25th Sunday 2020
Isaiah 55:6-9; Philippians 1:20-24,27; Matthew 20:1-16
What time is it? I mean, what hour is it in terms of working for the Lord? Is it early, or late, or the middle of the day?
Looking around the Deanery, I would be inclined to say that, in terms of the clergy, at least, it is getting on a bit. I think that I am right in saying that you could fit those under 60 into a phone box, assuming you could find one. And raising our sights to the whole Diocese, the picture is very similar.
Most of the clergy, and indeed of the consecrated religious and active laity, have far less time ahead for service of the Lord than has been available to us in our past.
Does that mean that we can pat ourselves on the back, and congratulate ourselves on work well done? Does it heck as like! We may have had plenty of opportunity to labour in the Lord’s vineyard, but have we made the best use of it, whether as priests, deacons, religious or lay people?
Those of us who are priests emerged from the seminary, most of us decades ago, confident that we were just what the Church had been waiting for. Full of zeal and enthusiasm, we were the people who would build the Kingdom of God, who would set the Diocese on fire. Many lay people too had a great vision of service of God and of His people, and have been and are faithful to that vision.
Yet the picture is one of retrenchment and apparent decline which would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. So, have we not been working hard enough? Have we been working in the wrong way?
I suspect that only God Himself can answer those questions: no one is ever the best judge of his or her own case. My own feeling is that people have been and are doing their best: that clergy, laity and religious alike are working as hard as, and in some cases harder than their predecessors, despite the sneers of a few cynics who hanker after an imaginary lost Golden Age. Like the recent Golden Generation of English footballers, the Golden Age of the Church in England comprised more myth than substance, and it contained a fair amount of cruelty and abuse, alongside much that was good.
The principal issue that we face is that society has changed beyond recognition in the last half century or so, and these changes, especially in the area of sexual behaviour but also in the growth of a sort of superstitious scientism and pseudo-rationalism which push God to the margins, have dealt hammer blows, not only to the Church, but to the whole concept of the place of religion in the world.
I have mentioned before my conversation with the Methodist chaplain to Beaumont Hospital, where I had my tonsils and adenoids removed shortly before my eleventh birthday in 1961:
“Whereabouts are you from?”
“Scotforth.”
“Oh, I often go there to preach at Greaves Methodist Church. Do you go there, or do you go to St. Paul’s?”
“No. I go to St. Bernadette’s.”
This gentleman’s assumption that a ten year old would be going to church somewhere, perfectly natural sixty years ago, would be inconceivable today.
So what do we do? We keep on working, and we keep on trusting, not in ourselves, our own efforts, our own plan, our own vision, but in the God who has called us, and who continues to call us, to labour in his vineyard. Whether we have joined the workforce early or late does not matter. What wages we shall receive is a matter for God. All that matters is that we, at least, remain faithful to our calling: that, until the day ends, we continue to work faithfully in whatever situation we find ourselves, and that we remain alert, even to the very last minute, to the guiding call of God.
