Babylonia. Or Rome. Or Samaria. Or Denver.
I'm not trivializing what the Assyrians did, by the way.
I'm inviting you to consider where your own heart resists the mercy of God.
We all have that one city, or Zip Code, or group of people to whom we would not go.
For justified reasons or not, there are people to whom your heart has become closed.
For whom our response to God would be, “One ticket to not THERE, not THEM please.”
Before we ever reach Jonah’s ending, we have to see that he has already separated the sheep from the goats and the wheat from the chaff. He’s already determined who was in and who was out in God’s cosmic plan.
Apparently life 3,000 years ago was just like today.
You can see Jonah giving a 1-star review of Assyria on Google or chronicling his journey away from Nineveh on TikTok. And the algorithm of the ANE would have loved it.
Jonah’s disdain and disgust for a foreign people, a people unredeemable and unsavable, would have gone viral as he identified himself by whom he hated rather than who God loved. Jonah was living in an age of contempt…only it was his own contempt for the message and mission God had given him.
Let that sink in…
I’m going to trust that you know all about his stormy night at sea, going overboard, the belly of the whale, and then being spit out so he could accomplish his Mission: Undesirable.
Our specific passage takes place after Jonah has preached his fire-and-brimstone message. He has spoken the words given to him by the Almighty, presenting the Ninevites with their just desserts.
And of all the audacious acts that Nineveh could conceive, it never occurred to Jonah that they just might accept the invitation. Despite his eventual willingness to see the mission through to completion, Jonah had not wrapped his mind around the great grandiosity of God’s graciousness or the magnificent might of his mercy.
Jonah wasn’t preaching as the herald of hope but as the harbinger of doom-and-gloom. And when the Ninevites accepted the grace offered by God through repentance and a profession of faith in the God of Israel, Jonah is offended and affronted.
The absolute dizzy limit for dear Jonah is his withering bush. He can’t even have that!
It is better for me to die than to live.
Poor, poor pitiful prophet.
It’s hard work preaching a message that leads to genuine transformation.
(For everyone who would love for their sermons to result in conversion and transformation every Sunday, can I get an Amen?!)
Peter had his 3,000 – Jonah has his 120,000.
This pity party won’t be solved with crackers and juicebox, either, like it was for Elijah.
Jonah knew YHWH’s character. In his burning displeasure and raging anger, in his utter contempt for YHWH’s goodness, Jonah admits to knowing that YHWH is “a gracious and merciful God, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from punishment.”
And he didn’t like it from the beginning. He sounds like the slave in the parable of the talents who knew the owner’s character and planned accordingly. Jonah knew who God was, and is, and ever shall be, and he wanted no part of it.
This was why he was fleeing with one ticket to not Nineveh please.
It begs the question, Can the prophet preach a mercy he secretly resents?
Let me put it to you another way with Rob Bell’s crassly profound question posed in the middle of a preaching conference sermon. He asked, “Are you smoking what you’re selling?!”
And everyone in Colorado said: Yes and amen!
Jonah was not.
The poetic irony is that the mercy he rejects and rebuffs for Nineveh is the very same mercy God shows him. There is no prejudice in the bountiful mercy and plentiful grace of God. And it was never Jonah’s job to differentiate who deserved it and who did not.
In Nineveh, grace and mercy had won the day, but Jonah misunderstood that in this win for and from God, no one, not even he, was a loser.
And that brings us beautifully to our parable in Matthew 20.
The story of the laborers in the vineyard is one we know well without becoming tired or trite like other well-troped parables. It was as offensive and discomforting then as it is now if we have the eyes to see and the ears to hear.
We know the gist of the story easily enough: a landowner needs labor for his field and so he goes to the 1st century equivalent of Home Depot or Lowe’s and finds help. He does this multiple times throughout the day, right up until quitting time.
The laborers come, they work, and the day ends.
That’s the easy part.
The hard part comes with the paying.
It’s all fun and games until money is involved…
The landowner pays in reverse order: Last in, first out. Those who had barely broken a sweat before the work whistle blew are given a full denarius. Very generous.
Then the next set of workers receives a denarius.
So on and so forth – lather, rinse, repeat – until those who worked all day long came forward and received a denarius, too.
At first blush, a denarius for a day of work was fair. It was the going rate. The issue for the workers isn’t the money but the comparison with those who showed up when the work was nearly done. Why should THEY get the same as the rest of US?
You have made them equal to us, says the labor union representative.
They didn’t work hard enough to deserve that!
They’ve only been coming to this church for 3 months and I’ve been here for 50 years!
That’s the pew my grand-daddy built!
How could THEY possibly be treated like US!
This parable is hard because we are tempted to commiserate with one side or the other. Either we understand the self-righteousness of the first workers or we tell ourselves that the gospel is as efficacious on the death bed as it is in the cradle. We do this to assuage and alleviate the feelings we’d rather not acknowledge or admit. The ones we’d appreciate the Lord not knowing about. They are the feelings surrounding the us vs. them paradigm which we have so comfortably created.
The gospel doesn’t do that.
Jesus doesn’t do that.
We do that.
As Anne Lamott reminds us, “You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”
The actual issue was the concept of equality, the idea of self-righteousness and self-justification, the feeling that out there in the real world, I may not be a landowner but I’m certainly better than those who come in at the end of the day.
The landowner’s question is so good: are you envious because I am generous?
The answer is a resounding YES!
And not just for the early worker, but for us as well. We spend so much time trying to be better, do better, live better that we miss the fact that the gospel is better because God is better.
In the vineyard, grace and mercy won the day, but the laborers misunderstood that in this win for and from God, no one, not even they, was a loser.
The psalmist sounds like an echo of Jonah: The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. Jonah's reluctant confession and the psalmist's joyful praise spring from the same source: God's own self-revelation to Moses. One quotes it in protest; the other sings it in worship.
The Psalm cries out about who God is for Israel and God’s character is that of grace, mercy, and steadfast love. This is from the Psalm which Israel has recited three times a day for thousands of years, blessing God, praising God, extolling and exalting God.
It sounds so good we might even needlepoint that on a pillow.
But have we paid attention to the meaning of the words?
We normally supply a pronoun or two to that verse which makes it feel even better for us:
Something like, The Lord is gracious and merciful to me.
Or, he’s slow to be angry with me because I’m not that bad.
(Oh, am I the only one who does that?)
The psalmist understands that who God is and what God does are not separated. God shows grace and mercy because God IS grace and mercy. The goodness and works the psalmist proclaims belong to God, not to herself. She is not boasting in who she is but in who God is. She understands that God is gracious and merciful and that he demonstrates his steadfast love to all people, including those with whom we would rather not associate.
And finally, she understands that the only faithful response to what God has done, is doing, and will do is to proclaim his works so that all people might know the glory of his power and kingdom.
In his letter to the Philippians, Paul circles the same question as Rob Bell: are you smoking what you’re selling. Paul exhorts his readers to live lives worthy of the gospel. What and who we proclaim must be backed-and-matched by how we live. Prayer and belief are joined with daily living.
The gospel to which Paul is referring is the same one that Jonah balked at, the same one that the early laborers grumbled about: it is the gospel where all of the wrong sort of people get into the Kingdom of God. Not on account of their merits but on account of God’s unrelenting faithfulness, graciousness, and steadfastness.
If you’ve stayed with me thus far, you probably aren’t seeing a problem. But let me be clear, friends, there is a scandal afoot:
We are the wrong sorts of people getting into the Kingdom!
We are the Ninevites;
The laborers showing up at the end of the day;
The prodigals returning from a far off land of dissolute living;
The grandmother who stole a nine cent loaf of bread!
Or, to really turn it on its ear as an equal opportunity offender:
We are the Pharisees resenting God for who he lets into the kingdom;
We are the Jonahs who resent God’s character;
The early laborers who are envious of his generosity;
The older brother who grumbles and complains while refusing to join the party;
The shopowner wanting to make an example of a grandmother trying to feed her grandchildren.
No matter how you cut it, we are never the all-star of the parable. We, too, are in desperate need of redemption, restoration, renovation, and reconciliation. This is how we begin solving rage, anger, and contempt – how we navigate living in a culture rife with a hermeneutic of hatred, suspicion, and cancellation.
In our sinful nature, we are adept at creating these us vs. them paradigms when reading Scripture. For some of us, we almost never place ourselves with the them. We are almost always the us. For others of us, we are always the them because others insist on being the us,
What these lessons show us, however, what they invite us to consider, is that we were enemies of God, ragamuffins in need of redemption, sinners in need of saving, low down, dirty, rotten scoundrels on account of our sin problem and STILL he invites us to the banquet.
We spend so much energy separating and siloing ourselves from one another that we have actually convinced ourselves that we don’t need grace as much as those people. Everything and everyone around us is contributing to the same reality: like Jonah, we are defined by who we hate instead of who God loves; we are identified by the news outlets we subscribe to, the political party we belong to, the denomination or theological vantage point for which we are stumping…the list goes on and on.
We are living in a moment where contempt for God, or creation, or other people, (or even ourselves) flows from our misdirected affections, our misaligned admiration, and our misappropriated attention.
But here’s the tricky thing about grace…
It’s amazing, yes, but only because it’s wild and scandalous.
We know it’s scandalous for the prostitutes and politicians, the tax collectors and the god-deniers to receive it. But when we stop seeing ourselves as the prostitutes, tax collectors, lepers, or sinners, we unintentionally become the Pharisees and scribes who love separating into us and them.
God refuses to distribute grace and mercy according to human calculations. When grace and mercy win, God wins. And no one loses.
The scandal of grace is not that God saves people we think don't deserve it. The scandal is that God saves people like us.
Grace should scandalize us and mercy astound us, not because other people are getting it, but because we have received it, too.
I think what scares us about grace is not that we might be left out…but that we might be counted in.
So, can a preacher proclaim the grace he secretly resents?
Can a minister mete out a mercy that affronts her?
Is the body of Christ smoking what it’s selling?
From the vantage point of mercy and compassion, God is concerned about Nineveh, wherever that may be. He is concerned about the monsters and evildoers that keep us up at night. He is concerned about the tyrants and despots and would-be-kings.
But, friend, he is also concerned about you.
He is concerned about what’s in your heart. Maybe it's hate, or it’s grumbling, self-righteousness, insecurity, deception, addiction, you name it. His grace and mercy want to redeem every inch, every nook and cranny.
When Paul writes that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, it also means that there is no longer an us versus them. As we (preach and) live in an age of contempt, it isn’t a matter of crafting better sermons but believing in a Better Gospel because we know the heart of the Better God.
And when our hearts, minds, and lives are devoted to proclaiming the goodness and greatness and graciousness of the Lord; when we cease showing contempt for his compassion and mercy; when we start smoking what we’re selling to a hurting and weary world; then we shall see God in all his redeeming glory.
Because when grace and mercy win, when God wins, no one loses. Amen.