The Rev. Dn. James Wesley Holcomb III- Change Through Mercy

I speak to you in the name of our one Lord, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Amen.

Please be seated.

Right before the section of today's gospel that we've heard today, Jesus did something.

He bothered a few people who were already a little perturbed with his very existence.

He entered the temple and he turned over some tables.

And then the religious leaders began to confront him in the scene that we're given in today's gospel, and they ask him, By what authority are you doing these things?

In other words, who are you?

Jesus turns the question back on them by simply asking whether John's baptism came from God or merely from human beings.

And instead of asking what is true, they worried more about what their answer would cost them.

In other words, they simply tried to save their own hides.

And so Jesus tells them the story of two sons.

One son says no to his father, but later changes his mind and goes to work in the vineyard.

While the other says yes, he says yes, but he never goes anywhere.

And the difference between them is not simply what they said, but whether they are willing to change and do what the Father asked of them.

And that brings us to what I believe may be the heart of today's gospel.

And it is this that God's grace meets us exactly where we are.

And yet it calls us beyond where we are to change.

It calls us to change, to change our minds, to change our hearts, and then to get up and do what God has asked of us.

And we're able to embrace this and we're able to uh do that change simply because God's power is shown not through judgment, not through vindication, not through consequence, but God's power is shown through mercy, through mercy.

And sometimes the hardest place for God to change us is where we have already convinced ourselves that we're saying yes.

We've deluded ourselves.

Some of us say, Well, I'm already doing that, I'm doing exactly what the Lord told me to do.

Of course, I'm willing to make things right with that individual that I fall in out with.

They know where to find me.

I'm waiting on them.

And that sounds like a yes until we realize that we expect the other person to change while requiring nothing of ourselves.

And that is just one example of the danger that Jesus exposes in the second son.

And then he goes on to say the tax collectors and the prostitutes who were publicly regarded as sinners, they were able to hear John.

And they believed and they responded and they got up and they changed.

But yet the religious leaders who knew the scriptures, who worshipped in the temple, who did all the right things and knew all the right things to say about God, were the very ones that did not believe.

The people that they looked down on because of their perception of them and their opinion of them were the ones that responded to the call of God.

And they never stopped to ask themselves whether God might be calling them to change.

And the same danger that they found themselves in is the danger that we may also find ourselves in.

We can save the creed, we can participate in active ministry, we can receive the sacraments, know the Bible, serve in the church, might even be a delicate to the convention, but we still resist what God is trying to do and change in us.

In saying yes to God, my friends, it matters because Jesus reminds us that our yes must become the very life, the very way that we live.

And I know I'm guilty of doing that every once in a while.

This is a hard word that Jesus gives them, but yet it is still an act of mercy.

Jesus tells them an uncomfortable truth because the reality is it is not too late for them to change.

And it's not too late for us to change.

I heard an old preacher once say, if you ain't dead, you ain't done.

There's still room for the grace of God and for the mercy of God to be alive and well and for us to change.

The tax collectors and the prostitutes, they were going into the kingdom ahead of these Pharisees and these religious leaders.

And that lets us know that just as they were still able to get up and follow, those religious leaders had the ability to get up and follow.

And that, my friends, is good news for us.

God does not simply wait until we have everything right before coming to us.

I don't have everything right right now.

And if the truth be told, none of us have everything right.

And yet, we serve a God whose love is so infinite, whose mercy is so great, and whose grace is always available that God never gives up on us, even when there are still things in our lives that need to change.

And in the words of my late grandmother, now who wouldn't love a God like that that can love me in spite of all my faults and all my weaknesses?

And if God, who has the power over the body and the soul, can love me to that extent, how much more I for my siblings in creation?

And so I ask this where is God calling us to change our mind and to follow?

Maybe there's a relationship that needs healing, a prejudice that you might need to face, a wrong that you need to make right, or something that you just need to finally let go of.

Whatever it is, however long you may have been carrying it, know that God is able and willing to meet you in this place, and that the fullness of grace that we prayed for this morning in the collect is able to follow us and lead us forward, and know and be comforted that the God who calls us into the vineyard is the same God whose power is shown most clearly, not only in his mercy, but in the way we show mercy, in the way we embody grace, and knowing that God's mercy is powerful enough to change us, to change me, to change you, and to change the world one soul and one interaction at a time.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

Amen.