ayn rand was wrong

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

27^th ORDINARY SUNDAY (October 8^th) 2023

 

 

READINGS:

Exodus 20: 1-4, 7-8, 12-20

Psalm 19: 7-14

Philippians 3: 7-14

Matthew 21: 33-46

 

Both the Bible and Jesus can be awfully problematic!

By this I mean not so much the awkward claims Jesus places on our lives – moral and ethical strictures in particular. They, by and large, make good sense when compared to philosophies of “Just do it” or “Have It Your Way,” both extraordinarily successful marketing slogans (Nike and Burger King respectively!!). Those philosophies can become at times the mantra of some parts of society, even of faith society.

If life is “anything goes,” and I am the only judge of all that I do or say, as seems to be the attitude or some parts of society, then we have nothing to say to for example the gang member who brutally assaulted a vulnerable person person  on a suburban street in Hastings. Nor at the risk of being political, do we have anything to say to a  leader of the free world – a former leader at the moment –  who believes it is okay to assault women, mock physically incapacitated persons or injured military veterans, or lie brazenly in order to boost business profits.

If anything goes, without restrictions such as those restrictions that our faith places on us, then we run the risk of becoming no more than a Lord of the Flies society, a Lord of the Flies world. Checks and balances are a paradoxical stone in the shoe – or, better, a nerve ends on the fingers of our conscience that tell when we are burning ourselves or others.

Jesus’s moral and ethical strictures by and large only ring-fence our more selfish inclinations. Or maybe I’m the only person who has those? But if taken seriously Jesus challenges us to look closely at those aspects of our own life that we shut away from the scrutineering of divine gaze. What part of my life assaults or even assassinates goodness, represented by the owner’s son in the parable, obliterates life-giving energies in the community around me, shuts down sources of light, metaphorical or literal, that make my neighbours’ lives bearable?

These are of course rhetorical questions. Or not quite: rather they are questions that only I can answer for my small life and you can answer for yours. But they are far-reaching. I may be a small person in the global scheme, but are there aspects of my life that deaden the signs of God’s goodness, God’s compassion and justice in the lives of those with whom I share a world?

Today’s odd, overly dramatical, caricatured portrayal of evil and even crass stupidity that Jesus places in a parable at the pointy end of his life journey: this is designed to shock.

This of course is slightly harder after two thousand years of using and abusing it in the service of Christianity. The murderous tenants of the parable have often been used as an excuse to persecute adherents of the Jewish faith, our cousins in Christ. There is no such permission in the word picture that Jesus draws. The tenants of the vineyard, the corrupt and wayward leaders of society, and more especially religious society, they are those who are destroyed in this over-the-top Jesus parable.

The vineyard though remains, and we are invited with all who practise decency and compassion, to be inhabitants of that vineyard. This parable does not limit habitation of the vineyard to any one people or any one faith, but opens the vineyard to all who practice Christ-like decency and compassion. The parable is about replacing all that is recalcitrant in our corporate and individual lives, all that is God-denying, love-denying in our corporate and individual lives, and allowing the growth there instead of all that is life giving and godly.

The challenge is for us, as Paul puts it in our snippet of his letter to his beloved Philippians, never to cease pressing on to the goal, the exercise in our own life of powerful life giving, Christ-emulating energies that benefit those amongst whom we live: personally, communally, and globally.

And for that we need the help of God continuously.