Proper 22-A
October 2, 2011
The Rev. Marguerite Alley
The Gospel for today is a challenging one. Not in the sense that it is hard to preach, but in the sense that you may not like what it says. Now in preparation I have looked at several of my usual preparation sources and they are all pretty much in agreement on what the message of this parable is. Unfortunately, in our rush to not damage each other’s self esteem, in our need to put salve on our wounds, and in our twisting of our framing story, we have come out the other side with what I would suggest is a completely inappropriate, if not altogether incorrect understanding of what Jesus has just said.
I am wondering if any of you were able to catch the pilot of a new television show this fall called “Terra Nova”. If not, here is the skinny. The earth is on its last leg. The environment has been destroyed. People have to wear masks if they leave their houses. They can (if they can afford it) have air purification systems in their homes. If they can’t, they wear masks 24 hours a day. The wealthiest of the world live in a few plexiglass domes that have all the air purified and can therefore live “mask-free”. There, in these domes, some trees and plants can still be found and enjoyed and are employed as part of the purification system. Outside the domes there is no vegetation. The population has outgrown the lands ability to sustain, and thus there are no houses, only high rise tiny apartment spaces. There are no pets, because they use up “human air”. In the story, 7 years prior, a crack was found in the time/space continuum, and some explorers were sent into it to see where they might end up. It turns out that they end up 25 million or so years in the earth’s past. The decision is made to begin sending small groups of carefully selected people to “re-start” civilization and try to stop the destruction of the planet before it begins to happen. Ironically, they have only been working on this for 7 years and already the advance group has split over ideology and now is quite hostile towards each other. It promises to be an interesting show that I am going to actually make the effort to follow.
Now….what has this to do with Jesus’ parable? Well, the characters in this parable are a bit too familiar for us to look at this and escape seeing the obvious. The tenants are enjoying a good life on the land. It is pleasant, comfortable and the benefits are great. Along comes a “messenger” who reminds them that the rent has come due…in other words, they are expected to give to the owner some of what they have enjoyed in payment for being allowed to live there and enjoy it! Despite the fact that they have been given this beautiful garden to live in and enjoy, they resent having to give back any of what they perceive to be “theirs”….so they kill the messengers. The owner must have thought that the news sent back to him was a mistake, because he sends more servants the second time. Oddly enough, the tenants I guess believe that the owner is so far away, there is little he can do to them, so they kill the next bunch as well. At this point, who can fail to see the obvious point? Pay what you owe or God will send servants to collect, and we will have to kill them to protect what is rightfully ours! God is so far away from us…what can happen? Well, so maybe we need to hear the next piece to make sense of it. After the second set of servants is killed, the owner decides to send his son. We are told that he thinks that the tenants will “respect” his son and pay what they owe. To no one’s surprise, the tenants kill the son as well. Now, who can fail to get the point here? The landowner is obviously either dimwitted, the eternal optimist or completely oblivious to the point of risking the life of his own child.
Even I can see where this is going. Pay up or you will be forced to do something drastic that might cause you a moment or two of regret, and goodness knows, we don’t like living with regret. So there you have it folks…the easiest parable of the Bible. Unless of course, you want to take a look at what Jesus is saying…rather than what we are hearing.
Perhaps we should take a second look. The tenants, wicked and enigmatic, look strangely like us. We think the vineyard belongs to us and so we do with it as we see fit. We abuse the land, the water, and the air. We have built and we maintain societies based on the power of having natural resources intended for all to share and in which a decent life for everyone is not a reality, but at best an ideal. And when the landowner sends his servants to remind us of our obligation to each other, we reject them. The behavior of the landowner is hard to accept as well, because it too is familiar. It is the behavior of God. The landowner sends his servants to proclaim and collect justice, and that message is rejected and the messengers murdered. God tries again with the same result. Finally, in an all out desperate act, God sends Jesus to proclaim justice, and mercy for all and we, still feeling as though we OWN the vineyard, decide this is not what we want and we see an easy way out in killing Jesus.
Now if we still want to try and see what the story is really about we must look at
the end of the story. We are left with 2 possible outcomes. The first comes from those who are with Jesus. They are shocked and horrified by the story. They cry out that the landowner should put the wicked tenants to death and maybe even torture them a bit so that they suffer as much as he did. I wonder what would happen if I said right now that the United States
If the landowner, if God believes that the tenants are not capable of any other kind of response then perhaps God should have wiped out human beings along time ago. Clearly, our Creator believes that we, the tenants, (see how smoothly I slipped that in?) are indeed capable of more appropriate behavior because if we are not and God kills us then we win. We are dead yes…but we forced God to deal with us in the exact same way that we dealt with those servants and God’s son! I seriously doubt if God will fall for our devious plan. Instead, we are “given” Jesus who offers us the ONLY plan that will save our lives!
In that pithy statement about the stone rejected by the builder becoming the cornerstone, we are given a way forward. Now many folks have interpreted this statement as being that Jesus is the stone rejected by the builders and certainly that could be true. But it would be more accurate to say that Jesus’ message is what was rejected. What Jesus taught and stood for and died for is what is being rejected in the story and in the world right now. That message is to us, about us and for us. It is quite simply….get over yourselves. Think about the bigger picture. Stop treating each other like enemies and start thinking about how you can all live together and take care of the vineyard.
How do we do this? We could start by understanding that whomever we call an enemy has within them some broken, rejected part of ourselves. By accepting that enemy, we accept back that part of ourselves. By continuing to reject that part of ourselves, we remain in a broken state. Acceptance of our own brokenness is the first step in being able to open the gates of the vineyard to all for whom it was intended. Allowing “our enemies” to share in the abundance of creation, accepting their differences and celebrating the diversity of creation means we are transformed and so is are they. That transformation is what Jesus came to teach, to live and to die for. The challenge then, from this parable is this…will we continue to be the wicked tenants or will we step outside the walls we have created around the vineyard and greet the servants and the son as welcome reminders of our interdependence and our connections to each other, and be transformed.
+
No comments:
Post a Comment