17 Pentecost

 

September 20, 2026

Matthew 20.1-16

+ I love this story Jesus shares in my our Gospel reading for today.

 Actually, I don’t love it.

 But I get it.

 And it certainly resonates with me.

 Because I’ve been there.

 A lot.

 And I think that’s the point of the story.

 I think it’s suppose to resonate with us.

 More importantly, I think it’s supposed to bother us and get under our skin and irritate us.

 And challenge. . .us.

 I really do think Jesus intends just that in this parable..

 Because most of us understand immediately why the workers who had  been in the vineyard all day were angry.

 They worked since morning.

 They carried on in the heat of the day.

 They’re tired.

 They’re sweaty.

 They’re aching.

 And then, at the end of the day, they watch the landowner hand exactly the same wage to people who worked only an hour. 

Of course they grumble. 

I would!

You would too.

 Because somewhere very deep inside us is this conviction that life ought to be fair.

 If I work longer, I should receive more.

 If I behave better, I should be rewarded.

 If I have sacrificed more, followed the rules more carefully, showed up more consistently, then surely I ought to receive something extra.

 But then Jesus says this,

 “The kingdom of heaven is like this.”

 And suddenly everything gets turned (as always!) upside down.

 Because the kingdom of God does not operate according to our carefully constructed accounting system.

 Hate to break that news to you today. . ..

 The kingdom of God operates according to grace.

 And grace is almost never fair.

 Now, we should say, thank God.

 But I do so with gritted teeth

 ***Ok.***

 ***Yes.***

 ***I agree.***

 ***Thank God***

 But let’s take notice of something important about the workers who come late.

 When the landowner finds them standing around, he asks them,

“Why are you standing here idle all day?”

 And they answer,

 “Because no one has hired us.”

 It’s not because they’re lazy.

 It’s not because they didn’t want to work.

 It’s not because they were irresponsible.

 No one had chosen them.

 Maybe they were too old.

 Maybe they were too young.

 Maybe they were sick.

 Maybe they were disabled.

 Maybe they simply weren’t the kind of workers anyone wanted.

 Whatever the reason, they had spent the day waiting.

 Waiting for someone to see them.

 Waiting for someone to hear them!

 Waiting for someone to choose them.

 Waiting for someone to say,

 “There’s a place for you too.”

 And eventually someone does.

 The landowner comes back.

 Again and again.

 At nine.

 At noon.

 At three.

 And finally, almost absurdly, at five o’clock, when there’s hardly any working day left. 

Still he comes looking for them.

 Still he invites them.

 Still there is room in the vineyard.

 That is what the kingdom of God is like.

 God keeps coming back.

 God keeps looking.

 God keeps calling.

 God keeps making room.

 Even when everyone else has decided that it’s too late.

 We human beings are very good at deciding who exactly has arrived too late.

 Too late to change.

 Too late to belong.

 Too late to be forgiven.

 Too late to make something meaningful out of a life.

 Too late to become the person God created them to be.

 But God it seems doesn’t own a watch.

 God’s time is not our time!

 God simply keeps going out into the marketplace saying,

 “You too. Come into the vineyard.”

 And when evening comes, everyone receives the same amount.

 Everyone receives what they need to live.

 And this is where grace becomes difficult.

 Because most of us are perfectly happy with grace when it is given to us.

 We become considerably less enthusiastic when grace is given to someone we don’t think deserves it. 

That is the scandal at the heart of this parable.

 The landowner says to the complaining workers,

 “Are you envious because I’m generous?”

 That question reaches across two thousand years and lands directly in our laps.

 Are we angry because God is too generous?

 Are we offended because God refuses to love according to our categories?

 Or the Church’s categories?

 Because God loves the person who got everything wrong?

 Because God welcomes the person who showed up at the last minute?

 Because God forgives somebody we haven’t forgiven?

 Because God makes room at the table for someone we would rather keep out there? 

The uncomfortable truth of the Gospel is that none of us owns the vineyard.

 None of us owns the Church.

 None of us owns the world.

 None of us controls the guest list.

 None of us gets to decide when someone has arrived too late for grace.

 That belongs to God.

 And God is extraordinarily generous.

 Of course, this doesn’t mean that justice somehow doesn’t matter.

 Quite the opposite.

 Notice what the landowner actually does.

 He makes certain that even the people who stood unwanted in the marketplace all day receive enough to live. 

He sees the people everyone else overlooked.

 And he gives them what?

 Dignity.

 That’s not cheap grace.

 That’s mercy becoming justice.

 It’s the kingdom of God breaking into a world that constantly assigns human worth according to productivity, usefulness, success, wealth, stats, race, sexuality, age, health, achievement, or respectability.

 Jesus says,

 That is not how God measures a human life.

 In God’s vineyard, human worth is not earned.

 It is given.

 Because you are God’s beloved child. .

 Or as we will hear toiday at Lucelia’s baptism,

 “You are Gods’ work of art!”

 You are God’s own.

 You belong to god.

 Period.

 And perhaps that is why this parable ultimately leads us to this table.

 Because here, at the Eucharist, the same thing happens.

 Nobody receives a larger piece of Jesus because they have been faithful longer. 

Nobody receives more grace because they prayed harder this week.

 Nobody receives a better cup because they’ve made fewer mistakes.

 We simply come forward.

 All of us

 The lifelong Christian and the person barely holding onto faith.

 The certain and the doubtful.

 The joyful and the grieving.

 The happy and the bitter.

 The righteous and the messy

 Which, of course, is every single one of us.

 We stretch out our empty hands.

 And God gives God’s very self to us.

 The same Jesus.

 The same grace.

 The same mercy.

 The same astonishing love.

 Some of us came to the vineyard early.

 Some came at noon.

 Some of us may have arrived only five minutes ago.

 It doesn’t matter.

 The invitation is always the same,

 Come.

 There’s still room.

 There’s still work to do.

 There’s still enough mercy.

 There’s still enough grace.

 There’s still a place for you.

 Because the kingdom of heaven is not something we earn.

 It is something God gives.

 Freely.

 Lavishly.

 Almost scandalously.

  All we can say in response—this time without gritted teeth—is 

Thank God.

 

 

Dedication Sunday

 

September 13, 2026

 + So, here we are.

 Seventy years.

 Seventy years ago, a small group of people gathered here in north Fargo and dared to imagine a church.

  They could not have known exactly what St. Stephen’s would become.

  They could not have imagined all the people who would pass through these doors, all the prayers that would prayed here and the worship that would happen here, all the Eucharists celebrated, all the tears shed, all the laughter shared.

 But they planted something.

 And seventy years later, here we are.

 Now, I know it’s sometimes in our tendency to romanticize the 1950s.

 I do it.

 Have you seen my house?

 Have you seen my cool 1959 Lane Acclaim coffee table or end tables or my champagne blond Heywood Wakefield cocktail table?  

 And for us, seventy years later, we still have some hold-overs in the way we think about the Church from that time.

 We look at the booming churches of the 1950s and 1960s.

 Some of you remember that

 And fondly.

 We look at the overflowing Sunday Schools and children in the church.

 But. . .

 Let’s look at those kids from the 1950s and 1960s here at St. Stephen’s.

 There are some photos here at St. Stephen’s showing the kids of St. Stephen’s in about 1965.

 There are about 20 or 25 of them in that photo.

 But. . .let’s ask one very hard question about that photo.

 Where are those kids now?

 Those kids who are now in their sixties and seventies?

 How are they somehow the future of the Church of their time?

 Of that group of 20 or 25 kids, I know of only one who is still a member here.

 Laura Nylander.

 The rest, this morning, are for the most part, not in church, I can tell you.

 They’re sleeping in—worshipping at the Church of St. Mattress.

 Or playing pickle ball.

 Or watching the news.

 I was a youth leader at Gethsemane Cathedral almost 30 years ago before I was ordained.

 Back then we had 20 some kids in that confirmation class.

 None of them are members at Gethsemane now.

 Or anywhere else.

 I know this.

 Because I sometimes do their weddings or the baptisms of their children.

 The belief that a church full of children is the future of the church as a whole is not a reality.

 We need to stop comparing our statistics now to what they were in 1959.

 Those numbers weren’t real.

 It was a bubble that by the 1970s, popped.

 So then we need to ask, where is the future of the church?

 Well, of course children are our future.

 But children get older, they  get confirmed and no matter how much we say otherwise, often think that confirmation is “graduation” from church, and they go off to college and they often don’t ever come back to Fargo.

 So, where do I think the real future of the Church is?

 I’ll tell you. Because I’ve seen it proven true again and again.

 It’s in the young adults of the church.

 They are the future.

Lexi, who is being baptized today (sorry for calling you out today yet Lexi), is the future of the church.

Krisotfer and Katie and Stephanie and Amy and Josh and John H and others---they are the future of our Church.

 They are the ones who actually choose to be here.

 They are the ones who want to be here.

 Who make the commitment to be there.

 Who come and step up and help out and do ministry here.

 And our job is to encourage the young adults to be the next generation of the church, the one that replaces us.

 To be vital and committed and contirbuting members of the church.

 To listen to them and to engage with them and hear their voices and their concerns and their ideas for what the Church is and will be.

 Because, the Church in my opinion as somehow who does this for a living, isn’t dying.

 But it sure is changing.

 And change is hard!

 Yes, the Church goes through ebbs and it goes through floes.

 But, as we all know, God always provides.

 And God always renews.

 I know.

 1956 seems like some halcyon age.

 But it’s just that.

 Halcyon.

 Fantasy.

 A misty image from the past.

 We will never be 1956 again.

 If we want to look to history  and examine a time more like this time, let’s look back 100 years, to the 1920s.

 Those numbers reflect a time in which there was no bubble.

 Or better yet, let’s not even look at numbers and the past.

 Let’s look at now and the future.

 And not lament when we hear yet again about the Church “dying off.”

 In my entire career as a priest these stories have been consistent.

 They were saying the same thing 20 or 30 years ago when I was in seminary and being ordained. 

They were saying the Great Generation was the last generation of the Church.

 Then the Silent Generation was going to be the end of the Church.

 They were saying the same thing about Covid.

 “They’re never coming back!” the news articles proclaimed in 2020.

 Really???

 Our job is to do what we need to do here and now.

 We need to continue to be this strange, inclusive place.

 We need to worship God in liturgy and music, and follow Jesus and serve others in love.

 And to encourage our next generations of Christians.

 And I also want to add, what is remarkable about St. Stephen’s is not simply that we have survived for seventy years.

 It is that we have continued to become.

 Throughout our history, this congregation has often been willing to move ahead when moving ahead was difficult.

 St. Stephen’s was an early advocate in our diocese for women in leadership.

 St. Stephen’s later stood for the full inclusion of LGBTQ+ people.

 We continue to be a place on the forefront of eco-justice, with our commitment to the earth and God’s creation.

 We continue to be a place of innovative liturgy and music

 We continue to be a place, in often dark times, of being the place of full-inclusion in a community in which there are not many opportunities for such a place.

 And that’s important to remember today.

 In Fargo-Moorhead, there are currently roughly five or six congregations which are fully committed to fully welcoming all people.

 Five or six.

 Just think of that.

 In this community of churches.

 In this community where there’s a church on almost every corner.

 There are only a handful of congregations that are committed to welcoming and including all people in love.

 And we’re the only Episcopal one in our community.

 And this is not just something we decided to do last year or ten years ago or twenty years.

 This is what we’ve been doing throughout our history.

 Even when those positions brought resistance from the larger Church and the community and society.

 And that tells us something important about who we are.

 We have tried, imperfectly but persistently, to actually live out what Jesus commands us to do, “Love one another as I have loved you.”

 When he said that, he really meant it.

 Not love some.

 Not welcome some.

 Not make room for some.

 Love one another.

 That radical welcome remains at the heart of St. Stephen’s today.

 We are a community committed to justice and to the worth and dignity of every human being.

 So today we give thanks for seventy years—but we do so knowing we are not building a monument to the past.

 We are standing on its foundation and looking forward.

 Because somewhere in Fargo or Moorhead right now there is someone who does not yet know that they need this place.

 Someone who has been told there is no room for them in the Church.

 Someone who has been wounded by religion.

 Someone who is lonely.

 Someone who is searching.

 Someone who simply needs to hear the words:

 You are welcome here.

 You are fully included here.

 You are loved here.

 You belong here.

 There is a place for you at this table.

 For seventy years, God has entrusted this little corner of the Church to us.

 And our job is to be faithful to what has been entrusted to us by God and those founders.

 May we honor those who came before us not simply by remembering them, but by having the same courage they had—to keep opening the doors wider.

 To keep welcoming.

 To keep being radical and innovating and different.

 And weird.

 To keep pushing ahead.

 And pushing back when we need to.

 Seventy years of grace.

 God’s grace.

 And, by the grace of God, we truly do have a future of hope.