There are some church members who say they
have lived good lives and kept the commandments. They have spent their lives
doing the right thing and maybe thought that they “should be alright when they
face their Maker”. Some have read their Bibles diligently, tried very hard to
practice what they have learnt and do what is right. But they have had no
passion in their lives and little joy and peace. They have lived from a sense
of duty. While Christians say there is more to it than that, many are unsure
about what the more is.
It is to people such as these that Paul was
speaking in the reading from Philippians 3. In all the worldly ways, Paul
qualified as a righteous person, blameless under the law. Paul had grown up in
the vineyard of Jesus’ parable. He had benefitted from all that implied. He was
born into a good family which carefully followed the religious laws. He was of
the right race, the right tribe, the right religion. Paul had been brought up in
the sheltered monoculture of a walled vineyard. What more could there be to
life! Surely this is how God intended people to behave.
It is certainly what the people in the
vineyard had come to think. They so valued all that they had produced in the
way of religious dressings that they were not about to part with even a small
part of it as tribute to the owner and provider. What they had produced had
become more important to them; the buildings, the dogma, the creeds, the fancy
paraphernalia, their feelings of self-righteousness and above all, their
embellishment of the guidelines God had given them to live by.
When the stories of the life and teaching
of Jesus reached Paul and made a claim on him, as they must have done for him
to have reacted so violently against them, Paul rejected them wholeheartedly.
They were like the messengers from the landlord who had come to collect what
had been agreed upon with the tenants of the vineyard. Paul even saw it as his duty to reject the teachings of Jesus,
and persecute those who dared follow that man. To mix metaphors, Jesus became
the stone Paul rejected that was to become the cornerstone of his life.
Rev Julianne Parker
for complete sermon see sermon's page
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