Category: Sermons

“Go ye also into the vineyard”

The parable of the labourers in the vineyard is powerful and disturbing. That is the point of the parables. They are meant to prod us into thinking. They offer us another way of looking at things. Often as not they are deliberately provocative.

What could be more provocative than the idea that those who have worked less should receive the same pay as those who have worked more? It violates our sense of justice completely. And yet, the point of the whole parable is to open us out to a larger consideration of the justice of God. “Whatsoever is right, that shall ye receive.” But what is right? Are we the measure? Is right simply, ‘what is right for me?’ Meaning, of course, what I want for me? But on the other hand, is there not a question about equity, about a sense of shared equality? Otherwise doesn’t everything come down to what is simply arbitrary? Now there is a problem!

But is that what we have in this parable? I don’t think so. I think this parable challenges the assumptions that I am measured by what I get and that I am owed what I think I should have; in short, it challenges the entitlement culture of our world and day. What is that? The idea that I am entitled to whatever I think I should have. Why? Because of who I am. Who am I? I am measured by my sense of self-worth but that is measured entirely by what I think I am owed. It is, of course, about arguing in a circle but the assumption is clear. My worth is measured in terms of what I receive. To the contrary, the parable challenges all of the forms of homo economicus, our humanity as defined primarily by economics, whether as consumers or as producers.

The parable suggests another principle which defines our lives. It is simply this. We are called to be labourers – workers. Not in the Marxist sense of homo faber, that I am what I make or produce, but in the much more radical sense that there is something positive and free, something dignified and true in labour. It belongs to the truth of our being as intellectual and moral creatures, creatures who know and love. Work or labour is about our lives as spiritual beings. Standing idle is not good and is not wanted. “Go ye also into the vineyard”. What is that vineyard but the good order of creation? What is our place in the created order? Both before and after the Fall, we are called to labour, to work: first, “to have dominion over” the whole of creation and “to be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it”; and, secondly, “to toil” on the ground and to labour for only “in the sweat of your face shall you eat bread.”

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“Behold, the days are coming … when I will send a famine on the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord.”

Epiphany season ends this year not with a bang or a whimper but on a note of reflective judgment. Epiphany season is about the making known of God and about what God wants for us. That alone is an astounding matter. It centers on the idea of revelation, that there are things God wants us to know and which are revealed to us. That says so much, on the one hand, about the truth and the dignity of our humanity, and says so much, on the other hand, about the truth and the mystery of God, the God who makes himself known to us so that his life can live and move in us. This is an astounding wonder.

The idea of God’s revelation of himself and his will for us means that something about ourselves is revealed to us. We are in these stories individually and institutionally, as it were. Something about the dynamic and nature of human institutions and human personality is revealed in the witness of the Scriptures. We are made aware of something beyond ourselves, a principle of absolute goodness and truth to which we are held accountable and without which we have no freedom and no real dignity. That we close our ears to this is our folly and our wickedness; judgment itself.

Judgment. We are uncomfortable about the idea of judgment and well we should be. In our day, judgment is about being judged by others without any recourse to the question, “upon what basis?” What are the principles that inform our moral, social and political discourse?

We live in a world of wheat and tares, wheat and weeds, as it were, and it is not always easy to know which is which or even which are we. That is why we are given sage advice by Paul in the Eucharistic epistle for today to forbear and to forgive one another and by Jesus in the Gospel parable to let both wheat and tares grow together until the harvest. “Whatsoever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus”, Paul says, and that suggests a check upon our judgments of ourselves and one another. In a world where we are constantly being told what to say and what to eat, what to do and what to think on the basis of mere assertion and arbitrary authority, it is good to be reminded of God’s judgment rather than ours. It is to be returned to the Lord who has made known himself and his will for us. There is a kind of intellectual and principled accountability.

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“Whatsoever ye do, in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus”

Epiphany runs out in the themes of mercy and judgment. Today’s epistle complements and illustrates the gospel. Wheat and tares grow together in the field of the world. Wheat and weeds are there together, both the good and the bad. But who can be sure which is which? What is weed and what is wheat? This is to recognize the limitations of our judgments. “Let them both grow together until harvest”, says the sower. God is the gardener and God is the judge. Not you and not me. That is itself a great mercy.

This doesn’t simply mean the suspension of our judgment in the abdication of responsibilities. We have the obligation and the ability to discern right from wrong and, and by God’s grace, to act accordingly. We are bidden to be God’s good wheat in the world of wheat and tares. But it does mean a check upon our judgmentalism. Forbearing one another and forgiving one another is the counter to our judgmentalism. Our judgmentalism is our presumption to know what we cannot and do not know about others and even about ourselves. We would put ourselves in the place of God as judge. We would presume to have a total and absolute view when, in fact, our viewpoint is altogether restricted and limited. We see, at best, “through a glass darkly”. To know this is to be aware of the limits of our knowing. It is the beginning of wisdom. It frees us from the tyranny of ourselves.

“Did you not sow good seed in the field? From whence then hath it tares?” the servants ask the householder who replies, “an enemy has done this”. There is always the possibility of discovering that we are the enemy. That we are the tares even when we think we are the wheat. Our judgments have a way of turning back upon ourselves. It is called hypocrisy. It is a very wide net that catches us all.

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“The Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to his temple”

Candlemas marks the mid-point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. A blaze of light in the bleak darkness of winter, Candlemas awakens us to the hope of spring when we might hear again the words of the Lord of love, “Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away, for lo, the winter is past, the rain (and the snow!) are over and gone.” Candlemas points us to Easter, to the triumph of life over death. That alone is a comforting and even a cheering thought, isn’t it, especially for a people oppressed and wearied by the winter storms?

We aren’t there yet, of course! But Candlemas is a compelling and significant festival and this year, in the Providence of God, it falls on a Sunday, on what is the penultimate Sunday of the Epiphany season. A double-barreled feast, at once of Mary and of Christ, it reminds us of the deep logic of the Incarnation, of the radical meaning of God being with us in the humanity of Jesus Christ, the eternally-begotten Son of the Father, born of Mary. The themes of the Epiphany are wonderfully concentrated in the rich fullness of this celebration: The Presentation of Christ in the Temple commonly called The Purification of Saint Mary the Virgin, to give it its full title, redolent of theological significance, and yet even more commonly known as Candlemas. Light blazes forth into glory.

In some many ways, it is a most complicated feast. It is a feast of meetings. Eastern Orthodox Christians call it “hypapante”, meaning encounter or meeting. And to be sure, there are a great number of meetings that the Gospel presents: the meeting of God and man in the infant Christ, the meeting of Law and Gospel, the meeting of men and women, Mary and Joseph, old Simeon and aged Anna, the meeting of the Old Covenant and the New. A rich feast of meetings.

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“But speak the word only”

What wonderful words! They challenge and convict all the atheisms of our world and day. They challenge and convict the unbelieving church which has forgotten or denied the meaning of the Epiphany season captured so wonderfully in this Gospel story. Epiphany is simply and entirely about the making known of the essential divinity of Jesus Christ through his humanity. I can’t put it more simply than that. The miracles teach us about the essential divinity of Christ and the meaning of Christ for the understanding of our humanity. They reveal God to us and show us, too, something about what God wants for us. “Speak the word only” is a powerful counter to all our confusions and denials about God. It counters the prevailing spirit of religiosity in our churches, what one might call, ‘Western Buddhism’, which is neither western nor Buddhist, I hasten to add.

This is the anti-intellectualism which thinks that there are simply many different names for God and that religion really comes down to clichés like “don’t sweat the small stuff and it’s all small stuff,” the idea that ideas don’t matter, and that God is not essentially the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost in the Christian understanding but whatever terms you feel comfortable using. Our prayers and praises are merely addressed “to whom it may concern” or to the God of x and y of whatever our choosing. It is really all about us, all about ‘the you,’ the self. This is contrary to Buddhism’s fundamental insight that there is no you. You are an illusion; the self does not exist. It is also contrary to the Western world’s insight into the reality of the world, a world which is in principle intelligible because God is intelligible. In the orthodox Christian understanding, God reveals himself to us in Jesus Christ and that idea makes all the difference in the world about our thinking and our doing, our being and our actions.

We see this in today’s gospel. It is about the power of God’s Word which goes forth not only to create but to restore and heal. Here we have a double healing, a healing within Israel and a healing outside of Israel, a healing touch and a healing word, the word tangible and visible, we might say, the word audible and intelligible. Jesus heals the leper by “put[ting] forth his hand and touching him,” touching the untouchable, the leper, and then says, “I will, be thou clean.” Here is the Word and touch of Christ near and at hand. Then, there is the healing of the Centurion’s servant, a healing from afar, by the simple power of the Word spoken and passed on, as it were, down through the ranks of the Roman legion!

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“O woman, what is that to thee and to me? Mine hour has not yet come.”

Another snowstorm! Another sermon! Another Epiphany story! Something about God is made manifest in Jesus Christ. John tells us that “this beginning of signs did Jesus in Cana of Galilee and manifested forth his glory and his disciples believed on him.” It captures in a way the purpose of the Epiphany season. Something about the truth and glory of God is made manifest and known through the humanity of Jesus and we are being challenged about how we respond. What is made manifest about the glory of Christ?

A miracle? To be sure, the Epiphany season is the season of miracles that show us two things: first, the power of God which cannot be constrained to the physical world simply; and, secondly, the truth and perfection of our humanity which God seeks for us. “This beginning of signs,” as John puts it,  is especially significant because it shows us something of the deeper purpose of God’s will for our humanity; something more beyond the truth and wonder of the healing miracles that point to restoration and wholeness. Here water is turned into wine signifying a greater good, our social joys, we might say.

Yet beyond miracles themselves there is something else that stands out in the Gospel story. It has to do with the dialogue between Jesus and Mary. That itself is outstanding. There are really only two dialogues between Jesus and Mary in the Gospels. We heard last week about the encounter in the temple at Jerusalem. There Mary interrogates Jesus, “Son why hast thou thus dealt with us? Behold, thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing.” It provides the occasion for him to make manifest the higher purpose of his coming and his being with us. “Did you not know that I must be about my father’s business?” he says, pointing Mary and us to the deeper reason and purpose of the Incarnation. Something of God’s will for our humanity is made known in the incarnate life of Christ. It is a wonderful exchange.

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“Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?”

Only Luke gives us this story. It is the only story of the boyhood of Jesus in all of the Scriptures. We go, it seems, from the infancy narratives of the child Christ to the boy Jesus at the age of twelve, and we go, too, from Bethlehem to Jerusalem. There are no facebook pages, no Selfies, no albums of pictures, no stories that have been handed down about the boyhood of Jesus – only ones invented many, many years, even centuries later that portray an entirely different Jesus, a kind of super-brat, you might say, a wunderkind, as it were. For where there are gaps, conspiracy theories rush in to fill them. Such are the stories, fantastic and inventive, told in the gnostic gospels about Jesus as a boy. They have no part in the Canonical Scriptures. We have only this story.

But what a compelling and intriguing story! It is an Epiphany story, we might say, for no other reason than something is made manifest, something is made known, about Jesus and about who he is theologically and doctrinally speaking, we might say, in terms of his humanity and his divinity. It illustrates, too, an essential feature of the Epiphany and the Epiphany Season. It is emphatically a feast and a season of teaching.

It reminds us that ‘teaching, teaching, teaching’ is an essential feature of the life of the Church. The Collect for today makes it abundantly clear that “perceive[ing] and know[ing] what things [we] ought to do” is the precondition for doing them, albeit only by God’s “grace and power.” Human reason participates in God’s reason; human reason expresses itself in human action as well. Our doings are but our thoughts in motion.

As Paul makes it clear in the Epistle reading from Romans, we are “transformed by the renewing of our minds.” This underscores the point about being changed by what we hear and see which leads to sacrifice and service in our lives. It complements the Gospel wonderfully. For our transformation is through the grace of teaching, through the grace of Revelation and through our reasoning upon what is made known to us in the witness of the Scriptures about Jesus Christ.

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“They fell down and worshipped.”

There is nothing more foreign to our contemporary world than the idea of worship, and yet, that is exactly what the Magi-Kings are all about. What is worship? The honouring and commitment to what is greater than yourself. There is no more wonderful an illustration and story of that than in the story of the end and the beginning of Christmas, what we call the Epiphany.

It signifies the Christmas of the Gentiles, to be sure, but even more it speaks to the deeper meaning of Christmas itself. It is about the real significance and meaning of the birth in Bethlehem. Christ is God with us. The Magi-Kings intuit and understand this. Their gifts are “sacred gifts of mystic meaning.” They are gifts that teach us about the radical meaning of Christmas.

They saw, they came, they worshipped. They are moved to a long and arduous journey, “the ways deep and the weather sharp, the worst time for a journey.” But isn’t that the point? We are all on a journey in and through the weather sharp and deep realities of our world and experience.

Epiphany awakens us to the splendour and glory of the Child Christ. The light now shines from within the world and not just from without. That will be the recurring theme of Epiphany, the theme of school and teaching that illumines the seeming meaningless of human life.

“They fell down and worshipped.”

Fr. David Curry
Short Meditation for Epiphany
January 6^th, 2014

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