Sermon: 21st Sunday after Pentecost

Twice we hear about a vineyard in our readings for today. Twice we hear about a disappointing vineyard. First, from the prophet Isaiah, God plants a vineyard on hill, clears it of stones, plants it with the choicest of grapes. But that vineyard doesn’t turn out the way God desired, God does not get what God expected. There is no justice, there is only bloodshed. There is no righteousness, there is only rubbish. And then we hear the parable spoken by Jesus this morning, right on the heels of our texts for the last two weeks. It is the same leaders of the temple that were asking about authority last week, it is the same crowd that caused them to fear. Now Jesus tells another parable, this time about a vineyard. The people hearing his words would have remembered Isaiah’s vineyard, the one that did not yield what God expected.

For those of us that have heard this parable before, it might have been explained as a simple allegory. The tenants are those wicked leaders, the servants sent by that landowner are the prophets- so those wicked leaders beat them and send them away. Then, God finally sends God’s son, Jesus, and those wicked leaders kill him. Even the end of the parable says that those leaders, who were seeking to destroy what Jesus had been building realized with great anger that he was talking about them. They had been ignoring and silencing those people God sent. But if that is the only layer of this parable, then the sermon should end here. Because that means this parable is stuck in a time we no longer live in, and it doesn’t have anything to do with us.
I think that there is so much more to the parable of the vineyard than just a condemnation of those leaders that sought to oppress the people through their power. I think there is much more in this parable that speaks to us this morning- because in so many ways we have become those wicked tenants.

Every morning over the last week I turned on NPR, and I was bombarded with stories about the bailout. There were people appalled that we are giving money to those rich people on wall street, there were people who said that if we don’t do this, if we don’t bail out the market than the sky is going to fall, credit will grind to a halt, and we will find ourselves in the middle of the grapes of wrath. Economists have been saying for months that things have gotten as bad as they are going to get, and then another morning rolls around and someone is telling us that things have actually gotten worse. We’re in real trouble.

And we are. We’re in trouble bailing out wall-street, and we’re in trouble if we hadn’t. We’re in trouble, because things have gotten so far out of control, we have been tilling the land for so long, we have become so obsessed with credit and the access to credit, that we have become completely separated from the one who really owns the land. Like those wicked tenants, we have forgotten who owns the land on which we live, the one who owns those things for which we labor, our primary relationship is not with the giver, the landowner, our primary relationship has shifted to the stuff that is produced. And it is one big risky, frightening disappointment, isn’t it?

Brian Stoffregen suggests that the parable of those wicked tenants is most about our inherent selfishness. We don’t want to accept that God has authority over us, that what we have, all of it is from God, it isn’t from us. It isn’t about us. When we hear that God asks us to live differently, to shift our primary relationship from the stuff of the creator to the very author of creation, that is a threat to our very economic lives. When we start getting crazy and throwing around words like stewardship, suggesting that in order to free ourselves from this obsession with money and credit and things, we ought to give that first ten percent of time and talent and treasure to the one who blessed us with them in the first place, it is then that those selfish attitudes start to boil up within us, and we find ourselves considering that it might be easier to get rid of God than to give back some of the things of this life. Instead of returning the profits of the land to the landowner, those tenants start to believe that those profits are their own, that they deserve them, that the own them, and so those servants coming to take them away are really coming to steal what is rightfully theirs. So they beat them, and stone them, and finally they kill the last one.

When we start to use words like stewardship, I know that for some of us, our minds start to wander, and we begin making mental grocery lists or imagining what we are going to order for brunch. But, we would be fools if we didn’t talk about money this week. It is all anyone is talking about, our leaders voted for a seven hundred billion dollar bailout. Things have gotten so bad that we need to spend seven hundred billion dollars for a hope that things will improve. I can’t even comprehend how much money that is. I can’t even wrap my mind around that many zeroes.

You know, this is a hard lesson for me. But, here’s the gospel truth. Credit is all rubbish. It isn’t hope. There isn’t true power in credit. There isn’t true power in the stuff of the land. That is what those tenants didn’t understand, and that is the force we have to fight. That stuff isn’t going to save us. That stuff isn’t going to make us truly secure. It just can’t. The profits of the land will just make us more and more anxious, more and more afraid that someone is going to come and take it away from us. When our primary relationship, when the thing that is most important to us, when we invest all our hope for the future in the profit, than it is going to keep falling apart again and again and again.

But here is the hope my friends. As Paul writes from prison to the Philippians, all those gains, they are nothing compared to what we have found in Christ. That’s the good news, and I promise that it is deeper and stronger than anything you’ll hear from wall street. We are just stewards, managers, of the blessings of God. All creation, all profit, all abundance, comes from the hand of God, and we are just those who hold it for now. And we can white knuckle grip the profits of the land, we can kill the messengers who suggest a new way of living. We can keep putting all our hope and all our faith in money and the market and credit. We can care more about the produce and the profit than about God our landowner. And it will keep spiraling out of control. Or we can reimagine a different kind of market, a different kind of world. We can reimagine a world where our grip on the stuff of this life is not as white knuckled. When the profits and the credit and the money are all just blessings from God, not God himself. We can reimagine a world where the thing we desire most is not a relationship with creation but a relationship with the creator. A relationship not with the stuff, but with the one who knits us together in our mother’s womb. Friends, our attitude has to change. And, I don’t have any simple answers. I struggle to get there myself. I don’t know how to always be generous, how to always be good stewards. But I do know that we aren’t there now. That things are not as they ought to be.

But we can begin. We can begin by seeking to grow in our stewardship of the abundant blessings of God. We can seek to grow in our ability to let go, to give back, to loosen our grips on the profits. I know it is scary. I know it is threatening. But on the other side of the release of all this stuff, there is freedom. Freedom to live without anxiety and fear. I know the argument sounds weak. Give up some of what you have, give it back to God the landowner, and you will find a freedom that you will never get from wall-street. But, I promise that it is true. Because it is all loss, it is all rubbish compared to what we have found in Jesus Christ. Amen.