Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost Sermon
By Amy Sexauer MDiv '26
Ministry Fellow, the Memorial Church of Harvard University
(The following is a transcript of the service audio, Sept. 20, 2026)
Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable to you, oh Lord, my rock and my redeemer. Amen.
In today's gospel reading from Matthew, we have the parable of the workers in a vineyard. Jesus compares the kingdom of God to a landowner who hires people to work his vineyard. In this story, different groups of laborers work different amounts of time, and yet they are all paid the same amount of money. Understandably, the people who work the longest are upset that they did not earn more money than those who worked the shortest amount of time.
As readers of this story who are familiar with the teachings of Jesus, it seems unfair. The workers are not being paid fairly for their labor. This seems like the kind of Scriptural story that could be too easily manipulated into telling people to accept their suffering as God's plan. Imagine me, a white woman with a degree from Harvard, standing in this pulpit and telling my suffering friend that they should not question God's generosity. That interpretation is on the page, but I cannot stomach it. We need to be concerned with inequality in the world. And we know from Scripture that Jesus was deeply concerned with taking care of each other. So what is this story about, and how do we protect ourselves from interpretations that would perpetuate accepting inequality in the world as God's plan?
In my poor attempt at imitating Matt, I looked up the Greek of this parable, and one of the final lines contains an idiom that I found interesting. The translation of the landowner's words to his upset worker are, "Are you jealous that I am generous?" The Greek expression literally translated says, "Is your eye evil because I am generous?" Is your eye evil? Are we looking at this situation incorrectly? Is our perspective wrong because we are in this world and not seeing with the eyes of God? I don't think this parable is about work or money. I think it is about all of us having equal access to the love of God. Maybe that feels contrite or patronizing. It's easy for me to say that everyone is equal in the eyes of God, but it's hard to feel that when we're raised in a culture that does not value everyone equally.
Last year, I was getting a coffee with a friend of mine, not far from here. This friend is a fellow veteran and a member of the Harvard community. Both of us had spent the first part of our adult lives serving in the United States Army, and both of us had chosen to go back to school late in our 30s and to take dramatically different career paths from the army. We discussed the challenges of starting all over again in our 30s, of being at the bottom of the food chain in a new career field while having all this untranslatable life experience. We talked about the ways that Harvard is different from the army, mainly that everyone here is allowed to have feelings and wear what they want. We also noticed the ways in which Harvard is similar to the military. It is an organization whose power and influence do not always reflect the diversity, compassion, and humanity of its members. It is an organization so big that people turn into data. It is a place where individual human beings' worth is measured by how they perform and what they produce.
At the end of this conversation with my friend, he said something that I've been wrestling with ever since. He told me, in this next chapter of his life, he is learning to separate his value from his labor. In other words, my value as a human being is not tied to my labor. Beyond Harvard or the military, our American culture is saturated by the values of capitalism, which measures the success of any endeavor by what can be gained, that is always only interested in profit.
This parable only feels unfair when we see it with our eyes that have been trained to see each other this way, as useful or as burdens, as laborers indistinct from each other outside of what we can do. The eyes of this world will look at a Harvard student and say, "That is an investment." God says, "They are my beloved." The eyes of this world would look at our immigrant neighbors and say, "They are a liability." God says, "They are my beloved." The eyes of this world will look at an Iranian school filled with children and say they are an inevitable casualty. God says, "They are my beloved." The eyes of this world will look at a soldier on a battlefield and say, "Their life is a calculated risk." God says, "They are my beloved." The eyes of this world will look at you and say, "What more can you give me?" God says, "I love you." God says, "You are my beloved."
You do not need to achieve anything for God to pay attention to you. You do not need to do anything to be worthy of God's love. And you are not in competition with anyone for access to God. We live in a world that says, "You will never be enough," because the machine of capitalism is loud and always hungry for more. We need to be able to separate those demands from the voice of God inside us, and that's not an easy task. It's one I struggle with myself. Unhelpfully, the New Testament is full of economic metaphors, debts, ransoms, fruitful labor, the wages of sin, the price of salvation. Even in our epistle reading from today, Philippians, Paul tells us that to live is Christ and to die is gain. The word for gain could also be translated as profit. So if you believe the greatest goal is profit, then by Paul's logic, what are we doing here?
Paul is writing this letter from prison and struggling with that exact question. Wouldn't it be a relief to leave this mess, to leave all of you and go home to my Savior? Paul answers his own question when he writes, "I am hard-pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better, but to remain in the flesh is more necessary for you." In other words, you need me, and I need you. Beloved of God, there is no institution on earth that needs you. Your job doesn't need you. Capitalism doesn't need you. But I do, your family does, your friends do, your community does. The antidote to the perspective of the systems we live in is to love each other irrationally.
To us, you are not a number or a means to an end. We are not efficient machines following biblical instructions like an operating manual. We are messy humans in love with each other, in love with God, and we are in this together. In closing, I would like to leave you with more of Paul's words from his letter to the Philippians because I cannot say it any better. "I thank my God for every remembrance of you, always in every one of my prayers for all of you, praying with joy for your partnership in the goal from the first day until now. And this is my prayer: that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you determine what really matters." Amen.