Pastor Will Rose drives straight to the heart of the message: God’s generosity flips human ideas of fairness—“the last will be first and the first will be last”—and calls people into solidarity rather than standing idle. He walks through Jesus’s vineyard parable from Matthew (where every worker gets a denarius no matter how long they labored) and the whole Jonah sketch (Nineveh, a big fish, a plant and a worm) to show how Scripture uses stories—parables and prophetic satire—to reveal God’s surprising mercy. He explains, in plain terms, that Jesus’ repeated “kingdom of heaven is like…” sayings are teaching tools that upend status, wealth, and the usual scorekeeping, inviting listeners to a different way of valuing people. Preached at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in Chapel Hill, NC on September 20, 2026, he mixes warmth, jokes (yes, he jokes about being swallowed by whales and old notes home), and serious challenge: don’t be idle in the vineyard—stand with those at the back of the line. The homily encourages practical faith—work that manifests God’s love for everyone—and leaves listeners with a simple question to ponder: if God cares for a plant that appeared overnight, shouldn’t God’s people care even more about those who don’t yet know their way?

Pastor Will Rose brings a warm, witty homily to Holy Trinity Lutheran Church (Chapel Hill, NC) on September 20, 2026, and he does it with the kind of charm that makes theology feel like backyard conversation. He walks listeners through two vivid Bible stories—the Matthew parable of the vineyard workers and the whole mini-drama of Jonah—using plain language and a wink. He explains the parable basics (a denarius = about a day's wage) and highlights Jesus’ recurring theme: God’s kingdom upends human accounting. Where humans keep painstaking score, God operates on a surprising, generous logic that can feel scandalously unfair—and that’s the point. He peppers the talk with personal color (childhood mischief, his mom’s memorable quips, and a surfer’s quip about whales vs. jellyfish) to make scripture feel lived-in and human.

Beyond the laughs, Pastor Will leans into concrete takeaways. He names the danger of a prosperity mindset (thinking wealth equals blessing) and invites the congregation to resist saying “ew, those people” about enemies or outsiders. The homily frames the vineyard as shared work: don’t stand idle, notice the last in line, and practice solidarity. He closes with a pastoral nudge—read Jonah, sit with its strange humor and mercy, and let God’s generous accounting reshape how you live and love. It’s theology with a grin and a call to action: don’t just admire God’s generosity—join the work in the vineyard.

Takeaways:

• He highlights the vineyard parable to explain God's radical generosity, where late-hired workers receive equal pay, challenging human ideas of fairness and merit and introducing the biblical concept of a 'holy reversal'.
• He ties Jesus' repeated phrase 'the first will be last, the last will be first' to the prophetic tradition and Jonah, explaining that holy inversion is a core way Scripture names God's upside-down kingdom.
• He uses Jonah's story — the great fish, the sudden repentance in Nineveh, and the withered plant — to show God's surprising mercy even toward enemies, teaching that repentance and compassion can change outcomes.
• He peppers the homily with personal stories about being a mischievous kid and a camp counselor to illustrate how repeated reminders form character, clarifying that repetition in scripture is formative rather than merely nagging.
• He urges the Holy Trinity community (Chapel Hill, Sept 20, 2026) toward solidarity with those marginalized, arguing that faithful work in the vineyard means active service, not standing idle while others wait.
• He calls listeners to live into a love stronger than death—practical theology with heart—by serving across differences, rejecting ‘ew, those people’ attitudes, and embodying God’s generosity in everyday actions.

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Foreign.

Thank you for engaging with the homily by Pastor Chill Will from Chapel Hill.

I hope this message encourages you, challenges you and moves you to go deeper in your faith and enrich how you love God and love your neighbor in your day to day life.

Just a reminder.

Like the Scriptures and Gospels themselves, this homily was written for a particular community in a particular context, time in history.

And yet, like our sacred texts, I hope that these words hold timeless truths about God's unconditional love and grace.

We hope these words speak to you in a meaningful way.

The Holy Gospel According to Matthew Glory Jesus shared for the kingdom of Heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard.

After agreeing that with the laborers for a denarius for the day, he sent them into the vineyard.

Into his vineyard after agreeing with the laborers for denarius for the day, sent them to the vineyard.

When he went out about 9 o', clock, he saw others standing idle in the marketplace and he said to them, you also go into the vineyard and I will pay you whatever is right.

So they went.

When he went out again about noon and about three o' clock he did the same.

About five o' clock he went out and found others standing around.

He said to them, when they why are you standing here idle all day?

He said to him, because no one has hired us.

He said to them, you also go into the vineyard.

When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, call the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and going to the first.

When those hired about five o' clock came, each of them received a denarius, and when the first came they thought that they would receive more.

But each of them also received a denarius, and when they received it, they grumbled against the landowner, saying, these last worked only an hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.

But he replied to one of them, friend, I am doing you no wrong.

You not agree with me for denarius?

Take what belongs to you and go.

I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you.

Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?

Or are you envious because I am generous?

For the last will be first and the first will be last.

The Gospel of the Lord may be seated.

The name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit so some of you have heard me share this before.

I was a kid who couldn't sit still in school and got notes sent home that I talked and laughed too much in class.

I know.

Shocker.

My mom has dementia and while her short term memory is gone, there are still some core long term memories that have stuck.

When I go to hang out with her and help take care of her, she will remind me often.

That one I used to have hair.

Thanks Mom.

And boy, you sure did get a lot of notes sent home from school and I probably didn't see the half of them.

You're right mom, you're right.

Little William's behavior also bled over to church and Sunday school as well.

Let's just say that I, along with my little band of friends and rebels, made our Sunday school teachers questioned why they signed up to teach in the first place.

I remember one of my Sunday school teachers actually showing up at my ordination just to see if it was really happening.

Yeah, I was a handful and admittedly I confess that when I got a little older, late high school, early college, I started to mature a little and became more self aware.

I specifically remember coming home from my first summer as a camp counselor at Camp Luther Ridge in the North Carolina mountains after a full and magical and transformative summer being a camp counselor for youth of all ages.

When I got home I sat my parents down at the dinner table to have a serious conversation with them.

Could only imagine what they thought I was going to share.

Mom, Dad, I am so sorry you had to tell me more than once to do something.

They were relieved and they smiled and they were proud.

Yes, telling someone more than wants to do something is super frustrating.

And I'm sure a lot of us have jobs and professions and leadership roles and in parenting that we have had to repeat ourselves a lot.

It seems us humans need to be reminded about many things from time to time in order to learn.

We need deep experiences and constant reminders and hopefully we grow into some healthy self awareness.

When we examine Jesus and his story found in the Gospels, it seems Jesus repeats himself quite a lot.

Jesus says the kingdom of heaven is like over 10 times in Matthew alone.

And throughout the four Gospels Jesus says more than one time the first will be last, the last will be first.

It seems that God's holy reversal and sacred inversion is pretty important to how Jesus understands God and God's action in the world we live in for today's reading.

In Matthew, Jesus shares another parable.

Jesus is wandering the countryside with his disciples and Jesus shares again the kingdom of heaven is like.

I'm really hoping that his disciples wandering the countryside with Jesus are saying to themselves and to one another, wow.

Jesus says that a lot.

Perhaps we should pay attention, we should take note.

Not long before this parable, a rich man walks up to Jesus and asks him what he must do to be saved.

Jesus responds, go sell all your possessions and give to the poor and then come follow me.

The Gospel of Matthew shares that the rich man walks away sad because he didn't want to give up his possessions.

Jesus turns to his disciples and says that famous attention getting quote, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.

The disciples were right in saying, well then, who can be saved?

I'm not sure if Jesus is coming down hard on those who are doing well financially as much as he is resisting against this idea that if you are rich, you must be blessed and God likes you more than others, or if you're poor, you must not be in God's favor.

Jesus was not on board with any version of the prosperity gospel.

Case in point, Jesus's repetitive theme and teaching of the holy reversal in the sacred inversion of blessed are the poor faith being compared to a small unnoticed seed.

The first will be last and the last will be first.

Jesus literally flipping over marketplace tables, exploiting the poor and marginalized to make the point.

Again, Jesus shares the parable about a vineyard and a vineyard owner who hires workers throughout the day, some working long hours and others just one hour.

And everyone gets paid the same whether you worked all day or if you just worked an hour at the end of the day.

The parable's plot twist and scandal that grabs our attention is that for us it is natural to say, you know what, that's not fair.

I don't know where you learned account.

That's not fair.

What is Jesus trying to say about God here?

About the kingdom of God, about God's mass?

Sure, Jesus isn't an economist, he's a rabbi.

He's concerned about the spiritual welfare of his people.

And yet you can't separate the spiritual from the physical.

He really doesn't want anyone standing around idle.

And so Jesus has something to say about a surprising God who doesn't operate the same way we do, who is concerned about the totality of who we are.

The way we keep score and do accounting, perhaps isn't how God score.

Or does God's accounting.

We have a surprising God who often inverts and flips over our understanding of power and wealth, status, influence.

The first will be last, the last will be first.

And Rabbi Jesus is in continuity with the Hebrew prophets of old.

And specifically one of my favorites, Jonah.

I do challenge you today or sometime this week to read the entire Book of Jonah in one sitting.

It's only four chapters, and it's like a mashup of a Shakespearean tragedy and comedy and even a Saturday Night Live sketch, sacred humor about a surprising God who does surprising things with many curveballs and plot twists.

And the story still holds up because of the tragedy and comedy nature of it all.

And there's even a movie coming out this October called Whale Fall about a scuba diver who gets swallowed by a whale.

Wonder where they got that idea?

Go watch the trailers, a couple of them out.

As a lifelong surfer, I'm not nervous about being swallowed by a whale.

Now, if they made a movie about a giant jellyfish, I'm not seeing that.

You can read the book of Jonah for yourself.

But since our first reading drops us right to the end of the story.

Like with the children's message, Just a short recap.

The prophet Jonah is called by God to go to Nineveh to stand on the corner and tell the people of Nineveh to repent.

And side note, Nineveh was one of Israel's most brutal enemies.

The Ninevites had the reputation of skinning their captives alive and then impaling them on giant stakes.

Ema throne stuff.

And so, yeah, you could see why Jonah ran in the opposite direction to Tarshish.

To get away, Jonah's like, ew, those people.

No thanks.

And yet, through storms and wind and tempests, God appointed a great fish.

Notice the text never says anything about a whale.

And this fish actually put Jonah back on track.

What he was called to do, this fish, is a means of grace to point him in the right direction.

Once Jonah reaches his call destination, Jonah gives a very short one sentence sermon.

If you guys were only so lucky, 40 days more and Nineveh will be overthrown.

All he says.

And that's all it took.

It's a weird plot twist because there is repentance, there is turning around, there is a change of heart, a change of ways.

And weirdly, the story even shares that even the animals repented.

That's when we get to the part of the story we heard read this morning.

Jonah sulks and grumbles and is super irritated that God changes God's mind and doesn't smite them with wrath.

The Jonah sits in time out.

And as God appointed a great fish to assist in Jonah's turning around, God appoints a plant and A worm to make a point.

And I love how the whole four chapter book ends with an open ended question.

How our first reading ends today is how the book actually ends.

You are concerned about the plant for which you did not labor and which you did not grow.

It came into being at night and perished in the night.

And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from the left and also animals?

End of scene, end of sketch, end of story.

Leaves us to ponder that question.

Reflect on it.

Prize God loves everybody, even your enemy.

God even loves the person who votes differently than you.

No matter your status or what you accumulate in life.

God loves you the same as the one who doesn't have what you have.

Even those who say out loud or to themselves, ew, those people.

God loves them too.

You see, we have been entrusted with a vineyard.

You see the work in the vineyard here and beyond our walls, and how we work together in the vineyard and how we see and value other people leads to a table and to a cup and to a Messiah, a Christ who lifts up a cup which contains wine from that vineyard.

A cup that identifies in solidarity with the last and those waiting and longing for more.

How does our work in the vineyard impact people's lives?

Where we stand in solidarity with the last and those waiting and longing for more.

In a world of uncertainty, in a world of rising tension, in a world where Christians and anyone who's religious are seen as that type of group that says all the time, ew, those people.

You're called not to stand idle.

We're called to continue to repeat ourselves.

And we will that we are loved, with a love stronger than death.

And it's for all.

May we continue to be surprised by God, but not surprised by God's generosity.

Solidarity with those in the back of the line.

May we not stand around idle because there's work to be done in the vineyard.

Amen.

Thank you for listening.

If there is anything that stood out for you, or if you have a question or you just want to have a conversation, you are always free to reach out and contact us.

And remember you are not alone and that you are loved with a love stronger than death.

Sam.