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Chapel Sermons and Homilies

The Struggle for God's Vineyard

October 2, 2005

Rev. Thelma Megill-Cobbler, STS

Adjunct Pastoral Assistant

Matt. 21:33-46

33"Listen to another parable: There was a landowner who planted a vineyard. He put a wall around it, dug a winepress in it and built a watchtower. Then he rented the vineyard to some farmers and went away on a journey. 34When the harvest time approached, he sent his servants to the tenants to collect his fruit.

35"The tenants seized his servants; they beat one, killed another, and stoned a third. 36Then he sent other servants to them, more than the first time, and the tenants treated them the same way. 37Last of all, he sent his son to them. 'They will respect my son,' he said.

38"But when the tenants saw the son, they said to each other, 'This is the heir. Come, let's kill him and take his inheritance.' 39So they took him and threw him out of the vineyard and killed him.

40"Therefore, when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?"

41"He will bring those wretches to a wretched end," they replied, "and he will rent the vineyard to other tenants, who will give him his share of the crop at harvest time."

42Jesus said to them, "Have you never read in the Scriptures:

" 'The stone the builders rejected
has become the capstone;
the Lord has done this,
and it is marvelous in our eyes'?

43"Therefore I tell you that the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit. 44He who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces, but he on whom it falls will be crushed."

45When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard Jesus' parables, they knew he was talking about them. 46They looked for a way to arrest him, but they were afraid of the crowd because the people held that he was a prophet."

+ In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

This is an old, old story about they way God calls to himself a people and the way people thwart that call. The chief characters in the parable are the owner and the tenants. And, in the background, but not least is the vineyard. We begin with a storyline that is lovely and pastoral, and wind up with a tale of bloodshed and heartbreak. Then comes a blast of judgment, and warning for religious leaders then and, I believe, for religious leaders now. Oh, and something about a stone.

A quote: "Dirt," I would prefer to say earth, "has always been seductive-the smell of it, the feel of it, the sight of it, and certainly the possessing of it." That's from the Bible. Not this bible, but The Wine Bible. I prepared for this sermon in a number of ways, including a field trip to a vineyard and winery. Is the earth of a vineyard seductive? Let me tell you what I saw, because it's harvest time out there for some grape varieties. And the ripened golden grapes which had bathed in the sun and in the cooling breeze and the rain, which had been fed sparingly by the sandy soil, and by sugar from the foliage were being hand picked by the ton, and were piled deep and high. And they looked so, so good. They were within reach, just there for the.taking. No, I didn't take any. Imagining the sweetness condensed from the drier growing season made it that much harder to let the delight of the eyes stop there. But the produce was not mine, even to touch, let alone take.

Yes, the vineyard seemed a seductive, alluring place and also a miraculous place. "Most of the wine" they told me "is made in the vineyard." What they meant is that all the stages of human processing of the grapes, including fermentation, are secondary. It's the vineyard and nature, along with careful tending of the vines, which produce the grapes. And the quality of the grapes is pivotal-relatively little can be adjusted after the fact. When I told our guide why I was there, she spoke about Jesus' miracle. "Jesus turned water into wine," she volunteered helpfully. "Isn't it interesting," I said, "to think that water is being turned into wine here, too, but it takes a lot longer." You see, the peculiarities of the earth and the wind and the exposure to sun and rain slowly make their mark on the grapes, whose character will be subtly distinguishable from any other. It is that essence which will be transmuted into wine. It's like a miracle in slow motion. Or maybe Jesus' miracle at Cana was a kind of speeding up of the process. A shortcut of sorts, by the one through whom all things came to be.producing wine like no other.

The young vineyard of our parable was at least potentially a seductive, alluring place. At the outset Jesus asks us to imagine the owner at work. It seems the beginning of a long, loving relationship. And how relationships begin is important. The owner provides for the vineyard, doing everything that it needs to flourish.

First he plants the vineyard. This takes intentionality, choosing the right location, making the investment in new vines made from cuttings of productive older vines. Planting is thus an act of great care, and the marriage of the right elements will produce the desired results. Then the owner protects the new vineyard with a fence all around. He provides a winepress and vat, dug, probably into stone. Then he sets up a tower for further protection. The owner has every expectation that the vineyard will yield, and that the yield will be good. Jesus' hearers would be familiar with the vineyard as a metaphor for Israel, the people of God's love. They would make the connection between the all-providing owner and God, just as surely we all know that the fruits of the earth get to play the sexy part in more than one biblical text.

The owner then leaves this state of the art, if young, vineyard in the hands of tenants. We can suppose they are competent, given his great care in setting up everything else. He trusts them to care for the tender vines, almost as you would vulnerable children, but as stewards on his behalf. He travels to another region. None of this would be startling in the first century, or to the hearers of the parable.

What is startling is the behavior of the tenants. When the time of harvest draws near, the owner reasserts his authority and lays claim to the produce through emissaries. The tenants, however, mistreat and kill the emissaries, first one slave of the owner, then another. The tenants seem to think they are in charge and can do whatever they will. They have corrupted their relationship with the legitimate owner. Their reasoning and expressed motives may seem rather baffling to us, even if we understand the allure of possessing a plot of earth. But in the first century, if some time had passed since the owner had left, they might, as occupants, have some stake in the land and a conceivable claim to it themselves. Jesus' listeners could have assumed the passage of time, of more than a single agricultural cycle. This is because Jewish law required that the produce was not to be used for three years. In the fourth year, it was to be offered to the Lord, and so the harvest from which the owner could first benefit was in the fifth year. Even today, a young vine is barely more than a shoot in the first year, in the second year it really branches out, and in the third year it yields fruit, but the grapes are not useable. But in the fourth year there is an abundant harvest. Now if all this is so, then the tenants' hopes to frustrate the owner's claim were not at all unrealistic, only greedy and bloodthirsty. It's the lush, abundant harvest they want for themselves, and the vineyard which produced it. They want it now, and with it, they want to secure their own future.

The owner persists in sending emissaries, and the beating and death of many more follows. Then the owner then decides that enough is enough. He will send someone with more authority to clear up the mess. "They will respect my son," he says. While the murderous momentum suggests the riskiness of the move, we should not think the owner is simply being foolish. The story doesn't even say the son took on this mission alone.

But the insurrection of the tenants of the vineyard only intensifies. "Here comes the heir," they think. It appears to them that the only thing standing in their way, the only thing which keeps them from possession of this plot of earth, is the son. Perhaps they think the father has died; perhaps they think the son has been granted ownership. Either way, they attempt to take the ownership by force. They gang up on the son, and cast him out of the vineyard like so much refuse, and kill him.

After this violent climax, Jesus asks his hearers for a verdict. Then he turns the judgment that will surely take place in the story on its hearers: the kingdom will be taken from you and given to a people who will produce the fruits of it. Who is this "you"? The crowd itself? The Jewish people, as has sometimes been suggested, and as the verse in isolation seems to mean? No, the text says the people regard Jesus as a prophet. We learn from the verses that follow whom Jesus intends by "you"-the religious leaders perceived that he was telling this parable against them. They were stung by Jesus' pronouncement.

By this point in Matthew's gospel Jesus has outraged the religious leaders of his day by acting and teaching as one with authority. His words and deeds embody the kingdom, a new rule, the reign of God, suggesting that the present powers will have to yield. Again and again he tells the crowds, "You have heard it said" which means, your religious leaders have told you. Do you hear the word "but" coming? Then his pronouncement on the subject begins, "but I say to you".And it's not easy to predict a pattern. Jesus relaxes some of the demands of the Sabbath, and fasting. But he tightens the restrictions on divorce, both compared to the Jewish law of his day, and compared to the secular laws of today. While in Jerusalem, where he tells this tale of the struggle for the vineyard, he treats the temple as a corrupt institution and drives out those who are buying and selling sacrificial doves to the poor, and other religious necessities.

What remains the one constant in all this is that Jesus wants his followers to live by his word, implying he is in a privileged position to convey God's will and that he is showing us a life lived by God's every word. Putting those who follow him in utter dependence on his word is nowhere more shocking than when he pronounces forgiveness. He has the audacity to act on God's behalf. Forgiveness, divine and human, offers us a new future which we have not earned by our past actions and attitudes. We don't deserve the mending of a relationship, but there is a new beginning anyway. And Jesus' way of associating with notorious sinners goes against the way we are taught to size up others and ourselves, and treat each other according to our deserts. People then as now spend much of our time trying to be upright according to what is socially correct, or else on our own terms, not wanting to be dependents (think: tenants) of anybody. Jesus teaches us to pray for the Father's forgiveness, he announces it and acts it out; he announces that the last and the lost, who know their need of God, will be forgiven and enter the kingdom first. For all these acts of authority, he is driven onto a cross.

In the story of the struggle for the vineyard, Jesus predicts the religious leaders' complicity in Good Friday. And they do want to seize him, though they still lack the opportune moment. But Jesus upsets our comfortable patterns as well.

For an old, old story tells us that we have not lived by God's word. God planted a garden, charging the man and woman he had created to care for it, and for the creatures among whom they lived. All their needs were provided for. They could eat the fruit of any tree, save one. That was one of God's words by which they were to live. They were God's stewards, but they wanted to be more. The serpent told the woman, eat this fruit and you will be like God. And she looked at the fruit in a new way, becoming aware of how it delighted her eyes. It looked good enough to eat. It was just there for the.taking. And she took and ate, and the man took and ate, and human beings have been deciding what is good and evil ever since.

And that attitude is the root of any number of ways sin gets expressed. Sin isn't sin because "nice people don't do that." Sin usurps God's vineyard, is trying to be like God, is our deciding what is good and evil, is any way of trying to secure our own future instead of entrusting ourselves to God, and the rule of God Jesus brings. When explaining particular sins, Luther points out how they stem from breaking the first commandment, "you shall have no other gods." And so the breaking of a particular commandment is an expression of our failure to fear, love and trust God.

This is of course why Good Friday is inevitable, because human beings do not fear, love and entrust ourselves to God by our own reason or strength. We do not welcome any rule but our own. The parable holds a warning for religious leaders today, if, in their confusion-and the leadership of some Protestant denominations seems beset by confusion and unable to offer solid guidance on a number of vital and controversial issues-they renege on their responsibility to call us to depend in life and death on Christ, God's Word, and instead simply allow us to rule ourselves on our own terms or on the basis of any other word or testimony.

In one of his more charitable moods, Luther made clear that the Jewish people, then or now, are not to be blamed for the crucifixion. Luther said we are the ones who rebel against God and that our sins drive Jesus to the cross. We are in bondage to sin, as the general confession of sin says, and cannot free ourselves. Jesus, who forgave sins, is found among sinners in life, and in the sinner's place in death. He bears the consequences of our rebellion, as the Son sent by the Father who will not give up his vineyard. He is cast outside the city and hung between two robbers.

But death cannot hold him. The cryptic saying about the stone is there as a signal of the Son and heir's victory. The Old Testament illustration is of a rejected stone becoming the cornerstone. The site where Jesus' cross stood, then used as a refuse dump and for carrying out executions, is alongside an abandoned quarry. Abandoned quarry, rejected stone. But just here sin and death are defeated. Jesus is vindicated, and it is amazing in our eyes.

The usurpers cannot prevail. The heir overcomes death and the rebellion, and lays claim to the vineyard, a strangely alluring and miraculous place and a people planted by God, who are objects of his tender care and who will by grace and the Holy Spirit, yield a bountiful harvest. With the harvest comes the wine, the best saved for last, for the final feast. We hurry toward that feast each time we come to the Lord's table. And Christ graciously comes to us here and now in the bread of the earth and the fruit of the vine, giving us already the wine that is like no other.

+ In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.