Septuagesima Sermon 2021
Septuagesima – Matthew 20:1-16
St. Andrew’s Lutheran Church, Laramie, WY
31 January A+D 2021
“For many are called, but few are chosen.”
We grumble when we think that we haven’t gotten what we deserve. The Israelites contended with Moses and said, “Give us water, that we may drink.” It wasn’t right that they didn’t have water to drink. Their complaining was due to a lack of trust. Would God really deliver them from slavery in Egypt only to let them die in the wilderness? Would God perform the miracle of dividing the Red Sea and drowning their most feared enemy in it only to kill Israel whom He had just redeemed? When they had to wait a little while for water, they immediately lost their faith in God.
God calls us out of bondage to sin and Satan and death. He calls us to work in His vineyard. He promises to give us what is right. He promises to take care of us. This is all in the call of the Gospel. Israel had this call. They were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and the sea, and they all drank the same spiritual drink. They drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them, and that Rock was Christ. But with most of them God was not well pleased, for their bodies were scattered in the wilderness.
They did not understand that the call God gives is one of grace. Israel didn’t do anything to be redeemed from slavery in Egypt, and what a vicious slavery! Pharaoh was commanding them to kill their own children! He took away all their time and sweat and labor, and even their lives. Their lives were spent in one futile day after the other, doing what a tyrant told them to do. And God called them out of this bondage. He did it because He loved them. The Red Sea taught them that. Why did they grumble? Because they despised God’s grace.
It is an act of mercy to be called to work in the vineyard. It is entirely God’s grace that we are called from standing idle in the marketplace in order that we might be under the care of the owner of the vineyard. Grace is God’s undeserved love. It is His favor towards poor sinners. It is His attitude of goodwill and love for us who don’t deserve it. Before we hear the call of the Gospel we are doing nothing worthwhile at all. We are standing idle in this world’s marketplace, where things are bought and sold for a price. This means that before the Father calls us out of darkness and into His marvelous light, all of our works are futile and without meaning. This is what Christ means when He says, “Without Me you can do nothing.” (John 15:5) This is what Paul means when He says, “without faith it is impossible to please God.” (Heb. 11:6)
Life before God calls us to His vineyard is slavery in Egypt. It is standing idly in a marketplace, doing nothing. Our work is in vain. It is only for the purpose of surviving for a little while on this earth. This is what St. Paul calls the “futility of their mind.” It is being “alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them.” (Eph. 4:17-18) Before we are called to faith in Christ Paul says, “that at that time you were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.” (Eph. 2:12)
What a miserable existence! This is the marketplace of the world, where the prices are set, and you must pay the price to get what you want, but what you get is never enough. It doesn’t satisfy you. It doesn’t give you what your soul needs. To be without God is to be picking up scraps of bread from outside the house, not caring about the one who wants to give you much more than a few years on earth.
Many are called, but few are chosen. Jesus is speaking here of our election by grace. God decided to call us out of darkness from eternity because of the grace and mercy and love that is in Him. Jesus explains this when He says, “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up on the last day.” The Father draws us from the marketplace of this world where our works have a certain price fixed to them, and they can only get us certain temporal earthly blessings. But God’s election is not temporal. He calls us in time, but He chose from eternity to call, justify, and glorify His children, as we know from Ephesians 1(:3-6),
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love, having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, by which He made us accepted in the Beloved.
This means that the cause of our being in the vineyard, the reason for our being in the kingdom of heaven, the Holy Christian Church, the entire cause is God’s grace alone, and not our own doing. So it was with Israel. Moses told Israel in Deuteronomy (7:7-8),
The Lord did not set His love on you nor choose you because you were more in number than any other people, for you were the least of all peoples; but because the Lord loves you, and because He would keep the oath which He swore to your fathers, the Lord has brought you out with a mighty hand, and redeemed you from the house of bondage, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.
God’s election, His choosing us, is always by grace. It is not because of who we are, but because the Lord loves us. This is a great mystery, but one of great comfort. It means that we don’t need to look at ourselves to see if God loves us. We always look to the call of God. If the call is by God’s grace, then our whole life, our faith, our love, our labor – all of it is given to us by God’s pure grace and mercy.
People confuse this all the time. They try to figure out why some are saved and others aren’t. Some try to find the difference between the saved and the damned in the people themselves. They will say that the reason some are saved is because they believed. But God chose us before we believed. His choosing us in Christ was before the foundation of the world. Others adopt the horrible opinion that God simply chose who would be damned as much as He chose those who are saved. Then life because one terrifying question of whether God chose me to be damned. But God chose no one to be damned. We know this because the call is for all. It is for all who are standing idle in the marketplace.
Listen to the Holy Spirit reject the heresy that God wants some to be damned,
As I live,’ says the Lord God, ‘I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live. (Ez. 33:11)
For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. (John 3:16)
God our Savior desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. (1 Tim. 2:3-4)
Jesus Christ the righteous…is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the whole world. (1 John 2:1-2)
The call of God is to all sinners because Christ died for all sinners. “This is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into this world to save sinners.” (1 Tim. 1:15)
Many are called with the same call. God’s grace calls us. He calls us away from serving sin and living for no purpose at all into the forgiveness of sins won by Christ’s blood. As the Passover Lamb’s blood turned the angel of death away from Israel and delivered Israel out of slavery, so the blood of Christ the Lamb of God pays our debt of sin to God and rescues us from serving the devil.
Look at this world! Everyone trying to get more and more and no one ever being satisfied! And all for what? Surely every man at his best state is altogether vanity! A man heaps up riches, but can’t take them with him. A man works his whole life long and then gets a plaque and a pension so that he can maybe spend a few years driving his Winnebago around the country until cancer or stroke or heart attack takes him. All of our labor under the sun amounts to standing idly in the marketplace unless we are with God, unless God is the source of our life and our works. Works done without God will be forgotten. No one changes the world. The world stays the same dominion of the devil until the last day, a dominion where people work for themselves, where they make sure they get what they worked for, and then when they have it, they lose it.
But God’s call to His vineyard, to His Holy Christian Church is not so. Christ planted this vineyard on the cross, where He destroyed what makes life futile. He took the sin that kills and He killed it. He died the death that destroys us and death no longer has dominion over Him, because He rose from the dead. His kingdom is His Church, where all of the benefits of His death and resurrection, forgiveness of sins, rescue from death and the devil, a clean conscience before God, peace with God through Christ’s blood, eternal life, fellowship with each other, peace with each other, love that lasts beyond the grave, life that is holy and innocent and righteous and pure and that does not fade away, the inheritance of the saints in light, joy no eye has seen or ear has heard – all of this is ours when God calls us into His vineyard, when He baptized us, preaches to us the Gospel, and we believe that God is our true Father because we have His true Son, our Brother, as our Savior. Pharaoh no longer owns us. Slavery is not our life. Our labor in the Lord is not in vain because we are His and nothing He does is in vain.
But there are many who are called who think that the Church, the Father’s vineyard, is just like the marketplace. They are those who haggle with God. They make sure that they will get a denarius for their days work. They set the value of their own labor. They think they are the first. Those who think they are the first are those who are still under the Law, and not under grace. They think that they deserve to be in God’s kingdom, that the call is not by grace. They are working for what the Law gives. If you do this, then you get these blessings.
Look at the other workers whom God calls. He calls them from standing idle in the marketplace, and He says, “Whatever is right, I will give to you.” The word for “right” here is related to the word “righteous.” The workers don’t demand to get a certain wage. The call into the vineyard itself is the greatest reward. They get to be with God. Their life is no longer in vain. They have work to do that will last and that matters, and that God is pleased with. They don’t compare themselves to others. They are not working for the reward, but for the giver of the reward.
No so the so-called first. They are working for what they know they will get. They limit God’s mercy. They hate it. When the owner of the vineyard calls everyone to get paid, he has his foreman, his steward, to pay everyone, and he pays the last workers, who only worked one hour a denarius, and he pays them first. Those who were first think that they will get more because they worked more. But they get paid a denarius. Again we see that they do not understand grace. They are not grateful for working in the vineyard. They are working only for the reward. They are under the Law. The Law promises a reward to those who work and says that the more good you do, the more good you get. But God does not call us because of our work. He called us when we could do nothing, before we worked at all. This is what St. Paul means when he tells the Romans and us,
Now to him who works, the wages are not counted as grace but as debt. But to him who does not work but believes on Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is accounted for righteousness. (Rom. 4:4-5)
It is not because of our work that we are called into the vineyard, and it is not because of our work that we are rewarded. We are called by the grace of God and we work by the grace of God. Listen to this beautiful passage of Scripture that should be memorized by every one of us,
For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. (Eph. 2:8-10)
Do you see how the first workers don’t understand the grace of God? Not only is it by God’s grace that we are saved, called out of the marketplace, but it is by God’s grace that we do any good. We are His workmanship. He made us. He gives us faith and He teaches us to love. The power and the strength to do anything good all comes from God’s beautiful and free grace, as it is written,
“It is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure.” Philippians 2:13
But they complain. They complain because the owner of the vineyard makes the last workers, who worked less, equal to them who bore the burden and scorching heat of the day. They think they should be given more because they worked more. They are under the Law. They judge the owner of the vineyard to be unfair and evil, and they judge their fellow workers to be less than themselves. They were called, but they reject God’s choice for them. They want their own choice. They want what they think they deserve.
So God gives them what they agreed to. They limited God’s mercy, so they can have their temporal reward, they get their denarius, but then what does the owner of the vineyard say? “Take what is yours and go.”
God does us no wrong when He gives this work to one and that work to another. We forget that we were just saved from bondage in Egypt when we think that God is holding out on us, that He isn’t giving us what we need and deserve. When we complain against God we are complaining against His grace, which is enough for our weakness, and gives us far more than we ever worked for.
But those who will live under the Law reject God’s call of grace. They don’t want to be in the vineyard with God; they want the reward and that’s it. And they want to be better than others. They despise the grace of God because their eye is evil. They despise their neighbor and have no love because they despise the grace of God.
You work, and you work, and sometimes it all seems in vain. But how could it be in vain when you were bought at such a great price by the blood and suffering of Jesus? This vineyard in which you work is no ordinary place. You are not idle in the marketplace. You are with God. He called you when you had nothing, and He calls you again today. The real work is already done. Where did this vineyard come from? When the earth was a barren wilderness, and you looked for good in your life, but could only see sin and error and the same old faults and vices rising up to blot your conscience, and this sad life seemed only toil and trouble and then we die, then you were shown a new place, a place like the kingdom of heaven, and it is the Holy Christian Church.
You were called here when you had nothing to offer but a life of idleness and sin; when life was futile, then God’s purpose was shown to you. His purpose in His Son. You shall no longer be a slave, but a son. And God showed you His Son, who became a slave for you. He bore the burden of every day you live on this earth because He bore your sin. He bore the scorching heat of the sun because He felt God’s wrath against your sin. So don’t think that you are under the Law that is prodding you and demanding you do this and that or you won’t get your denarius. You’re not working only to leave. You’re working to stay with God forever, because He has made you His own. He forgives you. He tells you, “Your labor is not in vain. You’re not changing diapers and working long hours and studying and figuring out finances for a few short hours of peace and quiet at the end of a short life. You’re serving God. Everything you do in the vineyard is done for God. You already have everything. You have God, the source of all, and you have Him freely, despite your sin, and He covers all that, and rejoices over you and all that you do.
Whatever sin you see in your work Jesus covers, and He rewards you far more than anything this earth could give you. He gives your heart that peace which the world cannot give. The sun is not scorching you, and the burden is not great. There’s only one hour left to work, and soon you will join all the saints and receive more than you could possibly imagine. You will see God. You will enjoy life where no sweat stings your eyes and no stench fills your nose and no scars numb you, but the scars of Christ will always remind you that His labor was not in vain. For the joy set before Him He endured the cross, despising its shame, and you were His joy, and He is your joy forever, because He chose you from eternity, and He calls you today with this same grace that is poured out on you in the Gospel you hear and believe and in the body you eat and the blood you drink for the forgiveness of your sins.
Let anyone who has this world’s goods live as if he does not have them, because you have more in Christ. Let anyone who has money give to the one who is in need, and to the Church so that God might send pastors to call poor sinners out of a life of futility to a life of joy in serving God. Let anyone who is complaining, turn from his thirst for earthly things and drink of the water that Christ gives, that whelms up in your heart as a fountain of eternal life. Let all of us rejoice in the grace of God that abounds more than our sin could increase, because there is only one hour left in the day, and Christ’s commandments are not burdensome when He has taken our sins away, when He has fulfilled for us the work that needs to be done, and the work that we do is imitate Him, to bear fruit of faith and love and hope and patience and longsuffering, and goodness, and self-control for our neighbor. And when the day comes, the elders will cast their crowns before the throne of God and the Lamb, and we will say with King David,
For everything comes from You, O Lord; and all that we give You comes from Your hand. (1 Chronicles 19:14) Amen.