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Saying Yes, Doing No
A sermon by
Dr. Jim Somerville
Pastor, Richmond’s First Baptist Church
Richmond, Virginia
September 28, 2008
The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost
The last time we were
together Jesus was telling a charming little parable about a vineyard and some
workers and a crazy owner who stood justice on its head in the name of grace.
That was last week.
This week we see Jesus
staring down the religious authorities of Jerusalem with a steely gaze and
thunder in his voice as he says to them, “I tell you the truth. Tax collectors
and prostitutes will go into the Kingdom of Heaven before you.” So you have to
ask, “What happened?” Last week it was all grace; this week it is all
judgment. What happened?
Well, just to fill you in
between last week’s gospel reading and this one, Jesus has entered the city of
Jerusalem on a donkey. We call it the triumphal entry and it was triumphant as
he rode in. People stripping off their outer garments and throwing them down in
the road, taking palm branches down from the trees and waving them and throwing
them in the path and everybody shouting out, “Hosanna to the son of David.
Hosanna in the highest.” So that the whole city was in a turmoil, Matthew says,
and people were asking, “Who is this? Who is this?”
Jesus came into the city,
walked into the temple, took a look around, and almost immediately began turning
over the tables of the moneychangers, driving them out of the temple, saying,
“My father’s house is supposed to be a house of prayer. You have turned it into
a den of robbers.”
So you can’t be all that
surprised that the next day when Jesus comes back into Jerusalem, a Jerusalem
that he has turned upside down, the local authorities might have a few questions
for him.
The religious authorities
have a few questions. “What gives you the right to do this, to come riding into
town, getting everybody all stirred up and then turning over tables in the
temple, running people out. What gives you the right?”
And Jesus, knowing that
the best offense is a good defense says, “Let me ask you a question: The
baptism of John – where did it come from? Heaven or earth? Was John doing that
by God’s authority of his own authority?”
And the religious
authorities conferred with each other. “If we say that his authority came from
men, from earth, the whole crowd will turn against us because everyone believes
he’s a prophet. But if we say it comes from God then Jesus, here, will ask us,
“Why didn’t you believe him?”
And so they gave a good
political answer. “We don’t know. We have no knowledge. We really don’t know.”
And Jesus says, “Then I’m
not going to tell you where my authority comes from either.
“But I will ask you this:
There was a man who had two sons. He went to one of them and said I want you to
work in the vineyard today and his son told him no but later he did go to the
vineyard and work. He went to the other son and said the same thing and he
said, ‘Yes, I’ll do it’ but he didn’t. Now let me ask you the question: Which
of these two sons did what his father wanted?”
Well the answer is so
obvious even the religious authorities can figure it out – the one who did what
he wanted, the one who went to the vineyard, who worked. That’s right, Jesus
says, and now let me tell you, “Tax collectors and prostitutes are going into
the kingdom of heaven before you.”
Which ought to give us
pause because here’s Jesus talking to the religious people of his time and
telling them that they’re going to be the last in line.
Look around you this
morning. We are the religious people. I mean we’re all dressed up. Here we
are in church on Sunday. We’ve been saying the prayers, we’ve been singing the
hymns. Suppose Jesus were to say to us something like this, “Tax collectors and
prostitutes will go into the kingdom of heaven before you people.’ We would want
to why know. What did we do? What did we not do? And the answer, it seems, is
in this parable.
Look at it closely and you
can see that there are four possible responses: The father comes to his son.
He asks him to work in the vineyard. The son could either say no and do no or
he could say no and do yes. He could say yes and do no or he could say yes and
do yes – go the vineyard and work. And Jesus says if God were lining this
people up for entry into the kingdom, this is how it would look. The ones who
would be first in line are the ones who say yes and do yes. And then the ones
who say no but do yes and then the ones who say yes but do no and then the ones
who say no but do no – they would be at the last. In fact, they might not even
make it in at all.
But those who say yes and
do yes would be first and then after them the ones who say no and do yes – the
ones like tax collectors and prostitutes, Jesus says. After them somewhere
would be the religious authorities who say yes but do no and then the others.
Which makes me wonder.
What have these tax collectors and prostitutes done that puts them ahead of the
religious authorities? And it comes down to this. John the Baptist was
preaching in the wilderness, inviting people to repent and be baptized, and
these tax collectors and prostitutes who had initially said no to God now said
yes. They heard John’s preaching. They repented of their sins. They were
washed in the waters of baptism. They came up to live a different kind of
life. This is the work of God, Jesus might say, the work of repentance, of
changing your mind, of turning around, of doing what the father wants.
Which causes me to look at
us again and wonder. What can we do, what sort of works must we do to ensure
our proper place in line?
Well, if we dig down into
the story just a little deeper there are some clues, I think.
I’ve tried to imagine how
it would really be if the father went to his son and asked this question. And I
can picture a modern-day father going to his son’s bedroom door, knocking,
saying ‘Son, I need you to work in the vineyard today.” And the son would shout
from behind his closed door, “No. I’m not going to do it. You’re not the boss
of me.” Maybe some of you have heard this from behind closed doors. So the
father goes to the other son and says, “I need you to work in the vineyard
today.” And there’s his son lying on the couch, listening to his iPod, reading
a magazine, popping his gum. He says, “Sure, Dad, yeah, no problem. No, I’ll
do that – right away. Promise. Not a big deal.” But he doesn’t go.
This other son, the one
who shouted from behind the closed door, begins to think better of it later. “I
shouldn’t talk to my dad like that. He’s just asking me to work in the
vineyard. The work has to be done. Somebody has to do it. Maybe I could do
it. Maybe I should do it.”
This son begins to feel
something stirring inside him as his father’s question and his own response
conflict with each other. He feels remorse that causes him to repent and he
gets up off his bed, leaves his room, goes to the vineyard, and gets to work.
And Jesus says, “Which of
these two do you think did the will of his father? The one who went to work in
the vineyard or the one who dismissed the whole conversation and never took it
up again. Oh the first one, the one who went to work, he’s the one who did his
father’s will.
Again I look at us and
wonder what sort of work we need to do to ensure our place in that line. How
can we be standing there before the gates of the kingdom when they swing open.
We all do some work for the master, don’t we? Get up early, some of us, and say
our prayers, do our devotional reading. We read through the Bible in a year.
We come to Sunday school. We serve on committees. Here we are in worship. We
sing the songs. We pray the prayers. Sometimes we help those who are less
fortunate. What more can we do that we have not done?
And I think it is this work of repentance we need to consider.
In the Bible there are two
words for repentance. One is epistrepho which means to turn around and
the other is metanoia which means to change your mind. I’m wondering
today about people who have been Christian for a long time, who made up their
minds a long time ago about Jesus, who believed then that they knew what God
wanted from them and what they needed to do, people who have been following that
same pattern now for tens and twenties and thirties of years. Are they ever
confronted with a new word from the Lord, a fresh work? Do they ever have to
look at things in a different way than they’ve looked at them before?
These religious
authorities who had found a comfortable routine in Jerusalem find that routine
suddenly upset by Jesus who rides into town hailed as the son of David and
beings turning things upside down. He says he comes with God’s own authority,
that his business is God’s business and the religious leaders can’t believe it.
But is it possible that even in our time God is breaking into the word with a
fresh word and fresh work? Is he calling us to think differently about things?
To change our minds? To repent? To see the ways in which Christ is at work in
the world around us and go to work with him? Is it possible the work Christ
wants us to do most of all, the work the father is calling us to do, is the work
of changing our minds?
At my last church we used
to have a Wednesday night supper just like we do here. It was a little
different because in the city of Washington it is so hard to get from one place
to another that the people who typically came on Wednesday night were the
retired people who could leave their homes in the suburbs at 3 in the afternoon
and drive into the city.
You’d see them there.
They would arrive at 3:30, 3:45; they would sit in the library and study their
Sunday school lessons for the coming week. They’d go down to the Fellowship
Hall and put out the tablecloths and the napkins, the silverware. They would
fill the glasses with ice, make the lemonade, all of this while waiting until 6
o’clock when we had supper. But these were the pillars of the church, the
saints, and you would see them sitting there around those tables maintaining a
tradition that they had kept for fifty years. These are the people who would be
first through the gate and into the kingdom of heaven, if only because they left
home at 3 o’clock in order to get there.
But one day somebody
wandered in and ended up sitting at the table who was unlike almost everyone
else in the room. About thirty years younger, first of all, with hair that was
a different color, style of dress that was different. This guy’s name was Gary
and he didn’t seem to be intimidated in the least by all these pillars of the
church, these saints who sat around the table. He sat right down there with
them and before you know it he was talking and they were laughing, engaged in
conversation that went on and on. His joy was contagious.
And when they finished
their meal, Gary would pick up their plates, their silverware, take them from
the tables back to the kitchen. This sort of heavenly busboy who had been sent
to us from nowhere, talking, laughing, taking our dishes.
This went on for weeks and
weeks and people began to get used to Gary and the way he looked and how his
hair changed color from one week to the next. How he would sometimes show up in
a leather vest with no shirt underneath and make people a little uncomfortable
but they got to know Gary, just Gary, and they felt his joy every time he walked
into the room.
And then one day he said
he’d like to talk to me about baptism. He’d never been baptized. He hadn’t
been a Christian. He’d like to talk about that and so we sat in my study one
afternoon and he told me a story that would put most tax collectors and
prostitutes to shame, a story of a life lived in a way that most of us could
hardly imagine this was Gary’s life up until that moment.
But now, he said, he
wanted to be baptized. “Do you believe in Jesus?” I said. “‘With all my
heart.” Do you want to follow him as a disciple? With all my heart.”
“Welcome to the
baptistery,” I said, although I wasn’t sure our baptistery would ever be the
same afterwards.
I stood there on one
Sunday in January with Gary standing beside me. I introduced him to the
congregation and told the story of how he had been interacting on Wednesday
nights and then I said, “Gary, profess your faith.”
And he said it in a voice
loud enough to be heard in the back of the room, “Jesus is Lord!”
And with that and in the
Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, I dipped him down under those waters and
brought him up to a whole new life.
I remember seeing him in
the sanctuary in the weeks that followed. On communion Sunday especially, he
would sit back there in the pews just looking toward the ceiling with this look
of absolute rapture on his face. I asked him about it later. “What are you
looking at?’ He said, “The angels. The angels. Can’t you see them?”
“Well, no, I, no, I
haven’t seen the angels up there.”
He said, “Every communion
Sunday I see them.” He said, “I know what it is, really. It’s the lights
shining down on those silver communion trays when they’re passed around and they
reflect back up on the ceiling and every little cup of juice sends a reflection
sparkling on the ceiling. But to me, they look like angels. And every time I’m
here on communion Sunday I just feel so blessed by God.” What are you going to
say? From that day forward I saw angels, too.
Gary came to me and said,
“I’ve got this idea, Jim. It sounds a little crazy but I’ve got this idea. You
know these groups meet in our church – Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics
Anonymous. On Saturday the church is just filled up with alcoholics and drug
addicts, you know that.”
Yes.
“Well, I was wondering if
I could ask them if they have any prayer requests and then I could bring those
requests on Wednesday night when we pray for people, how about that?”
I said, “That sounds
good.”
So Gary did it the next
Saturday he went but I didn’t he was going to be taking little cards and asking
everyone to write down their prayer request. They did and then he came back on
Wednesday night and looked around at the tables where everyone was sitting, all
those pillars of the church, those saints, and he said, “Here’s what I want you
to do. I want each one of you to take one of these prayer requests and pray for
these people. All right? And then you can turn the card over and write on the
back, ‘Tonight I prayed for you.’”
And so he passed out the
cards. And there were some of the most unusual prayer requests we had ever seen
on Wednesday night at First Baptist Church. I was sitting there beside Mary who
was up in her eighties, she’d been a Sunday School teacher for 60 years. She
slid her card over to me and said, “What’s that word?”
I said, “I think that word
is, uhm, herpes.”
She said, “That’s what I
thought.” Says right here, “Pray for my lover who has herpes.”
I said, “What’re you going
to do?”
She said, “I’m going to
pray.” And she did and everybody in the room prayed and when they were finished
they turned the cards over and there was one of them that said “Tonight I prayed
for you. Signed, Mary.”
And Gary took those cards
back and gave them out to all those alcoholics and drug addicts. You were
prayed for on Wednesday night. You were prayed for on Wednesday night by the
saints of First Baptist Church, the pillars. What do you think about that?
I tell you what God might
think. God might think that when the gates to the kingdom are opened somebody
like Gary would be standing at the front of the line. And some of those people
he asked us to pray for and some of those people who did the praying.
Gracious God, we ask you
to help us repent. Open up our hearts to love the world you love. Open up our
eyes to see the way you are at work in it. Open our ears to hear you calling us
to labor in your vineyard. And let our answer be yes and yes. Amen.
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