At the turn of the 20th Century an English essayist by the name of G.K. Chesterton would often poke fun at the histrionics of British daily newspapers.  On one such occasion, he expressed his amusement that someone should consider it newsworthy that, at a meeting of an organization called “Modern Churchmen,” an eighteen year old lady observed that “public worship [failed to have] any attraction whatsoever for the young.”  Chesterton writes,

Is it really necessary that we should toil through all this tiresome repetition about the perfectly obvious difficulty of getting young people to work when they naturally want to play . . .?  It is perfectly natural that the boy should find the church a bore.  But why are we bound to treat what is natural as something actually superior to what is supernatural . . . ?  (The Well and the Shallows, "Collected Works":  Ignatius Press, 1990; Vol. III, p. 488.)

Unfortunately the histrionics of the press in Chesterton’s day, has worked its way into the Church in ours . . . so that some thirty years ago it was decided that since the old fashioned language of the 1928 Book of Common Prayer was unintelligible and off-putting to “young people”, a new and much improved Prayer Book would become the standard of Episcopal worship.  So, in 1978 I stood at the door of my mission church in Maine . . . and waited for the throng of “young people” that would come flooding in to hear prayers more suited to their tastes.  . . . But nothing happened.  I guess several bishops noticed this and decided something more was needed.  Because we have since been told that our ethics are as old fashioned and off-putting as our Elizabethan English; that we need to change our moral stance as well as our personal pronouns.  Consequently, the last several General Conventions of the Episcopal Church have included modifications to Her moral posture intended to make the Faith more comfy and less fundamentally severe.  The whole of it may be summed up as being a message of mitigation:  if it’s too hard, then God probably doesn’t intend for you to do it.  The effect of it has been to shatter the Scriptural structure of objective sin . . . and to erect in its place a model which makes all sin subjective:  if you can feel good about it, then it probably isn’t a sin.

    And all of this arises out of that peculiar desire of which Chesterton spoke:  that peculiar desire that “young people” not think ill of us; . . . that they be kept or lured into the Church by our avowed sympathy for their natural inclinations and abhorrence for what is supernatural.

    But, you see, that is not the Gospel.  The truth is that our “natural” lives are darkened by a single defect; . . . our “natural” lives are darkened by a mistrust of the supernatural.  And this blight upon our souls has done three things to us:  it has led humanity into a state of enmity toward our Creator, shame at our nakedness, and the necessity of assigning blame to misfortune -- to blame one another or God or something other than ourselves for what is “wrong” in our lives.  . . . This state of enmity, shame, and blame is called Original Sin.  . . . So, what individuals tend to call “natural” is, in fact, unnatural, . . . because our true nature has been lost to us by the defect of Original Sin.

    And so, Jesus tells us a parable.  . . . God has planted this vineyard, Jesus says: . . . God has planted a vineyard, and He has let it out to us to tend.  And it’s a lovely vineyard which grows wonderful grapes that make fabulous wines and the sweetest raisins . . . both of which buyers will pay top dollar to have.  . . . But then God sends a servant who comes up and says, “We’re awfully glad things are going so nicely for you here.  And since you’ve done so well with the Master’s vines on the Master’s land, He sent me to gather up a portion of your profits -- a portion of the fruit of your life, as it were -- so that the Master’s good can be felt elsewhere.  You know, the sort of thing God likes to do:  buy food and clothing and housing for the poor, see that justice is done for the neglected; generally lavish righteousness, love, unity, peacefulness, reverence, and medicine on everyone.”  . . . What would you do if that happened?  Well, Jesus says that the particular tenants He’s thinking about tell the servant, “Yea, right.  Get lost, loser; we are the needy.”  . . . And they push him out the gate empty-handed.  Well, the servant goes back to tell God what happened, and God says, “Well gosh, it doesn’t seem as if they understand.”  And so, God sends a second fellow to collect His due.  But the same thing happens!  And God says, “Well, I’ll be.  Let’s try this again with a more eloquent servant.”  . . . But this one, they punch in the nose.  So, God sends His Son.  “My Son, they will respect” God reasons.  . . . But the tenants kill the Son.  Out of mistrust for the Son; . . . out of greed and envy and just plain smallness of mind and heart . . . the tenants kill the Son.  Here God has come out to the tenants in the person of His Son in order to invite them to participate in the joy and sanctity and life of Heaven . . . and out of meanness of spirit they kill the Son of God!

    How do you feel about that?  . . . It really annoyed Saint Luke; . . . it annoyed Luke so much that he who wrote a conclusion to the parable telling how the Master would come and destroy those tenants and give the vineyard to others, … but the best evidence is that Jesus didn’t end His parable that way.  He ended it by saying that, “they cast [the Son] out of the vineyard and killed him.”

    So, how do you feel about that?  . . . If you have ever done the Stations of the Cross, . . . you perhaps remember that at the Ninth Station, where Jesus falls a third time, there a paraphrase from the Book of the Prophet Micah which is used … in which God asks,

“ ‘O my people, what have I done unto thee?  In what way have I wearied thee?  . . . Because I brought thee forth from the land of Egypt, . . . Because I led thee through the desert forty years, and fed thee with manna, and brought thee into a land exceeding good,’ thou hast prepared a Cross for thy Saviour.  What more could I have done unto thee that I have not done?”

My most immediate reaction to that verse and to our Lord’s parable of the wicked tenants . . . is remorse:  remorse that I should break God’s heart by killing His Son.  As a tenant of God’s vineyard I wonder about myself.  . . . What is there about me that desires to withhold from God everything that is His in the first place.  . . . What is there about me that is so suspicious of the supernatural that I should go to all the effort of being small minded and mean spirited.  . . . I am ashamed to see that everything I have is none of my own starting, . . . and that all that I have and all that I have done is the consequence of the Master’s generosity . . . yet I refuse to participate in that generosity.  Indeed, I am horrified to see that it is so natural for me to become the antithesis of what God created me to be; . . . to become the antithesis of God’s generosity.

    Perhaps the parable doesn’t evoke that sort of response from you, . . . but I’ll tell you this:  Christ’s parable of the wicked tenants makes me see how my preference for what is “natural” . . . for what pleases my appetites and my abhorrence for the supernatural . . . my abhorrence for the hard work of simplicity, chastity, and obedience to Jesus; . . . Christ’s parable makes me see how stinginess and greed and smallness of spirit can make a person miserable.  . . . And every day there are billions of people who make themselves miserable by treating God poorly.  Every day there are billions of people who kill God’s Son . . . because they are full of their own darkness; . . . because they refuse to admit the light and refuse to lavish the fruit of their lives upon God and participate in the joy of Heaven.  . . . And so, they make themselves miserable.  Oh, they may think themselves jolly enough, . . . but there is some blot of darkness lurking beneath all the cheerfulness that makes them small minded and mean spirited . . . so that the lack of something in their lives makes them irritable . . . and in a flash can make them nasty.  Nasty enough to kill Jesus.

    So what is to be done?  Well, the remedy for personal misery -- every kind of personal misery -- . . . the remedy for the Original Sin which creates in us a counterfeit nature of chronic stinginess and mean spiritedness which makes us miserable and public worship boring; . . . the something which is missing in a great many lives . . . is participation in Jesus:  to

count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.  For his sake I have permitted the loss of all things, and count them as garbage in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him.

To gain Christ and to be found in Him . . . by ridding our lives of everything but the desire for Jesus to fill our lives with Himself . . . this is the aim and the goal and the work of the Christian Life:  . . . to rid our lives of everything but the desire for Jesus to fill our lives with Himself.  And the way into that transformation of life is that, . . . remembering how God has treated you, . . . you come out of yourself and give yourself to Him.  The way out of meanness of spirit; the way out of going over and over in your heart how you have been wronged, and the nastiness that sort of thing engenders; . . . the way out of meanness of spirit and into the transforming joy of life in Christ . . .  is to permit the loss of everything but knowing Jesus.  To surrender yourself to the Son.  To give Him everything God wants . . . and more.  To “press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus”, which is to participate in the joy and generosity of Heaven now.  . . . Because, you see, failing to attain to Christ and to yield to God the fruit of His life as it is perfected in us -- repudiating this Way as too old fashioned or too much work when we’d rather play and do what comes “naturally” . . . is death.  But Jesus has come to us to preserve our lives from death and to heal us of our misery by inviting us to participate in God’s mercy and joy.  Jesus has come to us so that we who were strangers to God -- mere tenants of His Creation -- might become sons and daughters of the Most High.  . . . And we become sons and daughters by the grace of Jesus.  . . . But that transformation begins, Jesus says; . . . that transformation begins by pleasing God and no one else.