Trinity 16: Ezekiel 18:1-4,25-32; Matthew 21:23-32As a rule, I don’t choose the readings we have in church on Sunday. Mostly, I follow the lectionary, which is the list of readings on a three-year cycle which is used across the Christian church, all around the world. I don’t have to follow the lectionary, it’s up to me, but I figure that cleverer people than me have gone to a great deal of trouble to work out this cycle of readings, and that they must have a good reason to have made these choices.And I have to say, this week, the readings really work. Our Old Testament reading and the Gospel might seem to be very different – one is the voice of God, speaking through a prophet, the other is Jesus delivering a parable – but at their heart, each reading has the same core message. And it’s this: what we do matters.Take a look at the first reading, from Ezekiel. At the start of the third paragraph it says, “Therefore, I will judge you, O house of Israel, all of you according to your ways, says the Lord God.” And what the Bible means by ways, is actions, the things we do. God says God will judge us by the things we do. And in the paragraph before we get it set out in a bit more detail – “When the righteous turn away from their righteousness and commit iniquity, they shall die for it”. Again, let’s unpack the biblical language– what this is saying is that it doesn’t matter how holy you are – it’s what you do that matters.So in this reading from Ezekiel God reminds us that what we do has consequences – if the wicked turn away from wickedness, hurray, excellent consequences. But if the righteous turn away from righteousness, yeah, not so great. Because what we do matters. It matters to us, it matters to the people around us – and it matters to God.And the parable that Jesus tells in our Gospel reading today says exactly the same thing. Here we have one person, the first son, who tells his father he won’t help him, won’t go the vineyard. Clearly a bad thing. Refusing to help your Dad – big no no. But in the end, in fact he does go, despite saying he wouldn’t. The second son seems to be the good son. The one who says yes, seems to be ready to do what his father wants. But in fact, he doesn’t do it at all. He talks a good talk – but he doesn’t deliver.There are really clear parallels between these two readings – both have the same central image, of the bad person who does good, contrasted with the good person who does bad. And in each case, what matters is what each person does – not what they say, not what they think, not what their past record was, but what they do.And there is a crucial, crucial detail in both readings. In each case, there is a choice. A decision. In each case, the people involved make a choice – and that choice either moves them closer to God, or further away.In the gospel reading, Jesus tells us that the first son changes his mind. In the moment, he says one thing – but then, on reflection, he changes his mind and does what the father asks after all. And that’s quite a powerful thing. It’s hard to change our minds, hard to accept that we said the wrong thing, made a bad call - even harder to suck it up and go and do the thing we said we wouldn’t. In Ezekiel, the phrase that is used to describe this choice is “turn away”. The righteous turn away from their righteousness; the wicked turn away from their wickedness. Turning is a very important word – because of course, these people are not just turning away from something, but turning towards something else. The righteous person turns towards wickedness. The wicked person, however, turns their back on wickedness and turns towards God.And this choice, this decision, this turning away from one thing towards another, is a really important part of why it is that what we do matters. Of course, it matters in many ways that we do the right thing – it matters that we help people, that we do what we say we will do, that we act in ways which benefit other people, that care for God’s people and God’s creation. But it also matters that we choose. That over and over again we choose. Because when we choose to do the right thing, we turn ourselves towards God. When we choose to turn away from the bad things, we choose to turn our faces to God. And in doing that, we allow ourselves to be drawn closer to God.And isn’t that what we all want, really? To be drawn closer to God? Because God is everything we want. God is love, and light, and life. Let’s turn, then. Hard as it sometimes is, let’s turn. Let’s make the choice, over and over, to turn to God, to do the right thing, to follow Jesus. Let’s allow ourselves to be drawn closer to God. To live in God.As it says at the end of today’s reading from Ezekiel – let’s turn, then. And live.Amen
Matthew 20.1-16I hated this parable when I was a kid. Hated it. Along with the one about the Prodigal Son, I hated it because it was so unfair.Like all children, I had a very strong sense of fairness and I knew with absolute moral certainty that things that were unfair were wrong, plain and simple. I identified completely with the older brother of the Prodigal Son, and with the aggrieved vineyard workers in this story.I mean, this might have been because I’m an eldest child, the eldest of four. As a child it seemed to me - with some justification, to be fair - that I was always expected to work harder and behave better than my younger siblings. So these two stories really pushed my buttons. The older brother does what he is supposed to do, works hard, and then not only does his younger brother waste his inheritance, but his father seems to prefer him. And this story today – what a terrible employer the vineyard owner is! Treating his hard-working, responsible labourers so badly, showing favouritism to the slackers who came in late.Of course, as an adult I came to see that these two parables are actually about God’s generosity, about the endless abundance that God shares with everyone, whether we deserve it or not. And, since none of us deserve it, none of us, I came to see that the parables are also about God’s mercy. My childish understanding was focussed on fairness, on justice – but I failed to see that fairness and justice are much, much smaller than mercy. In fact, by asking God for justice I was actually asking for much less than God was willing to offer me. Because God doesn’t give us what we deserve. And thank God for that, because what we deserve is – well, not much at all. Nothing, really. And yet God continues to give and give and give, out of God’s endless mercy to us.And actually, Child Anna would have done better to remember a different kind of unfairness, one which God actually deals with in this parable. A different kind of unfairness – not the kind of unfairness which is about not getting extra, but the unfairness of not getting anything. The unfairness of exclusion. Of being the outsider. The unfairness of being the person who never gets picked.I really should have been able to see that in this story, because I was that kid who never got picked for team games. Some of you will know what I mean. That awful thing when the team captains look at a long line of kids and one by one pick the best kids to be in their team. Some of you, I know, were the first to be picked. Some of you were the team captains. Not me. I was the clumsy kid at the end of the line who could run, couldn’t catch a ball and never once scored a goal. The last kid to be picked.And now, as an adult, that’s what I see when I read this story. I see the last people to be picked and my heart breaks a little bit for them. We don’t know why the vineyard owner goes out again and again to the market to find more workers – but we do know that every time he finds more people. People who haven’t been picked.I wonder about those workers. Why hadn’t they been snapped up already? Why have they been standing about, with no one offering them work? Maybe they were just unlucky, maybe there just wasn’t much work that day. But maybe not. Maybe they weren’t picked because no one liked the look of them, because they didn’t fit in – they weren’t from round here, they didn’t look like the rest of the workers, maybe they were foreign even. Or maybe they looked like they couldn’t do a good day’s work –why would anyone pick a worker who isn’t up to the job, after all? Maybe this lot didn’t look as strong and fit as the others. But maybe that’s because they were old. Or poor – with the kind of poverty that makes you thin and tired and pale. Or maybe they weren’t picked because they were disabled.But this vineyard owner, the one I thought was being unfair, sweeps them all up, provides for them all. This vineyard owner isn’t at home in his chateau, watching the workers gather his harvest – he is out in the market making sure that everyone is given a chance to earn, to eat, to make a contribution. And as the workers gather in the harvest, the vineyard owner gathers in the people – all of them, no one left behind, all safely gathered in.That puts a different face on it, don’t you think? This vineyard owner, this God, misses no one out. Values everyone. Seeks them out, over and over again.And thanks be to God for that.But here’s one last thought for you. It is easy to recognise God in the vineyard owner. But parables often carry many meanings and here is one for you to think about. What if we are also the vineyard owner? What if we too are expected to behave, not just with fairness and justice, but with abundant generosity and mercy? What would that look like? What would it mean in your life next week if you were to act like this vineyard owner?I will tell you one thing for certain. God isn’t at home – God is out in the marketplace looking for people. And so I pray that we too might be out in the world, offering God’s generous love and abundance to the people we meet. Especially the people who don’t usually get picked. Amen.
It’s a bit of a challenge this parable, isn’t it? That ending – Jesus telling us that if we don’t behave then God will torture us. That’s a tough thing to hear on a Sunday morning.Especially since the point of this parable is to tell us to forgive people. It seems, well, let’s say it seems rather contradictory for God to be telling us to forgive one another – and then not forgiving us. What’s that about?And it’s not just that part that’s hard – it’s also this –Jesus seems to be saying that we have to forgive other people in order to be forgiven. Which sounds worryingly like a transaction. If I forgive someone for some petty grievance, then God will forgive me for some petty sin. But the logic of that is terrible – if I forgive lots of people then I will be forgiven a lot – which means I can sin a lot.Surely not. Surely not what we are intended to take away from this Gospel. We’re going to have to dig a little deeper. And my starting point is that this is a story. Jesus is a master storyteller – over and over we see him come up with stories to help us understand something about God. And this particular story is one which is full of hyperbole, wild exaggeration, great overblown fabrications which make a point – make several points actually. And the first point he makes is to tell Peter to think big.How often should I forgive someone, Peter asks – as many as seven times? And Jesus – well, you can practically hear his eye roll as he says to Peter “Seven? Not seven – seventy seven!” In fact – little aside here – in Greek, the language the Gospel was written in, the phrase used could mean 77 – but it actually says seventy times seven, 490. The point is that Peter is thinking way, way too small. He thinks he’s being generous suggesting that he forgives someone seven times – in fact, Jesus tells him to up his game, to be much, much more generous than that.And Jesus’s dramatic overstatements continue in the story he tells to help Peter understand. So this first servant, he owes the king 10,000 talents. Ten thousand – that’s going to be a lot, right? We might not know how much a talent is, but we can be pretty sure that this is a big sum of money, because 10,000 of anything is going to be quite a lot of cash.Well, I did the maths. Let’s start with the second slave. He owes the first one 100 denarii. Even if we know nothing of biblical currency, we can tell from the story that this is a lot less money. In fact, we know that historically the going rate for a day’s work was one denarius. So actually, 100 denarii is going to be a significant sum of money – 100 days’ work is a fair bit. I worked out that if the slave were paid the London Living Wage, 100 denarii would amount to over £8,000 by today’s standards. So not insignificant.But how much is 10,000 talents? Well – are you ready? - a talent was apparently 6,000 denarii. Six thousand. Six thousand days’ work for one talent - and this slave owed the king 10,000 of them.Works out at £5 billion. Five billion. Our low-paid London Living Wage slave would have to work for 2,300 lifetimes to pay that back. It’s a staggeringly large amount of money, a ridiculous amount of money. Basically Jesus just said the slave owes the king eleventy billion dollars – and the king let him off.Kind of puts things into perspective, doesn’t it? Bearing in mind that this is a parable about God’s forgiveness of us. God is prepared to cancel a huge, huge amount of debt, debt beyond our wildest imaginings, debt it would take us forever to rack up and which we would literally never be able to pay off. God will forgive. But we must also forgive. That’s the bottom line. But it’s not the bottom line because this is a transaction, a quid pro quo. No, it is, I think, simply because it is impossible for us to be forgiven if we don’t forgive. Forgiving is what enables us to be forgiven.Tom Wright, the former Bishop of Durham and one of the most important New Testament scholar of the last 100 years, describes forgiveness as being like the air in your lungs. There is, he says, “only room to inhale the next lungful when you’ve breathed out the previous one”. I think this is a brilliant metaphor. Forgiveness, like breath, is life giving – but you have to keep doing it. Seven times isn’t enough. Even seventy times seven isn’t enough – you have to keep at it, forgiving all the time.If you don’t, if you hold onto that lungful of breath, if, as Tom Wright says, “you insist on withholding [forgiveness], refusing to give someone else the kiss of life they may desperately need, you won’t be able to take any more in yourself”.And I think that’s true. We have to forgive in order to be forgiven because forgiveness only works if we ask for it, confident that it will be given. That’s the problem Joseph’s brothers have in the first reading – they don’t think they will be forgiven. Not unreasonably – they did after all sell their brother into slavery… And like Peter, they simply can’t imagine forgiveness big enough.So the point of Jesus’s parable of forgiveness is not the threat of torture at the end – which suddenly starts to look like another piece of ridiculous exaggeration. No, the point of the parable is in fact the certainty of forgiveness, the ridiculous generosity of the God who will forgive us eleventy billion times.The forgiveness is there for us. It is there for everyone who understands that forgiveness is the air that we breathe, who understands that letting go, releasing the anger, the pain, the regret, the bitterness of refusing to forgive - who understands that forgiving other people is quite simply how we heal. How we are forgiven ourselves. There is no end to God’s forgiveness. All we have to do is to understand that we too can forgive. All we have to do is let go of our injury. All we have to do is ask God, confident that God’s forgiveness is infinite. All we have to do is breathe out.
“When Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, ‘Zacchaeus, hurry and come down; for I must stay at your house today.’ So he hurried down and was happy to welcome him.”Was happy to welcome him. Zacchaeus hurried down from his tree and was happy to welcome Jesus into his home. Now, you might think you know where I am going with this. You’re pretty familiar with this story, right? It’s an absolute staple of Sunday School and family worship because it’s such a great image. The short guy who wanted to see Jesus, so he climbed a tree to get a better view. I bet quite a few of you sang the song too – do you remember? Zacchaeus was a very little man and a very little man was he And at the end of that Sunday School lesson, or that family service, I am willing to bet that the teacher or preacher said something like this:“Now children, Zacchaeus welcomed Jesus into his house – but we need to welcome Jesus INTO OUR HEARTS”.Am I right?Now, it’s not that this isn’t a good message. It is. It’s a brilliant message, because we do need to welcome Jesus into our hearts. And if I stopped right now and you went away with the message that you should welcome Jesus into your heart I would have done my job.But these are special circumstances. Our first day back in church after so long, our first worship together in this pandemic, I couldn’t rest with the obvious message – I needed to dig a little deeper. So as I’ve been thinking and reading and praying about this service, I’ve kept coming back to the Psalm we heard earlier, Psalm 84, and thinking about the dwelling place of the Lord. “How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord of hosts!”This is such a lovely psalm, full of such lovely images about the dwelling place of God – a place where everyone is happy, singing praises to God, a place so lovely that a day there is better than a thousand anywhere else. God’s dwelling place is a place of strength and protection. It’s also a place of safety, a place where even a tiny bird can nest. It’s a place that replenishes everyone who lives there, fills them up so much that they overflow with goodness and wherever they go they bring God’s abundance with them, so that pools spring up in their footsteps.Beautiful. To us, such a beautiful set of images of God’s kingdom. But think about this for a moment – this is the reason I’ve been thinking and praying with this psalm so hard lately. To the Jewish people of the Old Testament, God’s dwelling place wasn’t Heaven – it was the temple. Don’t forget, for them, God was literally present in the temple, in the Holy of Holies. Sometimes physically visible as a pillar of smoke, sometimes audible as a voice, actually present. God’s dwelling place, the place described in the psalm, was the temple.So fast forward a few thousand years and that means that for us, God’s dwelling place is ……… this. Here. This building. Our church.Now of course we have a much more complex understanding of God’s dwelling place than that. We are the temple. Each one of us is the Body of Christ, a living sacrifice, God’s holy temple – which is why the Sunday School teacher at the start of this sermon was right to say we have to invite Jesus into our heart.And of course, God is everywhere, in everything, always present, throughout all creation. There is nowhere that is not full of the presence of God.And yet, we build churches, we cherish churches, we make them beautiful, with architecture that fills us with awe, with art, with stained glass. We gather here to worship – not because we have to, because God is everywhere and we know that. We gather here to worship because we want to, because we know that while God is everywhere, there are some places where we feel that more strongly, where God’s presence is more evident to us. Churches are thin places, where the barriers between us and God are more permeable, where we hear God’s voice and feel God’s presence more strongly.“How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord of hosts!My soul longs, indeed it faints for the courts of the Lord;my heart and my flesh sing for joy to the living God.”God seeks us out. We saw that in the story of Zacchaeus – God doesn’t miss a single detail, sees us where we are, with all our imperfections and shortcomings, and calls us by name. God invites Godself into our lives, into our homes. And then, then God invites us into God’s home. Into God’s kingdom, into the heart and body of Christ, into heaven. And also, yes, God invites us into this little, physical dwelling place of God, God calls us to church. God’s home, right here.And our home.Welcome home, my brothers and sisters. Welcome home.
