World Communion Sunday
Scripture
Hebrew
Scripture – Isaiah 5: 1-7[1]
1Let me sing for my beloved my love-song
concerning his vineyard:
My beloved had a vineyard on a
very fertile hill. 2He 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.
3And now, inhabitants of
5And 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. 6I 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.
7For the vineyard of the LORD of hosts is the house of
Gospel
Lesson – Matthew 21: 33-46[2]
33“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. Then he leased it to tenants and went to
another country. 34When the
harvest time had come, he sent his slaves to the tenants to collect his
produce. 35But the tenants
seized his slaves and beat one, killed another, and stoned another. 36Again
he sent other slaves, more than the first; and they treated them in the same
way.
37Finally he sent his son to them, saying,
‘They will respect my son.’ 38But
when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, ‘This is the heir; come,
let us kill him and get his inheritance.’ 39So they seized him, threw him out
of the vineyard, and killed him. 40Now
when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” 41They said to him, “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.”
42Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in
the scriptures:
‘The stone that the builders rejected has
become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is amazing in our
eyes’?
43Therefore I tell you, the
45When the chief
priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they realized that he was
speaking about them. 46They
wanted to arrest him, but they feared the crowds, because they regarded him as
a prophet.
“You Might Think that God Would've Given Up on Gardening."
To listen to these stories from our Bible today, you might
think that God would've given up on gardening.
The troubles began even at the beginning – as far back as those first
caretakers in a place called
Just as troublesome, in every garden the caretakers never
own up to their dereliction of duty. We continue
to claim that we're not responsible; it's got to be somebody else's fault. We even blame God for the destruction caused
by ill-timed winds and rain, earthquakes, floods, fires, as well as all of the pests
that come to infest the garden. Peace
gives way to accusation and counter accusation, suspicion to terror, and then
finally order and justice descend to brutality and killing.
I am stunned by how contemporary these stories are. Aren't you?
These scenes portray, with far too much accuracy, the violence that
continues to wreak havoc across the face of our world: street killings, racial hatred, mass
starvation, "ethnic cleansing"….
The increasing bitterness and fragmentation of the global community
cries out for a true "world communion." Crazed tenants still ravage the vineyard of
civilization, and we're scared. Tragically,
though, when we are as frightened as this we start looking for a scapegoat[3] –
for someone to blame – and the violence escalates.
The narrator of the parable describes this increasing use
of force as the tenants move from seizing to beating to finally killing those
who are sent by the landowner. The first
ending to this parable – a place where we'd like for it to end, by the way – suggests
that the landowner will finally bring a stop to this ("Just wait until
your father comes home…!); when he comes in person he will put these wretched
tenants to their own miserable deaths! We're
disturbed (or at least I am) by a second ending, however, that suggests that the
end to these tenants might just come in a different way: by knocking down the cornerstone the whole
building will fall and everyone under it "will be broken to pieces."[4] It sounds to me like the end isn't in the
hands of the landowner but is, instead, the inevitable outcome of our
destructive way of life. Violence only
leads to more violence; killing sows the seeds of hatred and revenge that then leads
to more killing. The gardener expected
justice, but saw only bloodshed, called for life as it was meant to be lived,
but heard only the cries of injustice and pain.[5]
On this first Sunday of the month, a month in which we will
be introducing our fall stewardship campaign, this parable may be a sobering
reminder to us all of just how important our stewardship of the vineyard is in
the midst of a culture of violence. If
we don't speak up and act out of our convictions as the followers of Jesus, you
can be sure that there will be those who will speak and act in our absence – and,
in the case of the evangelical right wing, the only version of Christianity that
there is will be the one that they claim to be legitimate.
There would be no hope for this world if it weren't for the
fact that the gardener is also a lover.
Gardening and loving, I'd say, are a natural combination! Just think of what gardeners do: the till and prepare the soil; they plant,
nurture, and tend. So do lovers. Gardeners have a vision of the growth that's
possible, the fruit that the future can bring.
So do lovers. Lovers look at each
other and see what others often miss:
the grace, the beauty, the gifts still waiting to bloom if only they're
affirmed, nurtured, and supported. Too
many times we discourage this vision of lovers.
We're told to "get real," that we're romantic idealists, and
such idealism is a naive illusion.
There is another way to look at the garden. In seeing this potential for beauty and
giftedness in others, lovers understand what our world and its people have
truly been created to be and to become.
Most of the time we don't see it this way. We focus on flaws and failures and so not
only miss the true wonder of this place but the unique partnership with the
gardener that was the reason for the human race coming into being in the first
place. With the absolute certitude of
the fundamentalist, the Christian right has come to see only black and white,
good and evil, and what's worse, failed to see or come to grips with the evil
within itself – the potential within us all.
Maybe this is why God hasn't given up entrusting the garden
to us unreliable caretakers. We're not
just gardeners. We are loved. We have it in us to tend and nurture the
garden, to work on behalf of peace with justice, to treat this planet earth in ways
that do not destroy but that help shape it into becoming all that it was meant
to be. Even with all that we have done,
that's why God's never given up on tending the garden.
* * *
[1] Most biblical scholars believe that the prophet Isaiah preached his unpopular message to Judah and Jerusalem some time between 742-687 BCE – that critical period in which the northern kingdom (Israel) was annexed to the Assyrian empire (see 2 Kings 17), while Judah (the southern kingdom) lived precariously in its shadow and King Ahaz "gave tribute" to the king of Assyria (see 2 Chronicles 28: 21). This famous "Song of the Vineyard," or "Parable of the Vineyard," has been described, allegorically, as a polemic against social injustice, but at the time that it was first heard it was clearly meant as an indictment of its audience.
[2]
Matthew's parable here is an echo of the one in Isaiah and is also meant to be
a critique of the
By the way, the phrase translated as "wild grapes" here literally could be translated, actually, as "stinking things" – a much more graphic depiction, I'd say!
[3] Originally scapegoats weren't to blame for things
gone wrong. I invite you to take a look
at the biblical history of the "scapegoat" by first reading Leviticus
16: 1-28; then compare it to the way in which the early church came to adopt it
represented by Hebrews 10: 1-18. Strangely
enough, in no other culture in the
The word “atonement,” by the way, originally
meant “to unify” or “to make one” – i.e.,
referring to “reconciliation.” Under
the influence of the church over the years, it’s taken on the more restrictive
meaning of the process by which everything blocking our way to God is removed –
i.e., instead of what the removal of
all of that stuff is supposed to get us, which is reconciliation or reunion
with God. The word came to be used, in a
general sense then, to refer to a removal of the effects of sin. One purpose of the elaborate sacrificial
system was to provide such an “atonement” – so it became associated with the
death of a victim.
The writers of
the New Testament made the next leap in assuming that humanity’s need of “being
put right” with God (and our complete helplessness in doing that on our own)
required a kind of scapegoat to save us from ourselves. Jesus, in the complete giving of his whole
self – up to and especially including his death – became the only means by
which we could return to and be reconciled with God. According
to this convoluted piece of logic the immediate consequence of atonement is
that our relationship with God is restored – we are “at peace” with God. The New Testament writers never explain how
Jesus, as the Christ, is able to cancel out the effects of our sin and
reconcile us to God. They’re content
simply to affirm the truth of it.
The very sobering consequence of this
theory, though, is to perpetuate the belief that in the face of any evil
somebody’s got to pay, and pay in blood, even to the point of death.
No, it doesn't make any sense to me either. But, as one of my seminary professors often liked to say: "It's in your Bible."
[4] Matthew 21: 44.
[5] cf. Isaiah 5: 7.