Advent Lutheran Church

"Signs of the Resurrection (Pentecost 16)"

            Grace and peace to you from God the Creator and the Lord Jesus.  Amen.

            This morning begins our celebration of October as Missions Month here at Advent, when each Sunday we plan to highlight the various ministries that we conduct outside our walls – locally, nationally, and internationally.  As we emphasize those ministries, we’ll connect them to the Gospel lesson for that particular morning.

            It’s an especially challenging lesson this morning, this story of harsh judgment.  It’s an allegory, really; a story in which everything represents something else.  The landowner, for example, is God.  The vineyard is creation or the world.  The tenants, whom God entrusts with the tending of the vineyard, are the people of God.  The slaves are the prophets God sent through the generations.  The son of the landowner is, of course, Jesus.  And the produce, the fruits of the vineyard, are justice and righteousness that the tenants are to live out as unique people in the world.

            Justice and righteousness – they are the fruits the tenants are supposed to generate; but they refuse.  They decide to keep the vineyard for and to themselves.  But the landowner is not defeated by rebellious tenants; God’s will is going to be done, if not by the current tenants of the vineyard, then by someone else.

            Yes, this is a judgment story, but it reveals something else as well.  It reveals both what God desires for us, and what desires from us.  One word addresses both of those desires: Abundance.  God desires abundance for us in that God puts us in this vineyard, this creation, this place of incredible abundance, to start with.  God gives us one another so that we might build one another up in faith and encourage one another to good works.  And God desires abundance from us in lives that are themselves living signs that it is God who truly owns this world.

            Two years ago this congregation began a program of sponsorship of children born into extreme poverty.  We connected with a humanitarian organization, based here in Kansas City – Children International.  The idea was to offer a number of one-to-one, effective, life-giving and life-changing relationships between people in this church and children living in poverty.  At the end of the two-week project we had managed to sponsor 80 children, primarily in Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic.  This past July several of our members traveled to Santo Domingo to see first-hand how our efforts in the vineyard were going.  We met with our sponsored children and their families, and we also began to lay the groundwork for a possible mission trip in late spring 2012, an effort that will probably focus on a clean-water initiative.  This morning a couple of people who went on that trip are going to share their reflections with you, to try to bring a bit of that experience back home.

            (Two members share their experiences of visiting with their sponsored children and how sponsorship has impacted their lives.)

            God’s world truly is our mission field, and it can be daunting to wonder, “How can I make any kind of difference in the midst of so much need?”  Sponsoring a child born into poverty is a highly effective place to start.  When you commit $25 a month in creating a relationship with such a child, you make a tremendous difference.  You help to provide medical and dental care, school supplies and school fees and school uniforms, emergency food and antibiotics and vitamins, clothing and, in some cases, emergency aid to the families.

            As important as those benefits are, you also do something that is at least as vital.  Every time a child is sponsored, it’s a sign of the Resurrection.  Every time you provide a little boy or little girl born into poverty with the tools to imagine and then create a future for themselves that is very different from the circumstances into which they were born, it’s a sign of the Resurrection.  Every time you create that relationship, you are a living sign of the Resurrection, a sign that the God we worship and serve is about life!

            My prayer for each of us is that God would grant us the courage and the means to be such living signs.  Amen.