02 October 2011 Matthew 21:33-46

02 October 2011 Matthew 21:33-46

The questions we hear and often ask ourselves are seldom as innocent as they seem. One pastor tells of a visit with a lifelong member of the church who had not attended for a long time. As they talked the parishioner was curious, ‘How are they doing down at the church?” What a great theological question, “How are they doing down at the church?” From that question our pastor had her sermon for the next Sunday. She called it, “We Are They.”

Her theme was woven around the truth that we are the “they” in this morning’s gospel. We are the tenants who were leased the vineyard. We are they and the not so innocent question that should concern us comes in verse 20, “Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?”

Throughout church history the church has pointed to a lot of “theys.” Sometimes the list pointed to the religious officials of that day like the Pharisees and the chief priests. But the theys also included Gentiles, women, the uncircumcised, eunuchs, Judaizers, sinners, and Barbarians. People in every age have had a tendency to put distance between themselves and the theys.

It’s like being back in school when some of our classmates would get caught doing something we might now consider casual and being sent to the principal’s office. What will he do to them? And when they get home. What will their parents do to them? It’s like listening to the terrible things people do to one another on the news? What will they do to them? We want to stay away from those theys.
According to Matthew’s gospel the owner had already done a lot of the heavy lifting. He had “planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a watchtower.” And then he left his vineyard in the hands of the tenants who at harvest time seize his slaves, beat one, kill one, and stone another. Finally he sent his son and they killed him too.

It is painful to consider we may be the tenants in this parable. We understand God has left the vineyard in our care. But we are faithful people and we work hard to bring about God’s kingdom.

Leaving the vineyard in our care might remind us of that first creation garden in the Genesis story where God first left God’s kingdom in our hands. Like Adam and Eve and these vineyard tenants we have made our mistakes.

The first involves the land. We thought the land belonged to us. We forgot we were to be stewards of someone else’s property. The tenants create a false sense of ownership in their efforts to secure their perceived inheritance. They think, we are the ones slaving over the land. How dare the owner send servant after servant and finally his own son to collect what we have worked very hard to cultivate and grow and harvest. They felt they were due the inheritance, the land and its bounty. How dare anyone threaten to take what is rightfully theirs?

Before we rush to condemn these tenants we might consider for a moment how well we have done with the vineyard we have been given. Have we considered the jungle we have overtly or covertly made or allowed to be made? War; terror; ecological disaster; families in disarray; confusion; fear and pessimism everywhere; values twisted and the old words given new and strange definitions.
We protest, of course, we are not they. It isn’t our fault. We blame it on someone else. Like in Genesis the man blames the woman. The woman blames the snake. I guess the snake had no one to blame, or did not care.

We blame it on the tenants before us or the tenants here now. We blame it on the government or the hypocritical religious institution. Some of the darkest chapters in the life of the church are the times we blamed then punished others using chapter and verse from this parable.

In our way of thinking the words they and we were poles apart. Jesus will not let us judge so easily. He brings the two words and the two different worlds of they and we closer together.
Human beings have spent a lot of time and energy arguing about judgment and we know well the justification, “An eye for an eye.” The scholars tell us, “An eye for an eye” was originally an attempt to keep the urge to retaliate in check. Given the human appetite for revenge even “an eye for an eye” is hard to enforce.
Jesus spends a lot of time talking about judgment. He tells story after story, parable after parable. This particular text has been noted as Matthew’s way of showing the end times: the fall of Jerusalem, the diaspora of the Jews, the rise of Christianity among the Gentiles.

But, as Professor Anna Carter Florence has suggested, what if this wildly outrageous story is simply that: a wildly outrageous story about a world we have yet to meet? What if this is a story that contrasts human judgment with the as-yet-unexperienced-and-unimagined divine judgment of a God who is so far beyond us, that we cannot even apply the same patterns of justice?

In the human realm, when wicked tenants behave like this, we know what happens. We have perfectly credible, reasonable, rational ways to judge those caught in the act, and this act is particularly foul. So, what would we do? Well, we would put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give the owner of the vineyard the produce at harvest time!
Notice that Jesus doesn’t exactly confirm us in our perfectly credible, reasonable, rational judgment. Instead, he offers a cryptic exegetical comment, “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’? 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. The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls.”

The church today is having a hard time. A new song book is coming out soon because we cannot decide what songs to sing, we cannot decide what instruments to play, we have tried other ways and still cannot all agree on what liturgy to use, if any, we cannot agree on what time to meet, or what is appropriate attire for the occasion or how the building should be configured. Perhaps our trouble may be the same as the Pharisees. We forget this is God’s thing we do here on Sunday morning’s. We forget we are tenants only. We forget the owner of the vineyard will one day come and ask us for an accounting.

Maybe our most important calling is to stop pointing fingers. Maybe it is not the liberals or the conservative we should blame. Maybe it is not the government or the immigrants or the extremists or the terrorists or even our wayward parents. We are they. We are to faithfully tend the garden we have been given. We are to receive those God sends our way. We are to make sure that when God walks down our street and stops at our house we do not miss God.

How much easier to point fingers at those other folk over there. It’s just too hard otherwise to consider our role and responsibility to the vineyard, to consider what it means to be a tenant in this year of 2011 here at Genesis church?

The call to fidelity, which means tending the vineyard, begins at home. It does not end here but it starts here. To participate in the church is to risk an encounter like that moment when the prophet Nathan confronted King David after he had taken another man’s wife and foretold the fateful words, “Thou are the man.”
Oh, if we could come to church assured that the enemy is not us, that we are not the man or the woman on whom God’s kingdom depends or on whom God’s judgment falls!

One of our greatest challenges in this matter of divine judgment may be that we live in a society that tends to fear judgment. The “problem’ is always somewhere else other than here. The “sin” is always with folks other than us.
A visitor recalled sitting in a small, rural church in the mountains of North Carolina during a particularly pointed sermon. The preacher, as the visitor recalled, was preaching a text from Jeremiah in which the prophet catalogs Israel’s multiple sins. And then the preacher, as preachers often do, began to talk about the sins of the congregation, condemning them for their assorted instances of their sin. Then, as if the preacher sensed that the attentiveness of his congregation was wandering the preacher blurted out, “I’m talking about you! And you, and you and you!”
This was a powerful moment. It is so easy to have a sermon bounce off our head and hit someone in the pew behind us. “I’m talking about you!” leaves no rebound.
I wonder if Jesus is reminding us that ‘what we would do’ is not what God would do. In the realms of God, judgment will not look like it does in the human realm. The vineyard will bear another kind of fruit. The old ways will be crushed beneath an open tombstone and death, where will thy sting be, then?

All we can say is what we know: God will forgive seventy times seven. God will welcome the prodigal home. God will open the banquet to tax collectors and prostitutes. God will raise the dead to new life. What we know about what God would do is that it is completely incredible, unreasonable, and irrational; not at all what we would do.

And we need not be reminded that many of us are lousy gardeners. Not all. Some of us can plant anything and make it grow. But Jesus said we all have been given this plot of land. It was in good shape when God gave it to us. Now our task is the same as those who came before us. It is to leave the garden better than we found it.
If this is true it will take all of us to make this garden lush and green and productive again. Hopefully we will work to reach out and join hands and hearts to our brothers and sisters and even strangers and enemies. Isn’t this the kind of world we want to leave for those who follow us?
Maybe it is about us after all.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. One God, now and forever. Amen.

Additional resources:
“Pulpit Resource,” Volume 36, Number 4, 2008, pgs. 5-8.
“Lectionary Homiletics,” Volume XIX, Number 6, pgs. 11-12.

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