Preached on Sunday, September 20, 2026, the Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost, at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Little Rock.

“The landowner said to the laborer, ‘I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you.’” (Matthew 20:14)

There is a moment in today’s Gospel when everything seems to be going just as we would expect. The workday is over, and the laborers have come in from the vineyard. Those who have worked since sunrise are tired and hot, and now it is time to be paid. And then, the people who arrived at five o’clock, who worked only one hour, step forward, and the landowner gives each of them a full day’s wage.

Now, if you had been standing there since sunrise, you would probably begin doing the math. If they received a full day’s wage for one hour, then surely, we are about to receive more. But then your turn comes, and the landowner places exactly the same coin into your hand. What gives?

“These last worked only one hour,” they say, “and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden and heat of the day.” Frankly, you can understand the complaint. But the landowner says, “Friend, I am doing you no wrong. Did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage?” And he’s right: he has given them exactly what he promised; he has cheated no one.

And that matters enormously, because generosity never excuses injustice. If you owe somebody something, says Jesus, give it to them. If you have made a promise, keep it. If someone has earned a wage, pay it. The landowner does not become generous by giving the first workers less. He gives them exactly what he owes them. But then he does something more: “I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you.”

“I choose to give.” Those may be the most important words in the whole parable, because they take us beyond one of the basic questions by which we order so much of our lives: What do I owe? We ask that question all the time. What do I owe? What does this person owe me? We make agreements, we keep accounts, and we try to give people what is due to them. And thank God we do, because a world in which nobody receives what they are owed would be a terribly cruel world. 

But it would also be a terribly small life if that were the only question we ever learned to ask. There is another question, and it is the question the landowner asks himself: not simply, “What do I owe?” but, “What do I choose to give?” 

Think about the people who have mattered most in your own life. Very often, they are people who gave you something they did not owe you. Someone gave you more time than the situation required. Someone forgave you when you could not undo what you had done. Someone opened a door for you, believed in you, or stayed when they could have walked away. You could not have demanded those things. They were given to you.

Jesus tells us this strange and admittedly irritating story because he wants us to see that this is what God is like. God says, “I choose to give.” God does not give us life because we first earned it. God does not love us because we have made ourselves sufficiently lovable. God does not forgive us because we have managed to repay what we owe. God does not send Jesus Christ into the world after looking over the books and deciding that humanity has finally accumulated enough merit. God gives because God chooses to give. And that is what we Christians mean by grace.

The difficulty, of course, is that grace can be rather hard to live with when somebody else is receiving it. The workers who had been there all day were not angry because the landowner had given them too little. They were angry because he had given somebody else too much. And that comes rather close to us. We can be content with what we have until we see what somebody else has received. We can be grateful for mercy until mercy is shown to someone whom we think deserves it less. We can rejoice in grace right up until grace begins to look unfair.

But that is precisely the point. Grace is not a wage. It’s a gift. And when we begin to understand that everything we have received from God is a gift, something begins to happen to us. We become a little less interested in keeping score and a little less anxious about whether every relationship has come out perfectly even. We begin, perhaps, to discover something of the freedom of that ‘ole landowner, who can look at what he has and simply say, “I choose to give.”

And that is what we are doing as we enter another stewardship season here at Trinity. Of course there are budgets, salaries, ministries, buildings, and programs, and all of those things matter, but Christian giving begins somewhere deeper than a budget. It begins by remembering what we have received: life and forgiveness, community and hope, and above all, Jesus Christ Himself. Having remembered what God has chosen to give to us, we are free to ask what we, in turn, might choose to give.

That certainly includes money, but it also includes time, attention, patience, hospitality, forgiveness, love. The Christian life is not a life in which justice no longer matters, or promises no longer matter, or people are denied what they are due. But neither is it a life that ends with the question, “What do I owe?” That’s a  necessary question, but it’s not yet the Gospel.

The Gospel is that God looks upon people who could never earn what God is about to give them, opens His hand, and says, “I choose to give.” And having received such grace ourselves, perhaps we might learn to open our hands and say the same. Amen.