September 27, 2026
18th Sunday after Pentecost – The Rev. Mark S. Winward, MDiv, ThM
Proper 21A
Jesus said to the Pharisees, “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you.” – Matthew 21:31b
The Religious Leaders and John
This short passage comes from Matthew’s account of Jesus’ last week in Jerusalem. Jesus is teaching in the temple when the chief priests and elders come to question him. These are people charged with the worship of Israel. They know the Scriptures. They are dedicated to the temple and deeply cherish the sacrifices, prayers, and traditions that have held their people together for generations.
The temple was the nexus of religious life for the Jewish people—the place of sacrifice, prayer, pilgrimage, and teaching. It was a magnificent sight, filled with crowds who had come from all over the country and beyond. Even what remains of the Temple Mount today gives some sense of its immensity. For a pilgrim coming to Jerusalem, being greeted by a gleaming temple rising on the landscape must have been overwhelming.
Now the chief priests and elders were not bad people because they cared about worship or took religion seriously. Jesus himself took the worship of God seriously. He went to the synagogue. He kept the feasts. He taught from the Scriptures. The problem was that, when God was doing something the religious establishment had not imagined, they could not see it.
John the Baptist had the same problem. He came preaching repentance. He was not polished or respectable in the way the religious establishment understood respectability. He was out in the wilderness wearing rough clothing and eating locusts and wild honey. Still, people came to him. They heard his call to turn around, confess their sins, and prepare for the coming of God’s kingdom. The religious leaders heard John too. They even saw people responding to him. But they could not bring themselves to believe that just maybe his message was from God.
That is the danger Jesus is talking about. It is possible to know a great deal about God, have the right forms and say the right words, and still fail to recognize what God is doing.
The Two Sons
By the time Jesus tells the parable we just heard, the conflict in Jerusalem is already growing. Jesus has entered the city to the shouts of the crowd, disrupted the commerce in the temple, and begun teaching publicly in its courts. So the chief priests and elders demand to know by what authority he is doing these things. One of Jesus’ responses is the parable we hear today.
A father comes to his two sons and asks them to go work in the vineyard. One son says “no,” but later changes his mind and goes. The other says “yes.” He gives his father exactly the answer his father wants to hear, but then he does not go. Jesus asks, “Which of the two did the will of his father?” There is only one possible answer: the first son.
Then Jesus makes the meaning of his parable painfully clear. The tax collectors and prostitutes had said “no” to God in all kinds of ways. Nobody was holding them up as examples of righteous living. But when John came preaching repentance, Jesus says, “they believed him.” The chief priests and elders did not. Worse, when they saw others responding to John, even then they would not change their minds and believe.
The contrast is not simply between bad people and good people, or between people with religion and people without it. The contrast Jesus is drawing here is between those who are willing to repent and those who are not. One son had a bad beginning but a better ending. The other had the right words but never followed through.
Neither son is exactly what anyone would see as a perfect child. Certainly, it would have been better if both had said yes and gone into the vineyard. But Jesus does not ask which son gave the right answer. He asks which one did the will of his father. The first son changed his mind, and then he went.
When Yes Becomes More Than Words
The point of this little parable is simple: God wants your heart—but not just as a feeling. God wants us to have the kind of heart that can hear, trust, and follow him.
You can read your Bible every day and attend every church conference that comes around. You can refuse to smoke, drink, dance, cuss, and play cards on Sunday. You can know the most obscure rituals and the reasons for all of them. You can worship in the largest, grandest, and most beautiful church in the nation. You can sing in the choir, serve on the vestry or board of elders, or be a priest yourself. You can be the most learned, theologically polished scholar around. But none of those things amount to a hill of beans without a heart open to Jesus and a life that follows him.
This parable tells us that even if we have been ignoring him for a while, repentance is still open to us. While the first son had already said “no,” that was not the end of his story. And that is good news for people who have made a mess of things, wandered far from God, or said no to him over and over again. His refusal was wrong, but it was not final. He changed his mind, and he went into the vineyard.
But this parable is also a warning to those of us who are comfortable around religion. We can come to church, say the prayers, sing the hymns, give our money, and serve on committees—and still refuse to go into the vineyard. We can say yes to forgiveness and keep nursing a grievance. We can say yes to loving our neighbor and look the other way when someone needs us. We can say yes to following Christ and keep putting off the thing we know he is asking us to do. At some point, our “yes” has to become more than words.
Like the chief priests and elders, we can become so sure that we have God figured out that we leave no room for God to surprise us. We can become so certain that our way is the faithful way that we stop listening. When we put God in a box and confine him to our narrow categories, we risk worshipping not the God of the universe, but the god of our little box. Without a modicum of humility, we can end up worshipping a god of our own making—the most insidious kind of idolatry.
Paul says in 1 Corinthians that now we see in a mirror dimly, but one day we will see face to face. That ought to make us just a bit humble. None of us sees everything clearly or understand everything perfectly. We need to be willing to listen, to learn, and to repent when God shows us that we are wrong.
This does not mean that striving for the best in worship, doctrine, symbols, discipline, or right living is meaningless. But if God has our hearts, we are going to want to give him our best. Our worship ought to be reverent. Our lives ought to reflect what we say we believe. Our symbols ought to point us to Christ. Our learning ought to help us know and love God more deeply. But none of these things can take the place of hearing Jesus and following him. At their best, they point beyond themselves to him.
The Door Is Still Open
And there is one last thing in this passage worth noting… Jesus tells the chief priests and elders that the tax collectors and prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of them. Ahead of them. These are hard words, but the door is not closed. Jesus is challenging these religious leaders because just like “those others,” they can still repent.
That means we should be careful about dividing the world into people who are in and people who are out. The tax collector can repent. The prostitute can repent. The priest can repent. The elder can repent. Whether we have spent years running from God or years saying “yes” with our lips while refusing him with our lives, the Father is still calling us into the vineyard.
Maybe, like the first son, you have said “no” to him. Maybe, like the second, you have said “yes” but never risked venturing into the field – whatever that may be for you. Either way, that does not have to be the end of your story. The first son had already said “no.” Then he changed his mind, turned around, and went into the vineyard. By the grace of God, so can we.
Amen.
September 20, 2026
17th Sunday after Pentecost – the Rev. Mark S. Winward, MDiv,ThM
Proper 20A
For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.” — Philippians 1:21
Jim Elliot and the Question of Suffering
Those words could just as easily have come from the mouth of Jim Elliot, the missionary who was killed while trying to share the gospel with an isolated people in Ecuador. I first heard about Jim through his brother-in-law, Tom Howard, a professor at my college who was influential in my own spiritual journey. Through him, I came to know the story of a man remembered for his courage, devotion to Christ, and desire to share the gospel.
Jim and Elisabeth went separately to Ecuador as missionaries in 1952 and married there the following year. Together with other missionaries, they served among the Quichua people, providing medical care, working at translating Scripture, and sharing their Christian faith. But Jim and several others also hoped to make peaceful contact with the Waorani, a people who had had very little peaceful contact with outsiders. After months of trying to communicate their peaceful intentions, five missionaries established a small camp along the Curaray River. Their first encounters with Waorani people seemed promising. Then, unexpectedly, the five men were killed. Jim Elliot was twenty-eight years old.
Years before his death, Jim had written words that would later become famous: “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” And that raises a difficult question.
September 13, 2026
16th Sunday after Pentecost Year 19A – The Rev. Mark S. Winward, MDiv,ThM
Forgiveness After September 11?
Friday, our nation paused to remember the horrific attacks on September 11, 2001. Do you remember how you felt that day, 25 years ago? I do.
Like the rest of the country, I was angry. This was our generation’s Pearl Harbor. And like many of us, a part of me wanted revenge. With that desire for revenge against the extremists who had attacked us came an awakening of my old distrust of Arabs in general, buried since the Gulf War. My head told me that we could not blame an entire people for what these men had done. My heart was having a harder time catching up. I wanted the perpetrators brought to justice, but I also knew that some of what I was feeling went beyond justice.
Somehow, I knew that there was a need to forgive. Forgiveness would not relieve us of the responsibility to protect others or to bring those responsible to justice. But what would it mean to do those things without allowing hatred to take over our lives? Was this too much of a crime to forgive? So how much forgiveness is too much?
How Much Forgiveness Is Enough?
That’s exactly the question Peter brings to Jesus in this passage from Matthew’s Gospel. How often must I forgive someone who sins against me? How about as many as seven times?
September 6, 2026
15th Sunday after Pentecost – The Rev. Mark S. Winward MDiv, ThM
Proper 18A
A Nation – and a Church – Divided
This Friday marks 25 years since the 911 attacks on New York and Washington – a day we vowed to never forget, but have predictably begun to. Our initial response as a nation to those horrific attacks was extraordinary. At that moment, across this land, people weren’t Democrats or Republicans, black or white, gay or straight, one religion or another. We were first and foremost Americans. What a different time we live in now. Instead of defining ourselves by what we hold in common, the prevailing mood is to define ourselves by what separates us. Social media has only intensified this. Increasingly, we see those who disagree with us not merely as mistaken or misguided, but as threats – as evil.
The Scandal of Christian Division
Christians are hardly above this. More often than not, we define themselves by what divides us rather than by what unites us. Of course we have different styles of worship, different traditions, and different ways of interpreting Scripture. And, indeed, the way we shape our faith does matter – and I am not suggesting that every disagreement is trivial. But churches and denominations sometimes divide over things that are really not going to matter a whole lot when “the role is called up yonder.”
I firmly believe that the division of Christ’s Church is one of Christianity’s greatest scandals.