“Why are you standing here idle all day… You also go into the vineyard”(Matt. 20:6-7).
Today we commemorate Phillips Brooks, a noted preacher and pastor, elected Bishop of Massachusetts not long before his untimely death around the turn of the last century. His election was controversial: so much so that one bishop showed up in the vesting room before Brooks’ consecration in order to read a letter of protest! Why the controversy?: I suppose the fairest thing we can say is that Brooks was not much interested in theological precision, and it got him into trouble.
Brooks once said in a sermon that when a person wanted to explain to him the nature of God in Christ, he would “turn away from him without interest” (Sermons For the Principal Festivals and Fasts). For Brooks, such knowledge was highly speculative. The trouble for Brooks was that the nature of God in Christ is actually important: we’ve devoted a good portion of the Creed to it. You can see why he might have irritated people and ruffled a few feathers with such a cavalier dismissal. Brooks’ heart was in the right place, but his mind was elsewhere.
It’s remarkable how church history, and the Holy Scriptures, keep bringing us back to the same place: through the lens of Brooks, and in our own case, to episcopal election, theological controversy, and sudden transition. Some in this room may remember the unexpected and untimely death of our ninth bishop, George Reynolds, at the very beginning of the 1990s. For its part, the Episcopal Church over the last few decades has been no stranger to theological controversy, either; and that has played a part in our history here in Tennessee. History doesn’t often repeat itself, but as God works in history we often pick up the trace of a common thread, between our story and the story of those who have gone before.
Today our Gospel of the laborers in the vineyard gives us workers in a field. According to Jesus, some start work at the crack of dawn, or even before: they’ve committed early to the job and turned out and shown up in time to put in a full day of work. Others get there a little later, but the owner is eager to put them into the field and get the crop in. This scenario is repeated, and repeated again, throughout the course of the day, until we come to the finish. At that point, all the workers in the story get paid the same, even the people who just showed up a moment ago.
If you share the exasperation of those who had put in a full day’s work, and received no more than the “johnnie come lately” folk, then you’re only human. As Jesus tells the story, the workers complain, “These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat” (Matt. 20:12). The owner of the field points out to them that he can do what he wants with what is his. Do they object to his generosity? The story is a parable about God’s laser-like focus on the mission, in getting in the harvest, and God’s enduring character as both just and merciful.
The parable also offers us a meditation on the nature of Christian ministry, at a time of transition in the life of the Diocese of Tennessee. Some of us have been working for a while in the diocesan vineyard, and the day has advanced considerably since we started. Others are coming a bit later to lend a hand and to get the harvest in. “Why are you standing here idle all day… You also go into the vineyard” (Matt. 20:6-7), the owner says. The point is always the mission, and the task that is at hand, rather than our place in the pecking order.
Unlike the workers in the parable, which has a convenient ending point with the drawing on of dusk and the close of the day, none of us is certain when God’s mission will come to an end. Our role may change, or our part of the task may be complete, but the mission continues until God finally wraps it up with Christ’s coming in glory. Ministry, our participation in the mission, by its very nature is full of loose ends. That’s because we’re not holding the reins.
Let’s end this sermon with the words of another Episcopal bishop, Henry Champlin Lay, spoken a few years before Phillips Brooks, in a convention address to the diocese of Easton. Lay wrote that a bishop “may succeed tolerably well in keeping a Diocese in good order, gathering an annual harvest of Confirmations… and yet, when he comes to the end of his work, he may look back regretfully, if he has planted no seed of larger and better things” (Charles Henery, Yankee Bishops). Each of us harvests the labor of others, and in turn plants the seed of what will come after. May God, in our day, grant us so to join in this work, that the mission will advance, and God’s will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
