Sharing God’s Life
Texts: Exodus 20.1-4, 7-9, 12-20; Psalm 19; Philippians 3.4b-14;
Matthew 21.33-46
Ministry is not, of course, for so-called ‘ministers’ alone. We
are all called to share in Christ’s ministry by the commissioning we
received at our baptism, albeit in different ways. In recognition
of the fact that the particular shape of that ministerial offering can
change from time to time, the congregation each year calls upon its
members to prayerfully consider how they might contribute to the
ministry of the church in the year to come. There are two main
ways to contribute: (1) by serving on a group that carries out
Christ’s ministry—either locally, or in the wider church; or (2) by
providing the church with the financial support it needs to carry out
this ministry. I hope, of course, that every member will
contribute in both they ways! Still, I recognise that the
circumstances of life sometimes make it impossible to do as much as you
would like to do. Ill-health or poverty, in particular, have an
impact on what one may contribute. I know that, the church
knows that, and God knows that. So please don’t hear anything
that follows as some kind of law that you have to obey in order to
obtain the favour of God. If you are sick or short of money, you
have burdens that are difficult to carry. In those circumstances
it is the rest of us who are called to help carry those burdens.
For the church is, most of all, a community in which the concerns and
difficulties of the one become the concerns and difficulties of the
many.
As many of you will know, the proper resourcing of the church’s
ministry is guided by the ancient Jewish concept of stewardship.
Stewardship, in a nutshell, is a use of resources which understands
that those resources do not belong to oneself alone, but are given by
another for a particular purpose. Stewardship is sharing in
another’s resources in a way that honours the spirit in which they are
given. You can see the stewardship principle at work in the story
we heard just now from Matthew’s gospel. Here Jesus tells a
parable about a landowner who invests heavily to set up a working
vineyard. He then invites some people to run the vineyard on his
behalf. Together they form a covenant in which both parties will
reap the fruit that the vineyard produces because both parties have
contributed to the resourcing of the vineyard. The managers agree
to act as stewards for the landowner, to run the place so that it will
produce a bountiful harvest in which both parties can share
together. For Jesus and for Matthew, the parable is a picture of
the relationship God has formed with his people. God is like a
landowner who has entered freely into a covenant with human beings, a
covenant that will bear fruit for us all so long as the land is managed
wisely, according to the landowner’s intentions that is.
By analogy, the Christian tradition has always gone on to say
this: that nothing that you own and no skill or talent that you
possess belongs to yourself alone. It belongs to God as
well. God is the co-owner of what you have because God is its
creator and origin. What you have was given you according to a
particular covenant or agreement: that you take what you are
given and use it only to bear the fruit of faith, hope and love in the
world. So, while we are free to be as creative as we like with
what we are given, in the end our gifts will only bear truly good fruit
if they are managed according to the maker’s instructions. If
they are not, or if we get greedy and deny the maker his share in what
we produce, then things will eventually go bad for us. According
to our parable, the maker will one day call us to account for what we
have done with his gifts. Why? Because the nature of the
gift is this: it can never be possessed and hoarded for one’s own
benefit alone. Like the manna God gave in the desert, if you take
more than your fair share, the gift will go off and disappear.
Gifts are given so that they will remain gifts, freely given over and
over again, so that the whole community can benefit and not just a few.
In turning to the writings of Paul, we find that all the gifts and
talents we are given can be summed up in a single word:
Christ. For Paul, Christ is the gift that reveals what all God’s
gifts are ultimately for—our transformation from people who feel we
must compete with one another into people who accept ourselves and one
another. Let’s look at the psycho-theology of this for a
moment. In the passage we read from Philippians, Paul contrast
his former life with that he now lives, albeit incompletely, with
Christ. His former life was lived according to ‘the flesh’, which
means that he built his sense of being worthwhile in the world upon the
social and cultural expectations of his time. As a Jew of
Palestine in the first century, there was a particular way to get
ahead, to become a winner. First, one had to have been born a
Jew. A non-Jew didn’t have a chance. Second, one needed to
join the Pharisees, a political and religious party that wielded great
influence and power on the basis of its claim to truly understand what
was right and wrong. Third, one needed to be zealous in making
life difficult for anyone who didn’t share one’s views of what was
right and wrong. In Paul’s case, this meant persecuting the
earliest Christians.
At the time when Paul writes this letter he has, however, become a
Christian. Now he considers all those pursuits, all those ways of
establishing one’s worthiness in the world, to be nothing more than
‘rubbish’ (in the Greek it is more like ‘excrement’). Why?
Because at some point he came to realise that no matter how hard he
worked on the matter, he would never establish, completely and
unassailably, that he was a good and acceptable fellow in the eyes of
his fellow-Jews. There would always be someone whom he both
respected and envied who could look at him as an inferior, a person who
was not yet what they were. There would always be—if I may
translate into a more contemporary idiom—more fashionable, more
wealthy, more laudable people about, who could make him look and feel
unworthy by comparison. For that is what this phrase ‘the flesh’
means for Paul: a social and cultural system of written and unwritten
laws which is designed to make us all failures.
Now what the gift of Christ did for Paul is what it can do for all of
us as well: release us from our bondage to any social and
cultural assessment of our worthiness or unworthiness. How?
By declaring that God loves and accepts us just as we are. By
untethering our sense of worthiness or unworthiness from what other
people may or may not think. By measuring our ‘rightness’ not
according to the winds of social, or even religious, fashion, but
according to the love and forgiveness of God made manifest in the gift
Christ made of his very life. Paul promises that if we are
prepared to die with Christ to the basic principles of this world—its
pecking order, it fascination with wealth and status, its tendency to
make us all unworthy—then we can also be raised with Christ into a
world in which everything is a gift, and therefore no-one can claim to
have worked their way to the top in some kind of meritocracy.
The prize Paul strains towards is therefore a rather funny kind of
prize. It is not the prize that our society and culture
values—the prize of houses and cars and superannuated luxury. It
is the prize of being freed from the compulsion to own and possess
everything we see. It is the prize of knowing that everything one
has is a gift, and can therefore be given again. It is the prize
of detachment from the values and material acquisitiveness of one’s
society, because Christ has already given us the only thing that it
truly valuable: God’s love and forgiveness.
In this perspective, perhaps you can see that the responsibility to
consider, prayerfully, how you will serve Christ’s ministry in the year
to come has little to do with any law or expectation. On the
contrary, I would encourage you to see your reflection as an
opportunity to give tangible form to nothing other than God’s amazing
grace. Freely you have received from Christ all that you need and
more. You are free now to give what you have received, without in
any way losing anything that is truly valuable. For in Christian
perspective, it is the giving itself that is also our freedom. If
we cannot give what we have away, we are still in chains. It is
not we who possess the thing, whatever it is, but the thing that
possesses us. By giving we are released from this
possession. And we receive into ourselves the gift of
Christ’s very self, a self that is the pure gift of God’s
acceptance—never measurable according to the scales of our world, never
quantifiable according to our usual measure of success of
substantiality. And yet . . . it there anything more real
and valuable in all the world? I think not.
Glory be to God—Father, Son & Holy Spirit—as in the beginning, so
now and forever. Amen.
Garry
J. Deverell
20th
Sunday
after Pentecost
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