Text on Sunday, July 18, 2004
Matthew 20: 1-16
hat labor is there yet undone in your vineyard? I don’t mean work undone in your yard or your attic or your kitchen or your office. It’s summer and this is the Sabbath day of rest. Let’s not concern ourselves for any task at all, however troublesome or pleasant, which would take mere time and effort to complete. When I ask you about your vineyard, reflect rather on your essential you, your inside deeps, infinite, not fully known, vulnerable, alive, no pretense. This is your vineyard. The place where you find and pick the finest, most satisfying growth of your person and personality. Never mind self-deprecation—the guilts, the stories, the secrets, the shames. The Divine has planted on this earth a vineyard which is fenced and protected by your name, your skin, your heart and mind. Just you. “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own?” (1 Cor 6.19) What labor is there yet to be done in your vineyard?
Are you old? Is there work in your vineyard? Perhaps someone replies, I have enjoyed a good life; I thank God. I ask for nothing more now. Such acclamations of humble thanksgiving I have heard from many of you when we have talked in a late afternoon. But is the vineyard plucked of all fruit? Another kind of answer from the aged resounds with resignation to the lateness of the hour. Something, or someone, was taken and went missing from life. Perhaps the bereavement is new; perhaps it became a fixture of personality and experience long ago. As it seemed that life could never regain such fullness, the bereft soul dismissed all laborers from the vineyard, and began to wait out life’s little day. Is there no more to be done? You trust in the Lord! That faith you affirm again and again. Therefore, ask the Lord to speak an answer to these questions. Is there fruit in your vineyard, and grapes to be pressed and wine yet to drink?
I had the pleasure some weeks ago of talking with my English teacher from my last year of high school. Decades do not erase the honor and the mystery of a great year of learning; wide-open mind receiving the seeds from a teacher day by day, in row upon row. Now she is eighty-something. Her husband died a few years ago. They had—she has—a country house which suffered terrible damage this past winter; burst pipes, separating roof, caved walls. She told me how hard it was to undertake the repair of it all. She expanded on her own emotions by recalling Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse. We had read this book together half a lifetime ago. I remember it acutely in one sense, yet with little detail to mind. The novel tells the whole span of its subject’s life, from the woman’s vibrant adolescence through years of marriage and children and into the aging. Late, she returns to the island, to the lighthouse, where so much of life had borne fruit and multiplied. It has fallen to silence and shambles. It needs so much work to live there, to stay there. Can she start in at so late an hour? How this tale cut my heart’s skin when I was seventeen! At eighty-seven, my beloved teacher met the selfsame spirit in the flesh. But as she knew, and you see, the question of labor late in the day is not about the work itself, nor the relative frailty of the aged body. It is about your deep self. Is it too late for new laborers in your vineyard?
Perhaps you are of middle years. When the aged look at you, they see a young one. Really. But you, perhaps, experience yourself as a network of well-worn limitations. You feel the bargains and the compromises and the cares that middle years bring. Your relationships are packed with satisfactions and routines and blockages, all cooked together like a soup. Who could separate the ingredients? There is work that neither shrinks nor soars. And your body would respond to more-vigorous and careful disciplines, if only the time, if only the time, the time. Stretched across a dozen commitments, your self may seem not your own, but more like the property of a limited partnership—family, friends, co-workers. Does the vineyard really matter? Does it exist? If there is labor left in my vineyard, says the middle-yeared man or woman, I will get to it later. Later is the mantra in the middle.
You are young? Is there labor in your vineyard? Our whole culture supplies the answer: Of course! But as usual, the culture is talking about something else. About choices and status and satisfactions. Life looks like a restaurant menu: that’s how the culture brings its account of work to be done to the young adult. You pore over the possibilities, imagining, eager to make the best choice, but for the right price. May I take your order? I recommend the wife and graduate degree combo, with a side of home-schooling for the children, and a course of country house before the dessert. Do you need another minute? Shall I bring the wine list? Is there yet labor to be done in your vineyard? This seems not the most important question during life’s outward arc, when the whole farm wants planting.
Whatever our age, it seems, we have excuses for not attending to our vineyard, as if there is no work to be done there. But you are here. Your rising and preparing this morning for this time in this place, good habit though it may be, signifies your desire to touch down deep, to take nourishment the world cannot offer, to drink from a cup prepared in your own vineyard. Trust the ancient wisdom, with its truth set in paradox: no matter your age, it is late; it is the eleventh hour now, and the master is sending in more laborers, for the master knows there is still fruit unplucked in your vineyard. What is it? What is it? Do not listen to mere common sense for an answer. Nothing new or deep and true comes from what you already know. Listen for spiritual sense. Attend to the parable.
Your vineyard has been worked by many hands since the morning of your life. The parts of you that have put in long hours are those you trust and use the most: your skills, your firm beliefs, your good sense, the routines that others rely on, your character—even your sober awareness of weaknesses and how you stay clear of those prickers and avoid conflicts. But the master has seen more in your vineyard than all your wide eyes can see and hard work can do. This is Sabbath seeing, truth that comes clear in deep rest. Into your vineyard, the master sends the newest, the last, the least certain worker. This worker is the voice you just brushed aside—but this one has the work in hand, a full vine. You are armed with arguments against this latest laborer. “Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more…” They thought? When was such a thought ever new? How can thought be true? In thought, your old self is an autocrat and a tyrant. Shhhh! The last shall be first. She speaks the Lord’s word to you.
Here is how the last late worker came into the vineyard of a young man four hundred years ago.
What leafless tree plunging
into what pent sky was it
convinced you Spring, bound to return
in all its unlikelihood, was a word
of God, a Divine message?
Custom, natural reason, are everyone’s assurance;
we take the daylight for granted, the moon,
the measured tides. A particular tree, though,
one day in your eighteenth winter,
said more, an oracle. Clumsy footman,
apt to drop the ornate objects handed to you,
cursed and cuffed by butlers and grooms,
your inner life unsuspected,
you heard, that day, a more-than-green
voice from the stripped branches.
Wooden lace, a celestial geometry, uttered
more than familiar rhythms of growth.
It said By the Grace of God.
Midsummer rustled around you that wintry moment.
Was it elm, ash, poplar, a fruit-tree, your rooted
twig-winged angel of annunciation?
What is that word from God for you? You can’t just know, you know? I mean, the hard-working, self-sure you just doesn’t listen for God. She doesn’t! He doesn’t! It’s the last laborer who has the word, and sees the laden vine in you. Whose word is that, for you? Was it something your grown child said, or a grandchild, unaware how the words pressed, plucked, and broke your fruit? Was it compassion unexpected for wretched men in far away places? Was it your partner’s need, unexpressed, undemanding?—but you saw it, and you saw how wide a turn you had to make in the field to go and fill that unsaid need. Was it sudden awareness how your tongue wags with complaint and unkindness behind someone’s back, and a sudden surfeit at such misspent speech and lost love? Was it unexpected indignation at authorities you used to trust? Was it a call to cease from your busy-ness so that you might be reached within, at the heart of your vineyard. I don’t know your answer, of course. And I hope these clumsy assays do not break the subtle wire of your own precious attention. The master is sending a new laborer into your vineyard even now. Friend, do not resist, says the master. He is here, fully equal to your oldest, surest skill; here to receive the full wage, at the master’s bidding. To which vine has the new laborer gone? Pay attention. There is your depth, your full cup, your renewed joy. Say not “No.” I am doing you no wrong. The last shall be first.
Today, before the day is over, tell someone your inkling as to which word in your heart is the late come laborer of the Lord. Who is it—maybe? Say it to a mirror if you like, or with a pen to paper. However you speak, let the tender last one not be silenced altogether this summer day. For this is how the body of your saved life stirs from its tomb. The old laborers’ bitterness and grumbling have gone silent, as after a death. The word of invitation from Brother Lawrence is really rising now: “Let us enter into ourselves. Time presses.”
delivered at Central Presbyterian Church, Buffalo, New York
©Stephen H. Phelps 2004
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