Say Less, Do More - Sermon Transcript

Good morning, friends.

Good morning.

It's good to see each and every one of you.

And if you are a guest worshiping with us for the first time, once again, thanks for being here.

We're grateful that you're here.

We'll be coming back and worship with us again in the future.

My name is Mitchell.

I'm the senior minister here.

And we are in the midst of a worship series.

We're calling Participation Required.

 And before we get into our scripture reading today, I typically don't do this, but I'm going to sort of provide some broader context to where the parable sort of sits and its relationship to the story arc.

And so I think normally when we engage with a parable, we sort of just pluck it out, pick it up, and

 If we're good at reading scripture, we'll look at it like a kaleidoscope.

We'll sort of twist it around and see what emerges, not assuming that we already know the meaning of a parable before we engage with it.

But most of the time, we sort of just treat the parable as an isolated text.

And today's parable, I think, needs the broader context.

 And so here's what's happening before we get into the scripture reading.

At this point in the story, chapter 21, Jesus has entered into Jerusalem triumphantly.

I guess you can call it triumphant entry.

It's on the back of a donkey and there are people waving palm branches, shouting Hosanna.

He and Matthew has already sort of flipped over all the

 that the money changers were profiting off of.

He has, in other words,

 made it rather impossible to ignore that he is in Jerusalem hanging out in the temple with the high priest sort of engaging in a sparring match.

And now the chief priests and elders have come to the temple with a question that's dressed up as theology, but it's really a question that's built entirely out of fear.

 And they ask Jesus essentially, by what authority are you doing these things, riding donkeys and flipping over tables?

Jesus actually knows what kind of question this is and in a very Socratic way, asks them a question in response.

 the baptism of John in particular, where did it come from?

Was it from heaven or was it of human origin?

And the religious leaders, they huddle up together and the scripture reading right before today's text sort of gives us an insight into what they're discussing.

And in their discussion, they're not looking for truth.

They're really gathering to calculate risk.

And I think like,

 We know this feeling.

I think we've been in rooms where, maybe rooms full of people who we know what they think, or we know exactly what they think and refuse to say out loud.

You know what I'm talking about?

Where we've, you know, everyone has something to say, but they just don't say that one thing out loud.

You've felt it, I know you have.

 A staff meeting where everyone nods but nobody's actually committing to what they believe.

A dinner table where the real question sits like in the middle of the table and everyone just sort of sips their water awkwardly.

 A committee meeting where the vote is close enough that stating your position plainly might cost you something.

So you speak in generalities and hope nobody notices you never actually answered the question at hand.

That silence that we sort of move towards when we're feeling awkward, that silence is not creating an environment of peace.

It only looks like peace.

It's actually a form of self-protection.

 And it's exactly what we find Jesus sort of walking into here in the 21st chapter.

Because if the religious elders say, well, the authority that John the Baptist has is from heaven, Jesus will then ask us, well, why don't you believe?

And if the chief priests and elders say it's of human origin, then the crowds that have gathered will be very unruly because they,

 They tend to believe that John was a prophet.

So the chief priests sort of, they say, we don't know, which is not true, by the way.

These are men who know precisely what they believe.

They've actually spent their whole lives

 in scripture, they can tell you what the law looks like forwards and backwards, they can source a text, they can defend a ruling, they can cite a precedent going back generations.

What they cannot do though in this moment standing in front of Jesus is say a single true thing out loud because the truth would cost them something.

And so this is the context in which we move into today's reading.

 Matthew chapter 21, verses 28 through 32.

I invite you to rise in body or spirit for the reading of the gospel.

So the chief priests have said, we don't know.

And Jesus says this, what do you think?

A man has had two sons.

He went to the first son and said, son,

 go and work in the vineyard today.

The son answered, I will not.

But later he changed his mind and went.

The father went to the second son and said the same, and that son answered, I will go, sir.

But he did not go.

Which of the two did the will of his father?

And the chief priest said, the first.

And then Jesus said to them, truly I tell you,

 the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you.

For John came to you in the way of righteousness and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes believed him.

And even after you saw it, you did not change your minds and believe him.

For the word of God in scripture, for the word of God among us, and for the word of God within us.

Thanks be to God.

You may be seated.

Will you pray with me?

 May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing and acceptable to you, oh God, our rock and our redeemer.

Help us to move beyond words and promises and quick yeses.

So we may finally get to the work you call us to.

Amen.

The chief priests are quick to answer.

They answer their own trap, though, without realizing it.

 They quickly say the first son.

And I want you to notice the shape of the story here because it's sort of this shape, the architecture of this story that's the whole point.

This is not about a story about one good son and one bad son.

This is a story about two different ways of failing to participate and one surprising almost accidental way of finally doing it.

 The second son is the one I think that should worry us the most in this parable.

He is usually the one we skip over rather quickly because on the surface his answer sounds like the right one.

Yes, sir, I will go.

It is respectful.

It is immediate.

It costs him nothing in the moment because words are cheap.

And they're free.

 And saying yes requires no vineyard, no dirt under your fingernails, no actual Tuesday afternoon spent doing the thing he said he would do.

He gave his father a yes that produced nothing.

Not a partial obedience, not a good attempt that fell short, zero participation that is simply clothed in agreement.

 That is the son who looks like us on our best Sunday mornings when we speak our mind, when we mean the songs mostly while we're singing them.

We nod at the sermon.

We feel something genuinely move within us.

And then we drive home and our Tuesday afternoon, nothing has changed.

It looks the exact same.

 We can speak fluently about how wonderful Jesus Christ is.

We are affirming.

We have said yes to God in every way that it's cost us absolutely nothing.

And then we go on with exactly the life that we are already living.

The first son is a bit stranger to us.

 I would say harder to relate to, but I have two sons.

This son makes us uncomfortable to hold up as any kind of example because his story starts with plain defiance, which I know a lot about.

 I will not, the second son says to his father, no softening, no excuse, just clearly saying no to his father's face.

I know what that feels like.

And then miraculously, somehow the first son goes anyway.

I don't know what that's like.

 We're not told why the first son changes his tune or decides to go.

Scripture does not give us that moment where he changes his mind, whether it took an hour or a full night wrestling with himself or whether he felt guilty or simply got bored or didn't like the way that that no sounded like.

We only get the fact that he changed.

 He said no, and then he walked to the vineyard anyway, and his hands ended up covered in the same dirt that his father asked for in the first place.

The challenge then of today's text is found when we realize that the father never asked us for a yes.

God doesn't ask us for a yes.

God asks us to go to the vineyard.

 The father asked for a vineyard full of work.

And it turns out you can give the yes without ever walking into the vineyard, or you can give them the vineyard without cleaning up your no.

One of those, though, actually is the only thing that feeds anyone.

Say less, do more.

It's not like a bumper sticker.

It should be a bumper sticker.

Anna, get on that.

 Anna is in charge of all of our stickers here.

I'd like a say less, do more sticker.

I'm on record.

It's not like a bumper sticker I'm trying to put onto the text from the outside.

I think it's the whole point of the parable, though.

Jesus built it that way on purpose, aimed directly at men who had spent their entire lives, their entire careers, becoming excellent at saying,

 the right thing, and had quite quietly stopped doing much of anything that cost them something.

And there have been moments, clear ways that I have been the second son in my life.

And I think that's the beautiful thing about a parable.

It invites a sort of self-reflection.

It was early in my ministry when I was in seminary in the years right after, when I was young enough to believe that saying the right thing in the right room was the same thing as doing the work.

 I was very vocal back then about full inclusion for LGBTQ folks, which was an easy thing to do sitting in the classrooms at the prestigious Isle of School of Theology in Denver, Colorado.

And even when I returned home to North Texas, I found my voice for inclusion.

I believed then, I do now that the future of the United Methodist Church was, is directly tied to affirming full inclusion in all places.

 I said so plainly in classrooms at ILIF and late night conversations with friends who were themselves waiting to see whether the church would ever actually welcome them all the way in and at annual conferences where it felt bold and clarifying to name where I stood.

And I promised more than once

 in rooms full of people who needed to hear it, that I would do everything I could to help the church become a place of real belonging.

And I meant it.

I truly meant what I was saying.

I want to be honest that I meant every word of it in the moments when I said it.

And then I became a senior pastor.

And I found out something about myself.

 That the promises had been made when the cost of keeping them was still theoretical.

Theoretical and far away from a pulpit, a staff, a congregation, a career with actual weight to protect.

My conviction had to compete with something new.

 The very real, very specific consequences that come with being the person whose name is attached to the decision instead of one more voice in a classroom full of affirmation.

And it took me longer than I want to admit once the cost became concrete to move from yes, I had given so easily to the actual work.

 I'm not telling you this because I've arrived at some clean resolution where I get to sort of stand up here and act as the first son and let you all be impressed with how dirty my hands have become.

I'm telling you this because I know exactly what it costs to give God a beautiful, sincere, theologically accurate yes and let it sit there undelivered while the vineyard waits for someone to do the work.

 I have been the son with the polished answer and the clean hands and I suspect several of you know exactly what I'm talking about just in a different vineyard because this is not really a story about clergy or about the ancient temple and the chief priests or even about sexuality and inclusion specifically.

It's really a story, a parable about every single one of us who has learned to speak the language of faith fluently.

 So fluently we can talk about Jesus with such articulation that learning to say the right things in the right ways starts to feel like the whole assignment.

 Maybe it's not a public promise the way mine was.

Maybe it's quieter than that, the kind of yes, nobody else even hears, a commitment you made to yourself to deal with the things you keep avoiding.

Maybe it's a promise to a spouse or a child that this time would somehow be different, a resolution you made walking out of this sanctuary some Sunday that you would finally call, finally show up, finally forgive, finally start.

 Every one of us, I think, is carrying at least one yes that we've actually never carried into the vineyard.

And the world right now needs a church, needs the church to stop being concerned with being right.

The world needs the church, Christians to care less about getting everything polished up and sounding correct because we can be right.

We can be right about racism and never show up to the room where the actual repair work happens.

 We can be right about generosity and still never open our checkbook when it would cost us something real.

We can be right about hospitality and still let someone stand at the edge of the room before ever crossing the room to invite them in.

 We can be right about the friend who needs us and still only manage to think about them kindly from some safe distance.

Being right has never once been the same thing as participating.

Saying yes has never been the same thing as actually following Jesus Christ.

 This is not, I want to be clear, an argument for careless action over careful conviction.

Theologies matter.

Words matter.

I would not be standing up here every week gainfully employed if I thought otherwise.

But there is a version of theological fluency that becomes its own hiding place for us at this church, where naming the problem correctly starts to feel like solving it.

 Where our capacity to diagnose becomes a substitute for our willingness to move into the vineyard.

This church knows how to name injustice.

We're very good at it.

We can talk about power and grace and inclusion in real sophistication.

And still the question this text puts to us is not whether we can describe the vineyard accurately.

 It's whether we've ever walked into it and done the work.

Are our hands dirty, essentially?

Which brings us to the part of the text that should genuinely unsettle us because there's this line Jesus adds right after the leaders answer their own trap.

Truly I tell you, Jesus says, that the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you.

 For John came to you in the way of righteousness, and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes believed him.

Notice what Jesus does not say.

He does not say the tax collectors and the prostitutes finally got their theology right.

 He does not say they passed some test of doctrine that the religious leaders failed.

He says they believed.

And belief here means something closer to trust than to correct opinion.

And that trust put their feet on a road and they walked towards something, specifically the vineyard.

Nobody had to make sure their answer was defensible first.

They just went and followed.

 Meanwhile, the men, the chief priests who could recite law from memory, who could debate the fine points of prophecy, who never once said an incorrect word about God in that entire exchange are standing at the gate of the kingdom with a flawless, empty yes in their hands.

 That is the reversal this parable insists on.

And it's not really about tax collectors, prostitutes at all in the end.

It's about where the actual movement is happening because this is what I believe deeply.

Grace has never been waiting on our theology to catch up before we receive it.

Grace is continuing to push us to move our feet.

 The good news is not that the first son becomes impressive because he does not.

He starts with defiant and ends up covered in the dirt he never wanted.

And no one throws him a parade.

No one puts the finest robes on him.

No one slaughters the fatted calf.

The good news is, though, that the father never stopped wanting him in the vineyard in the first place.

Even after a no.

Even after the...

 Father had every reason to write him off.

The invitation to participate did not expire the moment he said no to his father's face.

And that is what grace actually does.

It does not require your yes to be clean, but for your hands, it hands you a task worth doing.

It does not wait for you to get your theology or your confidence or your courage fully sorted out before it says, hey, the work needs to be done.

 Grace keeps the vineyard gate open, unlocked, for all of us to enter into and do the work that God is calling us to do, regardless of how we feel about it on any given day, regardless if we feel fully prepared to do the work or not.

God is calling us to go into the vineyard to do the real work of the gospel, not simply say yes and drag our feet.

 Say less, do more.

Not because words do not matter.

They do.

Like I said, it's my job.

But

 We say less and do more because the father in the story is still standing at the edge of the field asking the same question he's always asked.

God is standing at the field asking us the same question each and every day.

Will you go do the work?

Will you go do the work, FUMC Dallas?

 Will you go do the work?

It's time for us to move beyond saying yes.

It's time for us to move beyond getting the answer just right.

Will we as a congregation go do the work that God is asking us to do?

Because it's only that work, the actual getting our hands dirty, that has actually fed anyone.

 It is that work that we are called to do.

We're called to do it today and in the days to come.

The vineyard still needs laborers, and the invitation is still ours to accept.

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, amen.