19th Sunday after Pentacost Oct.04,2026
Exodus 20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20; Philippians 3:4b-14; Matthew 21:33-46
19th Sunday after Pentecost A; 10.04.26;
G. Miles Smith+
The gospel reading today is another Jesus-story…with sharp edges. In this case, Jesus told an angry story directed at criticizing the chief priests and Pharisees…who were constantly finding fault with Jesus.
Jesus spent a lot of time in synagogues and visiting the Temple in Jerusalem. So, you could say, in terms of today, that Jesus spent a lot of time in “church”. But he spent most of his time out-and- about in Palestine where he encountered masses of suffering people…people suffering from the abuses of the Roman empire, from deprivation, illness, and spiritual torment. They were like “sheep without a shepherd” (Matthew 9:36). Jesus was humble in their midst, he was merciful, and compassionate… leading them, within a fallen world…into a transformative vision of God…and a transformed life.
But Jesus’ mercy and compassion did not fit into the chief priests and Pharisees’ well-established system of rules and ritual. There was then, as there still is today, a whole lot of religion around…and religious leaders with all their claims to status and power…endlessly talking about God…but obscuring the very point of it all…making it difficult for people to see and experience the heart of God…making it difficult for their hearts to be changed by the heart of God.
But Jesus was having none of it…even as it was very clear to him how much it would cost him.
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Clergy…and churches…we need to be really careful when we read such gospel stories…because we can so easily just point the finger at the “bad guys” in the Bible…and not realize that every religious institution in every age…is vulnerable to getting things all out-of-whack over and over again…turning inward with our religious rules and rituals…effectively leaving people abandoned to themselves…obscuring the whole point of the Christian vision in the first place…and making it difficult for our hearts to be changed by the heart of God.
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We even need to learn how to read the Bible again. It is not enough to read the Bible with “common sense”…and definitely not nowadays with social media-and-AI sense. The earliest Christians realized they needed to learn how to read the Bible with Jesus…with Jesus as our guide to the heart of God. And so, whenever Christians from the past have done that too then they can help us read the Bible.
Take an important text such as the Ten Commandments. Clearly, it is an essential icon of God’s call for us to have a spiritual and moral conscience…and in that sense it is truly a gift of God. But what the Ten Commandments is not about, when read with Jesus as our guide, is God simply as a rule-maker, rule-checker, and rule-punisher…where rules for rules’ sake end up becoming the focus.
We can know this intuitively ourselves, if we just think about it. What makes for a dysfunctional experience of having been parented? When parental rules and discipline were an end unto themselves and your compliance determined whether or not you could be loved. But what makes for a good experience of having been parented? When parental rules and discipline flow from, and toward…steady, clear, and abundant love.
It is endlessly difficult to keep this straight…to keep first things first…unless Jesus be our good shepherd and guide. We will quickly get this all twisted up over and over again even when we make the effort…to go to church…and read the Bible. But the more we let Jesus reveal the heart of God to us…the more clearly we can recognize when Christian institutions and leaders have once again lost sight of the heart of God. Fortunately for us today, the heart of God is actually in plain sight.
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We might be tempted to imagine that the Collect of the Day is some modern twist on Christianity which managed to sneak into our prayer book when it was revised in 1979. But the truth is, it has always been there…all the way back to the first prayer book in 1549. And this prayer existed even before that. It comes from the oldest liturgical book of Latin prayers (the Verona Sacramentary) dating back to the early 7th century. It is remarkable to realize that this prayer is so ancient…and has been so heavily prayed. It says very clearly what we can so quickly get twisted up. It reveals very clearly the very heart of Jesus…which reveals the very heart of God:
Almighty and everlasting God, you are always more ready to hear than we to pray, and to give more than we either desire or deserve: Pour upon us the abundance of your mercy, forgiving us those things of which our conscience is afraid, and giving us those good things for which we are not worthy to ask, except through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ our Savior; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
