Collect
Almighty God, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you: pour your love into our hearts and draw us to yourself, and so bring us at last to your heavenly city where we shall see you face to face; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.
or
Gracious God, you call us to fullness of life: deliver us from unbelief and banish our anxieties with the liberating love of Jesus Christ our Lord.
Post Communion
Lord, we pray that your grace may always precede and follow us, and make us continually to be given to all good works; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Readings
Epistle – Philippians 3.4b–14
Even though I, too, have reason for confidence in the flesh.
If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.
Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.
Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on towards the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.
Gospel – Matthew 21.33–46
‘Listen to another parable. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a watch-tower. Then he leased it to tenants and went to another country. When the harvest time had come, he sent his slaves to the tenants to collect his produce. But the tenants seized his slaves and beat one, killed another, and stoned another. Again he sent other slaves, more than the first; and they treated them in the same way. Finally he sent his son to them, saying, “They will respect my son.” But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, “This is the heir; come, let us kill him and get his inheritance.” So they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him. Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?’ They said to him, ‘He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time.’
Jesus said to them, ‘Have you never read in the scriptures:
“The stone that the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone;
this was the Lord’s doing,
and it is amazing in our eyes”?
Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom. The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls.’
When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they realized that he was speaking about them. They wanted to arrest him, but they feared the crowds, because they regarded him as a prophet.
Sermon on Sunday, Trinity 18
‘Listen to another parable,’ says Jesus. ‘Listen to another parable!’ and we cry – ‘Not another one!’ and Jesus seems to reply, ‘Just one more … you really might understand what the kingdom is, and what God is for you, if you focus on this parable.’
So, let’s think a little more about parables, but this time from a very different angle, perhaps you might think it an odd example, but it is one that has a link in my mind to the word “parable” itself.
Who has heard of parabolas? The word has a similarity, but a very different origin. It comes from geometry – you may have learned about them. The most well-known example of a parabola is a satellite dish. But we have also encountered a parabola close up. It is at a fun fair. – Who has ever been to one? We have all gone into the haunted house, haven’t we? In that house is often a hall of mirrors. A very scary place, isn’t it? Those mirrors use parabolas to create the effects that astonish us, but we enjoy them so much. We see ourselves in that very different way through those special mirrors. Sometimes we are long and thin, other times short and squat. Sometimes odd combinations of all sorts of shapes. It is amazing to look at ourselves in those strange mirrors, isn’t it?
The parabola has a unique property. There is unique focus in the parabola, and every point on the parabola is the same distance to the plane which is tangential to it and every line perpendicular to that plane goes directly to that focal point. – Don’t worry, I get confused at this point about geometric properties and mathematics as well, but I want to make this observation. I just want to say that the focal point is the important thing to consider. It’s what makes the satellite dish work. The parabola focuses everything on one point.
Isn’t this what a parable does? It forces us to think anew about ourselves and that one thing in our lives that gives us life in abundance. Our parable today brings us to consider how we treat others, especially someone who represents another. The son of the landowner becomes the focal point in our lives when we understand ourselves parabolically, when we think of the landowner in our lives (especially after Harvest!).
Again and again we listen to the parables of the Kingdom, and hope that the fellow standing in the pulpit might pull a rabbit out of the hat and make 21st century sense to this schizoid man (to quote a title of an old rock and roll hymn). We need to have that focal point in our lives so we can live and ordered life, like those lines on the parabola going through that special point unique to a parabola.
What does that parable mean for us right here and now? Do we understand what a parable is? We have heard them all time and again, but why are parables so important in the life of Jesus and the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church which follows her leader, Jesus Christ?
They focus our attention, but do we really understand them? Perhaps it is their obscurity which keeps them in mind. We struggle with them every time we hear them. I have always likened parables to the koans the zen masters pose their disciples. The most famous riddle is: “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” The masters hope that their followers will attain enlightenment – the zen mind – but the students tend to disappoint when they struggle with the koan. They want the one quick answer that will provide the solution to all the riddles of life.
If the parables are like these zen koans, then we should be stopped in our tracks every time we hear any one of them. Certainly anyone speaking about them should be perplexed just as surely as the hearers of the parables are. Both the zen master and the preacher aim all their words at the heart for salvation.
If something is not really understood, if it is really a paradox, we may say there are two possibilities for its future. Either it can remain very significant in the tradition – or it can be forgotten. Of course, there is another possibility not mutually exclusive – that it remains front and centre for the tradition because it has been put aside and yet no one can let it languish in obscurity. This is the perversity of memory, isn’t it? When people say, “Oh, forget it,” aren’t we more likely to remember what we were supposed to forget? Isn’t it just like when we are told something is to remain a secret, don’t we want to share it with everyone?
Sadly, memories persist in a way that we don’t understand. We always remember the most embarrassing events in our lives, don’t we? Like those dreams in which we appear in the worst way possible – for instance, dirty and naked before the great and good, or running but never getting anywhere – you know the sort of thing, if you remember any of your dreams. These parables persist with the same sort of power as these diabolically remembered dreams do. They cause us to think again about what we ought to do and how we value everything. Parables and dreams – they arise from our own experiences. They teach in their own inimitable way – but only if we reflect on them. We can learn from the parables Jesus told, can’t we? They are teaching aids for those who wish to enter the Kingdom of God. They teach just like those teachers who helped you develop into the person you really wanted to be, deep in your heart – I imagine this was the sort of teacher the apostle Paul was, as he writes, ‘just as you have always [listened to] me, not only in my presence, but much more now in my absence, [you must] work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.’
The best teachers do let you “work out your own” self. They have confidence in you, although you proceed “with fear and trembling” into a future that is unknown. Those teachers threw you into the world with confidence because they had nurtured you in yourself. In spite of the knocking of your knees as you entered life alone, without your teacher to hold your hand and lead you along, you went forward with that abiding fear, but it was with a trembling of expectation.
I would like to think parables could give us all confidence in any situation like those best of teachers. We should take strength from our memory of them and the times we have struggled to make sense of the parables. As they say, every day is a learning day. We can learn so much from this parable when we focus all our energy on the one thing it is trying to teach us. We can always go forward – even if we do so as Paul says, ‘with fear and trembling’.
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