The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost - September 27, 2026

St. Pauls - Proper 21 - September 27, 2026

If there had been an inquest into Jesus’ death, the parable of the two brothers would probably have been presented as one of the things that got him killed. According to Matthew, Jesus told it during the last week of his life in Jerusalem—after he had stolen a donkey to ride into town on, after he had chased the merchants out of them temple, after he had cursed the fig tree for failing to bear fruit—Jesus went back to them temple to teach, and that is where the chief priests and elders cornered him. The main thing they wanted to know was who had given him the authority to do all those things. Who, they wanted to know, did he think he was?

Instead of answering them, he did something that was very typical for him. He asked them a question—What do you think?—and he told them a story. It took a little longer than giving them a straight answer, but Jesus was never one not give people answers they could come up with on their own. He knew truth is something people have to discover for themselves, so he want to the extra trouble of helping them do that, even when he knew it might backfire on him.

The story he told the chief priests and elders that day was the story if the Yes and No brothers as Barbara Brown Taylor names it. In Matthew’s Greek, they are simply two children, old enough to work in the family vineyard but still working out their relationship with their father. When he asked them in turn to go work in the vineyard, the No brother said he would not go and later changed his mind and went. The Yes brother said he would go and never did. Which brother asked his critics, did the will of his father?

It was an easy answer for them as it is for us. The first brother did the will of his father, of course. It was not what either boy said that mattered but what he finally did. Only that was not part of the truth that got Jesus killed. What got him killed was the second part, when he told the chief priests and elders which brother they were. They were the Yes men, he told them, who said all the right things, believed all the right things, stood for all the right things, but who would not do the right things God asked them to do.

They thought they were doing the right things, mind you, but they had gotten so attached to their own ideas about what those things were that it was hard for them to accept much correction. First John the Baptist and then Jesus suggested that they trade in their beliefs for a fresh experience of God, but they could not bring themselves to do that. They said yes to God while they acted out a great big NO to Jesus, who suggested that they might be in for a big surprise.

People they despised were going into the kingdom ahead of them, he told them—not instead of them, but ahead of them—people who may have said no at the beginning but who changed their minds and went, while those who refused to go continued to mistake their own convictions for obedience to God.

The judgment implicit in Jesus’s story of the father and the two sons is directed at every one of us who claims the name Christian.  We are meant to be uncomfortable, to be confronted, to ask ourselves: which son am I?  Am I the son who makes promises I fail to keep?  Am I the son who talks the talk, and sincerely believes that my sacred-sounding words are enough?  Am I the son who doesn’t see repentance as a lifelong business, a business that didn’t end at the altar call, or the confirmation service, or the baptism, or the newcomer's class at church, that first drew me to Jesus?

Or am I the son who says the wrong thing, but finally repents and obeys, anyway?  The son who might not sound all spiritual and sanctified, but still does the work of love and mercy when the rubber hits the road?  The son who recognizes that God is still at work, here and now, doing new things, transformative things, salvific things?  The son who changes his mind when new truth, new life, new possibility, and new hope, reveal themselves?

It’s worth noting here that the people who flocked to John and to Jesus were the people who had no other legs to stand on.  They were desperate.  They recognized the enormity of their own needs, hungers, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities.  They knew that they could never attain holiness on their own.  For them, the waters of baptism, the prayers of repentance, the grateful submission to Jesus’s authority — these were lifeblood.  Meat for the bones and water for parched tongues.  Maybe, if religion remains casual and optional for us, we have not yet recognized the extent of our lostness.

To be clear, what Jesus called out when he cleansed the temple and infuriated the elders was not Judaism or its various forms of worship.  It was a system of exploitation via exorbitant tithes and taxes that blocked access to the divine — that literally kept the bodies of the poor outside the gates of the temple, forcing them into more and endless debt before they could approach and worship God.

What Jesus opposed through the story of the father and the two sons was all forms of religion that stop at empty words.  All forms of piety that don’t move us into the world of concrete action on behalf of justice, mercy, equality, love, and compassion.  All forms of Christianity that flicker to life on Sunday morning, but then fade out between Monday and Saturday.

We are invited to be like the first son.  We are invited to be like the tax collectors and the prostitutes.  But we cannot do this if we keep our faith lives tethered to abstractions.  If we live a Christianity of the mind without also living one of the flesh. After all, it is with our bodies that we experience pain, anger, terror, and joy.  It’s my chest that hurts when I mourn. It’s my face that burns when I’m angry.  It’s my whole body that warms with pleasure when I’m full of joy.  Our faith is meant to be embodied.  To be incarnate.  To be organic.  To be active.  

God has been telling us all along—that there is no shortage of people who say, believe or stand for all the right things. There have always been plenty of those in the world. What God is short of are people who will go where God calls them and do what God gives them to do—even, say, when it goes against their beliefs. To quote Soren Kierkegaard, Jesus wants followers, not admirers. Whether we say yes or no to God is apparently less important to God than what we actually do. The important thing is what our lives say, and they are as easy to read as they story of the Yes and No brothers.

Which one are you? To tell which one you are, look in any mirror. What is moving? Your mouth or your feet?