Sermon — September 27, 2020
The Rev. Greg Johnston
In the novel Morgan’s Passing, the writer Anne Tyler tells the story of a man who’s not quite what he seems. The story opens with Morgan watching a puppet show in a park on a weekend afternoon. After a few minutes, the puppeteer comes out and asks, “Is there a doctor here?” Everyone sits in silence for a minute or so, and then Morgan stands up, walks over to the man, and asks what’s wrong. It turns out that the puppeteer’s wife is pregnant and she’s just gone into labor. So, Morgan puts them in his car and they head off to the hospital. While they’re still only halfway there, they realize they’re too late. The baby’s coming. So Morgan sends the father-to-be down the street to get some supplies, and delivers the baby. Then he bundles the family back into the car—I guess this was in the days before newborn car seats—and drops them off at the emergency room before heading on his way.
At the hospital, after they’ve had some time to recover, the new parents ask around: “Where’s Dr. Morgan? We want to thank him for his help.”
“Dr. Morgan?” comes the reply from the obstetric department. “There’s no Dr. Morgan here.”
A few months later, they’re pushing the baby in the stroller and they see him, right there—it’s the man who helped them! They show him how healthy the baby is, and they tell him how strange it was that the hospital hadn’t been able to find him.
“Oh! I’m no doctor…” he readily admits. “I run a hardware store. But you needed a doctor. And, to be honest, it wasn’t that hard to do.” In fact, he’d been doing it for years, serving as a doctor, a lawyer, a pastor, a therapist; whatever the moment called for, whatever profession people thought they needed.
But never, he added, never a plumber or a butcher; “they would find me out in twenty seconds.”[1]
Now, I don’t condone the unlicensed practice of medicine or of law. But I do condone—in fact, I strongly encourage—the unlicensed practice of Christianity.
After all, that’s more or less what the story and the parable in today’s gospel are all about. The chief priests and the elders, the licensed religious practitioners of their day, see Jesus teaching in the Temple and ask him, effectively, “Sorry—who are you? And who gave you approval to teach in this place?”
Jesus, in typical Jesus fashion, turns the question around. They ask who gave him authority to teach; he asks them who gave John the Baptist authority to teach, knowing that there’s no way they’d insult such a popular figure by saying he shouldn’t have been preaching. But in effect, here, Jesus is playing Morgan. What matters in the end, he seems to say, is not who’s authorized the preacher to preach, but what it is he’s preaching. It’s not whether you’re a board-certified obstetrician—it’s whether you can catch the baby.
And then Jesus takes another step. “Someone had two children,” he says, “and told the first: Go work in the vineyard.” And the child grumbled about it and said no, but showed up to work. And the parent went and said to the second child, “Go work in the vineyard.” “Yes sir, sure thing, right away!” And a few hours later, he’s still sitting there on the couch. So, which one did what the parent wanted? (Matthew 21:28-31)
It’s not a trick question. It’s as obvious as it sounds. And that’s what makes it so pointed. It’s not about who you are, whether you say that you’re a chief priest or an elder, an obstetrician or a Christian. It’s not even about what you say or what you claim to believe; you can say you’ll work in the vineyard and never go. It’s about what you do.
And in fact, this is what Jesus means by “believing.” “John,” he says—and this is his cousin John the Baptist—“John came to you in the way of righteousness and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes believed him.” (Matthew 21:32) Believing, in the sense Jesus means it, isn’t only something that happens inside your head, “believing” that John is a prophet. It’s not only something that comes out of your mouth: “We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ…” And it’s not only something that you feel in your heart. It’s all of these things, but it’s something more.
Believing in John the Baptist, believing in Jesus our Messiah, means doing something. Changing. Repenting. Not “repenting” the way the guy with the scary sign means it who stands down by Fenway after a game, promising the crowds they’ll burn in hell if they don’t accept Jesus as their Savior. “Repenting” in another sense: reorienting yourself internally in a way that shapes the way you live your life externally. Not because you’re frightened of a terrifying punishment, but because you’re following an inspiring leader. Because you accept the authority by which Jesus teaches, and so when you hear him calling you to work in the vineyard, you turn and follow him down the path that leads you there.
This is what ministry is. I don’t mean my ordained ministry. I mean all of our ministry, all the ways in which we love God and our neighbor as ordinary human beings. We wander through our ordinary lives, until one day, we hear a call. We turn a little bit, in one direction or another. Our path becomes a little clearer. We start to walk a little faster. And soon enough, sometimes without even noticing it, we’re far away from where we would have been, because even a tiny fork in the road creates a huge distance as you walk. (Just look at where Main St. and Bunker Hill St. start in the Neck, and where they end.)
You may not think you’ve heard this kind of call, or experienced this kind of gentle “repentance.” Too often in the Church we limit the meaning “vocation” to “ordination.” You might not the things that you do in your everyday life as a ministry. Maybe you’ve always thought of your life in separate slices: work, family, hobbies, church. But if you follow the logic of the parable, it becomes clear that it doesn’t matter whether our work in the vineyard happens through the Church or outside the Church, whether we think of the ways we love and care for one another as a Christian ministry or simple humanity. We don’t need to form a committee; we don’t even need the Rector’s approval! Because it doesn’t really matter, in the end, what we say about our work or how we talk about it. What matter is whether we do it.
I’ve said this before to a handful of people, and I’ll say it again and again. I want our life together to start from “yes.” The parable teaches us that saying “yes” is not enough. Point taken. But it’s a good start. If you come to me with an idea for something you want to do, for a ministry you want to create, I will try my best to say yes. (If you come to me with an idea for something you want me to do, I reserve the right to say “no.” And, buyer beware, if it’s something you think someone should do, I’ll assume you’re volunteering.)
Right now, in this strange Covid short-term, that’s sometimes hard. There are things we wish we could do that we can’t, or things we think should be safe that somebody else says are not. Fair enough. But we will emerge one day from all of this, and our lives will look different. There will be things we left behind in March that will never re-emerge. There will be new possibilities we never would have imagined.
I hope that we rise to the challenge together. I hope that we discover new ministries as we serve one another and our community. But even more than that, I hope that we discover the ways in which our whole lives are ministries; I hope we learn to recognize that holy voice in our everyday lives that’s asking us to go and work, as we slowly find our feet drawn toward the vineyard.
May we, like Morgan, uncertain and unqualified as we are, answer the call. May we, like the reluctant child, grumpy though we may be, do the work. May we receive, to quote from our Collect for this morning, “the fullness of [God’s] grace, that we, running to obtain [God’s] promises, may become partakers of [God’s] heavenly treasure; through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
Amen.
[1] Retold in Eugene H. Peterson, The Contemplative Pastor (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 130-131.