A Place at God's Table--March 9, 2023

A Place at God's Table--March 9, 2023

"Now to one who works, wages are not reckoned as a gift but as something due.  But to one who without works trusts him who justifies the ungodly, such faith is reckoned as righteousness." [Romans 4:4-5]

The rules of business are as certain as the law of gravity; they're as cut and dry as the logic of mathematics.  If you are going to operate strictly by the rules of business, be warned--there's no avoiding the demands of the bottom line.

I mean that literally, of course.  If you are hired to do a job at a certain rate--say, Pennsylvania's current minimum wage of 7.25 an hour--you can do the calculations yourself to know precisely how much you should make at the end of a week, or a pay-period.  You know that the rules of mathematics put a ceiling on how much income you'll have: it's number of hours times the rate per hour, and minus taxes.  In that set-up, the company doesn't have to think about whether you will make enough money to pay for your rent or housing, or whether there will be enough for food until the next pay period, or anything at all for savings or special things. The management is allowed to remain completely oblivious to such things and only apply the cold hard algorithms of basic mathematical operations: hours times rate equals pay.  And of course, the one in the manager's position feels the same pinch from a different perspective--the rules of mathematics require that costs for running the business not exceed the income, or else the whole operation collapses.  

All of that is how the set-up works in IDEAL conditions, too.  If, God forbid, you clock in late because there was a traffic jam or an accident that blocked your route, your pay will suffer for the time you missed.  If your kid gets sick and you have to call off and stay home, that's income lost, or maybe even grounds for losing your job.  If you make a mistake and there are expenses related to it or you did something wrong with your tax information, you can end up with garnished wages, meaning there's less pay to cover the same costs.  And if you live in a time of economic inflation, the numbers on the paycheck may stay the same, but their buying power will shrink--and still, your kids need to eat and you need to make your next car payment or rent check.

All of that is to say that everybody who operates by the strict rules of business learns pretty quickly that the rest of the world just doesn't have to care about whether your income is "enough" for you to actually live on or feed your family.  It's all cold, logical math: you work for so many hours, and you get so much pay. If that's not enough to run your household and manage your affairs, the world is perfectly willing to tell you to look elsewhere, wish you luck, and say, "It's not my problem."

God, on the other hand, does not operate by the rules of business.  In fact, to hear the apostle Paul tell it, God doesn't operate at all by the mathematical logic of hours-times-rate-equals-pay.  God isn't paying wages; God gives gifts. That turns out to be deeply good news for us who are never going to "earn" our way into heaven by our own winsomeness or merits, but it does mean learning to let go of the old pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps illusion we are used to trotting out when it suits us.  It will mean surrendering the arrogant pride that let us tell ourselves we've "earned" God's love and that others just haven't been "good" enough, "righteous" enough, or "obedient" enough to deserve it.  The gospel tells us that God doesn't give out love based on earning, because that's not how love works.  God gives gifts to folks who haven't "earned" anything, because God runs things more like a family than a business.

This is the change in thinking Paul wants us to make.  While it's true that the logic of earning wages has a lot of downside to it [if you're not making enough to live on, for example], it does allow for the pride of saying, "My paycheck is what I've earned--my labor deserves this pay, and I put the work in, so I achieved this."  And again, if you can do the work and be satisfied with what you get in return, good for you.  But if we find ourselves struggling and realize that we can't do this on our own, we realize that we are in need of something that the rules of business cannot and will not supply:  we need grace.  We need someone who will say, "I'll cover your needs--just trust me on this."  That's exactly what we have been given in Jesus.

What Paul is up to here in the fourth chapter of what we call Romans is to get us to shift our thinking about how we relate to God and other people.  If we can earn our status before God, then we have room to brag. If my good deeds make God love me, or if my fervent Bible reading or stance on token culture war issues win me "points" with God, then I can claim that I have achieved my own salvation like a worker taking home a paycheck. But if it turns out that there's no amount of "stuff" I can do that would put God in my debt, then the whole notion of "earning" falls apart.  And that's just it: God doesn't run things like a business or a corporation, but like a household.  And in a household, everybody gets to eat, regardless of how much work you've done to bring a paycheck into the family.  In God's household, like in yours or mine, everybody has a place at the table even if you forgot to make your bed or do your homework, even if you sassed your mother, and even if you broke a plate last week by being clumsy.  Your status as beloved in the family does not depend on earning, because the household doesn't operate by the rules of business.  Instead, even when you are rude to others in the family, you still belong in it. Even when you are bossy and short-tempered, you still belong in the family.  Even if you are a little kid or are sick with the flu or don't bring in a paycheck from the outside world, you "count" as part of the family, because a family doesn't run on the logic of wage-earning.  

That means as the followers of Jesus we can let go of the relentless drum-beat of "Have I done enough?  How do I compare?  Have I earned God's favor?" and all the rest of those questions, because that's not how God operates toward us.  You don't have to worry that if you clocked in late you're doomed to hell because God is now docking your righteousness account and you'll fall short of points.  You don't have to compare yourself to someone else and whether they have done as much as you have or have earned their place--because nobody is there on the basis of earning.  You don't have to puff yourself up to seem more important, or pull someone else down to try and get ahead, because God is not looking to fire anybody or downsize to keep overhead costs under control.  God isn't running a business--God has gathered us into a family of grace.

Now, I can't change the way the world around us operates.  There are still lots of places where the cold, hard, ironclad rules of business are in operation and there is no room for grace.  And I get it, too, that each of us still has to live our lives with at least a foot in that world of paychecks and bottom lines, because the world in which we live is still operating on an economy of earning.  But we are sent out into the world as people who also know what it's like to be loved and to belong without concern for what anybody has earned.  We are still people who know what it is like to hear God say, "You don't have to worry about earning your keep around here--I've claimed you forever."  We are still people who have tasted a whole other way of living in the world--where we don't worry about how we measure up to anybody else or whether other people's place at the table takes away from my ability to get enough.  We have been brought into God's economy of grace, where God silences our prepared speeches about earning a place as hired laborers and insists on bringing out sandals, robe, and ring to claim us as children in the household.  The God who "justifies the ungodly" rather than firing them has welcomed us to the table and says we have a place there forever.

The good news we need today is also the word that humbles us: we are here in God's family not because we've earned it [and then we get to look down on others as though they haven't achieved it] but because God is extravagantly generous and given us a place at the table and a welcome in the family for free.  All we can do is trust what God says is already so.  That's not earning a paycheck--that's receiving a gift.

Someone you know is still stuck striving and constantly trying to earn approval or acceptance--maybe you can be the voice they need to be freed from that endless hamster-wheel life, and to look up to see a place is already set for them at God's dinner table.

Lord Jesus, let us trust your free gift and at last be done with the impulse to earn and compare what you give by grace, unearned.