Proper 22A
October 4, 2020

O God of mercy and forgiveness, may we have the wisdom, the strength, and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth – come when it may and cost what it will.

I have a little exercise for you. Many of us are out of shape from not being able to sing together, so I’m going to say some opening words of various hymns and see if you can complete the first line –do it at home if you’re joining us by livestream. Those of you at home can even sing your parts! If I say: “Amazing grace,” you’d know that the next words are: “how sweet the sound.” If I say: “The Church’s one foundation,” you’d say: “is Jesus Christ her Lord.” If I say: “O God our help in ages past,” you’d say: “our hope for years to come.” If I say: “Immortal invisible,” you’d say: “God only wise.” If I say: “This is the day that the Lord has made,” you’d say:, “Let us rejoice and be glad in it.” One more time: “This is the day that the Lord has made. (Let us rejoice and be glad in it.)”

Some of you might be thinking that there doesn’t feel like there’s much to rejoice or be glad about. The news this past week has gone from bad to worse – we’ve sunk to some new lows, at least in the six decades of my lifetime. So the terrible news in our Gospel lesson seems ripped from the headlines: people entrusted with growing and harvesting good fruit in the vineyard, beat, stone and murder those that the faraway vineyard owner has sent to collect, even the owner’s son, whom Christians everywhere are trained to hear as standing for Jesus. Indeed, the reading ends with the desire of the leaders to arrest Jesus, but they were afraid of the crowds.

This week’s parable in the Gospel of Matthew comes right on the heels of last week’s parable. That one that ended with the shocking idea that tax collectors and prostitutes are entering into the realm of God ahead of the religious leaders of the people, because they trusted John the Baptist’s call to “bear fruit worthy of repentance” and they came clean, which means they stopped colluding with the occupying empire at the expense of the people of God. Matthew reports that Jesus said to the chief priests and elders: “you did not change your minds and trust John the Baptist” and then with hardly a breath, Jesus continued, “Listen to another parable.” He’s making another attempt to get them to come clean and change their minds.

The parable he tells is well-known. It’s based on the love song in Isaiah 5: “my beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill. My beloved dug it and cleared it of stones and planted it with choice vines, and built a watchtower in the middle of it and hewed out a wine vat, expecting good grapes, but the grapes were wild…[and a few verses later, what I read last week] my beloved expected justice [that is, “equitable and generative relationships” [1] among the people] but instead got bloodshed; my beloved expected right-relationship, but heard a loud cry from those being oppressed.” In Matthew, the interpretive move makes clear that this parable of the vineyard is not so much about the failure of the fruit, but about the failure of those left in charge to take care of the fruit. In Isaiah, the placement of this love song sets the context for what comes next, which is the call of the Holy One to Isaiah, to speak truth to the people whose moral compass has been corrupted by magnets of drunkenness and other excesses, to speak truth to a people who never give a thought to the plan of the Holy One or notice the design of loving kindness.

Jewish New Testament scholar, Amy-Jill Levine writes that in Jesus’ time, parables were teaching tools intended not to give answers but to extend invitations to “inspire and humble, challenge and comfort.” [2] And if Gospel means good news, we might wonder where is the good news in this disturbing story of an absent and naïve landowner and the violent tenants, a disturbing story of escalating anger and violence that has compromised the harvest of good fruit and result in beating, stoning and murder ? What is this story telling us about how to figure out what really matters in the communal quest for abundant life, especially in the midst of the Empire, whether that empire is Ancient Egypt, Babylon, Rome, or contemporary US?

What this Gospel story is not, is a story about the problem of Judaism, of Jewish thought or teachings. It’s an intramural argument about how to be faithfully Jewish, to live in the future shalom of the Holy One during times of national sorrows and tribulations, during times of great turbulence and suffering. We Christians have made this lesson our own, but we make a grievous error when we make this about Christianity versus Judaism. Even for Matthew’s community, this was not about Christians versus Jews. This was (and still is) about how to be faithful when everything’s coming apart.

I always want to point to the end of our Gospel portion and say that chief priests (or Sadducees) and Pharisees (or proto-rabbis) were two separate and distinct “parties” within early first century Judaism, with different philosophies and methods of practicing faith. A truer contemporary reading might go: “When the leaders of the Catholics and the Protestants, or when the leaders of the Democrats and Republicans, or when the high church and low church Episcopalians heard Jesus’ parables, they realized that he was speaking about them. They felt indicted. They rarely agreed on anything, but they agreed that they wanted to arrest him (because he was stretching every last one of their nerves) but they feared the crowds because the crowds regarded Jesus as a prophet.” In other words, Jesus’ teaching was troubling across a wide range of religious leaders. I can’t say often enough that we do violence to the text, and to Jesus himself, when we fail to understand this or any other mention of religious folks as a critique of ourselves and our own leadership, of our own fruit production and distribution.

It seems to me that the whole story hinges on the question that Jesus asks, “when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants? They said, “He will put those wretches to a wretched death and lease the vineyard to other tenants.” Jesus’ responds, “wrong! Do you not remember hymn (that is, psalm) 118? The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing and it is amazing in our eyes.” You might not know what comes next in that hymn, so I’ll tell you. It’s “This is the day that the Lord has made. Let us be glad and rejoice in it!”

The Good News in this difficult story is that God will redeem what has been rejected. God’s mercy and forgiveness will endure, God will deliver the people, and will not abandon them to the grave. The inclusion of Psalm 118 changes everything. Jesus is pointing out to the religious leaders of both parties that “they have internalized imperial violence as their theology” [3] rather than trusting in the mercy and forgiveness of the Holy One. He wants them to change their minds. To paraphrase my favorite Bible geek blogger, Mark Davis, for Matthew’s community, including Psalm 118 here makes a claim that God’s way of dealing with failures of faithful people living under an oppressive Empire is by redemption, mercy, and forgiveness, not by vengeance. This verse is Matthew’s argument that the early community of Jesus followers is indeed being faithful to the Scriptures, by trusting in God’s ability to restore the rejected stone to a place of prominence. [4]

According to Matthew, it matters how people behave – how people produce and distribute the harvest. What are the fruits of the realm of God, also known as the fruits of the Spirit, in Biblical terms? The Apostle Paul listed them in his letter to the Galatians. He was not inventing this list – he was remembering and reciting the fruits of the realm of God. The fruits are: love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, fidelity, gentleness, and self-control.

In every conflicted and even violent situation that I can think of (and they are coming fast and furious these days) we can ask and usually answer helpful questions like: How can we sow love in the midst of this hatred? Where do we recognize ever-present grace in a terrible situation? What would increase the well-being of the participants in this conflict? Can we bear with the hard work a little longer (or do we need to take a step back and take a rest)? What would be the kindest response? Where is the most morally excellent path – to use Thoreau’s words: “the path, no matter how narrow or crooked, on which you can walk with love and reverence?” What will help us grow fidelity and gentleness at the same time? How can we reduce our own reckless behaviors? As we struggle to figure out the next right thing to do, we can ask ourselves, what is the loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, good, faithful, gentle, self-controlled thing to do next? As long as we have breath, we have time to remember that “This, too, is the day that the Lord has made. (We will rejoice and be glad in it.) This is the day that we can give thanks for Emmanuel (God with us), because this is a community that helps us to pray again for the wisdom, the strength and the courage to do the next right thing.

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