Out in Arizona, in the city of Surprise, which is a fast-growing suburb about 30 miles northwest of Phoenix, there’s a huge mega-church that had a huge billboard along Bell Rd. when we were there. The billboard said “Bring Laughter Back Into Your Life, Try the Radiant Church.” The same church distributed flyers in the West Valley that said it served Krispy Kreme doughnuts and Starbucks coffee every Sunday morning.

 

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m all for laughter. I like it a lot. I like to do it, and I like to hear it. And I like to make it happen and milk it for all its worth whenever it happens. But laughter as a reason you should come to church, I just don’t know about. It just seems to me there are probably more important reasons, like life and death reasons, and life or death on this planet and for this planet reasons. Aren’t there? If there aren’t, then what purpose does the church have? There are better jokes on television, far better. Or in the comics pages, or the editorial pages -- far better things to laugh at and about. The church has got to have some other purpose than just bringing laughter or momentary joy into peoples’ lives. Surely there must be another purpose, even though both, by themselves, are certainly good and healthy things. Laughter, joy, contentment; who doesn’t want them? For sure, we all do.

 

But what we want even more, I think, is perpetuity and connectedness – connection, connection with something that somehow will last forever. Krispy Kreme doughnuts won’t, Starbuck’s won’t; even laughter and joy that is momentary won’t. They are fleeting. But what isn’t fleeting but is perpetual and eternal, rather, is what this table calls us to and calls us to do. No Krispy Kremes here. No Starbucks. What is here is the offer for eternity, guaranteed, and life, guaranteed, and joy that is real, guaranteed, and purpose that is legitimate and fulfilling, guaranteed.

 

You see, what we’ve got here to offer, for anyone who wants to come get it, is eternal life, perpetuity at its best, no strings attached, except appreciation. And what the appreciation for the free gift that is here is, is the willingness to take it to all of the men and women and boys and girls of God’s creation who haven’t found it yet. It’s called evangelism. What the appreciation that is called for -- for the free gifts that are here in the great vineyard of the great master -- is a willingness to give back to the Master what the Master put us here in the first place to accomplish. And that is to build up and care for and propagate and nurture what the Master Creator has created, this place, this home, this earth and everything in it -- all people and things, this vineyard as it were.

 

Best I can tell, we new tenants of the vineyard – the old ones got thrown out, the parable says, because they didn’t do a very good job – we’re not doing a very good job either, we’re going to get thrown out too – to a very nasty place, where the only sound, as another parable says, is weeping and the gnashing of teeth, a very nasty place in what is called outer darkness.

 

If you don’t believe me, then believe the astronomers, and meteorologists, and upper atmospheric scientists, and the authorities who know about world hunger and its real causes. We the new tenants of the magnificent vineyard continue to foul the place and not share the riches that it contains very well, I’m afraid. We take the oil out of the ground, we burn it, and foul the air. We pave the grasses and desert soils and warm the ocean waters until the icecaps begin to melt, the currents of the ocean and the air begin to change, and one hurricane after another begins to occur summer after summer, battering to death the shores of a nation that once had its self and the world almost convinced that it was invincible and even eternal.

 

But along came Katrina and Rita and Ike and pointed out what we do. We use the garden that God has given us to the maximum benefit it can have for us here and now. And we care very little about the future. Now’s the time, now’s the place to get, and get, and get, all that we can.

 

Into which attitude and lifestyle runs head-on this awful, scary gospel message. A master sent a servant into the master’s vineyard to collect from its tenants what was due the master. The tenants killed the servant. The master sent his most trusted and skilled servant. They killed him too. Then the master sent his own son, his own flesh, and his own blood. And they killed him too. Was there to be no antidote for the absolute greed and nearsightedness and stupidity of the vineyard’s tenants?

 

Yes, there was: the ultimate solution. The master himself went to the vineyard and threw the tenants out, out to the place where no sun shined, and no sound was heard, save for weeping and the gnashing of teeth. And the master invited new tenants into the vineyard, the vineyard of the kingdom. The new tenants are we. Best we learn to care for the vineyard as we’re expected to do. Best we learn that the vineyard has all we can ever need. And the table that is set in the middle of the vineyard contains all we will ever need, this table.

 

Best we come and take what this table has to offer, then go from this place, this wonderful place, and go into the part of God’s creation that isn’t so wonderful yet, taking our talents and treasures and skills and determination and passion, and determine with all others whom the Lord master has invited to the same table in the same vineyard, to fix things. For unless we do, we just might lose our opportunity, and the patience of the master of the vineyard will have plumb run out.

 

Let’s take, for example, the produce of this magnificent vineyard called the new St. Philip Presbyterian faith community and all the rich talent and resources it represents and do what God calls all creation to do, care for itself and one another. Let’s build, for example, one of the best pre-school and day-care centers in the world, one that every parent would want his or her child to be in because of its excellence. Let’s arrange to populate it with equal numbers of rich kids and poor kids. Poor kids are easy to find. Nearly a third of the children in the City of Houston come from families that are in poverty, which are families where the household income is less than $20,000 a year. And in most of those families the adults in the home are working.

 

Let’s take half of what one of our newfound resources in the St. Philip vineyard, the Central Presbyterian Mission Endowment Fund, will produce annually – about $300,000 at 4.5% of principal, half of which is $150,000 – let’s take that and provide financial assistance so poor kids can attend. Let’s create a sliding tuition scale so the families of rich kids will pay full value for what they get and the school can be sustained. It’s something you can do and sustain, I’m pretty sure, if you want to.

 

At the same time, let’s take the other half of this vineyard’s annual production, the other $150,000 from the Central Presbyterian Mission Endowment Fund, and partner with some other folks, like Kids Against Hunger, for example, and the World Mission Unit of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), involving ourselves (our people and our money) in efforts in sustainable hunger alleviation and peacemaking in a place like Peru or Bangladesh or Ethiopia, where Presbyterian mission workers are already on the ground but desperately in need of help. It’s something you can do and sustain, I’m pretty sure, if you want to.

 

Let’s use what the master of the vineyard has given us to change the direction of the wind, which is the prevailing attitude of our culture, which is selfishness. Some of us heard Jim Wallis speak this past week at Rice University. Jim is the publisher of Sojourners magazine, as you know, and a Bible believing, Jesus loving, evangelical Christian. But he believes his evangelical faith leads him to engage in justice making and peace making as the first priority of the Gospel.

 

Jim lives in Washington, D.C. and says people look pretty much the same in Washington, but you can always tell who the politicians are. They’re the ones you see with their index fingers in the air, testing which way the political wind is blowing. So you can’t change things in Washington -- or in America, for that matter -- by changing the politicians. Invariably they’ll go with the wind, he says, all of them. What we have to do, he says, is change the wind.

 

That’s what I’m proposing: that St. Philip Church immediately and from here on become dedicated to changing the wind with its money and efforts, changing the wind of the culture of selfishness that surrounds us to a culture of sustaining this vineyard into which the master has placed us and seeing to it that everyone in the wider vineyard called creation, everyone, gets a share of its produce.

 

Come to the table to be fueled for the task. Amen.