What Is Your Life Prefiguring? On Two Sons, a Vineyard, and the Future We Keep Performing Instead of Building

It wasn't too long ago that I felt a vibrant hope that we were right on the cliff's edge of a new world. I remember it the way you remember weather — a feeling in the air more than a fact you could point to. There was a tide turning, and I felt both caught up in it and called to account by it.

What was I doing with my body? My resources? Who did I need to link arms with?

I have a photograph from that season that lives in my phone the same way it lives in my heart: me, stepped off to the side of a river of protesters marching down Pennsylvania Avenue, just watching. So many people, carrying signs that read everything from "Black Trans Lives Matter" to "He Called All Mamas" — that last one undid me, because my own son was just weeks from his third birthday. That was the tail end of the spring of 2020, when instead of watching flowers open we watched the cutting down of Black lives, one after another: Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Tony McDade.

Six years on, I think the more honest photograph isn't the march. It's the millions of black squares posted on Instagram for Blackout Tuesday — followed, the very next day, by those same accounts returning to travel photos like nothing had happened. Six years on, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act is still stalled in Congress, affirmative action in college admissions has been struck down, and DEI work is being dismantled by government order. That cliff's edge I thought we stood on feels less like the threshold of a new world and more like the next room in a burning house we can't find our way out of.

So here's the question I can't stop asking: how do we know what's real? How do we tell the difference between what we believe and what we've only performed?

I think a strange little story Jesus told can help us. But to get there, I need to explain why, for the last several weeks, we've been reading the parables of Jesus alongside Afrofuturism — a pairing that might strike you as odd, maybe even a little bleak, like something out of a film you need a strong stomach for. Stay with me.

A Precarious World, and the Stories Told Inside It

Historians estimate that roughly nine out of every ten people living in first-century Palestine hovered around the edge of hunger. Most were tenant farmers or day laborers, working land they'd never own, at the mercy of landlords who could evict or replace them without a second thought. If you come from a lineage of sharecroppers, migrant workers, or day laborers, you already recognize this world — the one Jesus was born into, enfleshed as God in the middle of what must have felt, to many, like a dystopia. It's why beggars keep showing up at Jerusalem's gates in the Gospels — that's not incidental detail. That's where the money was, and that's where the desperate gathered.

Into that world, Jesus doesn't hand out a policy paper. He tells parables — short, strange stories that unsettle, that refuse to sit still inside one tidy meaning. In his book Parables as Subversive Speech, biblical scholar William Herzog argues something I think we too easily forget when we read these stories in our quiet time: the parables themselves were part of the threat. They weren't decoration around the real controversy between Jesus and the religious establishment — they were the controversy. Jesus was crucified so that we might be reconciled to God, yes. But he was also killed for telling stories that constructed a counter future — one that refused nationalism, refused the hoarding of wealth, refused business as usual.

That's not a coincidence. That's exactly what Afrofuturism does. Mark Dery, who coined the term, asks whether a community whose past has been deliberately erased can still imagine a future. Kodwo Eshun names the tension even more precisely: counter-memory (recovering what's been erased) held together with counter-future (imagining what hasn't yet been permitted to exist). Afrofuturism says you can do both at once. And Jesus is qualified to teach us about a counter future because he isn't just its messenger — he is the counter future. Most revolutionaries, at some point, start talking in code; you don't get off the plantation without some insider speech. So when we read the parables, we have to become code-talkers ourselves.

Two Sons, One Vineyard

Here's the story, from Matthew 21:23–32. Jesus has just ridden into Jerusalem on a donkey while people threw their coats on the road, walked into the temple, and flipped over tables. A day or two later, the religious leaders, understandably rattled, want to know: who gave you the authority to do this? Jesus turns the question back on them about John the Baptist and traps them between two bad answers. Then he tells them a story.

A father has two sons. He asks the first to go work in the vineyard. "I will not," the son says — but later changes his mind and goes anyway. The father asks the second son the same thing. "I go, sir," the son answers — and doesn't. Which one did the father's will? Even Jesus's opponents can't help but give the obvious answer: the first.

It's a simple story about the gap between saying the right thing and doing something else entirely — about posting the black square on Tuesday and going back to business as usual on Wednesday. It's also a story that reminds us that the people without the polished vocabulary, without a pithy caption to post, are often exactly the people we should be following.

Before we're too quick to judge those religious leaders, I want us to sit with the gap that exists in all of us. So let me ask you what I asked my own congregation: what's one thing you believe that your life hasn't caught up to yet? Not the easy answer. The real one — something you profess but struggle to actually live out.

What Is Your Life Prefiguring?

The first thing this parable teaches me is something almost embarrassingly simple: your actions prefigure the future. Not your intentions. Not your captions. Not the sign you carried one Saturday six years ago. Political theorists call this prefigurative politics — the conviction that how a movement organizes itself right now has to already embody, in miniature, the world it claims to be building. The son who says "I will go" and then stays home isn't neutral. He's prefiguring a future that looks exactly like his present.

So: what is your life prefiguring? For me, one answer is a church that's genuinely interracial — not one that quietly organizes itself around whiteness as its unspoken center, but one where justice and joy actually mingle across difference. Isabel Wilkerson, in Caste, names endogamy — marrying, gathering, belonging only within your own group — as one of the load-bearing walls of any caste system. My "I will go" is opting into the slow, uncomfortable work of building something that defies those lines. When that work starts to feel far-fetched, I remember a line from Octavia's Brood: "Each of us is already science fiction walking around on two legs." That's true of every church where the dividing wall of race is actually coming down.

"Every church where the dividing wall of race is being broken down is somebody's I will go made flesh, made real."

The second thing this parable asks is harder: are you willing to change your mind? It shows up twice in the passage — whether you'll change course once the truth is standing right in front of you. It's easy to call the religious leaders stubborn. It's harder to admit we protect our own comfort just as fiercely. Some of you have one foot near agnosticism, and something keeps pulling you back toward a Jesus who's been colonized and weaponized but who still, somehow, speaks. Can you change your mind? Some of you are tired of watching everyone deconstruct everything — can you let your steadiness become a gift instead of a judgment? And if we're honest, some of us just miss the ease of a bigger church, with the perfect lighting and the three-point sermon you can remember on the way home. Can you believe that something messier might be exactly where you're called to plant your feet?

Whose Story Are You Orbiting?

The third thing this parable warns us about is the danger of elite capture — a term the philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò uses to describe how elites co-opt our visions of the future simply because they have access to power, platform, or the right lineage. It's easy to be dazzled by people who have all the right words and the clean answers, especially when we don't have those things for ourselves.

In our corner of progressive Christianity, you can watch this happen in real time in the orbit of deconstruction influencers. Erna Kim Hackett describes it like this: after 2020, so many women of color and non-binary folks launched out of the gravitational pull of evangelical spaces — only to get re-trapped, looped into another version of white-male-centered theology by "deconstruction bros" who can only critique the world they're trying to leave. As Hackett puts it, forever critiquing white evangelicalism is like breaking up with someone and, five years later, still talking about them. Let it go, sis. Just let it go.

"It's easy to be dazzled by people who have all the right words and the clean answers, especially when we don't have those things for ourselves."

Jesus challenges us to question the safe wisdom of those who've always been in charge, because it's the downtrodden and the dismissed who are actually entering the kingdom ahead of the people the world calls wise. The religious elites heard John the Baptist and didn't believe him. John was a foolish preacher with no polish and no platform — and he was the one carrying God-given authority, because he lived what he professed. Then, as now, it's usually the people without credentials who recognize what's real first. So ask yourself: whose story are you orbiting? Whose version of reality do you struggle to look away from?

Rehearsing the Future

I'll confess something as I close: I was surprised to find myself preaching this sermon. I know what my life is prefiguring on the large scale, but week to week, I'm just as tempted as anyone to post the black square and call it a day. If the father had asked me to go into the vineyard, my instinct would be to ask if I could read about it first. That's my comfort zone. But I'm convicted every time I remember that the son who goes — even without fully understanding what's being asked of him — is doing the most important work there is. His "I will go" is costly, the way ours always is. It asks us to live out with our actual bodies the world we say we want to see.

Here's the good news, though, and it's the part I love most: every time we gather, we get to rehearse that future together — to confess Jesus and then practice what that confession means in real, messy relationships. When even the next step into the vineyard feels like too much, I think of the table we gather around: communion as our testimony and rehearsal of the counter future, the here-and-now prefiguring of a feast of joy and belonging still to come. By grace, just by showing up in Jesus's name, we're strengthened for whatever "I will go" is asked of us this week.

So I'll leave you with the same two questions I sat with alongside my own congregation:

What is your life prefiguring right now — not your intentions, but your actual, ordinary, Tuesday-through-Saturday choices? What's one thing you believe that your life hasn't caught up to yet, and what would it cost you to close that gap this week?

Thanks be to God, who unfolds her good future in the middle of our unpredictable present. Now — go into the vineyard.