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"Workers in the vine yard"

Pentecost 14 2011 Matthew 20:1-16
The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard.

As I begin today I think it’s important to remind ourselves of how the parables are meant to work for we who read them. They are intended to work a little bit like the message of the Old Testament prophets in that they have shock value; disturbing the reader into seriously rethinking some entrenched value or scenario and maybe changing their mind about something.   The parables like this one of “the labourers in the vineyard” were considered outrageous by their first readers or hearers even though we today almost always are hearing them for the umpteenth time and so that shock value can be lost on us.

The first thing we must do then is to identify what it was that would have been the 'big impact aspects of the parable.   Jesus is once again describing the Kingdom of Heaven. And it’s like this “A Landowner went out early in the morning to hire labourers for his vineyard.” Of course landowners never went anywhere themselves to do such a thing. This one has a manager who would have been the one to go.   As the parable goes on it seems to connect less and less to what the listeners would have expected.   If there were more workers need why weren’t they all hired to start with? And how can those hired at 5 o’clock have stood around all day “because no-one would hire them”? Something is not quite right. And then there is the whole matter of how much they were paid.   Those hired first were promised the usual daily wage but then the rest were assured they would be paid “what was right.” We know that at the end of the working day all workers were paid the same.

Now we are used to hearing the end of this parable and as we all associate the landowner with God then we are quite happy with the outcome as an expression of God’s justice and generosity. But if we were not familiar with the end of the parable then I think we would most probably disagree strongly with what the landowner did because it is definitely not the way we would see justice being carried out today in the workplace.
I understand there to be two lessons here for us today in this parable. The first being on the nature of grace and the second on how we look at people who come into our faith community which also connects with God’s grace.

Firstly, even if we have heard it many times before, grace remains amazing.   Grace is all about God’s freely given gifts to us.   God freely offers to give us everything of eternal value. He gives to us the creation and life itself. God gives to humankind the gifts of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, his Holy Word, the Church and the sacraments. He freely offers to us the way to attain forgiveness of sins and eternal life. In other words God offers us the greatest treasures, beyond anything we could imagine or hope to attain by our own merit.

Possibly even more amazing that the offer itself or even the content of the offer is that far from being a reward for our behaviour, far from being a just recompense for our efforts rendered to God; or our rewards being graded into distinction, pass, fail – God offers us all these things when we do not deserve them.

God’s amazing blessings are available to all people whenever they are able to confess their faith in Jesus Christ and to make a true repentance.
The labourers in the vineyard are all welcome and received there. They are given a job and they all receive the reward. Those who started first knew what they were to receive and those who started later were the recipients of great and undeserved generosity from the hand of the landowner.

God is wonderfully generous towards his people and blesses us in many ways, very often without us knowing the particular blessings at the time. God’s grace is truly amazing and we are blessed to receive it. Today, even though we are all far from perfect in God’s eyes, by faith through God’s grace we receive the gifts of the presence of Christ as we gather together, the Spirit’s teaching us through the Word and the strengthening spiritual food of the sacraments. What a grace filled morning we are having – we do well to recognise it as that.

When we come to the second issue, I think it’s very timely that just last week we celebrated Back to Church Sunday. I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed that celebration but it was a lot and we had quite a lot of visitors especially at 10.00 a.m.
As I have been sharing with you when we’ve spoken about BTCS, these days the emphasis is much more on inviting our friends, neighbours and workmates to Church.   The motivation is that God wants to connect with God’s people. God always has and that’s why there is a church – to bring the good news of God’s love and salvation to the people of the world.

Now the trouble is that far too often the people of a Church family can fall into a mistaken way of looking at things and doing things where the focus becomes totally inward and it can get to a point where we only think about the people who are actually already here and not those who we want to come – which is everyone else.

It is a mistake because it feeds all kinds of wrong thoughts - that we’re better than those out there; that people who don’t come to Church are somehow evil or inferior.

I remember one lady in my first parish where I was the Rector near Newcastle. She lived in a very rundown suburb called Woodbury. I put out about 1,000 brochures in letterboxes at one time trying to make some contact there because even though it was a huge suburb we had almost no one coming to church from that community. We got no one at all - except the few parishioners who came along to support me. And I eventually gave up.

Some months later I had a call from this woman who had one of my brochures in her hand and she was asked if he service was still happening. When I told her it wasn’t she was quite disappointed. She’d never been to Church because no one had ever asked her and there was no church near her. She had lung cancer and she was dying and she wanted to make her peace with God.

Over the next few months I took her home communion and got to know her reasonably well.   When she died we had the service in the Church which she had asked for with some trembling, thinking that I might not do it because she was so new to the Church. Of course there was no hesitation. And she was buried from St Paul’s Beresfield.

Originally this parable was probably written to Matthew’s Jewish Church who weren’t all that keen on Gentiles coming into the Church and being seen as just as loved by God as they were. After all they had born the heat of the long day so to speak, dealing with persecutions and other hardships because of their long enduring faithfulness to Christ. How could Gentiles be seen as equal to them? The answer through God’s grace – that’s how.

Well that’s not exactly an issue for us. But one way of looking at this parable today is to think about how we treat newcomers.   Do we welcome them fully into our life here? Or do we leave them sitting on the edge, at the back, not really accepting them. I’m really sorry if anyone was to feels like that. But it’s up to all of us to learn from this parable – to make sure all are made to feel able to receive the gifts of God’s grace.

The penny needs to drop for all of us that those who venture into St James and those who think about it but don’t are precious to God and perhaps are still in the market place waiting to be asked to come and receive the gift.

Yesterday I played my first round of golf for about 12 years.   I’m not a very good player but I didn’t do too badly. I felt very accepted and made to feel comfortable by that charming man that took me.   A young man came out of the clubhouse and was going to play alone but we invited him to play with us which he did. He was a great fellow and we all got on very, very well.

It was a great reminder of the power of inclusion and the difference it makes to people’s lives. So let’s continue to foster that inviting inclusive way of being Church that we can do so well when we are at our best. And let us all rejoice in God’s grace.

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