The Rev. Frank Logue
King of Peace Episcopal Church
Kingsland, Georgia
October 6, 2002

Singing A Different Song—The Easy Slide to Compromise
Matthew 21:33-43 

The Gospel reading for this morning is quite straightforward. Jesus uses a parable to expound on Isaiah 5:1-2. Jesus is using a preaching style common to synagogues of his day, which takes a text, expounds on it with a story and then concludes with a related text of scripture.  

Jesus starts with a Hebrew scripture, which is now part of what we call the Old Testament. In fact, he uses the same Old Testament story as we get today in which Israel is the vineyard and God is the landowner who has lovingly placed them on a fertile hill, which he cleared of stones, planted with choice vines, dug out a wine vat and built a watchtower. In this story from Isaiah, God gives Israel everything they need to be fruitful. 

Jesus then pushes this text further with a parable in which the tenants who have been given everything they need turn on the landowner; killing those he sends to collect his portion of the harvest. For Jesus, these slaves of the landowner represent the prophets who God sent to call Israel to repentance. Rather than listen to what God was saying through the prophets, the people beat and even stoned to death God’s messengers. Jesus continues saying the landowner then sends his own son, who we know to be Jesus himself. Jesus prophetically says that the tenant farmers, who are Israel in this parable, will kill the son. Jesus then asks his audience what the landowner will do to the tenants and gets the expected response that he will kill them and give the land to tenants who will give him his fair share come harvest time.  

Jesus finishes his little sermon by quoting Psalm 118 verse 22, which says the stone the builders rejected will become the cornerstone. Jesus who was rejected by most of Israel in his lifetime does then become the cornerstone, the key to the Christian faith. The lousy so and sos who would not do what God told them are out of the vineyard and we the good guys are in. End of story. Nothing more to learn. 

Amen. 

[Start to return to seat. Pause and then return to the pulpit.] 

OK. Maybe there is something more going on here. I will give you one clue. If you read through a story in the Bible and are sure it applies to someone else, but not to you, then you should probably slow down and read it again. We rarely get off so easy. The Bible is much more realistic than that. 

I wonder what is was like for those first tenants in the vineyard. Do you think they thought of themselves as bad guys? I doubt it. The people who beat and killed the prophets thought they were killing false prophets. They thought everything was going great and life would be even better if the prophets would stop calling them back into a deeper relationship with God. We don’t kill prophets anymore. We just ignore them and marginalize their message. 

Today, we are sophisticated enough to slide slowly away from God without doing something so dramatic as beating up a prophet. It works like this. You start making little choices that turn you away from God. Slowly and often steadily one can make little compromises with what you know is wrong until it doesn’t seem wrong anymore. 

I want to show a video parable in which someone compromises his beliefs in order to keep a job. 

[Show “Jesus Loves the Little Children” clip in which a singer is talked into singing the classic song “white and white and white and white” instead of “red and yellow black and white” in order to keep the contract and get a hit record.] 

A change here and a change there and you are soon singing a completely different song with a very different message. We too can do that. Any of us can find ourselves being asked to compromise our standards. Any one of us can feel pressure to do something we know is wrong. It starts small. Just a little compromise of values. And before you know it, you are singing a different song. 

In school, kids can be tempted to look over at another students test, just to make sure they have the right answer. That works so well, that you may find yourself copying a whole test. By the time you end up in the principal’s office for cheating, you can’t quite remember where you went wrong.  

In the workplace, you can be asked to look the other way while the employer avoids some bothersome regulations. You might pretend not to listen when a fellow employee is harassed. There are lots of little ways to let your values slide, to forget Sunday morning morals during the week. 

At home, you may find your spouse inattentive and start turning to the Internet for companionship. It begins innocently enough, but before you fully understand what has happened, everything you truly value has been put at risk.  

It starts so easy. That compromise of values is so small at first you hardly notice the change. However, it doesn’t take long until you find yourself singing a different song. The tenants whom the landowner needs to kick out of the vineyard in Jesus’ story probably never thought of themselves as bad guys. Those tenants started out being unproductive and then ended up getting greedy. It would be nice to read the story in such a way as to assume that those of us now happily ensconced in the vineyard have a lease for life and the afterlife too. We do as long as we remember that we are but tenants in this vineyard. Everything we have is a gift from God and we are called to be thankful and faithful to the work God has for us. 

In just a moment, we will baptize Michael Helton. We will sign him up on the work rolls in this vineyard. As Michael grows up alongside us, what will he learn from our example? Will he see faithfulness or dangerous compromises when he looks at our lives? In the service, those of us who are already baptized will be asked if we intend to do all that we can to support him in his life in Christ. When we say we will, we are agreeing to show him by our example as well as our words. 

This baptism is a chance for each of us to renew the baptismal covenant in our own lives. We can stop the slide toward compromising with what we know to be less than the best God has for us, by affirming our baptism vows. Pay close attention to the words of the service and then put them back into practice in your daily life. 

Let us now join together in baptizing Michael….