When I got out of the army, I tried
to go back to the radio station where I had been working before I was
drafted. They didn’t only want a disc
jockey, they also wanted me to be an engineer so that they could easily fulfil
the Federal Communication Commission’s requirement for every station to have
qualified engineers as well as announcers on their staff. I would have had to go to a special school
for several weeks and get a certificate.
I didn’t want to do this, so I told Rosie that I was going to apply to a
television station for employment as an announcer. She told me that they better pay me more than
the radio station had paid me. I went
off to audition. Fortunately, I got the
job and came back and told her of my fortune and of the considerable increase
in salary that accompanied it. I loved
that work. It was back before the days
of teleprompters, so I had to memorize all of the commercials; and I learned to
do the weather there.
Working has always been important to
me. I have enjoyed all of the careers
that I have chosen. When
the last TV station that employed me went bankrupt in the early seventies, I
spoke to the bishop of Pittsburgh about being an Episcopal priest. He was enthusiastic about that and made sure
that I was enrolled in Virginia Seminary that September. I did well in the seminary, graduated and was
ordained. I have loved this profession,
serving a number of churches and meeting some of the best people that I could
ever have known.
In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus is trying
to describe the Kingdom of Heaven to his listeners. He tells them that it is
like a landowner who goes out in the morning to hire laborers for his
vineyard. He agrees with them on a daily
wage. He then goes out several more
times and hires more laborers each time.
At the end of the day, he pays them all the same wage that he agreed to
pay those who were hired first. The
early workers were upset and complained that they ought to be paid more. The landowner pointed out to them that they
had agreed when they were hired to be paid what they received. He told them that he ought to be able to do
as he pleased with his own money. He
finished this comment by saying the last
shall be first and the first will be last.
This
is Jesus’ description of the Kingdom of Heaven, not the economy in which we
live. That is important for us to
know. There are a lot of inequities in
the world in which we live. Jesus is telling us that those inequities will
disappear when we come into his kingdom, even if we don’t think that it is fair
that the least who are among us are treated as we are.
That is a beautiful description of
God’s kingdom, where love is the predominant feature. It is love that we are taught needs to be the
foundation of our world also. When we
love, we learn to forgive and to accept our differences. Ultimately this results in our learning from
each other, not constantly arguing. If
we can learn this, wars will cease and our economies will prosper and all of us
will live lives that make much more sense that then ones that we are living
now. That is what Jesus is trying to
teach to both his apostles and the crowds that come to hear him. He gathered up all of the hatred in the
world, went to Jerusalem and presented himself to the authorities, who arrested
him, handed him over to Pilate who ordered him to be whipped and
crucified. God’s response to this
incredible demonstration of hatred was the incredible love of Jesus’ resurrection. That is the message that we need to hold in
our hearts as the essence of our religion.
To learn to love above all things is the way of life that our God gives
us. When we learn this, our world will
drastically change.
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