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Plenty For All
A sermon text by Rev. Robin Lunn at First Congregational Church UCC in Salem Oregon
Just Peace Sunday · September 20, 2026
Lfting up our Just Peace covenant with the UCC
Readings: Matthew 20:1–16 and Jonah 3:10–4:11.
Shared here in full by request — the version preached from the pulpit was shorter. A note on sources follows the sermon.
1. It isn't fair
The children heard it first this morning, and they were right to say it out loud: it's not fair. We teach ourselves to grow out of that sentence, but I want us to stay in it a little longer, because Jesus told a whole story to keep us there.
A householder hires workers for the vineyard at dawn and agrees to pay them a denarius for the day. Then he goes out again — at nine, at noon, at three, at five o'clock — and hires more. When evening comes, he pays them all the same. The ones hired last, who worked a single hour, receive a denarius. And the ones hired first, who bore the whole day and the scorching heat, receive the same — a denarius.
And they are furious. Listen to exactly what they say: you have made them equal to us. Not "you cheated us" — because he didn't. They got precisely what they agreed to that morning, gladly. Their complaint isn't that they were wronged. Their complaint is that someone else received enough. Hold onto that, because it is the hinge of everything in this story. The offense in this parable is not injustice done to the grumblers. The offense is generosity done to somebody else.
2. What a denarius is
To feel the scandal, you have to know what a denarius was. It was a day's wage for a day laborer — and a day laborer was among the most precarious people in the ancient world. Landless, hired one morning at a time, no security of any kind. The denarius was a subsistence wage: roughly what it took to feed a family for a single day. Bread, and not much else.
So picture the ones still standing in the marketplace at five o'clock. We sometimes read them as loafers — the text even seems to call them idle. But the Greek doesn't say lazy. It says without work. When the householder asks why they've stood there all day, their answer is not a shrug, it's an indictment: because no one has hired us. They are not idle. They are unchosen. And their families will not eat tonight unless someone takes them on.
And someone does. The householder goes out one more time, at the last hour, and brings them in — and then makes sure they receive the whole day's bread anyway. That's the heart of it. He looks at the people the marketplace had no use for and decides that they, too, will eat. Whatever else this parable is, it is first of all a story about a vineyard where everyone goes home fed.
3. A full day's labor, and no bread
Now carry that vineyard out these doors and into our own economy, because the ache in this parable is not ancient. It is this morning.
A full day's labor no longer buys a full day's bread. I want to say that plainly, with numbers you can check. Our federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour — frozen there since 2009. Work it full-time, every week of the year, and you earn about fifteen thousand dollars. The federal poverty line for one person is a little above that. Sit with what that means: the wage floor our government sets is beneath the poverty line our government draws. You can do everything right — show up, work full-time, all year — and be, by our own official measure, poor.
And it does not stop at one person. Two adults, both working full-time at that wage, still land below the poverty line for a family of four. Two full-time jobs, and still poor. And poverty, remember, is only the floor of destitution —
What it actually costs to live in a modest American town, to cover rent and food and a car and a doctor and a phone, is more than double that line. There is a whole canyon between "not officially poor" and "able to live."
Here is the sentence I keep coming back to. The denarius was a subsistence wage — it at least fed the family for the day. Our minimum wage does not clear even our own government's line for survival. The householder in the parable paid enough. Our marketplace floor pays less than enough. The generosity Jesus describes has become something our economy can no longer manage.
4. Follow the money up — and where fear leads
And this is not a law of nature. Bread did not become scarce. The harvest is enormous. So follow the money up and see where it went.
There are two ways to receive money in this country, and they are not the same. One is to earn it — to trade your hours and your body for a wage. That income stops when you stop, it is capped by the hours in a day, and it is taxed at the highest rates we levy. The other is to own assets — to receive money from capital, from stocks and property and equity. That income arrives whether or not you lift a finger, it compounds because returns earn their own returns, and it is taxed at a much lower rate than the wage of the person who works. The top one-tenth of households now holds around two-thirds of the nation's wealth; the bottom half holds almost none. This is the arrangement. It is not an accident.
And here is the thing I most want us to see, because it is the reason we gather on Just Peace Sunday at all. The lie underneath all of this is not that anyone goes hungry — people do — but that there isn't enough to go around. And that lie makes us afraid, and fear closes our hand. On the small scale it makes the early workers begrudge the latecomers their bread. On the largest scale it makes nations begrudge one another their security — and a frightened nation reaches for the weapon and calls the result peace. "Peace through strength" is scarcity logic with a military budget: the conviction that there will never be enough, so we had better arm ourselves against everyone who might take our share. It is the same fear in the vineyard and in the war room. And it is the same lie in both places, because in God's economy there was always enough. The householder proved it at sundown.
5. Notice which way the anger runs
Now watch something in the parable that is easy to miss. When the grumbling comes, notice which direction it travels. The first workers do not turn to the householder and ask why anyone should have to stand in a marketplace at dawn hoping to be chosen. They do not question the whole arrangement of day-labor that leaves people unhired and hungry. They turn sideways — against the workers beside them. Their anger runs horizontally, toward the people who got the same bread they did, and never once upward, toward the power that set the terms.
I think that is the most honest mirror in the story. Because that is exactly how we are taught to be angry. We are invited, endlessly, to resent the people beside us and below us, never the ones above us — to argue about who in the subsistence class deserves the denarius, who is working hard enough for their bread, who is getting something they didn't earn — while the arrangement that keeps nearly all of us hiring ourselves out by the day, and lets the landowner earn compound interest, goes politely unquestioned. The householder names it with a question that cuts: is your eye evil because I am generous? The complaint was never about justice. You got what was just. The complaint is that you cannot bear to watch someone else be given enough.
But let me be careful here, because the line I just drew is too clean, and it cuts more than one way. There isn't a wall between working people and owners; it's more like a turnstile that only opens above a certain wage. At the bottom you live purely on what you earn — there is never anything left over to become anything else. But climb, and the surplus begins to carry you through the gate: first a retirement account, then some stocks, then maybe a second property that earns while you sleep. Nine in ten of the highest-earning households hold retirement wealth; only about one in eight of the lowest-earning do. So the person making four hundred thousand dollars and the person making thirty-four thousand do not stand in the same place. The first already has a foot on the owning side, drawing income that compounds and is taxed more gently than her wages. The second will never be let through the turnstile at all. That is the deeper injustice — not simply that some earn more, but that the system lets the comfortable buy their way onto the side where money makes money, and bars everyone at subsistence from ever setting foot there. So the one who is actually going hungry should never hear "we're all struggling together". That is erasure. And the oldest trick in the vineyard is to keep all of us who still need a paycheck fighting each other, and never noticing the turnstile.
6. Jonah, who could not bear the mercy
If we think this resentment of another's blessing is a modern sickness, our first reading corrects us. Jonah has just watched the great city of Nineveh — the capital of the empire that would one day destroy his people — turn and repent, and watched God relent from destroying it. And Jonah is not relieved. Jonah is enraged. He would rather die than live in a world where God is that merciful to those people. He even throws God's own words back in God's face — the ancient confession that God is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, overflowing with steadfast love — and he says, in effect, this is exactly what I was afraid of.
It is the vineyard again. The grumbling laborers and the sulking prophet are making the same complaint across the centuries: you, O God, have been generous to someone I did not think deserved it. And it is worth hearing that the word Matthew uses for the workers' grumbling is the very word the Greek Scriptures use for Israel murmuring in the wilderness over the manna — the bread that fell fresh each morning, enough for everyone, that could not be hoarded. Scarcity-panic in the face of God's enough. Jonah's story ends not with an answer but with a question left hanging in the air, about a great city and all its people and even its animals — God asking, essentially, should I not care about them? The book refuses to answer for us. It makes us sit inside the question. So does the vineyard.
7. The saint and the subversive
Dom Hélder Câmara, the Brazilian archbishop, said it as plainly as it can be said: When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.
Hold the parable up against that line, honestly, and here is what we have to admit. The householder is standing at the saint's pole. He gives real bread to real people who were about to go without — and that is genuinely good; do not let anyone talk you out of the goodness of it. But look at what the story does not touch. It is one day. The five o'clock workers eat tonight. Nothing in the parable hires them tomorrow. At dawn they are back in the marketplace, standing around unchosen, hoping the householder happens to come out again. The generosity is an event, not a structure. It runs entirely on the householder's character — and a good owner, however kind, is not a just system. Change the owner's mood and the workers starve.
We have a very sophisticated modern version of the saint's pole. It tells the bright and the well-meaning to earn as much as they possibly can, by whatever the market allows, and then to give it away as efficiently as possible to relieve the most suffering per dollar. It is generosity optimized to the decimal point — and it never once asks how the fortune was made, because the fortune is the engine of the giving.
And it always says the same word first: not yet. Give it away later — when the company is finished, when the fortune is whole, when I finally have enough. The young Bill Gates, a billionaire in his thirties, meant to give his away someday, after Microsoft, after he turned sixty. But someday keeps moving, because "enough" is not a number. Ask where the line is — one million? five? a hundred and sixty-eight billion? — and no one can name it, because the line was never a sum; it sits just past wherever you stand and recedes exactly as fast as you walk toward it. Scripture already knew this man: the one whose harvest was so large he tore down his barns to build bigger ones, and heard God say, this very night your life is required of you. He died at "not yet."
So this is the householder with a spreadsheet — and notice, it never becomes subversive. It will feed a thousand people and never ask why they were hungry. It is the opposite of the vineyard in one decisive detail: the householder paid everyone the full day's bread at sundown — not someday, not when it was convenient, but now. Earning-to-give says wait; the vineyard says tonight. And waiting is exactly where power prefers us to stand, because a charity that keeps deferring — and never asks the deeper question — costs the powerful nothing at all.
8. What the parable will not build
So I will say something you might not expect a preacher to say about a parable of Jesus: I don't think this one goes far enough. It doesn't make the vineyard a cooperative. It doesn't give the workers the land. It leaves them dependent, at the end of the day, on being chosen again tomorrow. And I have come to believe that its refusal to go further is not a flaw in the story. It is the story doing its work on us.
Because Scripture does know how to go further. Set the parable beside the book of Leviticus, chapter 25 in particular, beside the year of Jubilee, where every fifty years the land itself returns to the families who lost it — not because a kind owner chooses to give it back, but because it is the law, and no one's goodness is required. Set it beside the sabbatical year, where debts are simply released. This is God legislating against exactly the thing our economy is built on: the permanent separation of people from the means of their own life. And when Jesus says, as he does, "you always have the poor with you," he is not shrugging. He is quoting that very law — the sabbatical command in Deuteronomy — whose next line is, therefore open your hand. It was never resignation. It was always a goad.
So let the parable leave you unsatisfied. Let it put a single day of enough on your tongue and then set you back down in a Monday marketplace that runs on the opposite logic — and let the taste make that marketplace unbearable. The parable hands you a hunger for the structure it declines to build. That hunger is not you being ungrateful for grace. That hunger is the call.
9. And we have made a covenant about exactly this
Here is the astonishing thing, and the reason we are lifting up our Just Peace covenant today. We have already promised to build what the parable declines to build. It is in our own covenant, in the plainest language.
When the national United Church of Christ named itself a Just Peace Church in 1985, it did not settle for asking the churches to be generous. It named shalom — the vision of a world where everyone has enough and no one lives in fear — as the center of our life. And then it got specific. It called us to work for the redistribution of assets, including land, and for the reduction of concentrated economic and political power. That is the Year of Jubilee written into policy prose. It called us to move money out of the machinery of war and into the hands of the poor — which is the very turn from scarcity-fear to shared enough that this whole morning has been circling. And it named, among the marks of a Just Peace Church, both a community of repentance, honest about our own tangled part in structural harm, and a community of resistance, standing against the arrangements that are comfortable with injustice.
And crucially, our covenant refuses to make us choose. It names two journeys and holds them together: the inward journey of prayer, care, and mutual support, and the outward journey of political witness and structural change. Not one and then the other. Not comfort or justice. Câmara fed the poor and asked why they were poor. Our covenant asks us to be the saint and the subversive at once — to hand over the bread tonight and to keep asking, out loud, why the marketplace leaves anyone standing unchosen at dawn.
10. Learning to build it, and singing our way there
Today, we are not promising this in the abstract. In this building, we have begun — haltingly, imperfectly — to try to live it. The Justice and Resilience Collaborative is our attempt to be both things at once under one roof: to be a place of care and spiritual grounding for the people doing justice work, and a home base for the organizing that goes after the conditions themselves, four blocks from the Capitol. Not charity handed down from above. A place built on listening first, on joining the work others are already doing rather than deciding on our neighbors' behalf, on sharing power rather than dispensing it. It is, in its own way, a resurrecting church learning to give its building over instead of guarding it — which is nothing less than the last becoming first, and dying in order to live, worked out in brick and schedule.
And I want to be honest about it the way the parable is honest, because we are not the generous householder let gently off the hook. We are older, whiter, more settled than the neighborhood we mean to serve. We have not yet done all the work we are called to do around inclusion and bias. We name that plainly, and we stay on the hook — because a community of repentance is not one that has arrived, but one that keeps turning toward the life it has not yet reached.
So let the parable leave you hungry. Plenty for all is not yet — not in that marketplace, not in ours. But we have tasted it: one day in the vineyard when everyone went home fed. We have made a covenant to build toward it. And in a moment we will rise and sing the prayer that our own tradition places at the heart of that covenant — lead us from death to life, from despair to hope, from war to peace. That is not a wish. It is a direction. It is the road out of the marketplace of scarcity and fear, toward the vineyard where there is enough — enough for the first and the last, enough for the early and the unchosen, enough, at last, for all. Amen.
Sources and notes
For anyone who wants to check the numbers and references behind this sermon.
The economic figures. The federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour has been unchanged since 2009 (U.S. Department of Labor). Federal poverty guidelines are set each January by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, so the exact figures shift year to year. That a living wage runs more than double the poverty line is drawn from MIT's Living Wage Calculator (livingwage.mit.edu). That the top tenth of households holds roughly two-thirds of the nation's wealth, and the bottom half almost none, is from the Federal Reserve's Distributional Financial Accounts. That income from capital is taxed at a lower top rate than income from wages reflects current U.S. tax law — long-term capital gains topping out near 24 percent including the investment surtax, against a top wage rate of 37 percent (IRS). The contrast in retirement wealth — roughly nine in ten of the highest-earning households hold it, against about one in eight of the lowest-earning — comes from the Federal Reserve's 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances (households earning above $150,000 versus below $30,000).
The parable and the Greek. Reading the five o'clock laborers as "without work" rather than idle rests on the Greek argos in Matthew 20:6. The echo between the workers' "grumbling" and Israel's murmuring over the manna turns on the shared Greek verb gongyzō, used in the Septuagint of Exodus 16. The denarius as a subsistence day-wage is standard in New Testament scholarship (cf. Matthew 20:2).
The other texts. Jonah 3:10–4:11. The man who tears down his barns to build bigger ones is Luke 12:16–21. The year of Jubilee is Leviticus 25; the sabbatical release of debts and the command to "open your hand" are Deuteronomy 15:1–11 — the passage behind Jesus' words "you always have the poor with you" (Matthew 26:11; Mark 14:7; John 12:8).
Câmara and Gates. The saying "When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint; when I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist" is attributed to Dom Hélder Câmara (1909–1999), archbishop of Olinda and Recife. The point about deferred giving reflects the documented arc of Bill Gates's philanthropy — a billionaire by the mid-1980s who turned to large-scale giving only later, founding what became the Gates Foundation in 2000; the words here are not a quotation of him.
The Jubilee. The sermon's redistribution language draws on the Jubilee legislation of Leviticus 25, part of the Holiness Code (Leviticus 17–26). Every fiftieth year — announced by the ram's horn (Hebrew yovel, which names both the trumpet and the year) on the Day of Atonement — ancestral land returned to the families who had lost it, indentured Israelites went free, and the land itself rested. The rationale is theological: "the land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants" (Leviticus 25:23) — because the land belongs to God, no one may accumulate it forever or be permanently dispossessed of it. Jacob Milgrom's Leviticus commentary reads the chapter as a graduated defense against destitution and notes parallels in ancient Near Eastern royal "release" edicts. Whether Israel ever fully practiced the Jubilee is debated — many read it as an ideal or program rather than a documented institution — but its vision carries into the prophets and into Jesus' first sermon at Nazareth, where he proclaims "the year of the Lord's favor" from Isaiah 61 (Luke 4:16–21), long read as a Jubilee proclamation. The "Sabbath economics" framing this sermon leans on — the sabbatical and Jubilee laws as a standing indictment of permanent debt and dispossession — follows Ched Myers, The Biblical Vision of Sabbath Economics, and Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance and The Land.
The covenant and the prayer. The Just Peace commitments — shalom at the center; the call to redistribute assets including land and to reduce concentrations of economic and political power; the move of resources from war to the poor; the marks of a community of repentance and of resistance; the inward and outward journeys held together — are from "Affirming the United Church of Christ as a Just Peace Church," the pronouncement of the Fifteenth General Synod (1985), and its companion Proposal for Action. The closing prayer, "Lead us from death to life… from war to peace," is the World Peace Prayer that the same Proposal for Action commends; it is sung here as "Lead Us from Death to Life" (New Century Hymnal 581).
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