The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost
September 28, 2008
Matthew 21:23-32
Philippians 2:1-13
~The Rev. Dr. Kris Lewis

The breeze of God’s love and grace is ever blowing; may we set our sails to capture that breeze, and may it inspire these words and those who hear them. Amen.

I’d like to tell you a story, a modern fable as it were:

There once was a famous preacher who preached in a large and beautiful church. His sermons were known far and wide for their insight, their wit, and their wisdom. The preacher spent many hours each week in his office working on those sermons—honing the message, crafting the words, polishing his delivery. And those sermons were something, full of the gospel, quoting the words of Jesus, and exhorting those who heard them to repent and to follow Jesus. “Feed the hungry,” he would preach. “Live in charity with your neighbor.”

Nearby this large and grand church there lived a poor woman. She’d had a rough life, and she struggled to make ends meet. Sometimes she drowned her troubles in alcohol, but she was trying to do better. She didn’t much believe in God, but occasionally she would slip into the back pew of the church to listen to the well-known preacher, and something about being there soothed her soul.

This woman also frequented the neighborhood soup kitchen. She was always grateful for the hot meal and for the company she found there. One night after eating she asked if she could help clean up, and she was given the task of wiping down the tables. Soon she was doing that every night and then she found herself going in early to help prepare the food and greet the other guests. Sometimes she brought people with her, people she met on the street. People began to notice her moving through the neighborhood, quietly speaking to others who were down on their luck.

The famous preacher walked past the soup kitchen every day but he never stopped in. He was well fed, and he was busy—he had those sermons to prepare. And he might get his fine suit dirty in such a place. He occasionally saw the poor woman on the streets, but he didn’t pay her much attention—after all, there were lots of street people and he was an important man, a community leader. And he never noticed her when she was in church, and she was sure to slip out during the last hymn so as not to be approached.

One day the famous preacher and the poor woman happened to be crossing the street in front of the church at the same time when a bus careened out of control, hitting them both. They found themselves standing in front of the pearly gates where Saint Peter, arrayed in his finest welcoming garb, met them.

“Whom do we have here?” he asked, looking at the preacher who had edged past the woman to be first in line. “Oh yes, you are the fine preacher. You talk about how much you love God and how important it is to repent and follow him, but you spend all your time in your fine office writing. You’ll need to step aside for a moment.”

Turning away from the shocked and speechless preacher, St. Peter spoke to the woman who had stepped deferentially to the side. “Welcome my sister,” St. Peter greeted her. “Please come right in—we have a place ready for you.”

“But, but, but what about me?” blustered the preacher. “I’m a good person—I’m a preacher. I know Jesus, and she..she’s just a street person.”

Peter turned to him and said, “Jesus called you to go and you said yes, but you stayed in your office and wrote your fine sermons instead of going. Jesus called this woman and she said no, but then she went and fed the hungry and cared for the lonely and downtrodden. Which of you truly did the will of the Father?” And the preacher hung his head in shame.

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Most of us as parents—or as former children—can easily identify with the parable Jesus tells in today’s gospel. We all know the child who, when asked to clean up her room, or to take out the garbage, says, “Yes, I’ll do it,” only to keep right on doing what she was doing and forget all about it. And we know the child who defiantly says, “No,” but then thinks better of it and goes and does it after all. We’ve been there and done that. It’s easy to hear this parable as reassurance to those of us who are sometimes resistant, but eventually come around. But like much of what Jesus taught, this parable is multi-layered, and what Jesus had to say to the scribes and the Pharisees—and to us—goes a bit deeper than that.

The scribes and the Pharisees, like the preacher in our modern fable, were community leaders, upstanding people, active in the synagogue and faithful in worship and prayer. They, like the preacher, had every reason to hear and accept Jesus’ message but they turned away. The tax collectors and the prostitutes, like the poor woman in the fable, were outcasts. They weren’t allowed to take part in the religious life of the community. Why should they care about an itinerate preacher who came to the people of Israel? But they, far more than the community leaders, got it—grasped what this itinerate preacher had to say. They not only heard it, but they began to live it.

And that’s the part, I think, that is harder for us to grasp, if not intellectually then internally. The underlying message of this parable is this: You can’t just talk the talk; you have to walk the walk. Being a good and pious person isn’t enough. Giving lip service to God isn’t enough. Like the poor woman in our fable, a woman who I might add struggled to talk the talk, we have to incorporate God’s will, God’s work into our lives, fully and completely, in every thing that we undertake.

That’s a tall order. It’s intimidating. It’s challenging. But the good news is that we are not left on our own to do it. In his letter to the Philippians, Paul writes,

“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus… work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.”

God is enabling us both to will and to work for God’s good pleasure. It is in concert with God, through the person of Jesus, that we work out our salvation. It is in concert with God, through the person of Jesus that we take our faith back out into the world to do the work we’ve been called to do.

Like the Pharisees and the scribes in the parable, like the fine preacher in our fable, those of us gathered here today generally consider ourselves to be “good citizens”—we come to church, we follow the rules, we pray and study, and we try to be good Christians. We are good at talking the talk. But as we work out our salvation, talking the talk isn’t enough. We must walk the walk as well. We cannot merely pay lip service to our beliefs, no matter how sincerely we might hold them. We must also take those beliefs, take those words of Jesus back out into the world. We do that, not by our own strength, not by our own power, not even by our own will. We do that by being of the same mind as Jesus; we do it enabled by God who infuses us with the power of the Holy Spirit.

It would be remiss of me to end this sermon, this call to do the work God calls us to without acknowledging that here at Saint Mary’s we have begun that work. Like the poor woman in the fable, many in our parish do this work quietly and unobtrusively. They cook for the Miracle Kitchen. They spend the night with the homeless at our overnights and they provide meals and company at our days of hospitality. They visit the sick and shut-ins, they build houses, they go on mission trips.

But today I would also like to challenge us to walk the walk one step further. You’ve heard me before talk about the Millennium Development Goals, the eight goals adopted by nations around the world and endorsed by the Episcopal Church and many others religious bodies—goals which aim to end extreme poverty, hunger and disease in the world, and to reduce it significantly by 2015. Hard as it may be to believe, 2015 is a mere 7 years (less really) away, and this week the endorsers of the MDGs met in NYC to review the progress that has been made towards achieving those goals. Progress has been made, but it is too little and too slow. And our perilous economic situation threatens to slow it even more.

And so I ask you, to pray and to consider how you—how we—might walk the walk even more and make achieving these goals a reality; how we might help to ease the debilitating hunger and disease, the overwhelming poverty that enslaves—yes enslaves—far too many of the world’s people, far too many of God’s children. We cannot do it on our own, but God is working within us, if only we open ourselves to that reality, God is working within us, enabling us to will and to work for God’s good pleasure. And in God, all things are possible.

AMEN