The Laborers

G: Hey, C, get up!

C: Uh? It’s, like, 3am.

G: Yeah, isn’t it great! Don’t you feel invigorated?

C: Ehhuuh.

            Old ‘Gus put a travel mug of coffee in C’s hand and drug him out the door to his car.

C: Where are we going?

G: The Home Depot parking lot.

C: Why?

G: You’ll see.

            The drove there and parked in the dark, no one else present… C sipped his coffee, Old ‘Gus did jumping jacks with a huge grin on his face.

G: I was wondering, I watched you preach on Sunday, no one called or responded—other than that one guy, and people looked at him funny.

C: Yeah, it’s not common in Lutheran churches.

G: What else has changed homiletically? Do you still have set pieces?

C (perking up): I do. In fact, I have one that is especially good, because it is true. It’s so true some days it is the only thing I can hold onto and believe in this Jesus stuff at all.

G: Well then, let’s hear it.

C: I was volunteering at the Comea Shelter, a shelter for homeless men back in Wyoming. Each day I filled the shelter’s old blue mini-van up with bedding and drove it down to the commercial Laundromat, picked up donations around town, picked up the bedding, and brought it all back.

Sometimes shelter residence would ride shotgun and help me load and unload things.

There was one resident in particular who would often ride with me. He happened to have a swastika prominently tattooed on his forehead—it looked like the mark of the beast or something.

We worked together for several weeks—and during that time I did my best not to stare at it, at that thing on his head—I did my best not to ask questions about it.

Then one day we were driving along and he said to me, “C, I know you look at it.”

“Look at what?” I asked, trying to avoid the whole thing and pay attention to the road.

“The swastika,” he replied.

I was… this close… to responding, “What swastika?” but by that time I was staring at his forehead instead of the road, so I replied guiltily, “Yeah, I do.”

“I got it in prison down in Denver,” he explained.

That was of course just the kind of comforting thing you want to hear while alone with a guy twice your size and scary. All I could reply was, “Oh?”

He then told me how he had hated blacks and Latinos… though he used much stronger language for both.

“Oh,” I again replied, limp.

He continued, “Then I got out. No landlord wanted someone like me, as a renter. The only place that would take me was a housing co-operative run by a black man. It took me a while, but I just couldn’t hate them any more.”

G: Wow. That’s a pretty good set piece.

C: And, when I’m fully caffeinated, I can do hand motions of me driving, and mention the brakes never working, and looking over at the swastika and looking away… it’s pretty good.

Of course, I fail to mention that immediately after that beautiful testimony of kindness in the face of evil bringing redemption, he had a set piece of his own—he quoted line for line a routine by comedian Chris Rock that no white person should repeat, especially one with a swastika on his forehead.

G: Huh. At the same time, in a way wasn’t that faith seeking understanding? He was trying to square his racist past with an opened up and new future.

C: Maybe…

G: Ah. It’s starting, why we’re here, the Kingdom of Heaven.

            He pointed to Latino day laborers waiting on the curb by the side entrance to Home Depot. Trucks started picking them up, not everyone, but some. The white hand would point at the guy and motion him into the back of his pickup truck.

            After a while the trucks stopped coming. There was a lull, the guys that didn’t get picked up meandered a bit, Old ‘Gus took out a knife and cut up an apple and handed a slice to me.

C: The kingdom of heaven?

G: Wait for it.

            We waited, and around 7 another set of trucks drove by and picked folk up. A little later straggler day laborers arrived. They didn’t look so great, one had a maimed hand, another kinda hobbled, others brought lawn chairs and looked bored. By noon all the “good” laborers were all taken, even some of the “bad” ones, the broken and hung over ones, the tired and old. Despite my protests we stayed there watching until 5ish.

G: What do you think it would look like if each of those people received the same wage, whether they worked an hour or 13?

C: That would be unfair.

G: They’d be envious of the contractor’s generosity?

C: The last will be first, and the first will be last in the Kingdom of Heaven, right?

G: Right.