Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity
Sunday 20th September 2020
Although we have been able to resume public worship not everyone is able to attend so the service was recorded and made available online as well as being played in church for those who chose to attend. That can be found here.
Trinity 15
Jonah 3.10 – 4.11
Matthew 20.1-6
Revd Preb Maureen Hobbs
After the first reading from Jonah
God plays by different rules to human beings.
Most of the time we are jolly glad that he does – because we recognise how richly we might deserve to be punished for the times when we mess up! But God is infinitely forgiving when we recognize we have made a mistake or damaged something or someone by our actions. And that is a wonderful, comforting thought.
Ah, but when God chooses to forgive someone else …. That can be a different matter and one that we might not be so pleased about! That is what happened to Jonah. He suspected from the outset that God wanted to forgive the people of Nineveh, even though they were wicked and thoughtless. Jonah had tried to escape from God and from taking God’s message to them. But Jonah discovered that God is not so easy to hide from and his purposes have a way of being realised, even when we try to thwart them!
Jonah hated God for being generous and forgiving. And he showed God just how fed up he was by staging the most terrific sulk imaginable. Of course, we wouldn’t behave like that, would we? Or would we?!
We don’t do well when we are not in control of a situation. That is why so many of us are feeling aggrieved and exhausted by the situation we are all in at present with the Virus. We are not in control. We cannot live the way we would like to. We cannot meet with whom we would like to. We are divided from friends, from family, from our neighbours. We are not in control.
And yet we still have so much to be grateful for – our health in particular. But how often do we remember to thank God for his generosity to us and to those whom we love and care about?
After the reading from St Matthew’s gospel
God plays by different rules to human beings!
A few years ago someone (I suspect they were on the other side of the Atlantic) came up with the brilliant wheeze of declaring 9 September “Buy your Priest a beer day”. Well, as you can imagine, this has fired the imagination of holy and self-sacrificial priests around the world! I have always treated it as mildly amusing, but never with the attention (or expectation) that perhaps the day deserves…. Imagine my surprise, therefore when this year – a few days before the date in question, I received a mystery parcel with one of those nice smiley signs on the front… What could it be? Who could it be from?
Naturally I couldn’t wait to open it. I wasn’t expecting any deliveries. And I was rather mystified when the package contained a bottle of German lager?
I’m not a great lover of lager – although I have been known to consume the occasional half of bitter…. But never look a gift horse – or in this case, a gift bottle of lager – in the mouth!
After a while, I realised that the great Day of 9 Sept was approaching – could this be the clue? I decided that yes, that probably was the answer – but I was still none the wiser about who would have sent it to me. I mentally went through most of the regular congregation – possible, but unlikely!
Then I had a little message from someone I once knew well, but now only ever communicate with via Facebook…. “Hope you enjoyed the delivery!”
Mystery solved! As she said, “Well you are now the only Vicar I know, so I couldn’t resist!”
I should add that she was once a young chorister in the church choir with me in Oxfordshire. Now she lives on the Isle of Wight and has two school-aged children of her own!
Surprised by generosity – that little anecdote serves to illustrate what I hope we will all think about as we consider this morning’s Gospel message. So often we get distracted by the fairness or otherwise of what happens between the landowner and the farm labourers. Maybe too by the fairness or otherwise of what happens to us?
But the parable is to demonstrate that God’s generosity to humanity is always undeserved and surprising. It doesn’t conform to our notions of ‘fairness and equity’ and thank goodness it doesn’t!
“Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?” God is not interested in being trapped into human rules that reward the achievers, the ‘haves’, the virtuous. Instead, God gives to the ‘have-nots’, and those who have no claim to make on others.
So does that mean then that there is no benefit to be had from ‘playing by the rules’ ? If God is equally generous to the scoundrel as to the saint, why not just enjoy ourselves without thought of the consequences?
Of course not. To behave well, with consideration towards others, may be evidence of our disposition towards God (and leads to a nicer world for all), but it is in no way the basis of any claim we may have on God.
In your family, do you love the new-born less than the child who was born three, six or nine years ago, just because they’ve been around longer to show you how nice they are? Of course not! So don’t expect God to choose a favourite to bless within his family. That is not how Grace works. If I see God blessing someone else, that does not mean less available for me. The labourers who were late to work received generosity because they were called. It was the employer, not the workers who determined the generosity they were shown. And there is no other basis on which our relationship to God and to friends can be established.
Surprising, isn’t it!?
Amen.