Parable of the Vineyard

                                                                Proper 22-A 2014

                              Exodus 20; Psalm 19;Philippians 3:4-14; Matthew 21:33-46

Father Adam Trambley

Oct 4, 2014 St.John’s Sharon

Paul writes in Philippians, “forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.”  Whatever’s done is done, and for Paul some of what was done was amazingly good and some was horrifically bad.  But none of that matters to him because he is going somewhere.  Paul is not staying where he is, but is pressing on to where God is calling him.  He knows that eventually God’s calling is heavenly, but he also knows that before heaven comes he has some work on earth.  Straining forward he presses on knowing that sometimes God’s call can require patience, endurance, determination and even suffering.  But like any hard work, Paul is willing to put in that effort with his whole being to get the heavenly prize, the reward, the fruit of his labor.  Paul encourages us to do the same.

In the Gospel this morning, Jesus is talking to some folks who are not so interested in straining forward toward their heavenly call.  He is talking to the Chief Priests and Pharisees, the religious and political leaders who had a vested interest in looking back to keep things pretty much the way they had been.  This parable is occurring during what we think of as Holy Week, after Jesus has come into Jerusalem and turned over the money-changers tables in the temple, but before Judas betrays him.  So we have some serious religious smack-talk going down here.  I love the line at the end of the parable: When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they realized that he was speaking about them.  They wanted to arrest him.  So we know they heard what Jesus was saying.

What Jesus was saying was that they weren’t the stewards of their people they were supposed to be.  In the parable, God is the vineyard owner.  He set everything up for a beautiful vineyard, which represents God’s people.  Then he turned the vineyard over to tenants, who were supposed to raise fruit for him. The tenants were the religious and political leaders of God’s people who God put in authority over them. The tenants raised a lot of fruit—remember that God set everything up perfectly-- but when God asked for it, they wouldn’t give it to him.  They beat and killed his slaves who came to collect.  Then the vineyard owner sent his Son, whom they also killed, hoping to keep the vineyard for themselves.  Of course, the son in the parable is Jesus, God’s Son, and the leadership is going to kill him, just like they do in the story.  After the chief priests and Pharisees hear the story, Jesus asks how they think it will end.  They say that the owner will punish those tenants and give the vineyard to better tenants.  Jesus agrees, quoting Psalm 118 to drive his point home.

Now Jesus’ point to those he was contesting with at the time was clear.  God put you in charge of his people and you didn’t listen to his Son, even killing him.  So God is going to invite into his Kingdom all sorts of new tenants who will bear fruit and give it back to God. 

We are part of this second wave of tenants who have been given the kingdom of God to produce the fruits of the kingdom.  We are the people who God has invited in to do his work according to his purpose.  We are the people who recognize his Son and, at least in theory, are happy to turn over the fruits of our labors to him. 

But we still have the responsibility to produce fruit, and the actual production of fruit has been a problem for us as Christians in this part of the Kingdom.  Here I’m talking more broadly than just St. John’s.  I’m also speaking also about the churches in our valley, in much of the Episcopal Church, and in almost all branches of Christendom in the United States.  We haven’t really made sure that the fruit of God’s harvest is brought in.  A retelling of the parable for us might go something like this.

 

A corn farmer had a farm that he leased out to tenants.  He put his Son in charge of tenant relations.  The tenants liked the Son, and they really liked the farmer’s land.  For years they produced bumper crops, and they shipped all the appropriate documentation, notarized and in triplicate, off to the farmer’s Son via Federal Express.  But their harvests were so large, they realized they didn’t have to plant all the fields to have as much produce as they needed.  So they planted less and less.  Eventually, the farm didn’t produce as much, but the tenants were happy, and they figured they could always plant more for the farmer if he needed it.  Harvests got smaller, but the tenants still took the same share.  Then one day the farmer’s Son came back for an inspection and found most of his fields overgrown with weeds while the tenants were in the barn gorging themselves on the seed corn.
What do you think will happen to these tenants?

 

As I look back, I think a lot of good Christian folks have together made a bunch of decisions that led us to a place that isn’t so pretty.  We had everything we needed for bumper harvests – people, leadership, resources, prestige, money, volunteers, buildings.  Then somewhere along the line, we stopped planting and just lived off our harvests.  We had plenty coming in so we stopped planting new fields, cultivating new ground, or even making sure that we kept the best ears to use for seed next time around.  People that wanted to plant in new areas were sent away on their own, and were either unsuccessful or ended up with new crops that don’t look like very much like ours.  We look around today and we see most of our area, and increasing our country, unchurched.  Younger people in our communities have never been in a church, have no idea who people like Moses, Noah or even Jesus are, and have no idea why they would go into a church building.  For many people Christianity is irrelevant, except as a nebulous justification used questionably in certain political debates.  We have huge church buildings all over the place, most of which stand empty most of the time, and quite frankly are mostly empty even on Sunday morning. If we added up their deferred maintenance costs, we can see that way too many Christian churches have eaten into the seed corn, and won’t survive another long winter.  If Jesus showed up, we’d all be happy to see him and want to go spend eternity with him, which in his goodness and mercy he may very graciously allow.  But we shouldn’t be lulled into believing that the current state of affairs in this part of his Kingdom would have been his first choice. 

So where does that leave us today, assuming that Jesus is either waiting a bit to come back, or could be convinced to keep us on staff if he stops by for a visit?  Well, it leaves us pretty much where we started, with a commission to go do the work, bear good fruit, and bring it back to Jesus.  We also have to start with where we are right here at St. John’s, which is not a bad place to be.  Our congregation still has what we need to go out and plant new fields that could bring in a great harvest.  We don’t have the surplus we may have at one time, be we have enough, maybe just enough, but we have enough.  Thanks be God, this congregation has taken our task seriously.  At times we have slacked off a bit, but at other times we have really shared God’s love with the Shenengo Valley.  On more than one occasion, we have decided to plant new fields, whether that meant bringing in people who needed to learn to swim, expanding our doors to those beyond our traditional British heritage, or opening up our parish to people of every age, class or situation that needed a church.  We’ve reached out in love to meet people’s basic needs and opened our buildings and our hearts to the greater community.  Sometimes those actions have produced great harvests, and sometimes small ones, but we’ve never entirely stopped looking for empty fields and finding new places to plant.   So today, when fallow fields lie empty all around us, we have an incredible opportunity to produce fruit for the kingdom.

What does this look like practically?  Here are a few ideas.

First, marshal every moment of monotony in your day and pray for the work.  Jesus instructed us to pray for laborer’s to be sent into the harvest, and we at St. John’s have suggested that people pray for our work here by praying for laborers to be sent into the harvest, for open doors for our ministries, for fruit to be borne by them, and for the financial resources we need to do the work. 

Second, put what we have to good use.  The SeeingThrough New Eyes process we did a few years ago had a slogan, “Be who you are; see what you have; do what matters.”  As a parish we are finding more and more ways to open up our facilities to those from new fields, whether they are ECS clients, community lunch guests, Cana’s Corner participants, AA members, guitar students or those needing inexpensive clothes at the rummage sale.  But we still have as a parish, and as individuals, many resources that could be redirected toward building relationships with people who might not know Jesus or whose lives are not bearing fruit for the Kingdom.  Maybe we have a car that could give someone a ride.  Maybe we have time to call people regularly who are trying to change their lives around and offer support.  Each of us can see what we have and do something that matters with it. 

Third, we all can keep our eyes out for new fields, and think about ways we can plant there.  Maybe we invite people to church or to a program at St. John’s.  Maybe we just invite them to lunch on occasion get to know them.  Maybe we make sure they have what they need for their new baby, or after the death of a family member, or once they’ve started empty nesting and are figuring out how to structure the next phase of their life and give it meaning  And maybe we ask folks from church to help with that.  Now if we are all doing this, we may not have as much time to fill all the church jobs we’ve always had done, but that is one consequence of planting the seed instead of grinding it into meal and making Doritios™ out of it.  Some things may look a bit out of control at times, but part of faith is trusting God to bring forth fruit where we’ve planted our seeds.  The more seeds we’ve planted, the more important the harvest is to us, and the more faith we need to have.  And usually the more prayers we decide to say.  But we’re not called merely to preserve what we have.  We are called to plant and tend and harvest and bring in much good fruit.

The harvest is plentiful, and we have the glorious privilege of being laborers in God’s vineyard.  So forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, let us press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.             

The Same Mind as Christ Jesus

                                                                Proper 21-A 2014

                           Exodus 17:1-7; Psalm 78;Philippians 2:1-13; Matthew 21:23-32

Father Adam Trambley

Sept 28, 2014 St.John’s Sharon

From Philippians this morning: Have the same mind as Christ Jesus.  He was up in heaven having a glorious time, but didn’t feel like he was entitled to that existence.  Instead he humbled himself to come down to earth, to be born like us, to live like us, and even to be crucified and die like us.  Saint Paul exhorts us to do pretty much the same, although we really can’t claim to start up there as equal with God the way Jesus did.

Heaven has better pyro-technics.

Christ’s willingness to come down from heaven to be fully part of humanity is the ultimate act of loving humility in the universe.  Christ Jesus is God, in the form of God, equal with God, living what we assume to be the pretty amazing life that God lives because, if you’re God, you probably set things up in the universe so your life is pretty spectacular.  All the scriptural visions of heaven are filled with choirs and incense and color and fire and all sorts of beautiful, amazing experiences worthy of the Almighty – things that make the Pink Floyd Laser Spectacular seem like a toddler with a Fisher-Price piano and a Lite-Brite.  Christ had all of that radiance surrounding him, for eternity if he wants it, but he doesn’t need to keep it.  He doesn’t feel like he has to hold onto it or make some sort of guarantee to always have it.  He willingly sets it all aside to be with us, so that we have a chance to experience that heavenly life someday, too.  Instead of deciding that he is God and all the glory is for him, he decides that he would rather give it away to us – to you, and to you, and to you, and to you, and to me.  That amazing gift of not only to his heavenly position but also of his very life was made to people that we know don’t measure up to Jesus, but who were considered by Jesus important enough to give it all up for.  That humble, self-giving love of Jesus is what we are called as Christians to follow.

Paul gives a couple of guidelines about how we are supposed to live this life.  He says not to look to your own interests, but to the interests of others.  Instead of being constantly obsessed with all of our particular worries and anxieties, we are supposed to pay attention to the needs of others.  As Christians, we put others first and trust that we will get what we need from God. 

Then Paul says something that turns our prevailing attitude on its head.  He says, “in humility regard others as better than yourselves.”  He doesn’t necessary say others are better than we are.  He says don’t worry about whether someone else is better or worse, just treat them like they are better than we are.  Act toward others like we believe that they are more important to us than even we are to ourselves.  Take the time to really listen to them.  Make sure they have what they need if there is any way we can provide it.  See to their comfort and convenience in the little things in life instead of demanding they bend their comforts to our own.  Think about how Jesus acted in coming down from heaven to us.  He acted as if we were more worthy of receiving his life than he was worthy of keeping it.  We weren’t more worthy, of course, but he acted like it, and in receiving his life he actually made us worthy of it. 

The monks tell a story about a monastery that was beset by conflict, fighting and dissention.  Nobody new was joining and nobody, including the monks, really felt like anything holy was going on there.  Then one day some of them went to visit a wise rabbi on the other side of the forest.  The rabbi said, “I’ll tell you a secret.  One of you is the Messiah.”  Now telling a bunch of Christian monks that one of them was the Messiah is a bit ridiculous since they knew Jesus was the Messiah, but the monks thought that maybe God had something special in store for them.  So each of them starting thinking about just who might be the Messiah.  Brother Robert seemed like a good candidate – he was quite, hard-working and prayerful.  But Brother John was wise.  Then Brother Aelred was so difficult that it seemed impossible for God to do anything useful with him, which was the kind of person who would probably turn out to be the Messiah.  Pretty soon, the brothers all started treating each other as if any of them just might be the Messiah.  They regarded everyone else as better than themselves.  Pretty soon the quality of their community life became so profoundly loving that amazing things began to happen and Jesus the Messiah really did show up in their midst constantly.

In humility regard others as better than yourselves and look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.  When we live into this calling in our lives, the quality of our relationships and communities change, just like they did for the monks in this parable.  If we treat our spouses and family members as better than ourselves, if we treat our co-workers or our fellow students as better, if we treat our church members as better, if we treat the people in the other cars on the road as better, if we treat people we don’t even really know as better, amazing things will happen around us.  Such willingness to love and serve others is hard, which is why we usually don’t bother to do it.  But we are called to nothing less.  Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus. 

But Christ didn’t stop with just serving.  He emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, humbling himself even to death.  He gave it all away.  Such sacrifice may seem excessive, and even impossible to us, so I want to share two examples of this kind of loving obedience unto death. 

The first is Constance, who along with her companions are called the Martyrs of Memphis.  If you come to the Thursday morning services, you know about her because I always celebrate her feast around September 9^th.  Constance was an Episcopal nun in 1878 when a Yellow Fever epidemic hit Memphis, Tennessee.  She was the superior of the Sisters of St. Mary who had come to Memphis five years earlier to found a girls’ school adjacent to the Cathedral.  When the epidemic began, Sister Constance and the Cathedral Dean immediately organized relief work in their area, which was one of the most infected regions of the city.  Instead of looking to their own interests and fleeing to safety, Constance and six of her sisters, as well as priests, doctors and volunteers from Memphis, Boston and New York stayed to minister to the victims.  All but two of the volunteers came down with yellow fever, and Constance and five others died.   Throughout Memphis, 30,000 people fled and of the 20,000 who remained, more than 5,000 died.  Constance did not see her own position and connections in other places as something to be exploited.  Instead she emptied herself serving the least of Christ’s brothers and sisters, obedient to the point of death.  Similar love is being shown by African doctors and nurses treating Ebola patients today.

A second contemporary example is a Syrian Christian woman named Liena, whose story is told by Voice of the Martyrs.  As many of you know, the current violence in Syria is of particular danger to Christians, with many being persecuted or killed for their beliefs. Before the current civil war, Liena and her family had been praying for revival in Syria, their home.  When the war started, their Islamic neighbors apologized for the evil acts of the terrorists toward Christians, and Liena and her family had opportunities to share Jesus with them.  She and her husband had great love for their Muslim brothers and sisters that lived around them.  In prayer, she asked God what he would have her do to be his witness in Syria to these people that she loved so much.  Over a series of days in prayer, God asked her if she could give him her life and the lives of her husband and children.  With great prayer and fasting, she and her husband knew they had to be able to offer themselves and even God’s great gift of their children back to God.  The terrorist already knew who they were.  They knew that Liena’s family shared the Gospel with people.  Her family was in danger.  But Liena and her husband decided they had to stay and do God’s work, refusing opportunities to escape to the safety of Western countries.  They had to talk to their children about what to do if they were attacked: to be quiet and not say anything except to tell the terrorists that Jesus loved them and that any pain would be short-lived and then they would be with Jesus forever.  Liena and her husband and children have emptied themselves and are obedient, even unto death, although we all pray it will not come to that.  But the same mind is in them that was in Christ Jesus, looking not for their own interests but for the eternal interests of those around them and to the interests of future generations who need a holy homeland in Syria and not a country handed over to terrorists.  They do not regard their privileges and connections to the West as things to be exploited, but to be turned over to God – and we trust God will exalt them in God’s good time.

We at St. John’s this morning face neither terroristic persecution nor fatal epidemics -- thank you, Jesus.  But we are called as individuals and as a church to be of the same mind that was in Christ and empty ourselves for one another.  Most of the good things that have happened at St. John’s over the past 150 years have occurred when, instead of ensuring we preserve the church for us, we have opened it and given it away to others that have needed it.  As a parish, we pray that we will have the wisdom and courage to keep looking to the interests of others, having the mind of Jesus to will and to work for his good pleasure.   Then, as we practice emptying ourselves as a church, we are better able to support one another as we as individuals humbly regard others as better than ourselves, and live into sometimes difficult and even dangerous consequences of such discipleship. 

Of course, these consequences are not the final consequences.  Paul writes:

Therefore God also highly exalted him…

So that at the name of Jesus

Every knee should bend in heaven, on earth and under the earth,

And every tongue confess

That Jesus Christ is Lord

To the glory of God the Father.

Parable of Good Employer

Proper 20-A 2014

                         Exodus 16:2-15; Psalm 105;Philippians 1:21-30; Matthew 20:1-16

Father Adam Trambley

Sept 21, 2014 St.John’s Sharon

Today’s collect, which is the special prayer for the week that we say before our readings, asks God not to let us be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly.  So let’s think on some heavenly things for a while, and we’ll come back to the collect a bit later.

Jesus says in the gospel that the Kingdom of Heaven is like a landowner who goes out to find laborers for his vineyard.  He gets all the laborers who are standing around at CareerLink Palestine, and he agrees to pay them the usual daily wage for their day’s work.  The daily wage is one denarius, and the daily work is twelve hours, from sun-up at 6:00am to sundown at 6:00pm.  A few more times during the day he goes out and finds others standing around, and tells them to come and work for him.  Now we might notice that after the first crew is hired, no one is negotiating for a wage.  The laborers who, for whatever reason, got there late, aren’t likely to have any other offers and will happily take whatever they can get.  The last time he goes out, there is only one hour of day light left to work, and, since this is taking place outside in a vineyard around 40 A.D., there are no halogen street lights, or nor even Victorian gas lamps, for working after dark.  When the sun starts to set, everyone comes in from the vineyard, gets paid, and goes home. 

The surprise comes during the collection of the pay.  The first unusual practice is calling the last people hired to come in first.  Normally you call the first people in first, especially if you are going to do something irregular that might make them upset.  Easier to pay them, send them home, and then deal with the rest.  But the manager first called the people who only worked an hour and gave them a denarius, which was a full day’s pay.  Then he gave the same pay to everyone else, finishing with the folks who worked a full twelve-hour day in the vineyards in the scorching heat.  Guess what?  Those guys feel like they should have gotten a bonus.  I mean, if they were kept for last, there was probably a reason – like to give them some extra pay, or a fruit basket, or two tickets to the Jerusalem Giants playoff game, or something a little extra special.  But the landowner says, “You got what we agreed to.  If I want to be generous to someone else, I’m  allowed.  Don’t be jealous.”  Pretty straightforward.  The workers think life isn’t fair.  The landowners says it is fair to you, and it’s better than fair to somebody else.  Be happy about it. 

We can get caught up in the same worries that the laborers have about what is fair or not fair.  We want the rules to be the same for everybody. Or, if the rules aren’t exactly the same, then we should be able to play by the best set of them.  We way too easily can move from being grateful for having everything we need to being upset because someone else seems to have more, or to have the same things we do but not to have worked as hard for them, or to need more than we do for some reason and to have gotten it.  Instead of being happy that we were able to work all day when some else wasn’t, or that we only need something basic when someone else needs some special accommodation, we get envious.  Our Christian call is to contribute as much as we can to the work in God’s vineyard, and true strength of character is shown by the self-control of not needing everything.  Modern consumerism says we should take as much as we can and that the more we take the better off we are.  The message of consumption which is inculcated into us with very sophisticated advertising says we need more to be OK, and that the more we focus on things temporal the more successful and more powerful and more beloved we can become.  Jesus doesn’t say that, of course.  To quote another line from our collect: “Grant us, Lord, while we are placed among things that are passing away, to hold fast to those that shall endure.”  Take your denarius, spend it on the important things you need, and be grateful that God is also taking care of everyone else. 

Now this parable is actually about a few things beyond just telling us not to be jealous, as important a message as that is.  One of the parable’s other points is that we are meant to go work in the God’s vineyard.  In another place, Jesus talks about the harvest being plentiful and the laborers being few.  The harvest is obviously plentiful in the parable, because the vineyard owner hires every worker he can get.  Everyone is ideally showing up first thing in the morning to worship God, care for people, and grow as Christians; to teach everything that Jesus commands and to baptize; to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, and visit the sick and those in prison; to proclaim that the kingdom of God is at hand; to love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength and to love your neighbor as yourself.  This work is what we are made to be about, and we don’t stop once we start.  We work the full day, and, as the laborers talk about being in the scorching heat, sometimes the work is hard.  People can be difficult.  Time and energy can be short.  We might have to struggle with ourselves to do the right thing and to love others.  Occasionally, Christians face persecution and other hardship.  And, if we do the work, what is this denarius that we get?  What is our daily wage?  On the one hand, we get what we need – remember “give us this day our daily bread” and “seek first the kingdom of God and all these will be added unto you?”  But at the deeper level, what we get is the eternal life of the Kingdom.  If we start doing Kingdom work, we are going to be living the Kingdom life, and at the end of the day we have our eternal Kingdom life.        

Another point being made by this parable is that the reward of eternal Kingdom life is the same for everyone.  Now it is always dangerous to talk too much about what heaven is like, because we can’t really know.  But the reality this parable points to is one where we all have an equal inheritance with our Father in heaven.  This attitude flies in the face of most of the jokes we tell about heaven.  Like the one about the cabbie and the preacher who get to the pearly gates and Saint Peter gives the priest a small hut and the cabbie an elaborate palace.  The preacher asks why, and Saint Peter says, “Easy, it based on performance.  When you preached, people slept.  But when he drove, people prayed.”  Our parable this morning says we shouldn’t expect palaces or other status differentiations in heaven.  This same wage for all the laborers also goes against any religion, philosophy or spiritual system that differentiates places in heaven based on works, on spiritual maturity, on enlightenment or on any other measurement, and such systems continually work their way into the country’s spiritual landscape and need to be guarded against. 

This parable also makes the very important point that God keeps coming back to find people and bring them into his vineyard.  We probably should try not to miss him when he shows up, but notice how the landowner keeps going out every few hours to see if anyone else is standing around idle?  The parable doesn’t say why they were idle.  Maybe they were too sick to be there on time, or were injured and couldn’t walk from their houses quickly.  Maybe the owner paid them first so they’d have time to drag themselves back home.  Or maybe they were too lazy to get up, or sleeping off a few too many from the night before, or engaged in any number of other activities that might have meant that missing a day’s work was their own fault.  The options are wide open, but however we see it doesn’t matter, because that exceedingly generous landowner brings them in to work whenever they show up, and he gives them the reward of the Kingdom.  The length of service is immaterial to God’s generous reward.  For us, the implications of this generosity are important.  Those who die too early and do little tangible work have a place in God’s eternal kingdom just as those who live full lives for God.  Also, those who don’t accept God’s call to work in his vineyard until later in life are also given a full wage like everyone else.  One notable example is Saint Augustine, who didn’t come out for work first thing in the morning, but famously spent a few hours praying, “Lord, give me chastity, but not yet.”  God keeps going out into the vineyard because he wants everyone to join in his work for as long as they can.  They will receive their daily bread in this life and their eternal place in the Kingdom to come.    

Going back to the collect before we close, we pray “Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly.”  We can worry about a lot of earthly things, and those anxieties can make us jealous, make us want to apply our earthly standards to heavenly things, or even keep us so distracted that we almost forget to show up for our vineyard work.  Our worries can seem so overwhelming that we lose focus on the heavenly things.  The history of this collect can put our anxieties in perspective, however.  This prayer goes back to Roman Christians at the fall of the Roman Empire.  They wrote this prayer when their city was being threatened and overwhelmed by Barbarians.  Anything they had that was earthly, they had good reason to be anxious about.  So they wrote this prayer asking God to let them “love things heavenly and…to hold fast to those [things] that shall endure.”  And we can pray the same as we go to work in God’s vineyard, rejoicing at all the people that God will bring in to join us in our labors, and in his everlasting Kingdom.