October 04 2020 Sermon

P18A 2020 Matthew 21:33-46
We are as far away in our calendar year as we can get from Holy Week, but today’s
gospel places us just two days before Jesus’ passion begins. Since I’ve been at St. Matthew, we
have not observed Passion Sunday, opting instead for Palm Sunday. The tradition for Passion
Sunday is to read the story of Jesus’ arrest, trial, and crucifixion with individuals taking the
parts of Judas, Pilate, Peter, and so forth and the whole congregation taking the part of the
crowds. Reading the Passion story the week before Easter began when pastors noticed fewer
people attending midweek services and didn’t want people skipping from the hosannas of Palm
Sunday to the hallelujahs of Easter without dealing with the betrayal, violence, death, and evil
in between. I much prefer contemplating the story in smaller parts on Maundy Thursday and
Good Friday, but that isn’t the only reason I’m not wild about Passion plays: although it can
give us the opportunity to experience the story from the perspective of those who lived it, it can
also give us the false sense of merely playing parts, as if we ourselves have nothing in common
with the biblical characters and the historical events are just that—part of a history that was
over long before we came on the scene. Although it’s the UCC’s tagline, and not the ELCA’s, it
is nevertheless true that “God is still speaking” and we’re the ones to whom these words are
addressed.
For brevity’s sake, we did not read today’s appointed passage from Isaiah, but it’s the
metaphor comparing Israel to a vineyard, prepared, planted, and tended by the Lord, which even
so still produces wild grapes. In Jesus’ version of the story, a landowner builds a vineyard with
great care, leases it to tenants, and sends servants to collect the produce at the time of the
harvest. The wicked tenants beat and kill those servants, and then more servants, until the
landowner sends his son, a representative of the family such that it was as if the landowner had
gone himself. The tenants recognize who he is—the one with the authority to speak and act on
behalf of landlord, but instead of giving him what is rightfully owed to his family, they killed
him as well, for some reason believing that their treachery would get them his inheritance.
There are historical connections between Jesus’ parable and the history of Israel. God
prepares Israel—not so much the place but the people—as a vineyard, giving them a land
flowing with milk and honey and the Law to govern their society. The people should be
producing the fruit of God’s labor—that is living as a community that demonstrates God’s
righteousness, yet instead they stray from God’s ways. God sends prophets to show them that
their neglect of the poor, the widowed, the orphans and aliens has decayed their nation’s soul,
but they reject the prophets. The people are conquered and exiled; they return and rebuild their
temple, but in short order, they return to ignoring the law that only required them to do justice,
love mercy, and walk humbly with God. And so God comes in person, preaching release to the
captives and good news to the poor, giving sight to the blind and healing the brokenhearted.
And of course, those in power kill him—not because they don’t recognize who Jesus is, but
because they are unwilling to give God the honor, power, and glory they want to keep for
themselves.
We can identify the landowner as God, the Son as Jesus, the servants as the Old
Testament prophets. But we cannot merely assign the part of the wicked tenants to the leaders
and elders who conspired to have Jesus killed 2000 years ago. Those wicked tenants were not
just one historical generation who, out of their ignorance or malice, lashed out against God;
they are all of us who share one common human experience. While we are all made in the
image of God and we are all inspired by the power of God’s Spirit living in us, we are also all
simultaneously subject to sinful human nature, from which comes greed, envy, pride, fear, hate
and all of the division by race, gender, sex, ability, age, and ethnicity that they cause. When
confronted with the ways in which we choose these sins over God’s righteousness, it is not our
first instinct to repent and change so that we begin producing the fruits of the kingdom; often
our first reaction is to shoot the messenger.
Although the priests and elders, at first not realizing they were condemning themselves,
suggested that the wicked tenants should meet a miserable death, that is not the consequence
Jesus predicts. Jesus says the kingdom of God will be taken from them and given to people
who produce its fruits. Again, Jesus isn’t talking about the kingdom of the afterlife but this life
in which we daily decide how to respond to God’s holy calling. God prepared our vineyard and
sent to us messengers in the form of the Law and the prophets, Jesus, the gospel, and the
epistles, 2000 years of Church teaching and tradition, and the example of countless saints to
show us how to live into God’s kingdom; if we still don’t respond, we should not be surprised
when we find that God simply chooses to work through others—whomever God can find who
will work for justice, who will act out of mercy, who will serve in love, who will take care of the
needs of the poor and despairing—whether they are part of the church, or not. If we, who
profess to be followers of Jesus, do not, in fact, follow the example Jesus set for us, he will be
happy to welcome those who do into a more abundant way of life. We daily are given the
opportunity to live in the kingdom of God; may we not reject the way of the one who has shown
us how to do so.