Imagine right now there’s something of amazing value and it’s LOST.  Imagine that perhaps this item is so small it could even be wedged under the cushions of your couch lingering between a quarter and a stale tortilla chip.  There it is –a lottery ticket you purchased months ago, long-since forgotten.  And this isn’t just any scrap of paper.  It’s a WINNING lottery ticket.  Now imagine for a moment you rush home, tear apart your house looking for it.  Lo and behold, you find it!  What would you do first?  My guess is one of the first things you’d do is you’d call the North Carolina lottery office. “I’ve found a winning ticket” you’d say.  You’d provide the numbers, give the date and location of purchase.  Relief building upon excitement building upon dream.  But then the words would come like a thundering blow.  “I’m sorry, Mr./Mrs. So-and-so, that ticket expired yesterday.  You’re too late to be awarded the prize.”  All of your dreams evaporate like wisps of smoke blown by the wind hearing the words.  Instead of millions, all you’re left with is the depressing realization that you were too late.

  I’m afraid some of us live our lives believing that we stand immutably in the state of too late. “If only I’ve stayed in college.”  “If only I’d applied for that job.”  “If only I’d listened to my mother.”  All of these “if only” statements head in one direction.  What we believe is that “if only” we’d have done whatever it was we didn’t actually do, then our life would be happy, joyous and free.  It’s a recipe for remorse in which “It’s too late” becomes the life-draining mantra of our days.  With this outlook, God’s grace is as unintelligible as a sentence in Sanskrit.  After all, to the “too later,” grace is something they failed to earn by not coming to church or not praying enough or living dissolute lives or any host of reasons.  You see, when it comes to grace, as with so many things in their lives, “too laters” believe themselves to be even too late for God.

  But hey, that might not be you.  People are different after all.  And the parable we’ve just heard from the Gospel of Matthew shines upon us all in different ways.  Some of us here this morning, are, undoubtedly, early birds.  They’re the ones who just naturally seize the day.  They’re the kind of people who arrive ahead of time to get the best seat in the house.  They see a good deal and they immediately jump on board.  Unfortunately, a lot of folks in this category are beset by a similar problem of their own when it comes to comprehending grace. Too often early-birds look at life through lenses which cast grace not so much as a generous gift of God but rather they see it as a personal achievement.  And believing themselves to having chosen rightly, there’s oftentimes a hardness of heart when it comes to thinking about other people.  They think “those people who didn’t act as wisely as us with respect to God, well, they made their bed, now they’ve got to lie in it!”

  And so oftentimes the Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ is as foreign to these early-birds as it is to the too-laters. Each believes it’s something you earn although they believe they stand on differing sides of the equation.  So, whether you’re a too later, believing the opportunity for grace has passed you by or whether you’re an early bird, confident you’ve made the right choices to EARN God’s Grace, there’s good news for all of us in today’s reading from the Gospel of Matthew.  Jesus, in talking about the Kingdom tells a parable of laborers in the vineyard.

  Now I’m sure a lot of you are thinking this parable would be a horrible way to run a business so you just reject it.  To you let me just say this – the parable of the laborers in the vineyard isn’t the best way to run a business. It’s a parable and as Tom Long explains it “the purpose of a parable isn’t to provide practical management skills.  The aim of a parable is to be monumentally IMPRACTICAL.  To so thoroughly fracture our expectations that we’re forced to think new thoughts about ourselves, about others and about God.  So, keep it in those terms and this parable will shine brightly on you, I promise!  Talking to a group of people, some “too laters” and a great many “early birds,” Jesus says “that the Kingdom of God is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard.”

  Now look, it being an introduction, we’re bound to skip over these words as though they were the Biblical equivalent of “once upon a time” and leave it at that.  But the parable subverts our expectations IMMEDIATELY.  Consider this – would you expect Bill Gates to personally take it upon himself to hire the people boxing his software?  Of course not, he’d be too busy, right?