A New Beginning

The Reverend Hugh Hildesley

17th Sunday After Pentecost Proper 20 Year A  

Exodus 16:2-15
Psalm 105:1-6, 37-45
Philippians 1:21-30
Matthew 20:1-16

“The last will be first and the first last”

Jesus, in his sermons to his disciples, usually made use of parables to drive home his message.  To this day, preachers understand that it is the illustrations that make the sermons memorable, especially those illustrations that refer to occurrences in the listener’s daily lives.

So let us return to the laborers in that vineyard around 30 C.E.  The red wine that we will be consecrating this morning comes from the Philokalia vineyard in Bethlehem, Palestine, where wine has been continuously produced for over 5,000 years.  You will be relieved to learn that today’s wine comes from the 2023 harvest. A photograph of this vineyard is available for you at the back of the church.  We hear of a presumably wealthy vineyard owner who is hiring multiple day laborers to pick his grapes at the optimal moment.  The original crew are not getting the job done in a timely manner, putting the quality of the ripe grapes at risk.  The owner continues to hire further laborers as the harvest proceeds and contracts to pay the later hires at the same rate as those who have been working since the early morning.

We agree with the members of the original crew.  “But that’s not fair!”

Worse than that for Christ’s disciples, the parable clearly points to the process of selection of those who will be chosen to occupy a place in the heavenly kingdom. Who gets in?  Who will be first in line? Will the disciples get a VIP pass? What about the non-churchgoers, the greedy, the idle, the criminal and the atheists?    Will my good deeds and being nice to people advance my chances?

Christ is warning the disciples, and us, that God’s justice does not operate the way the world does.  Would you believe that in God’s judgment, the first will be last and the last first, in a total reversal of the existent hierarchy, when Palestine was under occupation by the military forces of the Roman Empire, working with the collaboration of the puppet King Herod.  The early Christians faced persecution and opposition from both the Romans and the Jewish establishment and would have suffered heavily when the Roman army destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 C.E.  But the early Christians continued to meet in small groups, celebrating the Eucharist and retelling the stories that came down to them in a strong oral tradition. 

Unlike in the parlor game ‘Telephone’, Christ’s stories or parables have survived intact, in spite of numerous iterations.

The gospels as we know them began to come together around 100 C.E., originally in Koine Greek, a simple form of classic Greek in common use at the time, replacing the Aramaic tongue in which Jesus had preached.  

Such was the power of his message that these stories continued to ring true for the writers of the first English Bible, the Great Bible, published in 1535, to be replaced by the much-loved King James Version (KJV), commissioned in 1604 and published in 1611.  The King James Bible was first revised in 1769 and was re-revised in the Revised Standard Version in 1952, since when various “New” English versions have appeared, and yet, the message has survived:

God’s justice, mercy and forgiveness are different and available to ALL.

How does this message affect the world we inhabit today?

Can we apply God’s justice in an economy that produces individual trillionaires?

Elon Musk’s net worth is currently around $853 Billion.  Rhode Island State 

Minimum Wage is $16 per hour.  We need to address this inequity.

Christ’s vineyard owner made sure that all his laborers went home with enough to live on.  I believe that our task is to encourage that generosity in our own environment. 

I am willing to bet that most of us can recall moments in our careers when we felt underpaid and under-appreciated, as we encountered colleagues being promoted and paid more than us, while in our opinion they were achieving less with minimal effort on their part.  Feelings of injustice, jealousy and anger left scar tissue on our self-respect.  That’s how the laborers in that vineyard probably felt.  

And yet, Christ was speaking about a new creation, a creation which St. Paul describes in his letter to the Galatians (3:27-28): 

“For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ.  There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

We are called to a life in which there is no spiritual hierarchy.  We are all equal in God’s eyes and therefore subject to God’s unlimited justice, mercy and forgiveness, peace and love.  We are led to our mission, announced in our baptismal covenant: To seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbors as ourselves; to strive for justice and peace among all people; and to respect the dignity of every human being.

God knows our challenges and pressures, our fears and anxieties, our failures and mistakes, and God calls us home, forgiven and ready to take up God’s work, as Matthew’s gospel tells us:

“Come unto me, all you that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” (Matthew 11: 28)

Amen