Online Sermons
Proper 22-A: October 5, The Rev. Dr. Bill Pugliese
This Gospel parable is a very familiar one for me. In fact – and I think I’ve told this story before – it almost got me thrown out of seminary. It was my final year in seminary. I had been there for eleven and a half years – all through high school and college and three-and-a-half years of theology. It was my turn to preach to the entire student body and faculty and this Gospel was the proper for the day.
Now you have to remember that I was truly a model student. I kept the rules, was president of my class, was well respected by the faculty. That is not to brag. It is simply the case. My seminary, those in authority, had a way of keeping all of us in check. They used the fear factor. Every year, almost without fail, they would dismiss one of the senior seminarians for what seemed like some silly infraction. This always bothered me, but fear kept me from saying anything lest I become the next victim.
Nevertheless, on that fateful November day in 1968, I used this parable as an allegory to condemn those, what I believed to be, unjustified and certainly unchristian actions of the faculty and administration. I likened the seminarians to the sons of the founder of the seminary and the authorities to the tenants who stoned and killed the landowner’s sons. I intimated that if they did not change their ways, someone might come and take the seminary away from them.
Well, they got the message and they were furious. I was called on the carpet and, I suspect, if I had not been such a model seminarian and my actions were not so out of character for me, they might have made me the next victim. Thankfully they did not or else who knows what I might be doing these days. I have always believed I was justified in what I preached. In fact, the seminary has changed their ways over the years. I doubt if my sermon had anything to do with it, but one can always think so.
At any rate, even though to this day I believe I was correct in what I said, I was wrong. In fact, it has taken me all these years to realize that just as the authorities had misused the students, I truly misused this parable. But I am not alone. Scripture scholars say that Matthew himself misused, perhaps misread, this parable. Matthew wrote his Gospel for Jewish converts and for those Jews who were thinking of becoming converts to Christianity. Matthew understood this parable to mean that the Jewish people, who were put in charge of God’s Kingdom, had killed all his prophets and would kill his son. Because they did, the kingdom would be taken from them and given to someone else. In many ways Matthew’s take on the parable was anti-Semitic just as mine was anti-authority. We were both wrong.
The point of the parable is not about judgment, as Matthew and I seemed to think, so much as it is about stewardship. Yes, it is about judgment. We will be judged because of our actions. If we kill the messenger, if we misuse people, we will be judged and judged harshly, for our actions. But Jesus did not need to tell us a parable about that. In many ways, that is simply common sense. There are consequences for selfish actions. And if we act selfishly, we will suffer the consequences.
But, again, judgment is not the main point of the parable; stewardship is. Jesus is talking about the Kingdom of Heaven, God’s Kingdom. Everything is God’s. Everything. This world, this universe, life itself – all of it is God’s and is God’s gift to us. We are simply tenants, no more and no less. God gives us this world and whatever we have in this world for our use. Like the tenants in the parable, we are to do the very best we can with what God has given us to use. We are to be the best of stewards. That is all God asks of us and that is all we are to ask of ourselves.
But sometimes we become like those tenants in the parable. We begin to think like them. We think that what we have is ours, or should be ours. After all, there would be no harvest if we did not plant the seed and till the ground and tend the crop and finally harvest the crop. Crops don’t harvest all by themselves, do they? It takes a lot of work, a lot of hard work, to bring in the harvest. The laborer deserves to be paid, doesn’t he? So what’s the problem?
The problem is that the longer we take care of the land, the more easily we begin to think that the land is ours. We soon forget that the only reason why we have what we have, why we have the land to grow and the harvest to reap, is the grace of God. Furthermore, none of what we have is truly ours. It is all God’s and will always be all God’s. God only gives it to us to use for a while and then pass it on when we pass on.
A friend of mine used to be a fruit buyer before he retired. He was telling me about the time he went to visit one of the men from whom he bought cherries. He said that the man took him up on a hill on his farm where they could look down on all the cherry trees in bloom, acres and acres of them. He said that the scene was breathtaking. He looked at the owner of the orchard and said to him, “You must be proud of all this.” “No,” the man said, “I am just truly thankful that God allows me to take care of this part of his creation.”
That cherry farmer understood what stewardship is all about, what being a Christian steward is all about. All that we have is God’s gift to us. And all God asks of us is to use those gifts as best we can, no more and no less. All of us, you and I, have been abundantly blessed, more so than we will ever realize or perhaps ever know. There are times, I am sure, when we are tempted to think like the tenants in the parable. We begin to think we somehow deserve or have earned all that we have. We don’t and we haven’t. As the Collect this morning reminds us, God not only is always more ready to hear than we to pray; but God gives more than we either desire or deserve.
We must constantly be vigilant so that we never lose sight of the fact that we are called to be stewards of all that God has given us, with all that God has blessed us. Our response must be one of thanks. We live that thanks and give that thanks by doing the very best we can and by using those gifts not simply for ourselves but for others. That is what the Every Member Canvas is really all about. It is an opportunity to help us share those abundant gifts of God – our time and our talents and our material resources – in the service of others.
Paul, in today’s epistle reading, says that he regards everything as rubbish, as garbage, especially if it stands in the way of helping him know his Lord. Sometimes the gifts we have been given, especially our material blessings, stand in our way. Sometimes they prevent us from living out our faith as we know we can and know we should. Sometimes the material becomes more important than the spiritual so much so that we can almost become obsessed with the material: accumulating it, hoarding it, reveling in it. Our material possessions can easily come to possess us if we are not careful.
The authorities in charge back in my seminary days often acted as if they thought that the institution was more important than what the institution was for, namely, the students and their education and growth into good priests. We often think that the material is more important and makes us more important than the spiritual when it is just the opposite. As Paul understood, the spiritual helps give meaning to the material, helps us to put it all into a proper perspective. The material is important. It is vital. But the material is given to us by God to help in our spiritual growth and not the other way around.
Today’s readings, from the Collect, through the Old Testament reiteration of the Ten Commandments, through Paul’s observation on the place of the material and spiritual in our lives, to Jesus parable about stewardship – all of it is a call to spend some time reflecting upon our relationship to our God and how we live out that relationship each day of our lives. May we make that time and take that time sometime this week.
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