Sermon Sunday September 21 2008

Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Brothers and sisters,
grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
The question was posed this week when I went to text-study, and this is a paraphrase, but essentially the question posed was if the parable of the vineyard workers from this week’s Gospel lesson is true then why seek to be a faithful Christian? Why should we confess our faith or love our neighbor as ourselves or seek to feed and clothe the hungry if we don’t need to for our salvation?
If we can just be like those slackers who showed up at the eleventh hour to work in the vineyard and yet still received the same pay and the same reward as those who had worked all day, then why bother? If we can just live a life of selfishness and repent and confess on our deathbed and still be welcomed into our Lord’s eternal kingdom, just as much as someone who has served the Lord their entire life, then why bother?
Why would we want to work for something when we don’t need to? And yet still we try to earn that which we can’t. Still we try to take credit for that which can only come to us, not from our best and most pious and sincere efforts, but from outside of us, as a gift of God’s grace. And so in doing this, we look around and we see our neighbors maybe aren’t working as hard as we are, or not getting up as early as we are, or not giving as much as we are and we become like Jonah grumbling against the heathen Ninevites or that first group of laborers in the vineyard grumbling to the landowner about those slackers who showed up so much later than they did,
We look around at our neighbors and rather than loving and serving them the way that we are called to, we ignore them, or reject them. We hold onto grudges tighter than we would hold onto the last remaining piece of food during a famine. All one has to do is watch the news and hear all the talk of how the economy is in a shambles, and four dollars a gallon for gas would suggest that it is, and see how many different targets there are for finger-pointing in connection to the economy to see how much we love to grumble against the slackers.
And I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring up where we see this in the election; where one candidate’s attempt to besmirch the name of the other candidate, will the next day become the other candidate’s opportunity to haughtily exalt themself above their opponent all so they can say "See how they attack me."
All of this is a reflection of our inborn tendency to resist allowing God to be God. We love to sing that favorite old children’s hymn "He’s got the whole world in His hands" but when push comes to shove, we don’t really believe it, certainly not the whole world. You see as baptized believers in Christ, we talk a good game about grace but we have a really hard time accepting just how radical our Lord’s grace really is. We’re okay with God extending His grace and mercy to us, but when we see our Lord getting, what we perceive to be a little too loosey-goosey, maybe a little careless with that whole mercy and forgiveness thing, then we want Him to reign it in a little bit.
We think surely God must see the same faults, sins, and blunders in our neighbors that we see, and yet He doesn’t seem to be holding those against them. We expect the Almighty God and creator of the universe to bow to the standards and whims of His own creation. We demand that our Lord be brought to order and that He prescribe to our standards, so as to make sure that He condemns those whom we see as deserving of His condemnation.
But if ever the old adage, ‘Be careful what you wish for’ applied, it applies here, because if our Lord ever did start relating to us through any means other than His pure and radical grace, we would all be lost and condemned. For with every condemning thought against our neighbor, or every act of self-righteous indignation, or every mere angry thought we simply show ourselves to be bound to the very same sin that we love to point out in our neighbor. If God did prescribe to our standards of what is fair, just, and appropriate, we would be doomed for eternity.
But today in the Gospel lesson, our Lord comes to us with a radically different Word and He flips our standards of fairness and justice completely upside-down. Today in His Word our Lord comes to us and reminds us that try we as might, we cannot fit Him into our standards of fairness and justice.
We thought we Had Him once. We thought we had Him bound to our standards of fairness and justice, when we bound Him to a cross. But three days later, with the rolling away of the stone, He showed that He would not be bound to the grave. He showed that just when we thought we had Him, He was simply doing what He chose with what belongs to Him. He showed that what we thought was the demise of our Lord was actually the demise of our sin as He bore the wages of our sin by taking our sin upon Himself and laying down His life for us on the cross, and now we belong to Him.
And so from this we know that the work of the Lord Jesus, the Word incarnate bears fruit with or without us. His Word does bear fruit and so we see it bearing fruit today as our Lord comes once again in the waters of baptism claiming yet another laborer for His vineyard, as He has claimed all of us, and marked all of us with the Cross of Christ; the mark that try as we might we cannot erase from our head. We may try to erase it with our little schemes and projects, as the devil slings his arrows at us.
But the Word that is spoken over us in baptism, continues to come after us, just as the landowner continued to go out after workers for his vineyard. And so all we can do is simply believe; believe our Lord when He tells us that we are forgiven, believe our Lord when He tells us that we are His, believe our Lord when He tells us that He is gracious and merciful and slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
And so being grasped by the faith that we receive in baptism we go forth and work. We hear and respond to the calling of our Lord to confess our faith to our neighbor, to love and serve our neighbor, to feed and clothe the hungry and naked, to visit the lonely, to raise our children in the faith and expose them to God’s Word and the confessions and to bring them, with you, to the Lord’s house for worship, and do whatever else the Spirit leads you to do as the One who claims you in baptism does with you as He will.
And we do this not to receive kudos from our Lord, we do this because, as St Paul reminds us in the lesson from Philippians, we have been granted the privilege not only of believing in Christ but of suffering for Him as well. Indeed we have been freed to follow Paul’s lead and simply acknowledge that our Lord works in ways that we often don’t see, so we can stop looking and actually trust our Lord who promises that all things work for the good of those who love Him, and start hearing and listening to what our Lord is saying. Stop focusing on the old that is being done away with and start listening to the new that He is bringing forth in His Word and sacrament.
You are among the heathen who have come in at the eleventh hour to receive God’s grace. You are God’s own and He has done with you what He wants by showering you in His radical grace, mercy, and forgiveness. And what He wants is for all of His people to come to a saving knowledge of the truth, and so here today you once again have had that very saving knowledge in the Gospel of our Lord proclaimed to you, and soon you will come forward once again and receive the forgiveness of your sins in the body and blood of your Lord Jesus in His supper, and so when you leave today remember that you have been branded with the cross of Christ, and filled with the fruit of the vineyard, that your neighbor, be they a fellow-worker in the vineyard or not; you leave here with the fruit of the Gospel that your neighbor needs and that the Lord promises to produce in you.
Amen