Experiencing God: Joining God Requires Obedience

"Experiencing God:  Joining God Requires Obedience"
Matthew 21:23-32

I hated chores when I was growing up.  Being second oldest, a lot of the chores fell to my older brother and me.  I especially hated the outdoor chores.

Like mowing.  Our father taught my older brother and I to walk by mowing the lawn.  He would duct tape our hands to the handle of the mower giving us something to hang on to and balance ourselves while we attempted to walk back and forth across the yard being pulled along by this smoke belching behemoth.  And it was a big yard.  He'd sit on the front porch, watching every now and then to make sure we hadn't fallen down and let the mower get away from us.

Later, he got the hair-brained idea that it would be better to get a manual push mower.  You know, the kind with no motor.  My older brother and I would find some way to disappear on Saturday mornings before our father woke up and ordered us to push the manual push mower back and forth across our immense back yard.

At least I thought it was immense, until I took Ryan and Kristin there, when they were younger, to show them where I grew up.  I had told them stories about this huge back yard, and when I took them there, magically the backyard had shrunk to about a fourth the size I remembered it to be.

The other outdoor chore I hated was weeding.  Our house was built on a hillside, so we had this huge retaining wall in the front made of big rocks.  We called it "the rockery."  Digging weeds out from the crevices between the rocks was sheer torture.  The only time it was fun to weed the rockery was when my older brother made some homemade firecrackers with his chemistry set, and we blew the weeds out.  My youngest brother, when he was finally old enough to do outside chores, picked up quickly on the same method of weeding.

At the top of the rockery, along our long driveway, my mother had a rose garden.  The most dreaded words to be heard in our house, besides, "Go out and mow the backyard," were, "Go weed the rose garden and the rockery."  Because of all the rain in Seattle, weeds grew prolifically.  Which meant that once all the weeds were pulled, within another week, new ones were starting to grow, and they would laugh at us.

My older brother and I got out of these chores several times because of a little phrase we were sure our mother and father really meant to add to their orders.  That little phrase was, "...by the end of the day."  Certainly when we were told to go weed or mow, they didn't mean "now."  So we figured we had the whole day to goof off.  We would get the work done, sort of, "by the end of the day."

So, kids and parents alike should be able to relate to the story part of the parable Jesus told.  Even though Jesus had no children, he certainly had an astute awareness of the ways of children and chores.  And it's nice to know things evidently haven't changed much with kids and parents and doing chores.

So let's look at this parable.

The parable starts out describing a man.  The man has two sons.  We aren't told any more about the man other than the fact that he had two sons.  That's because the parable is about the sons, not the father.

The first son is an Eddie Haskell type.  You remember Eddie Haskell from the "Leave It To Beaver" TV show.  Eddie would come into the Cleaver home and start his schmooze routine:  "Hello Mr. Cleaver, Hello Mrs. Cleaver; you are looking very nice Mrs. Cleaver..."  Eddie was an apple-polisher.  That's how he got through life, telling people what they wanted to hear in order to get by.  So this first son, let's call him Eddie, after being asked to go work in the family vineyard, gives the schmoozy answer:  "Well, yes sir, I'd be happy to go work in the vineyard, sir."  But then doesn't do a thing to lift a finger in that direction.  And he probably had no intention of doing so.

The second kid was the brutally honest kind.  Like Jim Carey's character in the movie, "Liar, Liar."  Carey plays Fletcher Reed, an incredibly successful lawyer who has built that success by habitually lying in the courtroom.  And also lying to his divorced wife and their son.

At one point in the movie, his son makes a birthday wish while blowing out his candles, that his father will never lie again.  And the wish comes true.  Fletcher can't lie anymore, and becomes brutally honest.  At one point he walks into his office.  The receptionist has her hair in mini pig tails all over the top of her head, and she's wearing an awful houndstooth dress combo.  She says, "Hello Mr. Fletcher, do you you like my new dress?"
Fletcher replies, "Anything to distract from your face!"

That's the kind of person the second son is.  Let's call him Fletcher.  When asked to go work in the vineyard by his father, Fletcher, in effect says, "No way, old man; I've got better things to do, like play video games or chat with my friends on Facebook."  But then Fletcher obeys, and goes and works as he's asked.

Note that the father had to ask both sons to go work.  Neither of them volunteered to go work in the vineyard.  Neither saw that it was just the course of the day to go out and work in the family business.  "Who did what the father asked?" is the question asked.  But this question is not part of the parable.  It's asked by Jesus of the chief priests and elders, who were the listeners.

Being obedient to God is not determined by the first response to the father's bidding.  Saying "yes" but doing nothing is not what the father, or Jesus, is looking for in terms of obeying.  Saying "no," initially, and being disobedient, but then relenting and following through, seems allowable.  And the reason seems to be that we show our commitment and obedience by doing, not just by assent or denial.

The whole parable turns on one little phrase.  It comes up twice.  It is the word "repent."  Other translations use the phrase, "changed his mind."  The word usually means, when you're going in one direction, you decide it's the wrong direction, and you make a complete U-turn, and head in the opposite direction.

But the way Jesus is using this word, there is a different meaning:  it means to feel regret, or to experience remorse.  A person changes their mind, and decided to act obediently, because their regret acts as a motivator to make some changes.

Bobby was staying with his Aunt Mary.  He said, "Aunt Mary, I love the way you make pancakes.  Could you make me some, and can I have as many as I want?"

So his Aunt went to work and started piling the pancakes on Bobby's plate as fast as he could eat them.  After a dozen or so, he started to slow down.  Then with a sick look on his face, he stopped eating completely.  "What's wrong?" Aunt Mary asked.  "Don't you want any more pancakes?"
Bobby replied, "No, I don't want anymore.  I don't even want the ones I've already had."

That uncomfortable feeling of regret and remorse can be a powerful motivator for change.  Especially when that change is moving a person to become more obedient.

Rudolph Hess, the awful henchman of Adolph Hitler, in his last public statement at the Nuremburg trials, said:
I was allowed for many years of my life to work under the greatest son that my people produced in their 1,000 year history.  Even if I could I would not want to erase this.  I am happy to know that I have done my duty to my people as a loyal follower of my fuher.  I regret nothing.

Repentance and a new obedience never happened for Hess because there was no regret or remorse.  The older son who said, "No," and sounded totally disobedient, felt these pangs of regret, and allowed those pangs to change his behavior and make him more of an obedient son.

A person can feel remorse but not allow that feeling of remorse to lead to obedience.  Remorse and regret is a deep, almost torturing sense of guilt.  Judas' remorse led to a self-destructive depression.  If you can move from this deep regret to a deeper obedience to God, that allows God to take care of that remorse.  Peter's remorse at denying knowing Jesus, lead to obedience, which lead to leadership in the church.  It was an obedience and leadership that was marked by doing.

In the opening chapter of the book Robinson Crusoe, Defoe told how, in spite of the protest of his father and the tears of his Godly mother, he ran away from his home in York and went to sea.  On his first voyage he was wrecked off Yarmouth and barely lived to tell about it.  He regretted the course he had chosen for his life but was too ashamed to go back home and face the possibility that his friends would make fun of him.  Or his parents say, "I told you so."  So, wrote Defoe, "Men are not ashamed to sin, but are ashamed to repent and become obedient; not ashamed to do that of which they ought to be ashamed, but ashamed to do that which is their only hope and rescue."

The priests and the elders were the ones who were saying yes to God with their mouth, but showing a real lack of strength of conviction by doing nothing.  The tax collectors and whores were the ones who originally said no to God, felt the remorse of their no and let that remorse lead them into obedience to God.  Even when the priests and the elders saw the real power of remorse and regret lead the whores and tax collectors to obedience, they still did nothing to change their lives.

The priests and elders felt no regret about being two-faced.  Being two-faced ultimately keeps a person from ultimate obedience.  Who and what are you going to be obedient to, if your face is divided?  Jesus didn't want the kind of obedience exemplified by the priests and elders--just giving Jesus a nod and a thumbs up, won't cut it.

There's an old story about a young angel who was expelled from heaven and told the only way to get the gates of heaven to open back up for her was to search the earth for the gift most valued by God.

She brought drops of blood from a dying martyr.  She brought back the coins that a destitute widow had given to the poor.  She brought back a page from the Bible owned by a tireless evangelist.  She brought back a nail from a coffin of a missionary who had given his life for Christ in a remote place.  But none of these opened the gates of heaven for her.

One day, she saw a small girl playing by a fountain, singing hymns to herself as she played.  A man rode up on a horse and dismounted to have a drink from the fountain.  He saw the child and heard her singing.  He suddenly thought back to his boyhood innocence.  He looked in the fountain and saw the reflection of what he had become.  He suddenly saw a picture of what he had done with his life.  Tears of regret and remorse began streaking his face.  The young angel caught one of his tears and took it back to heaven, whereupon the gates were opened to her.

Is there an angel waiting by your cheek for that tear to drop?  Have you said, "yes-yes" to Christ but your lack of obedience said, "no-no"?  Are you saying all the right words so it looks like you are a religiously obedient person, but deep down, both you and Christ know the truth?  Are you looking at your reflection, and more and more you don't like what you see?  Are you hearing the wooing, childlike hymns of heaven, calling you to pay attention to your regrets, and begging you to live more obediently to Christ?

If so, bow in prayer with me:
Lord Jesus, we have made promises to commitment to you we haven't kept.  Everyone thinks we're religious, but we know in our hearts we haven't fully made the next big step into obedience.  So here we are again, Lord.  We are so sorry.  We have said "yes" to you so many times.  But now our lack of obedience is turning into regret, and the regret is turning into remorse.  We're ready to become fully obedient.  Accept us who are ready to turn their lives over to your loving control.  Please don't give up on those who aren't quite ready for that kind of obedience.  Amen.