There are moments in ministry when there is simply nothing to say. I have stood beside hospital beds, sat with families after someone has died, walked into rooms where people have just received news that has changed everything, and arrived at scenes where no sentence is going to make what has happened any better. Ministers are supposed to have words. We spend a fair amount of our lives producing them. We have prayers and Scripture readings and blessings, and occasionally we convince ourselves that if we can just find exactly the right combination of words, somehow we can make the unbearable a little easier to bear.
But sometimes words are not what is needed. Sometimes what is needed is for someone to pull up a chair and stay. Sometimes the most important thing we can do is listen, hold a hand, make a cup of coffee, or resist the temptation to explain what cannot be explained. Over the years, I have come to believe that presence is one of the most important gifts we can offer another person, not because our presence necessarily fixes anything, but because it says something that words often cannot: you do not have to be here alone.
I have also come to believe that this tells us something important about God. Years ago, I preached a sermon in which I asked that question that inevitably arises when life falls apart: Where is God in all of this? My answer was simple: God is right here with you. I still believe that, but lately I have been thinking about the question that comes next. If God is here with us, what does God’s presence make possible?
Paul gives us an extraordinary answer in his letter to the Philippians. “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,” he writes, and then he gives us words that may already have been an ancient Christian hymn by the time he wrote them. Jesus, though in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant and being born in human likeness.
We often hear these words as a lesson about humility, and they certainly are that, but Paul is saying something much larger. Paul is telling us something about God. God does not remain distant from creation. God comes all the way. The Word becomes flesh; Love takes a body. The Christian claim is not simply that God sent humanity better instructions about how we ought to live. God did not send us an owner’s manual from heaven and leave us to figure everything out. God came to live among us.
John’s Gospel puts it this way: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” I teach and describe the Incarnation as God coming to walk with creation again, and that image is important. God enters human existence with all its beauty and messiness, its joy and grief, its possibility and vulnerability. God enters time and relationship, suffering and uncertainty, and ultimately even death. God’s response to the broken relationship between Creator and creation is not greater distance but deeper communion.
Paul goes further when he tells us that Jesus “emptied himself.” The Greek word behind that phrase is kenosis, self-emptying, and we need to be careful about what we mean by it. Christian self-giving does not mean believing that you are worthless. Humility is not humiliation, and love should never be used as an excuse for abuse, exploitation, or telling someone that holiness requires them to disappear so someone else can flourish. Jesus knows who he is. He does not give himself because he has no value; he gives himself because self-giving is the shape Love takes when it moves toward another.
After giving us this magnificent hymn about Jesus, Paul turns back toward the little Christian community at Philippi and tells them, “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who is at work in you.” That last phrase is worth sitting with for a moment. Paul does not say that God is working instead of you. He says that God is working in you. Grace does not eliminate human responsibility. Grace makes our response possible. God’s sustaining presence does not relieve us of the responsibility of being human; God’s sustaining presence helps us become the people God is calling us to be.
There is something else we can miss when we hear this passage in English. The “you” is plural. Paul is not describing a private transaction between God and an isolated individual. He is speaking to the community. God is at work in all of us, among us, in the relationships that binds us together. That is why the passage begins with Paul’s appeal that they be of the same mind, have the same love, and look not only to their own interests but also to the interests of others. God’s sustaining presence creates an “us,” a community in which God’s presence is not only something we receive but something we begin to offer one another.
We caught a small glimpse of that this weekend as the storm approached us. We could not control the wind or rain, but we could prepare, notice the people around us, check on neighbors, and make sure someone was not facing uncertainty alone. Those are ordinary things, and perhaps that is precisely the point. Much of the work of love is ordinary. God’s presence often becomes visible through one person deciding that another person matters.
That brings us back to the vineyard. Last Sunday Jesus told us about a vineyard where workers arrived throughout the day. Some had been working since morning, while others barely had time to get dirt on their sandals before quitting time, and yet all of them were welcomed. It was a story about grace and belonging and about the danger of believing that because we arrived first or worked longest, we somehow belong more than someone else.
This week Jesus keeps us in the vineyard, but the question changes. A father asks his first son to go and work in the vineyard, and the son says no. Later, he changes his mind and goes. The father makes the same request of his second son, who immediately gives the correct answer: “Yes, sir.” Except he never goes. Jesus asks which of the two did the will of the father, and the answer is obvious, but I don’t think Jesus is simply telling us that actions matter and words do not. Words matter. Promises matter. What Jesus exposes is the distance that can exist between saying the right thing and allowing what we say to become part of who we are.
The religious leaders questioning Jesus know the vocabulary of faith. They know Scripture and tradition. They understand religious authority. Their question to Jesus is precisely about authority: “By what authority are you doing these things?” Yet Jesus keeps directing their attention toward what God is actually doing. Who heard the call and entered the vineyard? Who participated? Faith is not simply knowing the correct answer. Faith becomes visible in the way we live.
That question has been on my mind lately because we are living through an extraordinary technological moment. Artificial intelligence can now produce remarkably human-sounding language. It can write, teach, answer theological questions, compose prayers, offer advice, and even produce words that sound compassionate. It can produce something that looks very much like a sermon, and it will undoubtedly become capable of doing things we cannot yet imagine. All of this raises important questions, but one question keeps coming back to me: What can human beings do that machines cannot?
I am beginning to wonder whether that is the wrong question. If human dignity depends upon finding some ability at which human beings will always outperform technology, then we have already misunderstood where our dignity comes from. Scripture never says that we bear God’s image because we are intelligent enough, productive enough, creative enough, independent enough, or useful enough. Thank God for that, because if dignity depends upon those things, what happens to the infant who has not developed them, the person living with a profound intellectual disability, or someone with advanced dementia who can no longer remember the names of the people sitting beside the bed? Do they somehow become less human as their capacities change? The Christian answer must be no.
Our dignity does not begin with what we can do. It begins with who we are: creatures called into existence by God, beloved before we have proved ourselves useful, bearing the image of God before we have accomplished a single thing. So perhaps the better question for our age is not, “What can I do that a machine cannot?” Perhaps the question is, “What kind of person is God calling me to become?”
Scripture’s answer has remarkably little to do with efficiency. We are called to become people who love and notice, people who listen and accept responsibility, people who can give love and receive it. We are called to remain present when presence costs something and to recognize the image of God in another person even when the world has decided that person is inconvenient, burdensome, or unproductive. We are called, in the language of today’s Gospel, to enter the vineyard. Faith is more than producing the correct response. Faith becomes embodied in a life.
None of us does this perfectly, of course, which is why grace has to come first. Another of my favorite stories is the Prodigal Son. I am fascinated by the speech the younger son prepares before going home. He has everything worked out. He will tell his father that he has sinned and is no longer worthy to be called his son, and then he will propose a transaction: “Treat me like one of your hired hands.” Give me a job. Let me make myself useful. Perhaps if I become useful again, I can earn a place in the household.
But the father refuses the transaction. He calls for a robe, a ring, and shoes, and then he sets the table. The father does not restore the son’s value because the son never stopped being valuable. What the father restores is communion. The message is simply, “You are my son. Come home.” That is grace. God loves us before we become useful, before we get the answer right, and even before we enter the vineyard. Yet grace does not leave us standing where it found us. Grace calls us toward relationship, responsibility, and transformation. Come into the vineyard. Come to the table. Come participate in what God is doing.
This is where Paul’s words become so important: “For it is God who is at work in you.” God’s presence does not make our presence unnecessary; God’s presence makes ours possible. God loves us so that we can learn to love, forgives us so that we can learn to forgive, welcomes us so that we can welcome, and remains with us so that we can remain with one another. God sustains us so that, by grace, we might become a sustaining presence for someone else.
Perhaps that brings us back to those rooms where there is nothing we can fix. There are losses we cannot reverse, questions we cannot answer, diagnoses we cannot change, and moments when no collection of words is going to make everything all right. In those moments, we can pull up a chair, listen, and stay. And perhaps we should stop saying that presence is “all” we can offer, as though presence were what remains when everything more useful has failed. Presence may be one of the most profoundly human gifts we have to give because the pattern at the center of our faith is not a God who remained safely distant and sent us the correct answer. The Word became flesh. Love became present.
Paul tells the Philippians, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,” and remember, that “you” is all of us. God is at work among us, not instead of us and not to relieve us of the responsibility to love, but so that Love might take flesh in our hands, our choices, our compassion, and our willingness to remain with one another. The Word became flesh, and now the Body of Christ is here, gathered together and sent from this place into the world.
So perhaps God’s sustaining presence is not something we need to search for in some distant place. God is with us, God is at work in us, and God’s Love becomes visible among us whenever we enter the vineyard, pull up the chair, set the table, make the call, welcome the stranger, forgive, or simply remain when remaining matters. We will do those things imperfectly and always by grace, but we do not do them alone, “for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for God’s good pleasure.”
That is God’s sustaining presence: God with us, God at work in us, and God’s Love becoming present through us.
Amen.
