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Part of being in a non-profit organization is getting funding, and to get funding, you have to show that what you are doing has a quantifiable impact. For City Year, where I served as a tutor and mentor during the 2011-2012 academic year, that meant having pull-out math and reading groups in the classes we served and showing the improvements in math and reading scores overtime.
The idea was to have these groups set, more rather than less, in stone shortly into the school year. I was put in a 5th-6th grade combined class, and many of our 6th graders, in particular, had behavioral issues they had their own pull-out groups for.
It didn’t seem fair to me to have to look at a kid who genuinely wanted to learn and improve and say “sorry, you’re too late. We’re all booked up.”
Now my background at this point was not education. I was very intimidated by a lot of I was doing, and, try as I might, I didn’t really understand our whole tracking system, so when I tried to explain what I wanted to do with my pull-out groups, I was told it would mean starting completely over. All the data I had been collecting was now useless and I would be starting from scratch, which I did a couple of times that year. I was urged not to do this because it had a direct impact on me as well.
But the thing is, a lot of good results happened because I was willing to let students join in our group later. It helped the teacher for our class, who I loved working along side and got along very well with, identify some students who needed extra focus and some specific areas of study to help build them up. It meant that some of our worst behaved students started to behave better because they were finally being shown a little love in their lives. It meant that in reaching out to one student’s interest in mythology, he suggested we create an entire myth event for the school, which I worked hard to turn into a reality. One of the students I worked closely with finally saw the potential I had seen in him the whole time and earned for himself an award for most improved in behavior and academics the following year. Eventually, I finally figured out City Year’s tracking system so that I could add latecomers to our pull-out sessions without having to sacrifice all that data.
The world would have us act one way. It would have us base everything on merit. It would have us serve only those who come to the table first, and it would certainly not serve the latecomers equally to those who first arrived.
But as Paul reminds us in Philippians, we are called to live by different standards than the world, even when doing so causes us harm.
Living differently from the world means living into the parable Jesus tells us this morning. It means showing a little grace.
Jesus’ story is of a landowner who decides to pay the early-comers and latecomers the same exact price for their work. That decision balks at everything the world tells us about fairness. It turns everything we know on its head.
But the truth is, we all are latecomers, at least at one point in time. The truth is we don’t earn our way into Heaven. The truth is that God is trying to do what is best for all of us, and often that means letting the latecomer in.
As latecomers for living into the life God wants us to lead, the life Paul lays out for us in Philippians this morning, we have all been given a gift of grace, a gift freely offered and undeserved. That flies in the face of everything the world tries to teach us.
As you go out to live your lives in this world, try to show a little more of the grace that you have been shown. Help the latecomer do what needs to be done, even when that latecomer doesn’t deserve it. After all, we all have been latecomers too.