sermon preached
at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Bellingham, WA
by the
Rev. Josh Hosler, Associate Priest for Adult Formation
Proper 22A [Track 2],
The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost, October 8, 2017
This sermon began life as a seminary paper. That work, which is more academic in nature, can be found here.
Let
us imagine for a moment that we are residents of ancient Judah. The setting is
Jerusalem in the year 723 B.C.E. Fear is in the air, for the Assyrians are
threatening to overrun both the northern kingdom of Israel, against which we
hold no small grudge, and the southern kingdom of Judah, where we live and
where we believe—or at least hope—that our identity as the keepers of God’s
temple will protect us from foreign invasion.
 |
| Isaiah on the street corner? (from https://static.pexels.com/photos/ 363156/pexels-photo-363156.jpeg) |
From
its first notes, we recognize it as a familiar and rather hackneyed song about
a vineyard. This is surprising fare from a prophet who has gained a reputation
for gloom and doom. But the song is a guilty pleasure, and Isaiah is a good
singer, so we stop to listen.
The
first lyrics we indeed know well, for we have heard them sung often at weddings
by a paid musician or a musically inclined uncle.[1] We can even sing along
with verse 1: “I will sing now for my dear friend a song about him and his
vineyard. My dear friend has a vineyard on a fertile hill.”[2] The lyrics are pleasant to
the ear in our native Hebrew, with a singsong quality:
Ashirah na
lididi shirat dodi. L’charmo kerem hayah lididi b’qeren ben-shamen.
When
we hear “lididi” and “dodi,” it may as well be “do wah diddy diddy” to us … but
these are not nonsense syllables. Both words mean “dear one” or “beloved.” The
man is setting up a house for his bride, and as the music modulates, we expect
to hear about a couple of kids running in the yard. So, imagine instead the
Beatles’ “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.”
“And
he expected a yield of grapes … but it yielded nasty, stinking grapes.” Whoa,
whoa, hang on. This isn’t a love song at all: it’s a cheating song! What began
as “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” has become “I Heard It through the Grapevine.”
We
move into the second section of what will turn out to be a suite, and it is
here that Isaiah changes rhythm and even vocal tone to signify that it is no longer
the best man who is speaking. The honeymoon is over, and the bridegroom
himself, all worked up in grief and anger, steps up to the microphone for his
recitative: “And now, residents of Jerusalem … judge, if you please, between me
and my vineyard.” Isaiah has dragged us into court, and we are placed on the
bench to hear the farmer’s grievances: “What more could I have done for my
vineyard that I have not already done? Why, when I expected a yield of grapes,
did it yield nasty, stinking grapes?”
Now,
suddenly conscripted into service as magistrates, we wonder: how can a vineyard
be responsible for its own crop? Could the farmer have done more after all? Did
he do something to make his bride feel unloved? Or is this mixed metaphor about
to break down completely? We are given no time to review the evidence before a
loud voice proclaims the sentence:
So now, listen up! I will declare to you what I am
doing to my vineyard. I will take away its hedge, and it will be destroyed. I
will break down its wall, and it will become a trampled-down place. And I will
lay it waste. It will not be pruned, and it will not be hoed, and thorn bushes
and other rough growth will come up …
The
court has become a divorce court, and this relationship seems to be over. We
move from the soulful heartbreak of “I Heard It through the Grapevine” into a
bitter breakup song, a country song, perhaps “My Give a Damn’s Busted.” The
farmer is leaving his bride, and he will allow the vineyard to go to seed in
whatever way nature takes its course. “… And I will command the dark clouds not
to rain on it!” Here is yet another surprise. This is no literal farmer and no literal
husband. Only God can control the weather.
 |
| 8th century B.C.E., after the Kingdom of Israel had split in two. Note the menacing Assyrians to the north! |
“And
the man of Judah is the plantation of his delight.”
With
this line, Isaiah cuts us to the bone. There we stand on the corner, tried and
convicted, though we don’t even understand yet what the charges are. All this
time Isaiah has been using God’s voice to condemn us! This is not a love song, or a cheating song, or a breakup song,
or even a “God Bless Judah” patriotic anthem. This is a condemnation of us for blatant sins against God and
humanity.
But
what have we done to deserve this condemnation? Isaiah saves the charges for
the very end, and here he uses one of the most famous examples of wordplay in
the Hebrew Bible: “And [God] expected mishpat—justice—but
behold, mishpah—bloodshed! ‘Tz’daqa’—righteousness—but behold, ‘tz’aqa’—a cry of distress!” The words
stick in our ears as they stick in Isaiah’s throat. We have cheated on God. We
have produced stinking grapes, rather than the sweet grapes that God took every
possible measure to assure and which we had no right not to produce. God loves us and longs for us, but what have we
done? We stand guilty as charged … right there on the street corner in
Jerusalem, surrounded by beggars, widows, and orphans.
Is
all hope lost? No. For as we prayed in today’s Collect, God is always readier to
hear than we to pray, and to give more than we either desire or deserve. The
harvest will come, but not in the way we expected.
Jesus
said, “Listen to another parable. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard
…” Sound familiar? After three quarters of a millennium, the new prophet Jesus
stands in Jerusalem—right in the reconstructed temple!—developing the song
further. The behavior of the tenants is deplorable. Their logic is
ridiculous—how will killing the heir get them the inheritance? Yet this is what
they do. What treatment do they deserve from the landowner? Death, we cry, of
course!
But
we have seen the enemy, and he is us. We have cheated on God. We have killed
the Lord of Love. We have concentrated our wealth among very few in the name of
“progress.” We have wrecked our planet, and that is affecting the poor first. We
continue to allow all sorts of injustice. We have tried to take God’s Kingdom
by force, when force will accomplish, at best, a sickly parody of what God
desires for us. By our fruits we are known.[3]
Is
all hope lost? No. For we are God’s beloved planting, and God is always ready
to give more than we either desire or deserve. The harvest will come, but not
in a way that anybody could have expected.
Now,
we should probably let go of the husband-and-wife metaphor at this point.
Otherwise we just might wind up thinking of God as an abusive spouse, and overidentify
ourselves with wanton strumpets or some other ridiculous sexist term. Let’s focus
instead on the humility to which the vineyard song calls us. We are God’s
beloved creation, made for the purpose of love. Creation is like a spillover of
divine love into billions and billions of consciousnesses, made in the image of
God—made to love and to create and to give joy. When we fail to do that for
which we were made, we yield stinking grapes.
But
the vintner will see that the good harvest comes. “I am the vine,” says Jesus,
“and you are the branches. Abide in me.” You
are God’s beloved. Do you get
that—really get that? We are invited to be
the harvest, and to live eternally in God together. “Eternally” doesn’t just
mean after we die; it also means right
now.
Now,
I don’t know about your own experience of God’s love, but let me tell you mine:
it was only once I truly understood myself to have yielded stinking grapes that
I felt God at work within me, redeeming my life. Sin-and-redemption is not a
narrative that our culture is comfortable with, but it is a narrative that
defines who I am in relationship to my creator. When I was in the pit, God
jumped down into it with me and held me and called me “beloved.” I didn’t
become a better person through logic or willpower or shame, or in order to get
something from God. I became a better person because I am loved. “We love
because He first loved us.”[4]
And
so we give love to people who need it, not just people who deserve it. We use
the talents that God has given us in joyful ways—not calculated for maximum
efficiency, but with abandon, as labors of love. And we give away our money,
especially in a culture like ours where money has the final say in most
matters. For the sake of our souls, we must
practice not needing as much of it! We seek out the joy in giving away our wealth—not
to meet a budget, but to help support the work that the Holy Spirit is already
engaged in.
As
I look around St. Paul’s, I see good grapes ripening for the harvest. And it’s
not like we are incapable of producing filthy, stinking grapes—after all, this
story is for us, not just some kingdom next door. But God has given us more
than we could ever deserve. If we have lack, it’s not God’s fault. It’s either
because we don’t see the abundance, or because some other human beings are
keeping the abundance from us.
So
let’s be a different kind of human beings, relaxing into God’s generosity.
Let’s share, and in that sharing, let’s grow more closely together in love. For
that, my friends, is God’s dream for this vineyard, and we are the planting of
God’s delight. Amen.
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