Love’s Labors Lost?

15 08 2010

A sermon preached at Southminster Presbyterian Church

Boise, Idaho

August 15, 2010

Isa 5:1-7

Let me sing for my beloved
my love-song concerning his vineyard:
My beloved had a vineyard
on a very fertile hill.
He dug it and cleared it of stones,
and planted it with choice vines;
he built a watchtower in the midst of it,
and hewed out a wine vat in it;
he expected it to yield grapes,
but it yielded wild grapes.

And now, inhabitants of Jerusalem
and people of Judah,
judge between me
and my vineyard.
What more was there to do for my vineyard
that I have not done in it?
When I expected it to yield grapes,
why did it yield wild grapes?

And now I will tell you
what I will do to my vineyard.
I will remove its hedge,
and it shall be devoured;
I will break down its wall,
and it shall be trampled down.
I will make it a waste;
it shall not be pruned or hoed,
and it shall be overgrown with briers and thorns;
I will also command the clouds
that they rain no rain upon it.

For the vineyard of the LORD of hosts
is the house of Israel,
and the people of Judah
are his pleasant planting;
he expected justice,
but saw bloodshed;
righteousness,
but heard a cry!

I’d like to apologize for our Scripture passage this morning.

I didn’t like it any more than you did.

On first glance, it appears that Isaiah was having a no good, very bad day when he wrote this passage.
I thought about abandoning it in favor of something light and easy, like Leviticus or Judges.

But it wouldn’t let me go. This morning, I invite you to rest in the discomfort this text brings and together seek the Good News where it may be found.

“Let me sing for my beloved my love song concerning my vineyard.”

We begin today with a love song. It is easy to forget this is a love song by the time you get to the end, with all of the trampling, devouring, and desolation. This oracle of doom takes place in a love song.

The owner of the vineyard puts love and care and back-breaking labor into this vineyard. Digging and clearing a field, investing in choice vines and the infrastructure needed to make wine are all signs of the owner’s love and of his hope for a future of prosperity.  And this isn’t just a garden of pretty flowers. This is a vineyard that will bear fruit—so that people can eat, so people can drink. It isn’t just for the benefit of the gardener. It is for the benefit of the community.

Many of you grow zucchini and other produce in the summer, and I know this because you leave them outside my office door. I’ve been warned not to leave my car doors unlocked in the summer, or my car will be filled with zucchini when I leave church. And let me state for the record that you would never hear me complain about too much zucchini.

But I digress.

Those of you who garden and farm know that the harvest is too much to only benefit one person. An abundant harvest benefits others.

Well-tended vineyards and gardens are illustrations of abundance, of how you live when your cup is runneth-ing over.

So the owner of the vineyard has done everything that can be done to assure that this vineyard will be a blessing.

But, as evidenced by the wild bitter grapes, there is clearly only so much that the owner can do to affect the harvest.  What else, he asks, was there for him to do for the vineyard that he had not already done?

Somehow the vineyard doesn’t produce the good grapes it should. There is no abundant harvest.

This really just doesn’t make sense.  Good champagne grapevines just can’t decide to disobey the gardener and grow into wild bitter grapes. And why would they?
When they could be champagne?

But of course this story isn’t about grapes. It is about us. “For the vineyard of the Lord is the house of Israel and the people of Judah are his pleasant planting.”

This story is about us.

We, who have been created in love, and put on this earth to be an abundant harvest of good things for the world, choose, instead to be bad grapes.

Much like the grapes in the story, it doesn’t make sense. Why don’t we, as humans created in love by God, live our lives as blessings to the world?

Love’s labor is lost when we don’t.

Before this story was about you and I, this story was being told about Israel. And God’s expectation, for all of the care and provision he had given Israel, was for Israel, God’s pleasant planting, to share the abundance of the harvest. A harvest of justice and righteousness. These two words function together in the Hebrew scriptures to remind us of a “society in which the rights of all, including the most marginalized, are respected. This is God’s reasonable expectation, given the divine provision.” (Anna Case-Winters Feasting on the Word Year C, Vol 3 (WJK, 2010), p 344.)

But this love song has gone terribly awry. Justice and righteousness were not what the people experienced. “He looked for justice but saw bloodshed. He listened for righteousness but heard a cry of oppression,” is another translation of verse 7. “Isaiah’s words…picture what happens when a people refuse the care and nurture lavished on them—or accept it, but keep it only to themselves.” (Stacey Simpson Duke, Feasting on the Word Year C, Vol 3 (WJK, 2010),p. 344)  Isaiah is telling Israel that the people can continue to live for themselves, instead of pursuing justice and righteousness, but if they do, God will leave them to it.

Listen again to the middle verse of our love song:
And now I will tell you
what I will do to my vineyard.
I will remove its hedge,
and it shall be devoured;
I will break down its wall,
and it shall be trampled down.
I will make it a waste;
it shall not be pruned or hoed,
and it shall be overgrown with briers and thorns;
I will also command the clouds
that they rain no rain upon it.

Israel, who had been carted off into exile by this point in their history, had seen Isaiah’s words come true. They knew what it meant to live through the devastation described.

Where do we see this story playing out in our lives today?

Isaiah functions under a model of retributive justice, as do most of the other writer’s of the Old Testament. We’ve heard it before. 
“Israel sinned and did what was evil in the eyes of the Lord and the Lord delivered them into the hands of their enemies.”

While this tactic does have the unpleasant side effect of kicking people who are already down—“Yes, you are in exile and dealing with destruction and let me also point out that the fault is yours”—It also serves to reassure the people that they are NOT where they are because God has abandoned them. God did not change his mind and get a new people. “You want to know who to blame for this mess you’re in?”, God seems to be asking them, “here’s a mirror.”

But when you are in the midst of crisis, it helps to take stock of your responsibility. When you feel you’re hanging on by a thread, it can be helpful to figure out which part of the problem is within your control. What role did you play in getting here and what can you do, now, to get through the day.

But I want to be clear that while there is a connection between our sinful behavior as humans and the judgment of God—not all suffering that we experience on this earth is deserved or caused by divine judgment.

In light of the world falling apart around him, Isaiah is wise enough to suggest that our response to God matters. God expects a right response to the love, care, and work that God has put into the people.

While the Israelites can’t immediately change the reality of the crisis they are in, they can start paying attention to justice and righteousness. They can take control of their own behavior. They can turn back to God.

And if they were to start being a good vineyard of righteousness and justice, it would look like a healthy vineyard at harvest time, with abundant fruit to share.

Here is the Good News, friends. Despite the brokenness of the world in which we live, despite the fact that we turn away from the goodness of God, God is still singing a love song for us. And we can yet choose to be God’s justice and righteousness in our world.

And, of course, we have already been doing this. The history of Southminster is a story of people standing for justice in the community and in the world.

But this is a story that ever needs to be told.

Each day we have to decide to stand for justice and righteousness.

Each day we have to seek the common good and the larger welfare of our community.

It begins, of course, with prayer. Opening ourselves to hear God’s voice and direction in our lives. This year, as we begin to focus on our Year of Prayer, I invite you to pray to bear fruit of justice and righteousness. I invite you to use the Prayer Center, either during worship, or during the week, to be called into prayer in new ways.
And after we pray, I invite you to be the harvest of God’s justice and righteousness in the world.

The Mission Committee would be glad to help you participate in this harvest. Whether it is helping out at Jazz in the Park in 2 weeks to raise money for CATCH, helping people get out of homelessness and back on their feet. Or whether it is supporting our neighborhood school, Grace Jordan, by being a presence in the life of a kid.
You can join Randy and others tonight at Brewed for Thought, as they continue a discussion about how the choices we make in our lives contribute to justice.

The Session is continuing the discussion of how we can continue to work for God’s justice and righteousness. I invite you to share with them your ideas. I invite you to join with them in making those ideas concrete actions.
Another thing to consider about vineyards is this—grapes don’t grow overnight—whether they are actual grapes or the fruits of justice and righteousness.

It takes a long time.

And even when you can’t yet see the fruit on the vine, you have to continue to water, prune, and care for the plants. God as the owner of the vineyard has done that for us. We continue to receive the nurture and care we need to become a harvest of justice and righteousness. So, as we work toward justice and righteousness in our community, we also need to remember it is a long process.

As we spend time with the kids at Grace Jordan, we need to remember that the fruits of that labor may not be seen by us. But we need to trust that it still matters. We need to trust that somewhere down the line it matters that people gave of their time to be present in the lives of these children. In 1850, abolitionist Theodore Parker said “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

As we seek justice, in whatever area, we need to remember this and not lose hope.

In yesterday’s New York Times, Gail Collins wrote a piece about the anniversary of Women’s Suffrage. Suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt, estimated that the struggle to give women the right to vote had involved 56 referendum campaigns directed at male voters, plus “480 campaigns to get Legislatures to submit suffrage amendments to voters, 47 campaigns to get constitutional conventions to write woman suffrage into state constitutions; 277 campaigns to get State party conventions to include woman suffrage planks, 30 campaigns to get presidential party campaigns to include woman suffrage planks in party platforms and 19 campaigns with 19 successive Congresses.”

The work to get women the vote took a long time and a lot of work.

But the people working for justice and righteousness never gave up hope. “Susan B. Anthony… never lost hope. The great day was coming, she promised: “It’s coming sooner than most people think.” She said that in 1895.” Women’s Suffrage wasn’t ratified in the Constitution until 1920.

So we work for justice and righteousness. And we do so in hope with an eye to the future, which is coming sooner than most people think. Because God is still singing a love song for God’s vineyard.

If Israel can face the devastation of exile, if we can face the devastations at play in our lives and in the world, “we might just be ready to submit again to the bruised and aching hands of the master gardener, who still dreams of—and sings for—a vineyard yielding fat, gorgeous fruit for the whole world.” (Stacey Simpson Duke p 344)
May it be so.

Amen


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Categories : Isaiah 5:1-7

The Vineyards

6 10 2008

Isaiah 5:1-7
Matthew 21:33-46

A Sermon preached at Southminster Presbyterian

In the mid 8th century BCE, it was a lousy time to be an Israelite. The kingdom has been divided into Northern and Southern factions. Neither of them is militarily strong enough to defend themselves from the Assyrians.
The Assyrians had been the big bully neighbor on the northern and eastern borders for a while, but you can see on this map that they move on down the coast, swallowing up Israel and Judah. They eventually move all the way down into Egypt. And their particular way of maintaining political stability was to dislocate people. They sent the inhabitants of the lands the conquered back to Assyria.
How, as a people who made a covenant with the Lord to be the Lord’s people and to live in the Lord’s Promised Land, how do you reconcile what you know to be true of yourself with the reality of exile? Remember that for the Israelites, God and real estate are closely related. We still see that today being played out in the Middle East in a way that we in America don’t quite understand. If God has given you a land and you then get evicted from that land, what does that say? About God? About the Assyrian Gods? About you? About the future?
So the Israelites get escorted out of the Promised Land and into exile by the Assyrians. And it is in this political, economic, and existential crisis that the prophet Isaiah shows up.
Unlike some of the prophets who seem to have come from the margins of society, Isaiah appears to have come from the center. He is from Jerusalem and seemed to be familiar with the inner workings of the Temple, which likely made him a religious professional of some sort. He had access to the palace.
And, rather than fighting Assyria with force, Isaiah argued for repentance and trust in divine salvation. Isaiah had a long view of the political reality in which he found himself.
Isaiah’s writings are beautiful, which is all the more striking considering the violence and dislocation in which he lived.
“Let me sing for my beloved my love song concerning my vineyard.”
We begin with a love song. It is easy to forget this is a love song by the time you get to the end, with all of the trampling, devouring, and desolation. This oracle of doom takes place in a love song. Perhaps it is Isaiah’s way of reminding his hearers that despite their current situation, they are still characters in a love story with God. The collapse of the Jerusalem economy in no way impacts God’s love and concern for Israel.
The owner of the vineyard puts love and care and back-breaking labor into this vineyard. Digging and clearing a field, investing in choice vines and the infrastructure needed to make wine are all signs of the owner’s love and of his hope for a future of prosperity.
But, as evidenced by the wild bitter grapes, there is clearly only so much that the owner can do to affect the harvest. What else, he asks, was there for him to do for the vineyard that he had not already done? With that, Isaiah calls the hearers of his message to make their own judgment. If the owner of the vineyard had done everything he could do, who is left to pick up the blame but the plants themselves? “For the vineyard of the Lord is the house of Israel and the people of Judah are his pleasant planting.”
While this tactic does have the unpleasant side effect of kicking people who are already down—“Yes, you are in exile and let me also point out that the fault is yours”. It also serves to reassure the people that they aren’t where they are because God has abandoned them. God did not change his mind and get a new people. “You want to know who to blame for this mess you’re in?”, God seems to be asking them, “here’s a mirror.” But when you are in the midst of crisis, it helps to take stock of your responsibility. When you feel you’re hanging on by a thread, it can be helpful to figure out which part of the problem is within your control. What role did you play in getting here and what can you do, now, to get through the day.
In light of the world falling apart around him, Isaiah is wise enough to suggest that our response to God matters. God expects a right response to the love, care, and work that God has put into the people. “He looked for justice but saw bloodshed. He listened for righteousness but heard a cry of oppression,” is another translation of verse 7.
While the Israelites can’t immediately change the reality of the crisis, they can start paying attention to justice and righteousness. They can take control of their own behavior. They can turn back to God.
Notice that nowhere in this parable are people invited to assign blame to someone other than themselves. I know that Isaiah wasn’t writing about the financial crisis on Wall Street, exactly. But consider how much time has been spent in the ‘blame game’ this week. If you google “financial crisis blame”, you will come up with 2,070,000 hits on the internet, leading you to articles about who is responsible for the mess we’re in. And I didn’t hear a single voice on the news this week saying, “perhaps we all should have been living within our means and should have been paying more attention to what was happening in the markets.” Politicians were saying, “now is not the time to assign blame, but this wouldn’t have happened had the other guys not done x,y, or z.” Republicans, Democrats, liberal media, deregulation, taxes, tax cuts, wall street tycoons, risky mortgages, Fannie Mae, Jimmy Carter, community organizers, the list goes on. All of those people or groups were blamed this week.
But Isaiah is having none of that. He doesn’t want to hear any excuses Jerusalem might have to explain its role in the exile. The vineyard didn’t produce bad grapes because of any external factor. He calls on them to acknowledge their role and to move toward a better relationship with the God who loves them, who created them, who planted and watered and protected them.
Isaiah leaves his audience and leaves us with this question. What kind of fruit are we producing? Righteousness and justice? Or bloodshed and oppression?

The story we read in Matthew today suggests that Jesus was asking the same question in the Temple as Isaiah had asked. As the religious leaders are asking Jesus about authority, Jesus answers their question with a whole different premise. Using the Isaiah text to start out his parable, he begins. “Listen to another parable. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a watchtower…”
You can almost see the audience acting like eager school children around him, wanting to impress the teacher. “Pick me! Pick me! I know this one. It’s from Isaiah. We’re supposed to be good grapes! Good grapes! Not nasty wild grapes!”
But then the story changes, as Jesus’ stories are wont to do. God, the owner of the vineyard becomes an absentee landlord. All of the hands go down. “Nevermind. I thought I knew where he was going with this,” they think to themselves. “But why would God be a landlord? All the peasants I know who work for a landlord all the live-long day, don’t have one good thing to say about them. They take every penny earned and they the peasants end up with nothing to show for it. Why would he possibly equate God to a landlord?”

But Jesus is okay with the discomfort we feel when God does not behave as we think God should and he goes on with his adapted vineyard story. Landlord sends slaves to collect the harvest, but the slaves are killed. So he sends more slaves. Same thing. Then the landlord sends his only begotten son. Hmmm…why does that sound familiar?
Oh yeah, Jesus.
But now it takes an even bigger twist. Because the tenants decide that by killing the heir, they will become the new heirs.
Now where does that ever work out? Any economic system you know of?
The tenants on this vineyard seem to be operating on a false assumption. This land is not theirs. The harvest is not theirs. The labor is not even theirs.

And Jesus, like Isaiah, calls the priests in the temple to pronounce judgment on themselves. “Now, when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?”
They answer: “He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants, who will give him the produce at the harvest time.”

I think parts of their answer are correct. Their answer acknowledges that the next people on that land will also not be the heirs. The mistaken assumption of the wicked tenants—that they could kill the heir and then inherit—is done away with. And I think they are correct that the new tenants will be people who will hand over the produce at harvest. Because I think this is where Jesus is answering the questions about authority.
“You can ask me about authority all day long”, says Jesus, “but let’s talk about your obedience to God’s authority. You walk around this Temple as if you own the place. Who made you the heir?”
It scares me, this Jesus.
He seems 12 feet tall, angry, uncontrollable.
And then he starts quoting scripture. “Have you never read in the scriptures?”, he asks the people who read scripture professionally. This is angry Jesus.
“The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone….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.”
I would love to wrap this parable up in a bow and present it to you, neatly explained.
But I won’t be doing that.
Because I’m left with more questions than answers.
I wonder why Jesus would cast God as a vacant landlord.
I wonder about a part of the crowd’s answer. They said that the wretches should be put to a miserable death. And maybe that is what Jesus means when he says the kingdom will be taken away from them. But Jesus then goes on to say, “The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls.” So, I wonder. Who is the “one”?
In previous readings, I had always figured that if Jesus was the cornerstone, then the ones who got crushed would be the “wretches”. And maybe that’s it. But, this week, as I was thinking about World Communion that we’re about to celebrate, it occurred to me that this life-giving meal is available to us because Jesus, in dying on a cross, was broken to pieces. What more was there to do for God’s vineyard than God had already done? Death was crushed under a stone that rolled away from a tomb, leading us to new life.

So, I wonder if God’s mysterious justice means that the wretches don’t suffer a miserable death after all. Perhaps Jesus’ parable, like Isaiah’s, is also a love song.

And, finally, I wonder about the new tenants. Who are they? Are they people to whom we would never rent? Who have we not invited to join us here in this room, at this table?

Or are we the new tenants? If so, are we producing the fruits of the kingdom?
Are we speaking up for justice? Are we leading people to know God’s love in the things we do and say?

This week, I invite you to look both for new tenants who may have been invited to join us in the harvest, and also for signs of the fruit of the kingdom in our own lives. Around this table, we will gather. The grapes at this table are good grapes. And we have been invited to enjoy the harvest.
Like the vineyard, this table does not belong to us. It is the Lord’s Table. And due to the mysterious justice and grace of God, we have been invited to the feast.
Thanks be to God. Amen.


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Categories : Isaiah 5:1-7, Matthew 21:33-46, Sermon