A Sermon preached at Southminster Presbyterian Church in Boise, Idaho
Let me start with a disclaimer for the English Majors in the room. I will be mixing metaphors in this sermon. The vineyard theme that weaves through these two texts lends itself to many different readings. At some points, I might refer to us as the grape plants. In others, we’ll be the laborers tending the vines. So, please accept my apologies in advance. Here we go!
Our passage in Matthew this morning picks up right where we left off last week, in the midst of a debate about authority between Jesus and the religious leaders in the Temple.
When Jesus said, “Listen to another parable. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard….” the religious leaders, professional readers of scriptures, would have all thrown their hands up in the air and said, “pick me! Pick me! I know this one. Isaiah 5! We’re supposed to be good 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. The landlords take every penny earned and 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’m not sure they are wrong in their answer. I think their experience of landlords would suggest that killing the tenants wouldn’t be too far fetched. Perhaps that comment is more of an observation.
And I think they are correct that the new tenants will be people who will hand over the produce at harvest, but I don’t think they know how true that is.
In the context of their debate about authority, Jesus is, yet again, using their own words to pass judgment on them.
“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 instead of the hired hand?”
It scares me, this Jesus.
He seems 12 feet tall, angry, uncontrollable.
And then he starts quoting scripture. “Have you never read the scriptures?”, he asks the people who read scripture professionally.
This is angry Jesus.
“The kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom.”
The turn he takes to anger reminds us of the passage from Isaiah’s prophecy.
Because this prophecy starts out as a love song. God is a landlord who loves the vineyard of Israel so much that he wrote a love song to them. 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. And then God gets angry.
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.
It is easy to forget this is a love song by the time you get to the trampling, devouring, and desolation.
It is clear, though, that the Divine presence can get angry. Whether it is Jesus in the Temple, taking the authorities to task for not obeying God’s call to produce the fruits of the Kingdom, or whether it is God taking Israel to task for being bad grapes, for bearing fruit of bloodshed instead of justice, our disobedience angers God.
Let me say that again, our disobedience angers God.
God has lovingly put care in our planting, setting up a harvest that will be of benefit to the whole community, and we choose to be rotten grapes. God has lovingly sent God’s own son, to proclaim the in-breaking of God’s kingdom on earth, and we have decided instead to go our own way, pretending that we, the tenants on the vineyard, can inherit in the Son’s place.
But our disobedience is not the last word. God’s anger is not the last word. God, who knows who we are, still chooses to sing us a love song.
And so the response is ours. Will we join in the song, singing back to God with lives of justice and righteousness?
And what does that look like?
It means more than saying, “I will pray for peace.” Prayer is important, but it isn’t always the stopping place. Often, it is only the beginning point. Imagine me saying, “I will pray for a good garden this year.” If I didn’t go out in the yard, pull the weeds, plant the seeds, water the garden, and tend the plants, it wouldn’t matter.
We have to work for justice and righteousness.
And working in a garden for a good harvest, whether you want to harvest tomatoes or justice, is dirty work.
I heard a story on the news this past week that reminded me of this. October 2006, Charles Roberts opened fire and shot 10 Amish school-girls in Lancaster, PA, killing five of them, before killing himself. When his mother Terri heard about the shooting, “she crawled into a fetal position, feeling as if her insides were ripped apart. Her husband, Chuck, a retired policeman, cried into a tea towel, unable to lift his head. He wore skin off his face wiping away tears.”
But an Amish neighbor came to their house shortly after the shooting and told her husband, who worked with the Amish, “We love you.”
Instead of offering their judgment, which we could understand, the Amish community offered love, which allowed the Roberts family to seek new ways to live into the reality of this tragedy.
Three months after the shooting, Chuck and Terri, the parents of the shooter, started visiting the families of the victims. Terri invited the survivors and their mothers to her home for a tea party. One of the survivors is paralyzed and unable to move or communicate, but she is still alive. Terri goes over to her house once a week to sit with her, bathe her, sing her hymns, and read her Bible stories.
There is no erasing the tragedy that happened to those families 5 years ago. But these people chose not to let desolation, destruction, and ruin have the final say.
The illustrations in our lives might, or might not be as dramatic as this.
But we have to do more than say we care about justice and righteousness. We have to get down on our knees, digging in the dirt, preparing our gardens so justice and righteousness can flourish. And it is dirty work. It puts us in places where we feel vulnerable and unsure. It puts us with people we might not choose to be with.
And it takes time. Vines don’t grow overnight. Working for a good harvest takes time.
Our work for a good harvest requires action.
When we see a homeless person on the street, we need to do more than feel bad about the situation. We need to support the ministries that feed and house people. We need to work in our community and in our nation to help alleviate the conditions that contribute to homelessness.
David Brooks wrote about this in the New York Times this past week in an article called “the Limits of Empathy.”
He writes:
“Empathy—the ability to understand and share the feelings of another—makes you more aware of other people’s suffering, but it’s not clear it actually motivates you to take moral action or prevents you from taking immoral action.”
In other words, empathy allows us to be like the religious leaders in the temple, who preach God’s kingdom, but don’t take it any further than words. He goes on to say, “It has become a way to experience delicious moral emotions without confronting the weaknesses in our nature that prevent us from actually acting upon them.”
I think that is what this passage from Isaiah is calling us to do—to move away from empty emotions that only serve us and to move toward the real work that leads to a good harvest.
So, How are you going to do that?
It isn’t too late to join a house church. We’ll have the sign up lists available after worship. Helping homeless people prepare for their GED exams, working to support Grace Jordan, or seeking Human Rights are great ways to get dirty to prepare a harvest of righteousness. There are other ways too. But please be in prayer about how you can respond to God’s love song in your life. I won’t be in the office this week because I’ll be reading and grading Ordination Exams for the denomination, but I would love to be in conversation with you about how you can get involved in new ways in ministry.
Today is World Communion Sunday. We will gather around God’s Table, just as Christians are doing all around the world. As we come to the Table to be fed, let us remember that, at this table, God is singing a love song to the world. God has poured out great care and effort so that we, as God’s vineyard, might be fed, nourished, and bear good fruit. The rest is up to us.
Let’s go get dirty and have some fun. Amen.
