Four Signs
Matthew 21:33-46
Once upon a time at a church meeting, a wealthy member rose to tell the rest of those present about his Christian faith. “I’m a millionaire,” he said, “and I attribute my wealth to the blessings of God in my life.” He went on to recall the turning point in his relationship with God. As a young man, he had just earned his first dollar and he went to a church meeting that night. The speaker at that meeting was a missionary who told about his work in the mission field. Before the offering plate was passed around, the preacher told everyone that everything that was collected that night would be given to this missionary to help fund his work. The wealthy man wanted to give to support this mission work, but he knew he couldn’t make change from the offering plate. He knew he either had to give all he had or nothing at all. At that moment, he decided to give all that he had to God. Looking back, he said he knew that God had blessed that decision and had made him wealthy.
When he finished, there was silence in the room. As he returned to the pew and sat down, an elderly lady seated behind him leaned forward and said, “I dare you to do it again.”
Stewardship is less about our possessions than it is about our possessiveness. Our reading for today is a parable about stewardship, but we often miss this. We miss it because, for most people, this story is an allegory. Every part of an allegory represents something else. Figure out the code, and you know what the story is about.
If this story is only an allegory, then God is the vineyard owner, Jesus is the son, the Pharisees are the workers who seized, beat, stoned, and killed the prophets and the son. Therefore, the point of the story is that the Pharisees lose, and the followers of Christ win. The end. That’s how most people interpret this story. That’s how the Pharisees themselves interpreted the story – that Jesus was talking about them.
But Jesus calls this a parable. As I have said before, a parable is an imaginary garden with a real toad in it. The parable that Jesus tells ends with the killing of the son. It is the Pharisees who make the claim that the tenants will be put to a miserable death, and that the owner will lease the vineyards to others who will do the right thing. It’s an easy conclusion to come to, because it is a conclusion that is fair and just. It is so fair and just that we often quit listening to the rest of this passage.
We think the conclusion given by the Pharisees is the conclusion given by Jesus. We want our relationship with God to be about what is fair and just, and that we always get exactly what we deserve. But this is not a parable about justice. This is a stewardship parable. Even though the betrayal by his disciples was near at hand, and the cross was looming over Jesus, he was still teaching us about our relationship with God.
The 44 Standard Sermons of the Methodist Connection with sermon 1, paragraph 1 proclaiming, “Everything that is, is by God’s grace, so we have nothing to offer God except what God has given us.” This is where we start to think about salvation and the first great commandment to love God. This is also where we start to think about stewardship and the second great commandment to love our neighbors.
That’s how this parable starts, affirming that God has given us everything we need. The parable begins with four signs: The landowner first planted a vineyard to produce the fruit; second, dug a wine press to process the fruit; third, put a fence around it to define the vineyard; and fourth, built a watchtower to protect the workers in the vineyard. The parable begins just like we sing in the old hymn, all you may need he will provide, God will take care of you. When we start there, the rest of the parable becomes commentary on how all of us, in every generation, have lived as if we are not accountable to God for what God has provided us.
The conclusion that Jesus gives to this parable makes the point that God provides what we need to hold our relationship with God together – even when in our own wisdom we reject it. Most translations still say that the rejected stone has become the cornerstone, but if we check the footnote for that word, we learn that it can also be interpreted as the keystone, which makes more sense.
Cornerstones can become outdated and irrelevant. Things change over the course of time. Buildings get sold. Buildings get repurposed. Realities change. What may have been true when the cornerstone was laid may not be true years later.
For just one example, the cornerstone of this church says that this building is an M. E. Church, South. This building has been in continuous use as a church, without ever having been sold, but it hasn’t been a South church since the merger in 1939 created the Methodist Church. And the Methodist Church hasn’t existed since the merger with the Evangelical United Brethren in 1968 which created the United Methodist Church. Our cornerstone has been out of date for 72 years! It says more about who we used to be instead of who we are today.
Things change, and we know that a cornerstone may only reflect what used to be. That’s why I don’t feel comfortable calling Jesus the cornerstone of our faith, if that would mean he could be considered outdated, misleading, or just plain wrong.
A keystone, however, never loses its importance or significance. A keystone is the stone at the top of an arch. Its strength keeps the doorway open, and it keeps the walls on either side of the arch from collapsing. If you remove the keystone, it all comes tumbling down, crushing anyone it falls on. Jesus is the keystone, the one who holds open the gate of heaven, even if the Pharisees would reject him as being all wrong for the job of saving the people.
These vinedressers who refuse to give to the owner what is due are real toads. And we are toads whenever we try to justify why we keep what is due to God for ourselves. If we don’t want to be toads, it would be wise to know what it is that is due to God as our part of the stewardship.
Jesus summed up our stewardship this way: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength; and love your neighbor as yourself. God is due our love, and the neighbors God gives to us are due our love. The Church, over the years, has given us some direction on how we flesh out those “dues” by giving us the markers of “my prayers, my presence, my gifts, my service, and my witness.”
First, God is due our prayers -- and not just during worship. God is due our prayers when we rise in the morning, and when we retire for the evening. God is due our prayers when we receive the blessings of a meal, and for the blessings of family and friends, and for the blessing of watching over us. God is due our prayers while God still gives to us our breath and life.
Raymond Brown has written, “To be prayer-less is to be guilty of the worst form of practical atheism. We are saying that we believe in God but we can do without him. It makes us careless about our former sins and heedless of our immediate needs.” God is due our prayers.
Second, God is due our presence – and this is not fulfilled simply because we put our body in a pew on a Sunday morning. God is due our heart-felt praise for the blessings we have received. God is due our sin-sorry confessions for the times we have preferred our own will to that of God’s. God is due our hope-filled intercessions for others, so that God can work through us to bring comfort, peace, and wholeness. God is due our open and willing hearts, so that God can complete us as those who reveal God’s image to the world.
Too often, however, we have accepted the world’s stereotype about worship. The world thinks worship is when people gather, God appears, and an hour later both the people and God disappear. Worship is not so much about God coming to us, as it is about our being intentional about coming into the presence of God. God is due our worship.
Third, God is due our gifts -- and not just a portion of what we don’t need. God is due our gifts because everything that is, is by God’s grace. God is due our gifts because we have nothing to offer God except what God has already given us.
To keep those gifts for ourselves is to declare that we do not trust God to keep God’s promises. When the Israelites returned to Jerusalem after the second exile, the people felt overwhelmed with their need to rebuild their homes and their lives, and the temptation was great to keep for their own use the gifts that were due to God. The prophet Malachi, speaking for God, said to them: “Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house,” says the Lord Almighty, “and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that you will not have room enough for it.” -Malachi 3:10 (NIV). God is due our gifts.
Fourth, God is due our service – and not just the service we do at the church. In his Monday morning prayer, John Wesley asks God to “make me zealous to embrace all opportunities to serve by assisting the needy, protecting the oppressed, instructing the unknowing, exhorting the godly, reproving the wicked.” Service as our loving response to God’s grace is such a part of our Methodist DNA that we call it Wesley’s rule that we are to “do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can!” God is due our service.
Last, God is due our witness – and not just what we share in the safety of our small groups in the church. God is due a witness that declares to the world, “God’s will be done. Nothing more, nothing less, nothing else.” We are to desire nothing more than God’s reign in our hearts, or we will be guilty of beating away the first agent for the Lord, the Law of Moses. We are to desire nothing less than the redemption of the lost and least, or we will be guilty of killing the second agent, the prophets of God. We are to desire nothing else except to love God and to love one another, or we will be guilty of killing the Son of the Father all over again.
We have been given a vineyard to work, a vineyard that is a gift from God through the grace of Jesus Christ. We have been set as stewards over this gift, accountable to God for the harvest, and for giving to God what is rightfully God’s to receive. Everything that is, is by God’s grace. The world is daring us to trust God again with our prayers, our presence, our gifts, our service, and our witness. The world is daring us because the world needs us to be the Body of Christ, and to bring God’s kingdom to all the world as it is in heaven.
#620 “One Bread, One Body”