16th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 22A

16th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 22A
October 2, 2011
“On the 11th of September 1522 Sir Thomas More wrote a short letter to his daughter Margaret. Obviously she had asked him to send her some money, and in his reply More wrote, ‘You ask for money, my dear Margaret, with too much bashfulness and timidity, since you are asking from a father who is eager to give…As it is, I send only what you have asked, but would have added more…So the sooner you spend this money well, and the sooner you ask for more, you will be sure of pleasing your father.”i
This morning in our collect of the day, we pray to a God who is “always more ready to hear than we are to pray, and to give more than we either desire or deserve” and we ask God to pour upon us the abundance of God’s mercy…forgiving us and giving us those good things for which we feel unworthy to ask. It is important to remember this—what we are praying, what we are believing about God this day before we even begin to think about the readings for today.
Let’s start with the gospel. Today we hear Matthew’s version of Jesus’s parable of the wicked tenants, which is the second in a series of three parables that Jesus tells in the temple after he has ridden into Jerusalem in triumph, thrown the money changers out of the temple the day before and come back to teach the next day. These three parables are all set in the context of the chief priests and elders’ question to Jesus: “By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?”
In this second of the three parables, Jesus tells about a landowner who planted a vineyard and then left it in the hands of some tenants and went away to another country. The wicked tenants don’t want to give the landlord the fruits of their labor in the vineyard, so when the landowner sends two different groups of slaves and then his own son, the tenants resort to more and more dramatic acts of rebellion, finally killing the son of the landowner in a ridiculous and unreasonable plan to inherit the vineyard themselves from a landowner who is still living and whose wrath they have now provoked.
In its original setting, the parable holds at its heart the idea of how Israel rejects God. It also may serve us this morning as an invitation to examine how we reject God.
How do we reject God? In the Old Testament reading, we see the people of Israel receiving the 10 commandments. God begins with not a commandment but a deep truth about God’s relationship with Israel out of which all the following laws flow: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other Gods before me.” In a part that is left out of our reading today, God tells the people that they shall not bow down to or worship other idols, “for I the Lord you God am a jealous God…” God is claiming the full affection and demanding full relationship with the children of Israel. And so we reject God (or at the very minimum, we two-time God) when we bow down to worship other idols. We do this when we give our hearts to something that is not of God. We do this when we order our lives and our priorities around something that is not God. When we try to divide our attention with God, we are rejecting God.
In Paul’s letter to the Philippians today, we see a glimpse of what has happened to Paul in his conversion, how he goes from pride in his own achievements to gratitude for an utterly gratuitous call to a completely new way of life. In the past, Paul has rejected God when he placed too much pride in his own achievements. And so do we also reject God.
We reject God when we let others tell us who we really are and do not listen to the God who knows us and loves us for our most true selves.
We reject God when we reject other people for reasons of our own; we reject others because they do not fit into our standards of what is good, appropriate and fitting, and when we define others as being less worthy, less human, less valuable than ourselves, then we are rejecting God.
We reject God when we do not value and believe in the goodness in which God has created each of us. We reject God when we cannot believe and trust that we are, in fact, good.
We reject God when we place our trust in the world’s scarcity that says you’ve got to hold onto and fight for what is yours because there is not enough to go around; we reject God when we do not give our hearts to God’s abundance that says, not only is there always enough, but there is radically more than enough—resources, love…-- for everyone.
We reject God when we live too much of our lives and our faith in the sacrifice of the cross—in the “no” and we do not include the surprising gift, the “yes” of the resurrection.
We reject God when we refuse to die to our old selves and are not accepting of God’s gift of renewal and new life.
We reject God when we are not grateful for all the good gifts God so freely gives.
In the book The Parables of Judgment, Robert Capon writes about this parable of Jesus and this phenomenon of how we continue to reject God and to reject God’s grace through Jesus Christ saying, “So it is with me, if I am honest. And so it is with you. The Father’s will for you—his whole will, his entire plan of salvation—is that you believe in Jesus, nothing more. He has already forgiven you, he has already reconciled you, he has already raised you up together with Jesus and made you sit together in heavenly places with him. And better yet, Jesus himself has already pronounced upon you the approving judgment of having done his Father’s will. But if you do not believe him—if you insist on walking up to the bar of judgment on your own faithless feet and arguing a case he has already dismissed—well, you will never hear the blessed silence of his un-condemnation over the infernal racket of your own voice…”ii
This morning, may God who is always more ready to hear than we are to pray, and to give more than we either desire or deserve inspire our hearts to
Choose God. Choose blessings. Choose abundance.


i. O’Driscoll, Herbert. Prayers for the Breaking of Bread: Meditations on the Collects of the Church Year. Cowley: Cambridge, 1991, p161.
ii. Capon, Robert. The Parables of Judgment. Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, 1989, p110.