Tending The Vineyard

The Holy Gospel according to Matthew.

Glory to you, O Lord.

Jesus said, Listen to another parable.

There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a watchtower.

Then he leased it to tenants and went away.

When the harvest time had come, he sent his slaves to the tenants to collect his produce.

One of the tenants seized his slaves and beat one, killed another, and stoned another.

Again he sent other slaves more than the first, and the tenants treated them in the same way.

Finally the landowner sent his son to them, saying, They will respect my son.

But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, This is the heir, come, let us kill him and get his inheritance.

So they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him.

Now, when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?

Jesus said to they said to Jesus, The owner will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants, who will give him the produce at the harvest time.

Jesus said to them, Have you never read in the Scriptures, the stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone?

This was the Lord's doing, and it was amazing in our eyes.

Therefore I tell you, the dominion of God will be taken away from you, and given to a people that produces its fruits.

The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces, and it will crush any one on whom it falls.

When the chief priests and Pharisees heard his parables, they realized that he was speaking about them.

They wanted to arrest him, but they feared the crowds, because the people regarded him as a prophet.

The gospel of the Lord.

Praise to you, O Christ.

Please be seated.

Grace and peace to you from our Savior Jesus Christ.

Amen.

For our honeymoon back in 2000, Jenny and I backpacked across Europe, just two kids with oversized backpacks and a year rail pass.

We mostly stayed in hostels and on overnight trains, but we did get to stay with a few family friends along the way.

And that is how we wound up staying in Koblenz in western Germany, with a family friend named Mrs.

Sparvasser and her dog Humphrey.

Koblenz sits at the meeting of the Rhine and Mosul rivers, and both river valleys are lined with vineyards.

And each day, Mrs.

Sparvasser and Humphrey would drive us up and down those valleys, stopping at old castles and little cafes through village after village surrounded by grapevines.

And each night she would put on a wine tasting for us and teach us about wine.

She taught us that a Mosul wine and a rhine wine, even though the grapes may be grown only a short distance apart, could be remarkably different, depending on the soil, the exposure to the sun, the slopes, and the different way of tending the vines.

All of those things shaped what eventually found its way to our table.

Now, to that point in my life, most of my experience with wine was drinking two buck chuck from Trader Joe's.

So I remember being struck just by how much care and attention there was behind it all.

Mrs.

Sparvasser demonstrated in our daytime tours and our evening tastings that a vineyard is not simply a field where grapes happen to grow.

It's tended, the soil's prepared, the vines are trained and pruned and protected over decades, even centuries.

The grower pays attention to the sun and rain, to slope and season.

It requires patience, knowledge, care, and hope.

And all of this came back to me as I sat with our readings from Isaiah and Matthew for today, because they're both about vineyards.

And vineyards play an important role in the Bible.

And more often than not, when vineyards come up, they're used as an image for ancient Israel, for the people of God.

In our first reading from Isaiah, we hear what's called the Song of the Vineyard.

It tells how the beloved established the vineyard, dug it out, cleared the stones, planted good vines, built a watchtower, and a wine vat.

And the beloved here is God, who established ancient Israel, going back to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

It was God who led the Israelites out of slavery and set them in the promised land.

God established the vineyard, the people, the land, and the law.

And God expected the vineyard to yield good grapes, though it didn't always.

And Jesus' parable, told some eight hundred years after Isaiah, continues that theme.

Like the song of the vineyard, this parable works as an allegory.

God established the vineyard, and then the people strayed, and God sent the prophets to call them back, to call them to repentance and justice and faithfulness.

But the prophets were often rejected, mocked, beaten, and even killed.

And so finally God sends God's own son, Jesus, who, like the Son in the story, is rejected and taken outside the walls of Jerusalem and killed.

As though Jesus were condemning the hard-hearted Jews who rejected the prophets and then rejected him.

And so sadly, this reading has been used to justify antisemitism.

But that is not what is actually happening in this text.

Jesus is not drawing a line between Jews and Christians, but within the Judaism of his time.

Jesus was Jewish, his disciples were Jewish, the prophets whose tradition he stands in were Jewish, and his criticism is directed at particular religious leaders, those who had been entrusted with the care and the well-being of the vineyard, God's people.

And so the judgment falls on those leaders because they failed to nurture the fruits of God's reign, to do deeds of justice and loving kindness.

And so ours is not to look outward from this text and blame others, but to look within and understand the responsibilities that God has given us.

Because every one of us has been given some part of God's vineyard to tend.

And of course, I tend to think of things in terms of the church.

And so I think of this community, its people, its ministries, its campus, its resources, its witness, that is something that God has entrusted into our care.

We don't own this, we didn't create it.

We received it from those who came before us, and for a time we've been given the responsibility of tending it.

And really, that's true beyond the church as well.

We have relationships that are entrusted to us, families and friendships, neighborhoods and communities, workplaces, people who depend on us, causes and concerns that have been placed upon our hearts.

Each of us has some corner of God's vineyard that has been entrusted to our care.

And I think these readings invite us to consider how we are tending what God has given, what we are doing to create the conditions in which life can flourish.

Because that is what Mrs.

Sparvasser was teaching us all those years ago as she drove us through those valleys.

Vineyards become what they are because somebody cares and pays attention.

Somebody notices what the soil needs, what needs pruning, what needs protecting, where the sun falls, what the season requires.

Good tending takes attention and care.

It takes patience and work and hope.

We're called within the church and beyond it to create the conditions in which life and faith and our neighbors can flourish.

When we care for this campus, it's not simply because buildings need maintenance.

We're tending a place where people worship and pray, where kids learn, where people gather in recovery, where neighbors meet, where families grieve and celebrate, where people find community and belong.

When we invest in children and youth, we cannot know what their relationship with God is going to look like in five or ten or twenty years, but we can create a place where they know that they are loved, where they can ask questions and wonder, where they can encounter stories of faith and prayer, and can know other adults other than their parents who care about them and their lives.

We together can create the conditions under which faith has room to grow.

And when someone walks in these doors for the first time, we cannot know what this community will eventually mean to them, if anything.

But we can make room, we can learn a name and listen.

We can create a place where someone feels seen and welcomed and valued.

We can create the conditions for belonging.

And when we reach beyond these walls, when we feed people and help house people, collect supplies, support immigrants, open our campus to community organizations, and care for our neighbors in need, we know that we cannot solve every problem, but we can cultivate mercy.

We can make justice a little more real.

We can make room for hope.

This is what I think it means to tend the vineyard, to faithfully create the conditions in which life can flourish.

We don't tend the vineyard so that God will claim us.

God's already done that.

We don't serve faithfully so that God will love us, God already does.

We don't have to produce enough fruit to prove that we are worthy.

Our worth has already been given to us by God.

We tend because something precious has been given to us.

Because we have received grace upon grace and Jesus has made us his own.

And so, like Paul, we press on, not because we've already reached the goal, but because there is still life to nurture.

There are still people to welcome, still places that need our care, still seeds to plant whose fruit we may never see.

There is still room for faith to deepen, for hope to take root where people have grown so discouraged and afraid, for love to become visible in ways when we serve, the ways that we give, the ways that we care for each other and our neighbors.

And I think again of Mrs.

Sparvasser, who this year turned 96 years old.

All those years ago, she probably thought she was simply showing two young newlyweds around the Rhine and Mosul valleys, taking us to castles and cafes, pouring out a little wine at the end of the day, sharing something that she loved with us.

I doubt that she knew she was planting a seed.

She could not have known that 26 years later I would still remember those days, still remember what she taught us about the vineyards and the wine, and that on this morning her generosity of spirit would help me understand something about faith and church and the life that God has given us.

That we pay attention, that we offer what we have, that we share what we know and we make room, we plant seeds, and most of the time we have no idea what they will become.

Mrs.

Sparvasser could not see this morning from all those years ago.

And we cannot see all that God will bring forth from the love that we give, the welcome that we offer, the children that we encourage, and the neighbors we serve, the places we tend and the seeds we plant.

We simply tend the vineyard as faithfully as we can and entrust the rest to God.

What a gift it is to have received that kind of care, and what a joy and what a calling to offer it to others.