I know someone who once attended a cooking Master Class with Jacques Pepin.

From what I gather, not everybody at a class like that is actually passionate about cooking—some people are really just there to be seen, maybe snap a picture clinking glasses with Jacques, and that’s about it.

Anyway, at the end of the class, my friend went over to Jacques Pepin with a very splattered cookbook for him to sign, which delighted him completely…he was thrilled to thumb through it and see what she had attempted and what she hadn’t, and he especially liked the page stained by the very prominent wineglass ring, which he said was what he thought a cookbook should look like.

But as my friend was standing there, another woman, one of the people who was not really there for the cooking, grew impatient.

She came over, and she broke in to say, “Jacques, I just got some really wonderful foie. What should I do with it?”

Now she didn’t say, “Jacques, dahhhhling,” but she might as well have.

“Sorry?” said Jacques.

“I just brought back some really good foie. From France. What should I do with it?” she said expectantly.

Jacques smiled, then shrugged.

“Eat it,” he said.

Ouch. (Do you ever wonder how Jacques tells a story like this?)

And yet, it’s an important lesson in so many different parts of our lives, I think.

It’s not just what you have, it’s what you do with it.

It may seem strange to say it, at first, but this morning’s parable about the wicked tenants in the vineyard seems to point toward the same conclusion.

It’s an unsettling story—though really, aren’t they all?—about a landowner and a vineyard and a harvest and wicked tenants, who decide they want to keep their crops, and who, decide to shoot the messengers sent to collect.

The landowner sends a second wave, and the same thing happens.

Many of us would be looking to send in the goon squad at this point, but that’s not what the landowner does.

He sends his own son, figuring that surely he will have the tenants’ respect and will finally bring them in line. But not so.

If anything, he is a particularly enticing target, and he is killed.

And it’s at this point that Jesus suspends the story and asks his audience, “So what do you think happens now?”

And his listeners say, “He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at harvest time,” (v. 41).

Jesus agrees, saying, “Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom,” (v. 43).

It’s clear that he’s talking about God’s kingdom, and his own sense of being sent as God’s son, but what gets him is not so much that he will be killed, but rather that the fruits of the kingdom will not be cultivated and harvested properly.

Even more than the price he will personally have to pay quite soon after he tells this particular parable, what matters to Jesus is what the tenants do with the harvest that comes under their stewardship.

Now, if I had to guess, I would suspect that most people listening would say that this all makes sense…that we’re used to Jesus talking in just this way, and that what you and I do with what we have is spiritually significant.

Even so, I’m not sure that many of us look at the tenants in the parable and see ourselves.

Matthew reports that the Pharisees in Jesus’ original audience knew that they were being called out, but I don’t think we do.

Not too long ago, a friend of mine preached on a parable with vineyards and stewards in it, and a member of his congregation stopped on the way out to shake his hand, and said, “Isn’t it a little early for the annual stewardship guilt trip sermon?”

So let’s get it right out there that when Jesus is talking about the fruits of the kingdom, he’s talking about much, much more than money and how we spend it.

He’s also talking about time and how we spend it.

He’s talking about energy and focus and attention, and how we spend them.

He’s talking about the emotional bank account in our marriages and our friendships and our relationships with our children, and how we make withdrawals from those accounts and how it is that we add to them.

Actually, Paul’s letter to the Philippians uses financial language to get at much the same point.

Did you catch it?

Paul writes, “These things were my assets, but I wrote them off as a loss for the sake of Christ. But even beyond that, I consider everything a loss in comparison with the superior value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord,” (Phil. 3:7-8).

Whatever he was before, whatever status he had achieved, Paul writes it off, because he has realized that his faith has completely changed his sense of what’s important—what really matters.

And as we all know, what really matters isn’t something you measure in only one kind of currency…Our deepest contributions, the harvest of our best selves, might come in any number of ways.

It’s not just what you and I have. It’s what we do with it that matters.

That says more about who we really are than any biography or any resume.

When you put it that way, maybe we can begin to see ourselves on the receiving end of this troubling warning.

Because who doesn’t feel as if we can all too easily get caught up in things that, finally, don’t matter?

Who doesn’t feel as if the hours of our days can get spent on causes and tasks that are all too far from what’s truly on our hearts?

Or to go in the opposite direction, who hasn’t felt the incredible lift that comes from being part of something that actually matters to you? Doesn’t that put so many things in perspective?

Just because we wouldn’t kill our landlord doesn’t mean that Jesus isn’t talking about us—and about the subtle ways we try to avoid giving our lives away.

When it comes right down to it, there are a lot of times when we don’t want to give away the harvest any more than those tenants did – and it doesn’t matter who’s asking.

Because Jesus doesn’t come and ask for our harvest in his dazzling white robe with his piercing blue eyes aglow with love.

If that were how it was, we would know what to do…just as surely as the tenants would have given over the harvest if the landowner had come and asked for it himself from the get-go.

But Jesus comes in the form of an angry, withdrawn teenager. And a needy old woman in the post office. A single dad who can’t get out from under. The neighbor who is still out of work and is just too embarrassed to seek out community.

When the Lord comes to claim the harvest—the harvest of our time, our attention, our compassion, and our hopes—he won’t be interested in what it is we’ve managed to hold onto.

He will want to know what we’ve done with all that we’ve been given.

“Jesus, I’ve been blessed with this wonderful life, what should I do with it?”

And he’ll say, “serve it.”