God's Vineyard

“God’s Vineyard”

Rev. Stephen Milton

September 20th, 2026

Matthew 20: 1-16.

Today’s parable is full of deep wisdom, but it is also subtle, so it can be hard to hear what it is saying at first. So, let’s take a walk through it to see what we can find.

A vineyard owner hires people all day to work in his fields. The people who are hired first are promised a denaris, which was a fair wage for a day’s work. The people who were hired later were told only that they would be paid what was fair and just. 

Just an hour before quitting time, the owner returns to hire more workers. He finds a few left. He asks them has no one else hired you? This is an important detail. It tells us that there are other farmers who have been hiring labourers, but these people have been passed over. Why? We have no idea. But for some reason, they are not considered worthy of work. But the owner of the vineyard does think they are worth hiring. So they go to the vineyard too.

At the end of the day, the owner lines up the workers in reverse order. The ones who were hired last get paid first, in view of the all the other workers. The workers who were hired last probably feel quite blessed when they receive a full day’s pay for just an hour’s work. This owner values them more than other managers do, since he gave them work and paid them in full. The owner, a stand in for God, is saying that these workers whom no one else would hire are worth just as much as everyone else. 

However, the workers who were hired first witness all of this, and they are not happy. They don’t see why the owner would value these neglected  workers the same as themselves. Surely if they deserve a denarius for their work having worked only an hour, we should get two or three times that much for working longer?

But the owner reminds them that they thought a denarius for a full day’s work was fair when he hired them. Nothing has changed. They worked a full day, they get paid for a full day. It’s not their concern how the other workers get paid. But of course, the owner does care about how the workers think of this arrangement. He could have paid the first hired first, so they would have taken their money and gone home, and never seen how the other workers were paid. Instead, the owner pays the 5 o’clock workers first, in full view of the 9 o’clock workers. The owner appears to be testing the first hired workers - how will they feel about this? This is no longer about money, it’s about what goes on inside us. 

And, since this is a parable, told for our spiritual enlightenment, Jesus is asking how do we feel about this arrangement? How do we feel about people getting treated the same even though they were considered the least worthy by society?

This past Tuesday night, I attended a talk out on the Danforth. It was organized by a group called Crisis in Our City that was formed during the African Refugee Crisis back in 2023. They have stayed together to advocate for homeless people of all kinds, not just African refugees. 

Helwig talk
On Tuesday night they invited Rev. Maggie Helwig to speak. She is the priest at St Stephen’s in the Fields, an Anglican Church on College Street next to the Kensington Market. 

Encampment wide
A few years ago, an encampment took root on her church yard. Last year she published a book about it called Encampment. 

Her church is very small, with a tiny congregation. But it has a history of helping the poor in the area. Rev. Helwig and her parishioners had no problem with people camping on their property. 

Encampment side

But the City did. Neighbours complained. It was an eye sore. I cycled by many times during those years, and I can attest that from the outside, it looked like an encampment within a garbage dump. 

There is a Montessori school down the street. It was a mess. But it was also a safe place for people who couldn’t find any housing, and who couldn’t find work. Many of the encampment residents suffered from various forms of mental health challenges, which often happens when people live on the street for a long time. Knowing society hates you is not good for one’s mental health. Some of the encampment residents were regular drug users, and overdoses happened from time to time. Fellow camp residents administered naloxone and saved each other’s lives. Other times, no one noticed, and a few died. This was not what the neighbours wanted on their street. They told the City to get rid of the encampment. 

But the encampment was on church property. Rev. Helwig fought to protect the residents from eviction against their will. These people were like the people in the parable , the ones no one would hire. They are our society’s forsaken ones, people society wants to ignore. But Rev. Helwig, to her credit, saw them as members of God’s kingdom, so she protected them. 

But there was a problem. You know how when you own a house, the City actually owns the first ten feet or so of what seems to be your property? Not just the sidewalk but also a meter or two inwards? That was true of the Church’s yard on the corner. Most of it was officially City property, which gave the City the jurisdiction to shut down the encampment.

In November of 2022, the City announced it would tear down the encampment. On December 8th, interested parties were invited to visit the church to protest against the eviction. Here’s what it looked like that day. 

Choir
There was an Anglican choir, and the Bishop of the Toronto diocese spoke. There was lots of press there. 

Helwig December
Rev. Helwig announced that after two weeks of daily phone calls to the City, a solution had been worked out. The City had found shelter space and housing for all of the encampment residents.

They would be allowed to move out peacefully. As a protest, it was a bit of an anticlimax, but it seemed to have a happy ending. The encampment would end, and everyone would be housed. 

However, in the months that followed, the encampment stayed. In the spring, I happened to bump into Rev. Helwig at a meeting at Queen’s Park. I asked her what happened, why had the encampment continued? She told me that in the weeks after the announcement, the City refused to house any of the encampment residents because it suspected they were drug users. We both laughed at this. The city’s shelter system has lots of drug users, that’s never been a barrier before. So, the City appeared to have been bluffing or changed its mind. In Rev. Helwig’s book, the city appears as a confused and confusing entity, more disorganized and Kafkaesque than effective most of the time. 

So the encampment continued. Rev. Helwig wrote her book about the experience, Encampment. She received the Toronto Book Award on October 15th, 2025. The next day, I was riding past the church and I stopped to take a picture. 

The Claw

This is what Helwig calls the Claw. The city decided to tear apart the encampment once and for all the day after she won an award for her book about the encampment. You can’t make this stuff up. 

A year later, this is what the church yard looks like: 

Gravestones 1

The city installed concrete blocks to prevent anyone from ever camping there again on City property. 

Gravestones 2

The church yard now looks like a graveyard. 

Over the past few years, the City has done everything it can to clear encampments not just from parks, but also from school yards and any public space. 

In today’s parable, the owner goes to the public square to find people no one else will hire. In our society, we are trying to make those kinds of people disappear all together. We treat them like pariahs, people who should disappear into shelters and mental health wards. 

As a society, we have chosen not to build enough housing for everyone. Our real estate system and our government policies keep coming up short. We make housing not for everyone, but only for people with money. We even make housing no one wants to buy, like shoebox condos; they are made for investment, but not for living in. We make housing poor people cannot afford. 

We pretend that everyone should be able to get a job, so we ignore the empirical fact that there are some people who are not currently employable due to physical or mental disabilities. We elect provincial governments who keep the welfare rates so low that those who receive assistance cannot afford housing. With every cheque they receive, poor people are told they are not worth as much as other people.  For the disabled, the message is even more dire. Our system tells them that we won’t change our workplaces and schools so you can all find work, and if you can’t find a job and need social assistance, we won’t pay you enough to find housing. Studies have found that almost half of  homeless people suffer from mental or physical disabilities. 

Our society works for the people who in the parable get hired at the beginning of the day, but we are failing those who are unhired at the end of the day. We rank people, and we assume that if you can make money, you are worth more than people who cannot. And we assume it is their fault if they cannot work. 

But today’s parable tells us that in God’s kingdom, it is different. At the end of the day, everyone will be paid the same. In God’s eyes, everyone is worth the same. The mad and the sane, the able and the disabled, the employable and the unemployed. We are all worth the same, which is why in the story, the owner pays everyone the same wage at the end of the day. A living wage, in fact, even for the people who could not work for more than an hour. 

During her talk on Tuesday night, Rev. Helwig stated that the people she met in the encampment were some of the most lovely people she had ever met. They used drugs, had serious mental health challenges, but they were also loving towards her and each other. They had each other’s backs, saved each other’s lives from drugs and fires. They made art, and felt joy. They were not a different kind of human being. They were lovely in their own way. 

In the parable, when the workers who were hired first complain, the parable ends with a question from the owner. He asks, “are you envious of my generosity?” That is, do you wish you could be as generous as I am? It is a joke, since these first workers are only envious of the workers who worked less and got paid the same. 

The owner’s question is a dig and a challenge. We are called as human beings to be more like God. To make Earth more like God’s kingdom. That what we say in the Lord’s prayer : “You will be done, on Earth as it is in heaven.” To make society more like God’s kingdom, we need to see each other from God’s point of view. To see that even the people whom society rejects are precious in God’s sight. And when we can’t see it, when all we see is a mess of garbage on the street, we should remember that God still believes there is a place for them in God’s vineyard. They will not be valued more than us, but they will not be valued less, either. 

The encampment at St Stephen’s in the Field is over, conquered by law, not compassion. Keeping encampments in parks or churches is not the solution to our housing crisis. Everyone deserves housing and safety, better shelter than tents in subzero weather. But we should remember that the people inside those tents are just as precious as anyone else. And it is a mark of our spiritual evolution if we see them more as God does - as having a valued place in God’s vineyard, a field that needs them as much as it needs the rest of us. Amen.