Being Valued & Labouring in the Vineyard

 A sermon preached at Croydon Minster on Sunday 20 September 2020, gospel reading Matthew 20.1-16, 'The Labourers in the Vineyard', a parable of the kingdom of heaven.

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Oscar Wilde famously said that the cynic is the person who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

 

In that outlook everything can be weighed, measured, assessed, priced. There is no room for value, appreciation, delight, joy.

 

Lockdown showed us that things we value are infinitely more precious than things we can put a price on: being in church, seeing friends, visiting relatives, getting outside. How do you put a price on those things?

 

Prices change, but value doesn’t.

 

When many people today talk about ‘worth’ or value they are thinking about the ‘bottom line’, about a person or a company’s bank balance, and not their worth to the Common Good.

 

According to Forbes ‘Real Time Net Worth’, Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, has a net-worth of $115 billion. He himself would say that his real worth, his real value, is what his Foundation is doing to eradicate malaria globally.

 

But in a priced obsessed world the tech entrepreneurs, the celebrities, the hedge fund managers, the oligarchs must be the most significant because they top the rich lists. They are first, and the poor are last. That is how it is.

 

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Except that Jesus Christ declares that is not just how it is: the priorities of the kingdom of heaven fly in the face of that, he says, ‘so the last will be first and the first will be last’ (Matthew 20.16).

 

Jesus proclaims a kingdom that is value obsessed. Each person created in the image and likeness of God is of infinite value.

 

We see this in the parable. The landowner, who is said to be like the kingdom of heaven, rewards the labourers not on price grounds or daily wage but on the value of the presence they have simply by working in the vineyard.

 

The first worker is as valuable as the last and they are not measured by price. Their value does not lie in a transaction for their labour or even what they have contributed.

 

And this gets the grumbles going and that is about a perceived injustice based on price, not on value: the grumblers are talking in totally different terms from the landowner, who asks them ‘are you envious because I am generous?’ (Matthew 20.15b)

 

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Many people today feel themselves to be of low worth, not quite making it, not valued.

 

Low personal self-esteem is a blight of our times. But we cannot just generate esteem for ourselves; it is a vicious cycle and people feel increasingly worthless the more they are told they should value themselves.

 

But we gain self-esteem when we are held in esteem by others and when they show it. We receive esteem when we are valued and held to be precious, not when a price or measure is put upon us.

 

In God’s eyes human value and worth cannot be priced and go up and down. For love of us God prices nothing yet spends everything. As St Paul says to those entrusted with the care of the Church: ‘Keep watch over yourselves and over all the flock, of which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to shepherd the church of God that he obtained [or ‘purchased’ Greek periepoiēsato] with the blood of his own Son.’

 

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So the parable tells us we are of infinite value to God, who is the source of our life and our esteem. God’s love for you is unlimited, as seen in Christ’s death on the cross. Other people’s opinions, perceived judgements or what we think they think of us, wither away in relation to how we stand before God.

 

The grumblers are those who measure people by price and time, who say they don’t merit what they have received; the landowner, the kingdom of God, is generous in valuing each one irrespective of when they ‘turn up’.

 

 

The Church – established on the Apostles - is Christ’s chosen foretaste of the coming kingdom of heaven and is the crucible in which men, women and children endeavour, by God’s grace, to forge out the life of that kingdom. So it is all the more important for the Church to be a place of value not of price.

 

That means we seek to shape a culture of abundance and not a culture of scarcity: so that we rejoice in what we have and do not bemoan what we do not have.

 

This task begins in the human heart and spills out into our corporate life too.

 

A culture of scarcity is a culture that penny pinches and puts prices on things and people; a culture of abundance values, cherishes, treasures people upon whom no price can be placed.

 

‘Are you envious because I am generous?’, asks the landowner, the kingdom of Heaven. In fostering a culture of abundance, like the kingdom of heaven, let us make it our business to esteem and value others as God does, to invite them into labouring in the vineyard of God and may we be generous in valuing them such that our hospitality is boundless.

 

 

 

Manifold and Great Mercies: Re-considering the Prayer of Humble Access in the Year of Mercy

Pope Francis inaugurated a Year of Mercy in December 2015. As an Anglican I have been pondering his inspiring call to reflect on mercy. In this piece I want to do that through re-reading the distinctively Anglican prayer known as the Prayer of Humble Access and its characterisation of God as full of ‘manifold and great mercies’. At the end I have included a contemporary rendering of the prayer.

We do not presume to come to this your table, merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in your manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under your table. But you are the same Lord whose nature is always to have mercy. Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of your dear Son Jesus Christ and to drink his blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body and our souls washed through his most precious blood, and that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us. Amen.

The Prayer of Humble Access is widely disparaged – the ‘humble crumble’ – as a totem of a residual, nostalgic, Book of Common Prayer (BCP) sensibility and culture. It appears to be unremittingly negative about the body, soul and spirit.

I did not grow up with the Prayer of Humble Access in its BCP form, but a bowdlerised version in the Alternative Service Book 1980. The prayer is not a nostalgic one for me but has connected with me quite recently as a personal prayer of preparation before receiving Communion. Why do I think that?

The question of unworthiness is a tricky one. How can I be unworthy if the forgiveness of my sins has been declared in my baptism, the Sacrament of Reconciliation and the general confession at the beginning of the Eucharist? A sense of unworthiness before God and other people can be crippling. It can also be enabling. For example, Moses, the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah, Jonah and the Blessed Virgin Mary, are all aware of their unworthiness in the face of what God calls them to do. They respond to God in the face of the inadequacy: Moses’ inarticulacy (Exodus 6.12); Isaiah’s unclean lips (Isaiah 6.5); Jeremiah’s youth (Jeremiah 1.6); Jonah’s sense of unworthiness was marked by flight from God’s call (Jonah 1.3); Mary’s wonder at what was being asked of her (Luke 1.34). There is such a thing as a healthy sense of unworthiness. It acknowledges the capacity to receive the worth that God gives each of us created in God’s image and likeness (Genesis 1.26).

More than unworthiness the prayer calls us away from an overblown sense of our own righteousness like the Pharisee in Jesus’ parable (Luke 18.9-14). Un/worthiness and un/righteousness is overhauled by God’s ‘manifold and great mercies’, the God whose nature, ‘is always to have mercy’. I become more and more aware that trusting in my own righteousness is entirely wrong way to approach God and my neighbour. The Pharisee approaches the holy place trusting in his own righteousness, the publican ‘[does] not presume’ to trust in anything other than God’s mercy.

Daniel prays, ‘we do not present our supplication before you on the ground of our righteousness, but on the ground of your great mercies’ (Daniel 9.18b). A deeper understanding of the rich Biblical seam of mercy is very timely. What do we mean when we say, ‘Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer’, ‘Merciful Father, accept these prayers…’ or ‘Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison (Lord, have mercy, Christ, have mercy)? How do we articulate the Christian understanding of the ‘merciful Father’ to Muslims who know God as Compassionate and Merciful? (See also James. 5.11b).

The momentum of the prayer is one of approaching: there is a forward trajectory. It evokes Moses approaching the bush that was on fire but miraculously not consumed, and the LORD told him, ‘remove the sandals from your feet for the place on which you stand is holy ground’ (Exodus 3.5).

The sandals of our vanity and egoism are what we take off as we approach God in the Sacrament. In vivid language the prayer expresses our unworthiness – much as the publican – but the abject language grates for many. Why do we have to say that we are not worthy, ‘to eat the crumbs from under thy table’? The Syro-Phoenician woman got it (Matthew 15.21-28; Mark. 7.24-30) – ‘woman, great is your faith’ – after first approaching Jesus saying, ‘Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David’ (Matthew 15.22).

Left there the prayer outright denies the rich language of the declaration from God that in Christ, we are profoundly worthy. By baptism we are his Body before we share in his broken Body of the Sacrament.

After we acknowledge the disabling and dissembling character of ‘our own righteousness’ which frustrates God’s loving purpose, the prayer changes gear. There is new trajectory.  The Lord’s property is to have mercy, that is to act kindly and justly and consistent with the purpose that we, believing in him, ‘should not perish’ and that Christ does not come to condemn (John 3.16-17).

The approach we make is to share God’s life. We are not spectators like Moses, but partakers in the Divine Glory. Like the Bush, we are set on fire in the Spirit but are not consumed. Boldly, Peter declares that when we set the corruptions of self and the world, we become ‘participants of the divine nature’ (2 Peter 1.4).

So we approach, prompted by God, ‘the Father of Mercies’ (2 Corinthians 1.3) to share at his table where we are not just worthy to be, but invited.

This is where another layer of biblical allusion is added. We need to go to the sixth chapter of St John’s gospel where we find this vivid language of Christ’s Body and Blood. Jesus speaks of the bread, the manna, which the Israelites ate in the wilderness. It sustained them only a day at a time (John 6.49). The Living Bread that comes down from heaven will feed, sustain and give eternal life: eat it and you will never die. But Jesus moves us on from thinking that this is simply bread or perishable manna; it is his flesh. As it was for many of his first hearers, this is a stumbling block to so many (John 6.60).

In the prayer this fleshly language continues, ‘that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood’. In a time when we are so alert to the corrosive effect of low self-esteem and poor body image to speak of ‘our sinful bodies’ seems beyond the pale. Where is any sense of valuing the human body, which is, ‘a temple of the Holy Spirit within you’ (1 Corinthians 6.19)?

It comes back to a profound honesty about who we are, and, actually, the great dignity of not being abandoned. It is the lost sheep who is sought out and brought back by the Good Shepherd; the lost coin sought out by the woman; the wayward son welcomed back by the father (Luke 15).

To say ‘our sinful bodies’ acknowledges that they are in need of repair, healing and redemption and can be made clean and whole by God’s grace. After all, the woman in the parable swept and made clean her house as she searched for the lost coin (Luke 15.8). This is the redeemed washed in the blood of the Lamb (Rev. 7.14).

The prayer is about much more than any sense that it’s only about me sorting myself out. As Pope Francis reminds us, drawing from the Fathers, ‘The Eucharist, although it is the fullness of sacramental life, is not a prize for the perfect but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak.’ (Evangelii Gaudium §47, p. 29). It seems to me that the prayer makes that clear.

It is God who makes me a worthy recipient of his grace in the Sacrament: he first loved me (1 John 4.19) and all my life is about catching up with that reality.

That reality, and human-divine interplay, is total in Jesus Christ and is the source and summit of my life. The prayer ends with a great restatement of human worthiness in Incarnation of the Word, that, ‘he may dwell in us and we in him’.

A contemporary version of The Prayer of Humble Access

Most merciful Lord,

your love compels us to come in.

Our hands were unclean,

our hearts were unprepared;

we were not fit

even to eat the crumbs from under your table.

But you, Lord, are the God of our salvation,

and share your bread with sinners.

So cleanse and feed us

with the precious body and blood of your Son,

that he may live in us and we in him;

and that we,

with the whole company of Christ,

may sit and eat in your kingdom.

Amen.

Text of the prayers from Common Worship © Archbishops' Council 2000

© Andrew Bishop 2016