8-18-19 Readings & Sermon

A reading from Isaiah.

Let me sing for my beloved my love song concerning his vineyard.

My beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill.

He dug it and cleared it of stones and planted it with choice vines.

He built a watchtower in the midst of it and hewed out a wine vat in it.

He expected it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes.

And now inhabitants of Jerusalem and people of Judah judge between me and my vineyard.

What more was there to do for my vineyard that I have not done in it?

When I expected it to yield grapes, why did it yield wild grapes?

And now I will tell you what I will do to my vineyard.

I will remove its hedge and it shall be devoured.

I will break down its wall and it shall be trampled down.

I will make it a waste, it shall not be pruned or hoed, and it shall be overgrown with briars and thorns.

I will also command the clouds that they rain no rain upon it.

For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, and the people of Judah are his pleasant planting.

He expected justice, but saw bloodshed, righteousness, but heard a cry, the word of the Lord.

A reading from Hebrews.

By faith the people passed through the Red Sea as if it were dry land.

But when the Egyptians attempted to do so, they were drowned.

By faith the walls of Jericho fell after they had been encircled for seven days.

By faith Rahab the prostitute did not perish with those who were disobedient, because she had received the spies in peace.

And what more should I say?

For time would fail me to tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets, who, through faith, conquered kingdoms, administered justice, obtained promises, shut the mouths of lions, quenched raging fire, escaped the edge of the sword, won strength out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight.

Women received their dead by resurrection.

Others were tortured, refusing to accept release, in order to obtain a better resurrection.

Others suffered mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment.

They were stoned to death, they were sawn in two, they were killed by the sword, they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, persecuted, tormented, of whom the world was not worthy.

They wandered in deserts and mountains and in caves and holes in the ground.

Yet all these, though they were commended for their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better so that they would not, apart from us, be made perfect.

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him, endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.

The word of the Lord.

From now on, five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three.

They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter, and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law, and daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.

He also said to the crowds, When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, It is going to rain, and so it happens.

And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, There will be scorching heat, and it happens.

You hypocrites, you know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?

The gospel of the Lord.

Every day, everybody knows things are bad.

It's a depression.

Everybody out of work or scared of losing their job.

The dollar buys a nickel's worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter, punks are running wild in the street, and there's no one anywhere that seems to know what to do with us.

We sit in a house as slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller, and all we say is please at least leave us alone in our living rooms.

Let me have my toaster and TV and my steel belted radials, and I won't say anything.

Well, I'm not going to leave you alone.

I want you to get mad.

I don't want you to riot.

I don't want you to write to your congressman because, well, I wouldn't know what to tell you to write.

I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crying in the streets.

All I know is first, you've got to get mad.

You've got to say, I am a human being.

My life is value.

So I want you to get up now and yell.

Things have got to change, my friends.

You've got to get mad.

You've got to say, I am mad, and I'm not going to take it anymore.

These are the words of the news anchorman Howard Beale from the 1976 Academy Award-winning novel network.

Maybe words of a fictional movie that is, well, older than I am.

But 43 years later, it seems like not much has changed.

The world around us is crazy.

But are we to passively sit while it goes by simply watching the world turn?

Or are we to be outraged and then to get engaged?

I've heard more than one friend recently say to me, the world is on fire as we hear of the news of radiation concerns after an explosion in Russia.

We continue to witness mass shootings that terrorize America.

And then there's things like extreme glacier melts and Greenland.

And that doesn't begin to address the fires going on in our own individual lives.

What does it all mean?

And Jesus asks, why do you not know how to interpret the present time?

I don't know about you, but as I read and reread today's passages, I can't help but feel Jesus is questioning today as much as he was questioning 2,000 years ago.

The world just seems to be one hot mess.

How do we understand these current crises and how do we make sense of it all?

And then on top of that, what is God's role in all of this?

Is God the one calling down this fire?

Is this some wrath of God?

Or is God completely removed from it all, absent from all of our struggles?

Or is somehow God intimately involved with bringing correction, justice, and mercy?

And then on top of that, what is the church's role in response?

Are we supposed to separate ourselves from all of this craziness?

Or are we supposed to fight back?

Are we supposed to ignore it all and focus inward on our own spiritual journeys?

Or are we supposed to counter this destruction?

The reading from Isaiah is one depiction, one analogy of this world gone wild, a vineyard destroyed.

The vintner took great care to build up this vineyard.

The vintner chose the right vines for the climate and the soil to which the vines would be planted, tended the plants as they established themselves.

The vintner was so hopeful for a good harvest that the vintner built the wine vests even before the first harvest came.

But instead of good grapes which the Vintner had planned for, wild, inedible grapes grew.

What a disappointment and grief the Vintner must have felt.

Did the Vintner yell, I'm not going to take this anymore.

Possibly.

The Vintner had worked so hard for one thing, but instead got something entirely different.

God continually plans, develops, plants, and tends the world for fruits of justice, mercy, and love to grow.

And yet so often the weeds of injustice, selfishness, and hatred seem to be springing up around us.

This Isaiah passage was a warning to the Israelites that the vineyard God so carefully cultivated would become a wild place because of the bloodshed and unrighteousness of the people.

The vintner is the one who appears to advance the destruction of the vineyard.

And this leads me to ask what is actually being destroyed here?

Is God implying that there is a destruction of people, of rotten people, or of rotten and sinful characteristics?

When read in context with the rest of Scripture, I tend to believe that it is the latter of the two.

God does not set out to destroy humanity, but destroys what destroys us.

God does what God can to eliminate that continued growth that hurts the well-being of God's creation.

But God does not intend or try to hurt God's creation itself.

This passage can be read with as much of a promise as a warning.

It is a promise that wherever undesirable weeds grow, God is not the one cultivating them.

The vintner does not nurture inedible grapes, nor does God nurture injustice.

The inedible grapes of the vineyard will be destroyed.

Jesus also speaks of a type of destruction in our gospel passage.

Jesus longs to call down fire, but is less a fire that destroys everything, leaving nothing left, than it is a fire that refines, leaving behind what is good and pure.

Fire can burn, fire can ravage a whole forest, destroy homes, consume everything in its path.

Fire can take life, but not all fire takes life.

The fire that Jesus speaks of is a fire that refines, restores, and renews.

Think the refiner's fire that separates the impurities from precious metals, or the fire that is needed for certain tree seeds to be released.

Trees like the long lodgewood pole pine, the eucalyptus and the banaski require fires for gestation.

These plants have serentonious cones of fruit that are completely sealed with resin.

Those cones can only open to release the seeds after the heat of a fire has physically melted the resin away.

Some fires do not destroy, but simply make room for new life.

This is the same idea that Jesus then refers to when he mentions the baptism in the next line.

Baptism is a baptism into death, but also a baptism into rising again in new life.

It speaks of a resurrection.

Jesus says these words as he is making his way to Jerusalem.

He knows that there will be a time of death coming soon, a time of destruction, but also a time of new life, of resurrection.

So what do these passages say about God?

First, it reminds me that God does not give up.

At first glance, it may sound like the wintner just walks away from the promise of good grapes.

But within the context of the whole scripture, we know that God keeps trying, keeps fighting for this world that God created.

Through Noah, Abraham, Moses, Ruth and Esther, the prophets, the apostles, and most significantly through becoming incarnate God's self, God shows that God does not simply let creation run amok, overgrowing with sin and brokenness.

But instead, God continually cultivates new vineyards, new places of hope for the kingdom to be realized.

Secondly, these passages show that God is on the side of justice and mercy.

Throughout the beginning of the book of Isaiah, the prophet is calling out the unjust ways that in how the Israelites had acted, how they had not been on the side of the oppressed, how they had not come to the aid of the poor, the children, and the widows.

Those unjust, unrighteous ways of living are coming to an end.

There is no room for that in God's vineyard.

What do these passages then ask of us?

They ask what is being cultivated in us, edible or inedible grapes.

Or another way of saying it, what impurities would the fire burn away from our lives?

And what would be left afterwards?

Could be argued that the more that we work towards living a merciful, just filled, and righteous life now, the less the refiner's fire has work to do on us later.

While likely not a literal fire, there are aspects of our lives that will be removed from us as we grow closer to God, one way or the other.

This process may not always be pain-free, though, as I suspect we all have grown quite attached to some of our impurities.

But the process will ultimately bring new and better and fuller life.

The world is a hot mess.

It makes us want to yell, I am mad and I'm not going to take it anymore.

So go ahead, get mad, don't be passive.

Instead, go forward and destroy those vineyards that only produce rubbish grapes of hatred and fear, insecurity, doubt and oppression.

And so, how are we to interpret these times?

We interpret the need for repentance from unjust and unrighteous behaviors in our own lives and in the world around us.

We interpret the coming of death and of new life.

We interpret the ways we see that God is not giving up on us, but cultivating new vineyards where good fruit will grow.