Good Shepherd Sermons & Blogs

2026-53
sermon preached at Church of the Good Shepherd, Federal Way, WA
www.goodshepherdfw.org
by the Rev. Josh Hosler, Rector

The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 22A-tr 2), October 4, 2026

Isaiah 5:1-7; Psalm 80:7-14; Philippians 3:4b-14; Matthew 21:33-46

Every morning I begin with good intentions. Early on this beautiful day that the Lord has made, I will read today’s assigned psalm from the Daily Lectionary and pray with it in silence for a bit. I’ll drink my coffee, eat a healthy breakfast, and go to the gym, where I will either do my usual upper and lower body workout, or spend 45 minutes on the treadmill. I’ll come back home, shower, pack a very light lunch, and get to the office. I’ll work ahead. I’ll focus. I’ll actually eat the lunch I packed.

But sometimes at the end of the evening, having skipped the psalm, the silence, and the gym—and having dropped $30 on chicken penne alfredo at JP’s Tavern again—I ponder what it might mean to love my neighbor as myself. If I’m not taking care of myself, I can hardly be all that others need me to be. So some evenings, I wonder … today, did I give my first fruits to God … or my last fruits?

Can you relate? Some evenings I feel like if anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more! On other evenings all I can do is pray, “Restore me, O God.”

I recognize too, though, that perfectionism is also counterproductive. Not just that—I think it’s rubbish. (By the way, in today’s passage from Paul’s letter to the Philippians, that translation from the Greek, “rubbish,” doesn’t hit nearly hard enough. This summer at choir camp, a teenage girl excitedly informed me that a better translation here would be the word we abbreviate as “BS.” So said her theologian dad, so she felt no need to abbreviate in the presence of this priest! I’m sure she was correct. But for the sake of politeness, I’ll keep using the word rubbish.)

All my own accomplishments and pats on the back? Rubbish! All the guilt I pile on myself for not taking excellent care of my health every day? Rubbish!

Here I’ll drop in a sensory memory from childhood: it’s an October day, and my brother Seth and I have to go out to the backyard and pick up all the apricots that have fallen from our tree. We take the stinking, rotten, nasty fruit and put it out with … the rubbish. To this day, I still don’t like apricots.

Well, kids do have to do their chores. But what happens when the stinking, rotten, nasty fruit isn’t the last fruit of the season, but the first?

That’s the story we hear from Isaiah today. A farmer plants a vineyard and does everything he can to make it yield delicious grapes. He plants the best possible seeds, and he weeds relentlessly. But when the first fruit appears, he spits it out in disgust. Somehow it’s not even the right variety of grape! How is this possible?

This, says the Prophet Isaiah, is how God feels. God planted a divine garden of delight but wound up with a harvest of bloodshed and distress. Isaiah announces that the one who planted this vineyard is abandoning it. Sure enough, not long after Isaiah sings his song for his beloved, the Assyrians destroy the Kingdom of Israel.

It became a well-known trope in Jewish lore, that of the vineyard that yielded the wrong fruit. So when Jesus talks about a farmer planting a vineyard, his audience thinks they know what they’re about to hear. But this is a parable, and that means it has a twist.

In Jesus’ telling there’s no mention of the quality of the grapes. The problem is the tenants: they don’t want to hand over the fruit to the owner of the vineyard. Indeed, they’re hunkering down behind the wall, and every time the farmer sends someone to collect the fruit, they see him coming from their perch in the watchtower. They send him packing. Or they beat him up. And when the farmer finally sends his son, they kill him. (That last one turns out to be a bit on the nose!)

The farmer in Isaiah’s song clears the field of stones to prepare the ground, but when he is disappointed with the result of the harvest, he allows the weeds to grow back, tears down the wall, and invites all the beasts to come snack on the vines.

So what happens when the first fruits we yield turn out not so great? Shall we hide in shame from the farmer? Shall we secure the wall and post someone in the watchtower, hoping we’ll never have to admit to the farmer that it all went wrong? Shall we turn callous and even murderous in our efforts to protect ourselves from judgment?

No. When all that we can offer feels like so very little, we still have a duty to the farmer: hand over the fruit. The owner wants it anyway!

I think Jesus recasts Isaiah’s song for a reason. I think he’s saying that even the wild grapes that grow in you are a worthy part of the harvest. Perhaps they can at least feed the gazelles. Or if they must go on the rubbish pile, maybe the farmer can use them as fertilizer. What if the chief priests and the Pharisees, Jesus’ specific target of scorn in this passage, were to change their minds? What if they began approaching God in humility rather than self-assurance?

The fruit we bear in this life doesn’t need to be perfect. It doesn’t even need to be reliably tasty.  It only needs to be given.

Today is the first day of our fall pledge campaign, and I know it might feel like a sharp turn now to talk about money. But we probably need to have that conversation more often than we do. Money isn’t the only fruit we produce, but the labor we turn into money enables us to get things done. The Church of the Good Shepherd wouldn’t be able to function as we do without a reliable stream of funding for our ministries and all the tools that enable them.

Yet the practical, hands-in-the-dirt reality of the church needing money needn’t be the focus of our talk about stewardship—not if we’re praying deeply and broadly enough to recognize it. The focus is that we need to practice giving away what we have. God knows I would go to the gym more often if I understood it as a responsibility to someone other than myself! We invest in community to give us a place to bring the fruit we yield. It’s no good staying locked up behind the crumbling wall of a weedy old vineyard.

Sometimes people say, “I can’t make a pledge. That’s for people who have far more money than I do. Surely my little offering can’t make a difference.” You know what that is? It’s pre-judging our own fruit to be a bad harvest and then refusing to give it to the owner. Jesus says that’s far worse than growing bad grapes. Why not let him be the judge?

When I was a teenager, my parents instructed me to share a portion of my allowance with the church. In those days, that couldn’t have been more than a few dollars per month. I remember failing to do it, and my parents bugging me to get it done, and me feeling a bit resentful because who would miss that little bit anyway, and I’d rather buy the new Duran Duran album with it, and wasn’t I just helping pay my own dad’s salary?

But do you see what they were doing? The church didn’t need to receive my little bit of money. I needed to learn to give it.

Later in high school I fell out of the habit of giving a portion of my allowance, and my parents gave up bugging me about it. But they had planted a seed in a well-tended vineyard. After college, when I moved to Seattle and found my place at St. Mark’s Cathedral, I made my first adult pledge: $40 per month. I don’t think I calculated it as a percentage of my income. I think it felt like what I could part with. I had just been upped from minimum wage to slightly more than that, and I felt thankful about it.

At the same time, I was giving to the church in other ways. I had joined the Cathedral Choir, and I continued in that ministry for another ten years. Very soon I would meet Christy and several other people my age, and without any prompting from the cathedral’s leadership, we would start a Young Adults Group that would help countless young people find their way into cathedral life and ministry. Then I would serve a term on the cathedral’s Vestry. All of that happened years before I went to seminary.

When I was 22 years old, my first fruits couldn’t have mattered much on the cathedral’s budget spreadsheet. If I had seen it that way, I probably would have withheld my gift. But I had been taught better than that, so I began giving. It became a habit. And now I can’t imagine not giving at least ten percent of my income back to the church right off the top. First fruits … not last fruits.

There’s the fruit metaphor, and there’s the metaphor of stones. (I know we’re mixing metaphors here, but Jesus did it first.) Traditionally we see Jesus as the stone that the builders rejected, which has become the chief cornerstone. But I want to propose another interpretation: the owner of the vineyard even wants the stones that we reject. Our works don’t need to be an unstoppable force, because Jesus is an immovable object.

“I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish.” Maybe my first efforts, no matter how sincere, turned out to be no good at all. But why am I judging myself? I want to give up that nonsense. Let the owner of the vineyard judge the fruit. But he can’t do that if I hide it away from him. Amen.