Proper 22 year A RCL

October 5, 2008

Matthew 21:33-46

Jesus said, "Listen to another parable. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a watchtower. Then he leased it to tenants and went to another country. When the harvest time had come, he sent his slaves to the tenants to collect his produce. But the tenants seized his slaves and beat one, killed another, and stoned another. Again he sent other slaves, more than the first; and they treated them in the same way. Finally he sent his son to them, saying, `They will respect my son.' But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, `This is the heir; come, let us kill him and get his inheritance.' So they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him. Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?" They said to him, "He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time."

Jesus said to them, "Have you never read in the scriptures:

`The stone that the builders rejected

has become the cornerstone;

this was the Lord's doing,

and it is amazing in our eyes'?

Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom. The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls."

When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they realized that he was speaking about them. They wanted to arrest him, but they feared the crowds, because they regarded him as a prophet.

Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer. In the name of the Triune God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

We have another parable this morning. I tried as hard as I could to spin this one into a happy message. But I wasn’t able to.

Jesus, once again, is condemning the chief priests and the Pharisees for not seeking justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with their God. The leaders of Israel have been killing God’s messengers, the prophets, for centuries and now they are about to kill Jesus too. Through the history of humanity the religious elite have been more interested in building their own power, influence, and wealth than building up the kingdom of heaven.

Jesus tells them that they have not been producing fruits that are pleasing to God, so they will be cast out of the vineyard so that someone else will get a chance to find favor with God. In the parable it is easy to see that Jesus means that the poor, the outcast, and the gentiles will be the new occupants of the vineyard. They will be given a chance to yield the fruit that the religious elite could not.

We, gathered here today, are only safe from the scrutiny that the Pharisees received if we keep the parable in a detached historical context that doesn’t come anywhere close to including us. The problem is that I’m certain that isn’t what Jesus intended. I know that he wants us to examine the quality of our own efforts to build the kingdom of heaven. He wants us to weigh the fruit that we have produced. And that is the part that I cannot spin into a happy message because, frankly, my fruit is a bit light.

I measure my fruit (in terms of helping the needy) in two ways. The first is what do I produce as an individual and the second is what do I produce as a member of a church. As an individual I really don’t produce much. Only when I am working within the context of the church do I get anything done at all toward the building of the kingdom.

A few months ago my retired friend John got an idea that he wanted to join with two other guys and go about doing odd jobs for people with no money. Not being connected to a church themselves, they thought is best to operate within the context of a church anyway. That was where I came in. I put up a flyer at the senior center and fielded the calls and then connected the people to John. Right off the bat John’s two friends had a change in their amount of free time and dropped out of the project. Since John soon became overwhelmed, I gathered up my crewman, Matt, and we picked up some of John’s overflow. Some projects have been easy like the one where an older woman needed her answering machine re-programmed. But another project took Matt and I ten hours.

During that project, I was thinking about what it would be like to tithe a tenth of my time to the service of people in need. Immediately I had to put sideboards on what I meant by time: my waking hours or a 40-hour workweek? Even settling on the least number of hours possible left me with 4 hours a week, 16 hours a month. That would be two working days a month in addition to the days I already work. That is a huge commitment. So I started thinking of a way to leverage my time. That was when it became keenly aware to me that it is in working cooperatively that we make the biggest impact. And the Church is an obvious way for us to work cooperatively.

I’ve recently asked rhetorically, “If St. Timothy’s were to slide into the gully, would anyone notice that we did?” Obviously the many groups that use our building would notice. Indeed the fact that we open our space to so many different groups during the week is our biggest form of outreach. But it is passive outreach with the added bonus of generating revenue for the church even if all it does is cover our utilities.

Fortunately we have members of this congregation that have more vision than I do when it comes to producing fruit for the kingdom. I haven’t been the one thinking up the ministry ideas, although it is my job to help implement other people’s good ideas. I already mentioned John’s odd job ministry. He needs help beyond what I can provide and I hope that some of you are interested in joining that ministry. I already talked last Sunday about our emergency shelter program for families. We will be meeting again this Friday to review a policies and procedures manual that is being developed. And today we have a person from the local Food Bank that will tell us how we can step up our support for that organization.

We have been financially supporting many worthy causes in our community through fundraisers for many years. I am suggesting that we step it up a notch and get our hands dirty as we increase our fruit production. I am suggesting that we, as a church, increase our face-to-face contact with people in need. There is a blind man in a trailer park in Smith River that needs the door to his storage shed re-hung. There is a woman on oxygen living in Sea Bird RV Park that has a leak in the roof of the travel trailer where she lives. This winter there will be families with children living in their car when the temperature falls below zero.

These seem like opportunities for us to pledge some our time and yield some fruit. Indeed, these are opportunities for us to live out the Gospel of Jesus Christ and for us to experience the blessings that come from helping others.

==AMEN==