In the name of God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Amen.
Have
things ever not gone as you had planned? You prepared and practiced for the
interview and wore your best outfit, but you didn’t get the job. You planned
the perfect surprise party and had wonderful decorations ready, and then the
rain came and washed it all away. You had been trying for years to get pregnant
and it seemed like a miracle when the test was positive, and then there was a
miscarriage. You kept the feuding family members apart and were ready to change
the topic if it got heated, and still everyone will remember that family dinner
because of the fight. You did everything you knew to do to teach your child
about responsibility and making good decisions, and yet they ended up in jail.
You tried every treatment and prayed every prayer, and your loved one still
died. You studied hard and did every extracurricular activity you could manage,
and you still got a rejection letter from your dream college. You loved your
spouse and poured all of yourself into the relationship, but the marriage didn’t
last. You prepared the soil, watered the seeds, pulled the weeds, but there
just wasn’t any fruit on the vine. Sometimes, no matter how deeply your heart
is invested in something, no matter how righteous your motives, no matter how
hard you’ve worked, no matter how often you’ve prayed, things just don’t go as
planned.
This
is what our reading from Isaiah speaks of – “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.” Isaiah’s
prophecy expresses the reality of God’s relationship with humanity. God created
us out of love, gave us all we needed to thrive and yet we choose selfishness,
we choose violence, we place our trust in things other than God.
Towards
the end of this passage from Isaiah, it says “He expected justice, but saw
bloodshed; righteousness, but heard a cry!” Unfortunately, our English obscures
the power of this statement. In Hebrew, it is “He expected mishpat, but saw mishpah;
tsedaqah, but heard azekah.” These words are nearly
identical in sound, but opposite in meaning. One translation of that line puts
it this way “He hoped for justice, but there was injustice; for equity, but
found inequity.” It’s not that things are off by a bit, but rather that they’ve
gone in the completely opposite direction. It’s as if you give someone a
compliment and they take it as an insult. Things don’t always go as planned.
Isn’t
this what’s going on in the passage from Luke? Back in the first chapter of
Luke, Zechariah says of Jesus “By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on
high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the
shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.” But here was are,
eleven chapters later and that “tender mercy” and “way of peace” have given way
to Jesus as the bringer of division. The next time someone talks about Biblical
family values, remind them about this passage.
This
isn’t the image of Jesus that I’m most familiar or comfortable with. On my
desk, I have icon of Jesus who seems approachable and relatable. In this
church, we have images of a sweet baby Jesus and a Jesus who blesses the
disciples at the Ascension. What we don’t have is the hellfire and brimstone
Jesus in a stained glass window. When we think about Jesus, we think about compassion,
healing, love, not division.
And
don’t we have enough division right now? Of course, Jesus’ time was a divided
one as well. Remember that Jesus was a Jew who was living in the Promised Land
which was occupied by the Roman Empire. Racism, classism, and the gap between
wealth and poverty are not modern phenomena. Given that Jesus lived in a time
of division, and given that Jesus often spoke of peace, forgiveness, and
reconciliation, why is he intent on bringing more division?
History
doesn’t have many examples peaceful revolutions. When the King of England heard
that the colonies had signed the Declaration of Independence, he responded not
with a kind note that say “That seems fair, best wishes to you all” but with
troops. When any disenfranchised group seeks justice, whether it be African-Americans
seeking civil rights or women seeking equal pay for equal work, those in power
don’t say “We’re so sorry that we didn’t address this sooner,” but they resist
with every ounce of power they have. When Jesus came preaching a Gospel of Good
News to the poor and powerless, those in power didn’t say “Well, I guess it is
their turn to have some peace and prosperity” but they executed him. Jesus knows
that the powers of evil and fear aren’t going to roll over and cede power to love
and dignity. That’s what the Cross is all about, exposing the great lengths that
we will go to in order to avoid making a difficult change. When things don’t go
as expected, we push back. When the Messiah comes not to pat us on the back but
to take us deeper into radical love, we get uncomfortable. We’d rather shoot
the messenger than hear the message, even when that message is the Gospel.
There
is a poem that is printed in your bulletin this morning that speaks to this
reality.
("The Place Where We Are Right" by Yehuda Amichai)
From the place where we are right
From the place where we are right
Flowers will never grow
In the spring.
The place where we are right
Is hard and trampled
Like a yard.
But doubts and loves
Dig up the world
Like a mole, a plow.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
Where the ruined
House once stood.
In
particular, the line about the ground being hard and trampled by the places we
are right is poignant, both to the state of our society and these Scripture
readings. We’ve all seen shortcuts that people take across a lawn – the grass
is trampled down and nothing grows there. Perhaps the reason why the flowers of
gracefulness, racial reconciliation, genuine dialogue, respect, or love cannot
grow in our society is because we’ve trampled the ground to the point where
nothing can grow there. If our focus is on maintaining our privilege, power,
and comfort, then we will have to focus on being right and on defending that
privilege at the cost of others. When things don’t go as planned, when it
becomes apparent that we are not right, we often dig in rather than change
course.
In
Isaiah, the text speaks of the wall being trampled down just as the poem speaks
of hard and trampled yard. When we insist that we are right, we start to make
idols of things like our ideas, our politics, our rights. When we insist that
we are right, we may fool ourselves into thinking that our success is the
product of own creation. When we insist that we are right, we put up barriers
to others. When we insist that we are right, we turn away from God, because it
is only God who possesses the fullness of Truth and it is only God who is ultimately
right. This is what happened to Israel and what Isaiah writes about.
God
created the people, brought them out of slavery in Egypt, blessed them so that
that might be a blessed to the world, and called them to live with justice and
righteousness as their foundation. But then they started to think that they
were right more than they looked to God to see what was right. They stopped
treating all people, especially the poor and outcast, with justice. They ceased
to seek righteousness. God had planted a vineyard in them, hoping to produce
wonderful grapes that would become the celebratory wine of God’s love and peace
on earth as it is in heaven.
But what grew wasn’t these
heirloom grapes, but rather wild grapes. What grew were the sour grapes of
neglecting the widow and orphan, oppressing the poor, focusing on military
conquest, building power structures, division, and discord. And it wasn’t just
a problem that could be blamed on the larger society, individuals were focused
on themselves, they were unwilling to listen to the prophets who called for justice,
they fought for their version of the truth and being right while ignoring what
God had said was right. And as Jesus mentions, when he kindles the fire of
justice and righteousness, division will come. Because when we insist on being
right, we will run away from the searing light and purging heat of God’s Truth.
It seems that these sour grapes grow in American soil as well.
But
we do not live as one without hope. As the reading from Hebrews suggests “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.” Sour grapes and division may have their
day, but they do not get the last word. Though the vineyard is trampled and
overgrown, as that section of Isaiah comes to a close, the prophet gives us a
word of hope, that “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a
branch shall grow out of his roots.” Also in Isaiah, it is said that “On this
mountain the Lord of hosts will
make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich
food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear… It will be said on
that day, ‘This is our God; we have waited for him, so that he might save us.
This is the Lord for whom we have
waited; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.” Later in the gospels,
Jesus says “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to
myself.” The division will disintegrate in the love of the Cross; an instrument
of death and division will become the symbol of life and reconciliation. Though
God’s dream for love and peace have not yet come to full fruition as intended,
it is still a dream worth pursuing.
The
poem says “But doubts and loves dig up the world; like a mole, a plow.” There
are a lot of places in our hearts and minds that have been made hard by our
insistence that we are right. But no matter how hard the soil, God’s love and a
healthy sense of mystery, knowing that God Truth is bigger than our own, can
turn that soil over and make it ready for beautiful flowers and succulent
grapes to grow again. When things do not go as expected and the ground is
getting hard, what we need is to let doubt unchain us from our sense of being
right and let love turn things upside down so that we might see things and
people differently.
This
week, you might consider where are the places that you have become hard because
of your insistence on being right. You might pray a bold prayer, asking God to
dig up your world with doubts and love so that the fruit of the Gospel might
grow in you rather than the wild grapes of our society. If you encounter
division as you seek God’s justice and righteousness, know that evil isn’t
going to give up without a fight, but also know that the Cross of Christ will ultimately
transform that division into unity. And when things don’t go as you had planned,
may God grant you the grace to know that there is always the hope of a new
spring when things might grow again. Amen.
