In the last week or so, we’ve started to discuss and make plans for our Christmas Fairs. And when we get to this time of year, I’m always reminded of the very first Christmas Fair I attended as a curate, in my Title Parish. I don’t really remember the Fair itself, but what I do remember very well, and I’m sure I’ll never forget is what happened on the day of the Fair as the stalls were being set up. One lady, a rather lovely, sprightly but ever so feisty 90-year-old arrived at church to find that her stall had already been set up and so she promptly turned around, walked out of church and went home! The vicar asked me to go and speak to her and get her to come back. I thought that was something he should do, but he wouldn’t, and so off I went. Now I must admit, the lady was very nice, and always was, to me at least, but there was no way she was going to come back to church and the Fair. It seemed she’d been running that particular stall at the Fair for over 30 years and so she was non too pleased to arrive and find it already set up and someone else sat behind it. I told her that, no one was trying to take the stall away from her and they were only trying to be helpful, saving her the trouble of setting things up, to which she replied, 

“Well they should ask first shouldn’t they Father! I don’t need any help!” 

And then in answer to another appeal for her to come back she said, 

“No, it’s alright Father. I know he’s sent you over to see me because he’s too frightened to come himself, so you’ve done your duty. You go back, I’ll see you tomorrow.” 

I think that’s quite an amusing story but it’s one that does highlight an issue we often find in churches, and it’s an issue that can lead to problems. 

I’m sure we’re all familiar with the situation of people in a church thinking that something they’ve done in the past, and that could be any number of things, is their job by right, simply because they have done it in the past. And the more frequently they’ve done that thing and the longer they’ve done it the more they, and not just they but other people in the church too, start to see that thing as something only they should be allowed to do, and woe betide anyone who seems to want to even get involved, let alone who appears to be trying to take that job over, especially if the usurper is fairly or even relatively new to the church.  

Before I say anymore, I want to make it perfectly clear that without the faithful few who do take on jobs and roles for the church we’d be in a pretty sorry state. And there are some very faithful people in every church without whose commitment and hard work, not to mention long service, churches simply couldn’t function. So I’m very grateful to those who do this here, as we all should be.  

At times though, such long-serving members of the church can start to be seen as more important than anyone else in that church. And that is a situation and an attitude we shouldn’t find in any church because we know that Jesus took his disciples to task for arguing about which of them was the greatest. And yet we do find this happening in many churches. I’ve served in churches in which a few long-standing members of the congregation, to all intents and purposes, run the show, or at least try to. If they don’t like something, it shouldn’t happen, regardless of what anybody else thinks about it. Dates for things like Summer and Christmas Fairs, are set according to their availability. And if those dates aren’t suitable for someone else, well that’s just tough for them, they’ll have to miss out.  

And where this happens we often find knock on problems. If people’s views are ignored, if they’re made to feel almost like second class members of the church, if they’re not allowed to do something because it’s someone else’s job, and has been since Adam was a lad, to coin a phrase, they’re hardly going to be likely to want to help out when the church needs them to, are they. And as we go down the line, no matter how long someone has done something, no matter how well they do it, at some point they will have to step down from it because no one can go on for ever. And when that happens, someone else will have to take over. But if they’ve been made to feel as though they weren’t good enough to do that thing in the past, why should they be willing to do it at any time?  

So a church where some people are treated as better than others, for any reason actually, but one way in which that often does happen is where long service brings this kind of discrimination, is not only acting in a way Christ himself forbade, but is simply storing up trouble for itself in the future.  

In this morning’s Gospel we heard Jesus’ parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard. Obviously this is a parable which speaks primarily about the reward God will give to all those who answer his call and go about his business in the world. And the reward for all is the same, regardless of how long someone has been about that work. But there’s also a warning in this parable, a warning that those who’ve worked for the Lord for a long time should not be jealous of or discriminate against those who’ve worked for less time, even if that time has been very short indeed. God will not do that and so neither should we.  

This is a parable of the kingdom of heaven, of course, but the life of the Church, and the life of all churches should be a reflection of the kingdom of heaven because we’re called to live by the values of the kingdom. As Jesus says in the parable of the Unworthy Servants,  

“…when you have done all that was commanded you, say, ‘We are unworthy servants, we have only done what was our duty’”. 

And our duty to God starts when we accept his call to service, whether that was 50 years ago or 50 days ago. So as there are no special favours granted for long service by God, we shouldn’t treat people differently according to the length of time they’ve been a member of the Church or been helping out in a church.  

As I said earlier, this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be very grateful to those who’ve served our churches for many years. It doesn’t mean we can’t thank them perhaps even with some kind of long service award for all they’ve done. But it does mean that we shouldn’t treat them, or anyone else as in some way better or superior to those who haven’t served for so long. And we certainly shouldn’t discriminate against anyone in the church or take them, their gifts and what they do and have done as of lesser importance because they were called to service later than others.  

Amen.  

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Propers for the 25th Sunday in Ordinary Time, 20th September 2026

Entrance Antiphon 
I am the salvation of the people, says the Lord. 
Should they cry to me in any distress, 
I will hear them, and I will be their Lord for ever. 

The Collect 
O God, who founded all the commands of your sacred Law 
upon love of you and of our neighbour, 
grant that, by keeping your precepts, 
we may merit to attain eternal life. 
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, 
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, 
God, for ever and ever. 
Amen. 

The Readings 
Isaiah 55:6-9 
Psalm 145:2-3, 8-9, 17-18 
Philippians 1:20-24, 27 
Matthew 20:1-16 

Prayer after Communion  
Graciously raise up, O Lord, 
those you renew with this Sacrament, 
that we may come to possess your redemption 
both in mystery and in the manner of our life. 
Through Christ our Lord. 
Amen. 

Our readings this morning are all about sin and forgiveness. And it shouldn’t be at all surprising that sin and forgiveness should be spoken of together because these two things are inextricably linked. That’s quite obvious, I think, because without sin, if people didn’t act in ways they shouldn’t, there wouldn’t be any need for forgiveness. But what is sin? What is it that we’re so in need of forgiveness for ourselves and that we ourselves are called to forgive others for? 

In one sense I think that’s quite easy to explain. As I said in my sermon last Sunday, sins are a failure to love God and love our neighbour as we should and as we’re called to do. But we can go a little deeper than that and differentiate between sin and sins. Sin is a state of being that predisposes us to fail when it comes to love. Sin, as a state of being, predisposes us to be self-centred and to love ourselves more than we love God and our neighbour. This is why we sin and in need of forgiveness. Sins, plural, are the actual things we do that show our self-centredness and lack of love.   

But I think this is where we often run into problems because what actually constitutes an act of lovelessness, an individual example of a sin? And that’s not such a straightforward question to answer as it might seem because what we do in love may very well not seems like that to the one on the receiving end of it, at least at that time. For example, when my children were still children, I called into a shop with them to get them some sweets. As we came out of the shop, my daughter ran to cross the road back to my car, just as another car was coming along. So I grabbed her and yanked her back out the road, to stop her from running in front of the car. But in doing that, I dragged her back by the hair, just because that’s what I caught hold of as I made a grab for her. Of course, that hurt her and she started crying. When we got back home, her mum could see she’d been crying and asked her why, and my daughter said because I’d dragged her across the pavement by the hair! And of course, I got it in the neck for that. But what should I have done? Even though what I did caused pain and upset, it was no sin, it was an act of love because it saved my daughter from running into the road in front of a car and potentially being run over and seriously hurt or even killed. In that instance, not causing the pain and upset would have been the sin.   

And I’m sure we can all think of examples like that when we’ve done something that might have seemed to involve a lack of love, and therefore to be sinful, that have actually been done in love because they’ve been done to avoid a greater harm to the other person involved. We do it all the time with our children as they’re growing up.  

That’s one problem we can have with deciding what’s an act of sin and what isn’t, and that obviously causes problems for us when it comes to deciding who needs forgiveness and who needs to ask for forgiveness. And I think this is becoming an increasingly difficult problem for us in our modern society in which so many people seem to think that anybody who does, says or even thinks something they don’t agree with has hurt or offended them, or to put it in biblical terms, has sinned against them.  

But while this might be a growing problem, it’s certainly not a new problem. In fact, it’s one we’re all too familiar with in the Church because how many ‘holier than thou’ people have taken it upon themselves over the years to tell others what constitutes a sin and what doesn’t? And how many of those who’ve done this have based their list of sins on nothing more than their own, personal likes and dislikes? The problem with people who do this is that they try to turn the Christian faith into a kind of moral code of conduct, but they base it on their own morals which, in many, many cases, they themselves can’t live up to. Such as the case of the person I knew in one parish who rained hell fire on the clergy for agreeing to hold a weekly lottery to raise money. Such things were sinful, they said and we ought to be ashamed of ourselves for encouraging people to gamble. Strangely enough, the same person had absolutely nothing to say when, a few weeks later, they won said lottery! That’s quite an amusing example, I think, but people who do this kind of thing can cause all sorts of problems, not to mention hurt and upset, and be the cause of people leaving the Church. And yet, in my experience, they never see themselves as the sinner in any case. They never see themselves as the one who needs to ask for forgiveness from their neighbour but as the one who is righteous enough in God’s eyes to tell others what they ought to be asking for forgiveness for.  

So deciding what constitutes an act of sin isn’t always so easy. Last Sunday we heard St Paul saying that love causes no harm to a neighbour, and yet we can act in love and still hurt people. We can hurt them physically in trying to save them from danger.  

We can act in love and hurt people emotionally, we can upset them, because they really don’t want to hear what we’re saying to them, no matter how true it might be, no matter if we’re only trying to save them from deeper hurt and upset in the future. And we always have the problem of people thinking that anything they don’t agree with is a sin, regardless of whether it really is or not. But I think we can cut through some of this, at least, and get a better understanding of what constitutes a sin if we look at the accurate meaning of the Greek word in the New Testament that we translate as ‘sin’.   

The word used almost invariably for ‘sin’ in the New Testament is hamartano, or a derivative of it. And what hamartano actually means is ‘to miss’; it means to miss the mark and, by extension, to lose out on sharing in the prize because the mark’s been missed. And if we think about sin in those terms, we can say that we sin when we miss what we’re aiming for and because we’ve missed what we’re aiming for, we’re not going to share the prize for hitting the target. And I think we can turn to St Paul again to shed a bit more light on this because, as he writes in his Letter to the Romans,  

‘…all have sinned (hamartano) and fallen short of the glory of God.’ 

So what we’re aiming at, what we need to hit if we’re going to share in the prize, is the glory of God. And, where we see the glory of God is in the teaching and example of Christ. The prize, of course, is eternal life and so if we want to share in that prize, we have to aim at being like Jesus Christ. But we often fail to be like him because we live in a state of sin and the sins we commit are the specific instances of when we miss what we’re aiming at, when we’re not like Jesus Christ.  

But we have to be clear about just what that means. Jesus was sinless, anamartetos. He lived, as the old hymn says, a perfect life of love. And yet, by the world’s standards, Jesus was not always a particularly loving person. Think about it. When he cast out demons, the people he was helping were thrown into convulsions. What he said and did frightened people. He must have hurt people by what he said because he spoke the truth and the truth does hurt those who are wrong. He upset people by what he said and did. What he said and did was seen as scandalous. All these things were what led people to conspire against him and put him to death. And yet he loved perfectly and was sinless.  

So, if we hurt someone in order to help them in the long run, is that a sin? No. But if we allow someone to come to harm or risk that to avoid hurting them in the short term, is that a sin? Yes, because ultimately, that shows a lack of love. If we say something that upsets someone because they don’t like it or don’t want to hear it, is that a sin? As long as we are speaking the truth, surely not. But if we don’t speak the truth simply to avoid upsetting someone when they’re going wrong, being led astray or leading others astray, is that a sin? Yes, because again it shows a lack of love for those concerned. If we do something that someone else doesn’t like it because it offends their moral code, is that a sin? If it is simply a matter of their morals and there’s nothing objectively wrong what we’re doing, no. In fact in those cases, we’re probably the ones who are being sinned against because didn’t Jesus reserve his fiercest criticism for those who set themselves up on pedestals, the self-appointed holier than thou people who laid the law down to others while ignoring it themselves and put their own ways above God’s ways?   

The essence of this morning’s Gospel is that Jesus tells us to forgive as often as we need to, no matter how often that is. And we have to do that if we want to be forgiven because we’re all sinners who’ve fallen short of the glory of God many, many times ourselves. But we do need to understand when we need to forgive and when we need to be forgiven ourselves, and so we need to understand when we’ve committed sins and when we’ve been sinned against and we can’t judge that simply by what others think about what we’ve said or done.   

Sins are not what happen when we hurt or upset someone because we’ve acted in love. Sins are what happen when, through a lack of love, we miss the mark we’re aiming for, and that mark is the glory of God as seen in Jesus Christ. So, in every situation and every circumstance, let’s try to keep that mark in sight and aim for it to give ourselves the best chance of enjoying a share in the prize on offer, the prize of eternal life. 
Amen.           

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Propers for the 24th Sunday in Ordinary Time, 13th September 2026

Entrance Antiphon 
Give peace, O Lord, to those who wait for you, 
that your prophets be found true. 
Hear the prayers of your servant, 
and of your people Israel. 

The Collect 
Look upon us, O God, 
Creator and ruler of all things, 
and, that we may feel the working of your mercy, 
grant that we may serve you with all our heart. 
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, 
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, 
God, for ever and ever. 
Amen. 

The Readings 
Sirach 27:30-28:7  
Psalm 103:1-4, 9-12 
Romans 14:7-9 
Matthew 18:21-35 

Prayer after Communion 
May the working of this heavenly gift, O Lord, we pray, 
take possession of our minds and bodies, 
so that its effects, and not our own desires, 
may always prevail in us. 
Through Christ our Lord. 
Amen.