Generous Complaining

September 20, 2026

Exodus 16:2-15; Matthew 20:1-16

            Our second reading takes us back to Matthew with Jesus telling a parable about the problems we have with God’s generosity.  Listen as God continues to speak to you.

            READ

            It is either fortuitous or providential… I’ll let you decide which word you prefer… that this was the week that we read Fredrick Buechner’s chapter on the Gospel as Comedy in Bible study.  Because both of our readings today are absolutely hilarious. 

            As was mentioned in the class on Wednesday, I am aware that some of you have a difficult time thinking that the Bible contains humor… or that we are allowed to recognize the humor… intentional or not… in scripture.  But if you can’t see the humor here in this story from Exodus… I… well… I just don’t know what to say.  I mean… you have a group of people who have just been set free from slavery in Egypt.  To quote from earlier in the book of Exodus… “The Egyptians became ruthless in imposing tasks on the Israelites, and made their lives bitter with hard service in mortar and brick and in every kind of field labor.  They were ruthless in all the tasks that they imposed on them.”  That was the Israelites’ experience of slavery.  Bitter.  Ruthless.  The Daughters of the Confederacy weren’t there to spin and rewrite the ancient Israelites’ experience of slavery into a gracious and benevolent economic situation where the Israelites were better off in slavery than they were in freedom.  But… in a way… they didn’t need the lie of the Lost Cause… because now free and out in the wilderness… when faced with the harsh realities of the wilderness… the Israelites themselves would complain and in their complaint, they would fondly remember their time in slavery.  Oh, it wasn’t so bad.  What?

            And the passage we read this morning wasn’t the first time they complained.  The first time was about water.  In the book, Moses’ sister Miriam has just finished this great song of praise for their deliverance.  She and all the women dancing around with tambourines singing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously.  One minute it’s all ecstatic dancing and the next it’s complaint.  What are we doing here?  This wilderness makes our time in Egypt look good.  They are just two months out from Egypt… two months… that’s all it took… that’s when the complaining in our passage starts.  “If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.”   

            Now I know… I know that the serious minded among you are right now telling yourself how that’s not funny.  Suffering isn’t funny.  Preacher-man, why are you trying to convince us that suffering is supposed to be funny.  Of course, it’s not the suffering that’s funny… it’s their reaction to the suffering.  It’s what is revealed.  It’s the timing of the complaint after just two months.  Not a one says, “I’d rather die free in the wilderness than as a slave in Egypt.”  You would think that might have at least been a possibility.  The last wounds made from the taskmaster’s lash haven’t even had time to fully heal yet and they’re already pining for slavery.  As the story is told they had just witnessed all these amazing acts of God to free them from the Egyptians.  It’s the terribleness of the final plague and the death of the first born.  It’s the passing through the Red Sea on dry ground and then watching the most powerful force on earth… the Egyptian charioteers… get swallowed up as the waters come rushing back into place.  It’s a cloud of smoke and a pillar of fire in front and back as they have traveled through the wilderness.  It’s the amazing presence of God who has provided and provided and provided.  Take all of that… and what’s funny is that after all of that… there is neither enough gratitude… nor wonder… nor sheer awe to create enough trust to stop them from complaining.  It’s that all of God’s mighty and gracious acts are met with a shrug and a “meh” and a “we were better off in Egypt in slavery.”  What more could God have done?

            That’s the punchline.  That’s the unchanging truth about us that gets revealed in the humor of it.  And maybe… maybe if these ancient Israelites had been able to see the humor of it all… maybe then they wouldn’t have spent so long wandering lost in the wilderness.  Maybe then they could let go and be open to what God was doing among them… be open to what God was trying to teach… to how God was trying to shape them into a people who lived from the very heart of God.  Because in the very next chapter… in the passage we will read from Exodus next Sunday… they complain again.  And in time, the quail and the manna will get on their nerves too.  It’s not good enough.  God isn’t lifting them up as the world says they ought to be lifted up.  Sure… sure… they were oppressed slaves back in Egypt, but they were well-fed oppressed slaves.  And there was a bit of variety on their plates.  That weighed heavier on their scales of value and importance more than what God was doing… what God was wanting them to become.

            Like many of his parables, Jesus’ parable of the laborers in the vineyard has humor.  It’s the humor of the surprise twist.  The juxtaposition of what God does compared to what we… if we were in the role of God… thinks God should do.  That’s what would always trip up the Pharisees and the like when they heard the parables.  They couldn’t see the joke… because oftentimes the joke was on them.  It revealed something about them they didn’t like being so freely shown.  They couldn’t laugh at themselves when Jesus told his parables… let the tension loose and see what Jesus was doing… what truth he was revealing.  They couldn’t hear God speak because they were too quick to speak for God and then complain about it when others weren’t listening to them… or respecting the absolute authority of their words. 

            That’s the same tension in this story when the workers come to get paid at the end of the day.  If we were to imagine we were the day laborers who put in a full day’s work for a full day’s pay, we might also want to complain to the vineyard owner, “No.  You don’t understand.  You aren’t being generous.  If you were truly generous then we would have gotten more.  We should have gotten more.  If you were truly being generous then your generosity would also trickle down onto us so that we can enjoy it as well… instead of your generosity being shown only to these few who didn’t earn it.  After all, we deserve your generosity more than these others.  It’s not envy or greed that we feel, but it is justice that we’re concerned about.  Your generosity isn’t just.”  I like that sentence.  Your generosity isn’t just.  A generous laugh track gives that sentence exactly what it deserves.

            This is one of those parables where it’s so easy to image yourself there in the scene… where you can hear all the different arguments going on.  There are plenty of opportunities for truth telling laughs at ourselves.  From the ones who worked the least, you can hear them grumbling as they want to make sure to get away before the landowner changes his mind, “Hey man, don’t ruin it for us with your complaining.”  And back to those grumbling workers who weren’t cheated out of anything… who didn’t get less… but just feel like they didn’t get as good of a deal as these others… it keeps coming back down to this sense of justice… of getting what we earned… getting what we deserve… even if it’s not measured by the actual work we do, but by what these others who were last were given.  They shouldn’t be treated the same.  It’s the unspoken contract… you earn according to the work you put in.  If these who worked less earned a full day’s pay for what they put in… then it’s only right that those of us who worked longer should get more… just to keep things even… just to keep things fair.  That’s still the unspoken contract we work from, isn’t it?  It’s this idea of fairness.  We should all be treated the same… no special consideration… equality across the board… unless I feel I’m due a little bit more equality.  God should love all equally… just some more equally than others.

            Was it fair to die free in the wilderness as compared to living in slavery with plenty of water and meat to eat?  God doesn’t have a love problem.  God has a giving problem.  God gives too much of things we don’t want but need… and not enough of the things we want but don’t always need.  “Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?  Or are you envious because I am generous?”  That’s the punchline to the parable.  Am I not free to be the God I choose to be? 

            What if… what if Jesus is saying with this parable that the kingdom of heaven isn’t fair?  What if Jesus is saying that the kingdom of heaven isn’t earned or deserved. What if those words don’t have any real grounding in the kingdom of heaven?  What if Jesus is saying that the kingdom of heaven is generous and its generosity comes from a God who does what God wants with what belongs to God?  Grace… by our definitions of what is fair and just… grace undermines both.  Do you see the humor that creates?  Especially as we try to be good Christians giving grace to those who we feel may need it… grace as charity… too often believed necessary for some but not needed by all.  Not needed by those of us who can put in a full day’s work.  And don’t we carry a bit of resentment for our obviously grace-reliant brothers and sisters? 

             God’s generosity often unsettles us before it comforts us. The Israelites could not quite trust the freedom they had been given, so they reached back for the predictability of Egypt. The workers in the vineyard could not quite trust the goodness of the landowner, so they reached for the familiar logic of fairness. Both groups were standing in front of a gift freely given with love, and both struggled to see it as a gift.  Because deep down, we trust our own sense of fairness more than we trust God’s generosity.

            Jesus tells this parable because he knows how hard it is for us to believe that God’s generosity is truly for us… simply because God delights in giving.  There’s got to be a hidden catch somewhere.  Check the fine print.  We live in a world that teaches us to measure everything, including our worth, and it becomes second nature to assume that someone else’s blessing must mean less for us. But the kingdom of heaven doesn’t work that way. It isn’t built on fairness. It’s built on a generous grace that is going to upset our norms… that is going to create unexpected humor.

            Maybe that’s why the humor matters.  A good laugh can free us to recognize the ways we cling to old habits of thought, the ways we look at God’s provision and say, “This isn’t quite what I had in mind.” Humor helps us see that God’s generosity is not meant to diminish us, but to free us. Free us from comparison. Free us from resentment. Free us from the exhausting work of trying to earn what God has already promised so that we can become the people of that promise.  So that we can operate from the point of God’s grace rather than our limited and compromised definitions of fairness and justice.

            Who would have thought the generous graciousness of God could cause so many problems.  That God’s generosity would lead to such generous complaining.  That’s the joke.  Cue the laugh track, the mugging to camera, and fade out.  End scene.  Amen.