Restoring the Vineyard: Sermon for Proper 22A

Today, a day in which we celebrate the feast of St. Francis, I decided to stick with the lectionary readings for this Sunday in the regular lectionary cycle. And now, I am berating myself for not taking the easier path. Because this parable in the gospel before us is hardly on anyone’s top ten list of beloved stories. It is instead filled with corruption, violence, and murder. If that weren’t enough, over two thousand years it has been interpreted by far too many in the Church to justify the exclusion and even attempted extinction of the Jews, claiming that they forfeited their position as God’s “chosen people” when “the Jews” denied Jesus’s authority.

And that is anti-Semitism and hate, my friends. Jesus, after all, was a Jew for his entire earthly ministry. No, it is important to circle back and remember that when Jesus tells a parable, it is important to read it as though it applies to us—exactly how Jesus himself used his parables. And of course, that is the LAST thing we want to do with this one—because those main characters are AWFUL.

In order to faithfully engage this parable, then, we have to do one of the hardest things for us to do in 21st century America: to lean INTO our discomfort. To accept that this story has something to say about us. To acknowledge that we are not mere bystanders but participants in the injustices that surround us.

It is way too easy to use these parables to point the finger at others—even those who historically have been marginalized already, like the Jews. So let’s take a breath, and ask ourselves to consider how we ourselves are the evil tenants in Jesus's parable.

The genius of Jesus’s parables is that they can be applied to many different situations. Those who heard Jesus's parables at the time understood the vineyard to be a symbol for Israel, and since they were Israelites, that means they understood what he was saying as seeking to correct their own behavior. Thus if we are to enter into these parables correctly, we cannot use them to judge others; instead we must see them as a mirror in which our own lives are reflected.

One of the theological claims attributed to St. Francis was a sense of unity and harmony in all creation, the idea that the love of God is revealed in the natural world, as St. Francis extolled in his “Canticle of Brother Sun and Sister Moon.” On this feast day of St. Francis, we can take the parable of the vineyard as a commentary on how we treat the Earth and all her creartures, which would align nicely with the concern St. Francis himself spoke of frequently.

What would it be like to see all of creation as beloved family, rather than tools or objects of exploitation? Too often we use poor interpretations of texts in Genesis to claim that God gave us human beings dominion over all of the earth. For some, that leads to ideas that we can use up this beautiful earth and its resources as we see fit. What if, instead, we saw ourselves as tenants, placed by God within the vineyard of the earth to tend it and care for it? In our parable before us today, the tenants try to steal what is not theirs—and they are willing to kill and destroy in order to accomplish that theft. Yet, as we are reminded in the opening verses of Psalm 24—the one that comes right after the beloved 23rd Psalm:

1 The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it,
the world and its inhabitants too.
2 Because God is the one who established it on the seas;
God set it firmly on the waters.
3 Who can ascend the Lord’s mountain?
Who can stand in his holy sanctuary?
4 Only the one with clean hands and a pure heart;
the one who hasn’t made false promises,
the one who hasn’t sworn dishonestly.
5 That kind of person receives blessings from the Lord
and righteousness from the God who saves.
6 And that’s how things are
with the generation that seeks him—
that seeks the face of Jacob’s God.

                                    —(from the Common English Bible)

We, like those murderous tenants, reject the sovereignty of God when we look at rising seas and melting glaciers, and at devastating wildfires and catastrophic floods that have gone from being once in a lifetime events to yearly events, and say we can do nothing or deny that we have anything to do with such devastation. It’s dishonest—and in this case, foolhardy-- to claim powerlessness right in the midst of our simultaneous proclamation that we can do anything we want, without consequences.

We could also see the vineyard as being the ground of our hearts. Do we acknowledge God’s ownership of that territory? Or do we reject Jesus and throw him out when he asks of us what we do not wish to give: our time, talent, and treasure? Do we reject Jesus and throw him from the vineyard of our hearts when, in response to the new life he offers us not as a gift, we instead see a threat to our insistence on our utter and complete independence? We throw Jesus from the vineyard by our resistance to empathy and love of each other so that we can be instead be selfish and cruel.

The way of God cannot be aligned with contempt for God’s creation, or with a delight in cruelty or mockery.

We always have to remember that a vineyard is judged by the fruit it produces. 

And hateful, careless behavior from people who claim to be faithful children of God is a large part of why so many people are turning their backs on faith. As Christian convert G. K. Chesterton cynically noted, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”

I like to think he was speaking out of his own despair and frustration. The vineyard is the Christian ideal of abundance, compassion, justice, that leads to true peace. Which brings us back to St. Francis.

Even though most scholars realize that it is highly unlikely that St. Francis actually wrote the famous peace prayer that bears his name that we will pray together in a few moments, nonetheless the sentiments in that prayer beautifully express the components of a society grounded in love, justice and peace—one in which injustice, cruelty, and contempt for each other and this world truly become unimaginable. 

That same sentiment is also found in this beautiful poem by farmer/environmentalist, and poet Wendell Berry, entitled, “The Peace of Wild Things:”

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.



I rest in the grace of the world, and I am free.

Amen to that.

What if each of us resisted the despair of the world, a world who groans and asks us for love and protection, by dedicating ourselves to changing despair to hope, and hope to action? What if we resisted the despair of the world by remembering our oneness with this beautiful planet, and with every single person and thing in it and on it? What if we welcomed the Owner of All and his beloved Son into the vineyard of our hearts, instead of the wilderness of our fear? In the words of Joni Mitchell: “We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.”

In the end, even the parable of the Murderous Tenants contains good news, however, because it is about justice and reclamation, about embracing the generous love of God and being remade by it. Jesus’s parables call on us to re-imagine the world, and to re-imagine our lives, if we allowed ourselves to be fertile ground and faithful tenants within the abundant vineyard of God.

Amen.

Preached at the 5:15 outdoor Eucharist and pet blessing on October 3, and at the 10:30 worship service on October 4 at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO.

Readings:

Exodus 20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20
Psalm 19
Philippians 3:4b-14
Matthew 21:33-46

Citations:

1) Wendell Berry, "The Peace of Wild Things," from Openings: Poems (1968).