Woody Allen is the person who once said that, “80% of success is just showing up.” 

And this week, I’ve been thinking about how much of being a Christian comes down to showing up.  

I am delighted you are here this morning, whether in person or virtually.  

I love it when we get to be together, and the more of us there are, it’s not just merrier – it’s better than that.  

It’s more real…more of a true reflection of life in all its breadth and complexity.  

When people show up, our worship goes deeper and gets further as we take the risk of getting real and learning how to be vulnerable with God and one another.  

That’s a gift we give and receive in showing up for church.  

But that’s not where I want to focus this morning. 

What I want to think about is how faith teaches us to show up, not just for church – though: full credit for being at church. 

What I want to think about is how faith teaches us to show up for love.  

To show up for care. 

To show up for all those moments in life when something happens, and our first thought is “Ugh,” and yet something pulls us in, or sends us out, or gets us moving, or whatever it is and however it speaks, and we go. 

We go there to offer, well, we may not be entirely sure just what.  

But we go.  

We show up. 

II.

It’s a vision of discipleship that Jesus offers us in this morning’s Scripture, which comes from Matthew’s Gospel.  

For him, it’s a Holy Week story, the next installment after he arrives in Jerusalem for Palm Sunday. 

He rides up on that donkey and goes straight to the Temple. 

Truth be told, he arrives with a bang – he goes to the Temple and takes it upon himself to go flip over the tables of the moneychangers in the outer courtyard.

He says, “Scripture says ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer’; but you are making it a den of thieves” (or other translations say: “a bandit’s cave” v. 13). 

And it’s the very next day that he returns to the Temple and teaches his disciples with this parable about a man with a vineyard…and two sons. 

The man says to the first of those two, “Son, go and work today in the vineyard.”  

The son says, “Sounds great.  See you out there, Dad,” but instead, somehow ends up falling into his laptop and spending the day reading articles from the Harvard Business Review about “getting to ‘yes’” and taking in the view from the balcony, and management by walking around.  

But as the father is on his way out the door, keys in hand, uncool dad hat on head, tube socks pulled up to his calves, sunscreen on his nose, he runs into the second son, the younger one…the one who majored in Art History.  

“Come to the vineyard and work today,” he says…I guess because he’s like that.  

The son says, “Love you, Dad. But hard pass.” 

And yet, three quarters into his first cup of coffee, standing there in an empty kitchen paid for by the bounty of a vineyard he hasn’t seen in way too long, he decides to show up. 

Truth be told, when he does, he probably stinks at a lot of the work.  

He probably feels every inch of being the owner’s son, the awkward one who wasn’t rasied to it, trying to be helpful, but not sure if he’s actually helping…not sure if everyone is just being nice.  

But Jesus’ point is more basic than that.  

What Jesus wants us to see is that 80% of discipleship is just showing up. 

It’s leaning into the discomfort of what people feel ready to share and ready to ask, knowing that what you have to offer may not be “enough,” but that faith means offering it, just the same, and seeing where that goes.

Where it takes us.  

III.

This is the thing that the people in the Temple seemed to find so hard to understand. 

As a church person, I can understand how some version of solution to the troubles people find themselves in resulted in the urgency to tell them to find a church.  To find a people who will love them, but also challenge them – a people who will lovingly challenge them, and challengingly love them. 

I wish more people would seek such a place. 

The Temple was prepared to be that kind of place. 

But along those lines, there is a haunting and terrible moment in the movie, “Gandhi,” which happens after a terrible massacre by the British after a protest in Amritsar.

The details are not important here. 

What matters is that, during a trial after Amritsar, a deeply unjust killing by the British Army during an entirely peaceful gathering, the commanding officer, General Dyer of the British Army is called to testify. 

After going through the whole thing, he is asked “what provision were you prepared to make for the wounded?” 

And General Dyer says, feebly, that in principle, he was “ready to help to any who applied.” 

One of the judges then asks him, “General, how does a child, shot with a .303 Lee-Enfield [that’s a rifle] ‘apply for help’?” 

And by analogy, this is the challenge that Jesus wants to name about the Temple. 

Because what are we to make of a church that stands on ceremony and declares itself “ready to help” any who apply?  

What Jesus wants to say is that being “’ready to help’ any who apply’’ is something that falls far short of the Kingdom of God. 

Because God is interested in the more transformational possibility that comes from showing up.  

IV.

Who might show up? 

Who should show up? 

Who could show up? 

Who would show up? 

Who is willing to sit with problems in their complexity, and people in their complexity, and seek to offer kindness and perspective – and to lean into the challenging work of love and fairness? 

Because what matters isn’t some matter of vague principles.  

What matters is whatever begins by showing up. 

What matters is meeting actual people where they actually are, and not by holding on to where they should be – and certainly not some notion of how the good ones – the right ones, the appropriate ones – will come to us.   

This is what the second son is able to lean into. 

Because in deciding to go to the field, even though he may not want to, he decides to show up. 

He decides to open himself up to the messiness of what he finds, rather than hold back and decide in some abstract way what he’s willing to take on. 

He’s willing to engage the needs that meet him, rather than hide behind the needs he determines he is willing to engage.  

Now, don’t get me wrong: it is important to decide what we can do, and do well…offer, and offer fully…and to leave our conscience and our capacity in God’s hands to reveal to us. 

But if we commit to showing up, we see quickly that the stinginess is rarely on God’s side. 

It’s rarely God who says “don’t,” who says “wait,” who says “can’t.”  

We may not have the answers we need to help.  But we have the capacity to sit with the questions and to offer what we can, with the hope that we will learn to stretch, and in the stretching, to offer what we might. 

V.

So: how is God calling you to show up? 

Don’t get me wrong: it’s wonderful for us to be together. 

But let’s acknowledge to ourselves that in the courtyards of the old Jerusalem Temple, all those years ago, the regulars crossed paths all the time, and nodded to one another with knowing familiarity. 

Instead, “showing up” as Jesus imagines it, seems to be a thicker concept. 

It’s not about public religiosity.  

It’s about seeking and reaching the ones who need us most. 

It’s about bringing whatever we’ve learned about love…whatever we’ve learned about care…whatever we’ve learned about emotional generosity out in the field, hoping and praying that it makes the difference. 

Because Jesus is here to remind that love – genuine love – generous love – genuine love – all find a place beyond the sphere of our own immediate interests, pushing us into places where we may not see ourselves at first, or on some level, even wish to go. 

The issue for Jesus isn’t that we get out there late.  

The issue is whether we listen to his call to go where he leads, trusting that he will equip us to do whatever it is he asks of us. 

VI.

Don’t you know where it is that Jesus is calling you to show up? 

Maybe it’s doing the dishes without being hounded. 

Maybe it’s making time…and reserving energy…to receive how someone else made it through their day. 

Maybe it’s in keeping informed about the world at a time when so much is so upsetting, and the temptation of distraction looms so large. 

Maybe it’s in lending your time to the work of justice.  

Or maybe it’s in asking for help and in being willing to receive in a world that makes so much of self-reliance and has such broken ways of naming need.  

Whatever it may be, Jesus challenges us to show up. 

He urges us to be the ones who make it out to the vineyard, somehow – who  take up the work, who ask the questions, who live in the ambiguities, and who find the companions that remind us we are never alone in the struggle, much less in any triumph that is truly godly.  

You know where you need to show up.  

It doesn’t matter if you’re later than you might have been. 

What matters is that you get there – how you offer what you might. 

And how you come to grow in the offering. 

VII.

According to Woody Allen, “80 percent of success is just showing up.”

The Kingdom life teaches us that faithfulness isn’t measured by “success,” whatever the world may mean by that term, but by the depth of our willingness to give – our willingness to get out there, even if, at first, we may not want to.  

Our faithfulness is measured by our commitment to showing up, wherever we are most needed, praying that God will give us the words, and the skills, and above all the heart, to respond to that need.  

And to find joy in doing it. 

May it ever be so. 

Amen.