Trouble at Vineyard

From a sermon preached at St Andrew’s Dawson Street Methodist Church, Crook, Sunday 18th September 2011 by Ray Anglesea





How many trade union members does it take to change a light bulb? Fourteen. One to screw in the bulb. Two to hold him on the step ladder. Four to hold the step ladder steady. One to flick the switch to test the bulb. One to make sure that the other bulbs in the room will need fixing. One to supervise. Two to take a coffee break, one to eat lunch, and one to sleep!


We may laugh at this Trade Union joke but one of the great inventions of modern Western society according to the theologian and writer, Tom Wright, former Bishop of Durham, has been the trade union. A trade union, as many of you know who, like me, have been paid up rank and file members, is an organization of workers who bargains and negotiates with its employer for better working conditions, wages and benefits. At last week’s annual TUC congress held in London, Union activists discussed calls for co-ordinated industrial action in protest at the Government's controversial policies on pensions and spending cuts. Despite Ed Miliband’s pleas to forego strike action to his union colleagues that helped elect him, disruption is likely this November. Three million state employees are to be balloted about strike action, bringing schools, colleges, universities, courts, ports and job centres to a standstill. It will be the strongest industrial act of defiance yet against the government's cuts programme.

The British Trade Union movement can trace its origins back to the Dorset Tolpuddle martyrs. Five of the six 1834 martyrs who risked the wrath of landowners calling for better wages and conditions were prominent Primitive Methodists, village men of faith.“Their trade unionism grew out of their faith,” said the Rev'd Dr. Leslie Griffiths, The Lord Griffiths of Burry Port, former President of the Methodist Conference and Superintendent Minister at Wesley’s Chapel London. Primitive Methodism has always been marked by a strong tradition of political activism especially for its allegiance to the Labour Movement; it served as a kind of midwife in the birth of English socialism. You will remember the saying that the Labour party owes more to Methodism than it does to Marx.


It was during the industrial revolution that trade unions became popular. Here in Crook the town’s fortunes changed in 1844 when the first pit was opened by Messrs Pease & Partners; by the 1860’s there were a total of 26 mines in and around the Crook area. By the end of the nineteenth century Crook had been transformed into a thriving town. Our own James Robson from West Auckland was a prominent British trade unionist; elected President of the Durham Miners' Association, serving until his death in 1934; he also served as Treasurer of the Miners' Federation of Great Britain and was a member of the Methodist New Connexion. Peter Lee was another. A preacher and a primitive Methodist he gave his name to a new town in County Durham. And here too we pay tribute to the late Geoff Waterfield chair of the Redcar steelworks multi-union committee who spearheaded the campaign to save steel-making in Redcar.


But over the course of the twentieth century trade union activity was set to change. The Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher, rightly or wrongly, was determined to break the power of the trade unions. Even so, trade unions are still the largest voluntary organisation in the country but with declining membership together with the central question of British politics today - the need to reduce the deficit – this has placed the trade union movement in an invidious position. If the trade union movement is to survive it needs to find a way to reinvent itself or else decline will be terminal. The role of the unions has become something quite different from what our Primitive Methodist fathers and mothers envisaged. Today we live in difficult economic times; health service managers who don’t know whether there will be a job next year; employees in welfare charities whose central government and local authority funding is being cut at the very time when demands are increasing; armed service personnel who will gradually be made redundant in the next few years. It can’t be an enviable job to be a government minister who, in coping with the extent of the deficit, has to trim budgets and deal with the backlash from people whose livelihood suddenly comes under threat.


Today’s trade unions would have been horrified at the story Jesus told about the employer we find this morning in Matthew’s gospel and the workers who laboured at various times of the day. I am sure if what we just read in the Gospel took place today, there would be a huge hue and cry. Salaries are linked to hours of work; a skilled worker gets more than an unskilled worker; if workers have the same skills, the same hours of work and similar responsibilities, we expect them to get the same wages.


Matthew sets the parable in the context of the Palestinian September grape harvest. This picture was the kind of thing which could happen in the market place of any Jewish village or town. If the harvest had not been gathered in before the rains broke then it would be ruined. To get the harvest in was a frantic race against time. The kingdom of heaven is likened to how a landowner treated his day labourers during the grape harvest. By agreement they all get the same, one denarius, a subsistence wage for a family for one day; standard pay but not generous. What is surprising is that the landowner does not ensure he has a full workforce at the beginning of the day. He is prepared to accept fresh workers almost up to the end. These get paid first – one denarius – a financial symbol of what is enough to provide food, clothing, and shelter — the basics of human dignity for a worker and the worker’s family. It also gives the others hope that they will get a fat bonus. But no they get what was agreed, one denarius, they have no reason to complain. Some are treated very generously but none are treated unjustly. The story we read this morning asserts the value and worth of human labour. It is good and right that we should work. The story also suggest something more than trade union law, employment law or equal opportunities.


We can of course read the parable on many levels. We can see something of the comfort that God gives. Whether you discover, rediscover God late or soon, in the first flush of youth, the amber years of mid age, or the shadowing of lengthening years, you are equally dear and precious to him. We can see something of the compassion of God – there is an element of human tenderness in the story. The vineyard owner gives the labourers work emphasising the right of every man and woman to work and to expect a living wage.


But look at the last group of workers, the ones who were hired when only one hour of the day was left. The vineyard owner questions them: why haven’t you been working? There answer is revealing: nobody has hired us, nobody has given us a job. Nobody in other words wanted them. In today’s terms these are people who are long-term unemployed. Most frightening of all is the evidence that, in some places, unemployment is a third-generation issue. Work is simply not available. What does this say about the dignity and self-esteem of a household, a family, a neighbourhood? From my own experience of working in the inner cities this life is a social reality, the combined result of shifts in government policy and the forces of global markets. It is not a symptom of local indolence or moral turpitude. There are whole neighbourhoods where, for years, no one has said: “I have a job for you, and it will pay a living wage.” The twist in the parable’s tale is not simply that those who worked the shortest time got the same as the others; it is that these were the people whom no one else wanted, the bottom of the social pile. But they, too, received the living wage, and the dignity of the opportunity to labour for it. As Christians, our voices should be heard asking for an account from those who manage economies in the Eurozone as leaders battle to keep the faith as the Greek rescue descends into chaos amidst bankruptcy fears, as well as nationally, particularly as our jobless total soared to 2.6 million this week as the cuts begin to bite. Our standard of measure is the generosity of God, not the meanness of market forces.


But the thrust of the story in chapter 20 for me is not so much about the nature of God, his compassion, his goodness, his comfort, or the need to manage economic and financial markets and trade union reform. The parable is intended more of a warning to the disciples, that those at the front would end up at the back and those at the back would end up at the front, the last first and the first last. Jesus warns his disciples - just because you’ve been close to me so far, don’t think you are now the favoured few for all time, just because I am in bringing in the kingdom of heaven - don’t think that you are going to become rich and famous. That’s not the sort of thing I am about, that’s not the sort of thing God’s kingdom is about. You may well have set out with me from Galilee from the beginning but others may well come in much later and end up getting paid just the same, the regular daily wage.


There is always the danger that we get cross with God over this. People who work in church circles can easily assume that they are the special ones, God’s inner circle. I see it all the time as I work in the cathedral bookshop, ambitious clergy climbing the candlestick who use their power and influence to promote their own status and a pretty rectory, those who name drop, “when I was speaking to the Archbishop of Canterbury the other day” “Oh Rowan this and Rowan that,” “and yes of course, my dear, I already have an invitation to sit in the choir stalls for the enthronement service for the new Bishop of Durham.” And it is so easy to run the church without God, as if it was our club, in our own strength with our own skills.


The point of the story this morning is that what people get from having served God and his kingdom is not actually a wage at all, it’s not strictly a reward for work done, an honoury title, a seat in the choir stalls. God doesn’t make contracts with us like our trade union stewards as if our Primitive Methodist fathers and mothers in the faith could bargain or negotiate for a better deal. He does make a covenant with us. He promises us everything and asks of us everything in return. When he keeps his promises he is not rewarding us for effort but doing what comes naturally to his overflowing nature. In reality, God is out there in the market place, looking for people everybody else tried to ignore, welcoming them on the same terms and surprising them with his generous grace – all that God gives is grace. We cannot earn what God gives us, we cannot deserve it, we cannot put God in our debt, what God gives us is given out of the goodness of his heart, out of his grace, what God gives us is not pay, but a gift, not a reward but grace.



Psalm 145:1-8; Philippians1:21-30; Matthew 20 v1-16


Ray Anglesea is a self supporting minister working in St Andrew’s Dawson Street LEP, Crook and an authorised Methodist Minister working in the wider West Durham Methodist Circuit.