A Sermon for St. John’s Episcopal Church, Charlestown, Massachusetts

Matthew 21:28-32

At the end of today’s gospel lesson, we hear a parable by Jesus that brings us back to the vineyard. The story reminds me of a farmer I knew in Vermont. John and his wife were the kind of people who welcomed all kinds of folks into their lives. Up the road from them lived a teenage boy who spent a lot of time at their farm. He received from them the kind of love and support he did not receive from his own family.

The boy would spend quite a bit of time on the farm, helping with chores and the like. One day when I happened to be there, I heard the boy eagerly tell John how he was going to take the old, dilapidated pickup truck that was sitting in the barnyard and make a completely new bed with for it. He described in great detail where he would get the hardwood and how he would build the sturdy sides to the bed. You could hear in his enthusiasm his love for the couple that had in some ways adopted him. And then he was off on his way. After he left, John turned to me and mentioned that he did not expect to see any new flatbed on the truck. He went on to explain that the young boy had promised many things that he intended to do, but few if any of those things were ever completed. John paused, and then after a moment said, “But I tend to remember him for his intentions, and not for his accomplishments.”

What would you rather be remembered for, your intentions, or your accomplishments? If you could commission two portraits of yourself – one that somehow expressed all of what you intended for your life – your hopes and dreams, your desire to improve the world and yourself – and the other a portrait of who you actually have been and what you have actually accomplished – which would you choose for the world to see? I cannot answer that question for you, but I know that for me the more appealing portrait would be the one of my intentions. The more accurate portrait would be the one showing what I have actually done. That accurate portrait would resemble the second son in our parable:

A father says, “go, work in the vineyard.” And he answers, “I go sir,” but he did not go.

We don’t know why he did not go. Was he lying to his father from the start? Perhaps. He may never have had any intention of working in the vineyard. But I suspect he was more like many of us. Our own failures to follow through on our promises and our commitments are not necessarily rooted in deceit. The son may have really intended to serve. He may have had a deep desire to say “yes” to his father, even as there are times when our deepest desire is to say “yes” to God, to say “yes” to those whom we love, to say “yes” to the calls we hear to serve a broken and hurting world.

Consider the times when you have said “yes” and said it with heart, mind, and soul filled with conviction and pure intent. Perhaps you once heard the call of Jesus Christ in a way that was so compelling that you dropped your nets – whatever else it was you were doing – to follow him. Perhaps you have made a loving commitment to a family member, be it a spouse, a parent, a sibling, or a friend, and can recall how sure you were of that commitment, and how joyful it was to make it, a time in which you expressed the very best of intentions to love or support another person in all of the perils and challenges that this life can present. Or perhaps you recognized some great, unmet need in the world and knowing that you had been given the gifts and skills to respond to the need, found yourself gladly saying, “Yes, I go!”

We make such commitments, but of course, other things happen. Commitments multiply and compete for our attention. I want to work in the vineyard, but on my way there, I check my calendar and suddenly realize I have two other things I have said, “yes” to. And then there is the passage of time: when the eagerness and passion with which we committed ourselves is replaced by a weighty sense of obligation that we could not have imagined when we first said “yes.” And even when the desire remains, under the best of circumstances when we are committed and ready to fulfill the dream we have, we may have to acknowledge that our reach exceeds our grasp, and that we have neither the skills or abilities to be the surgeon, teacher, or singer we had hoped to be.

In his poem, “The Hollow Men,” T. S. Elliot describes that discrepancy between intention and results:

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the shadow

There is a shadow between what we desire and what we do. We say yes to the vineyard, but before we have even reached its gates, we find ourselves in the shadow.

And when we realize that truth? One response of course, not limited to New Year’s Eve, is to resolve to do better, to work even harder at eliminating the distance between idea and reality, between initial conception and final creation. But on that path lies another danger. Yes, there is the shadow cast by intentions that have been compromised or whittled away by the complexities that real life presents. But there is another kind of shadow, and that is the one created when one is so sure of one’s intentions that one’s actions are not affected at all by those very same complexities.

Listen to the tenor of our political debate today, and you will hear voices all too convinced of the ideological purity of their convictions, and all too ready to follow through with their intentions, regardless of the social cost. One can fail to live up to one’s intentions. One can also act on them with all too little thought and reflection.

If we return to the parable, we see that the son who did the will of the father was no such ideologue. He was no paragon of virtue. At first, he said no. He went on his way, and only then somehow found his way to the vineyard. At the end of the parable, Jesus tells us, “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you.”

Hardly the models of virtue, but perhaps models of awareness – aware of their own imperfection and their own inabilities, aware of how often they have said “yes” only to walk away, but also aware of how often they have said “no” only to find themselves drawn back to God.

And they are drawn back to God by the one who proclaims Good News to them. For ultimately, it is not to the first or the second son that is before us to consider, but the teller of the story himself: it is in the life of Jesus that we see no darkening shadow between intention and act, no gap between the intended and the achieved. In Jesus Christ we see both the perfectly obedient son, and the person who lived with a kind of freedom and integrity that gave him an authority even his adversaries could not deny. With that authority, he still comes among us, proclaiming God’s unwavering intention for us. God’s intention is for us, whether we have said “yes” and mean “no,” or said “no” and meant “yes.”

God’s intention is to be present in that shadow, and to make holy the lives that we offer. As Paul puts it, it is God who is at work in us, enabling us both to will and to work for his good pleasure. To will – to intend, and to work – to accomplish – God’s engaging with us to enable both.

Another writer described that mystery this way. In George Bernanos’ novel, The Diary of A Country Priest, a young priest in a poor rural French village records in his diary his struggles with his prayer life, and whether he is at all effective in carrying out his intentions. But after one sleepless night, a sense of peace comes as he writes these words:

How little we know what a human life really is – even our own. To judge us by what we call our actions is probably as futile as to judge us by our dreams. God’s justice chooses from this dark conglomeration of thought and act, and that which is raised toward the Father shines with a sudden burst of light, displayed in glory like the sun.1

Between the thought and the act, a dark conglomeration, a shadow Yes. But also light. The light of Jesus Christ, inviting us to see God’s intention for us.

And so, today, offer yourself to God. Offer your intentions. Offer your acts.

Offer the shadow in between. And pray, believing that what you offer will indeed be taken and transformed, so that shining with a burst of light, you will be displayed in glory like the sun.

Amen.

Preached on the Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 25, 2011
by the Rev. Thomas N. Mousin

1 George Bernanos The Diary of a Country Priest ( New York: Doubleday and Company, 1962 ) 68