Delivered 7 October 2002, the Saturday service based on the readings for the Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost.
Welcome
We have come from our homes, our recreations, some from our labors, to gather beside the waters of baptism, to gather at the foot of the cross. We are called here to worship together. In the red book days we heard that it was "meet, right, and salutary." In the Book of Common Prayer, they translate it as "meet, right, and our bounden duty." I love those phrases, but then, I lean toward the dramatic in vocabulary. Pastor Jim avoids such flourishes and gets right to the heart of the matter, saying: "It is good that we are here." And so it is.
The Lectionary
Look them up
The Sermon
Grace and peace to you from God our Father, and from his son Jesus the Christ, and from the Holy Spirit. Amen
As Dan Branscom said last week, we need to put a parable into context. It won't work to just slice it out and serve it up all by itself. The "Parable of the Tenants" was delivered at a high point in Jesus' ministry. In triumph, Jesus entered Jerusalem to the cries of "Hosanna to the son of David!" and "Blessed is he that comes in the name of the Lord." He went to the temple and threw the moneychangers out, overturning their tables and spilling their coins on the stone pavements.
The next morning he withered a fig tree that bore no fruit, and told his followers that if they had faith, they, too, could wither fig trees. In fact, if they had faith, they could tell the mountains to throw themselves into the sea. He returned to the temple where the chief priests challenged his authority, and he answered them with a riddle they didn't dare answer. He asked if the baptisms that John performed were from man or from God. If they answered that they came from God, Jesus would want to know why they weren't following John. If they answered that these baptisms were just from a mortal man, the people would take offense, for they thought John was a prophet.
When I was younger, nobody ever told me what a prophet was. From context of Bible stories, I concluded a prophet was a fortune-teller, someone who could foresee the future, what would happen in years to come. I almost concluded that the prophets in the Old Testament were cheating, because they talked to God and had the inside track on knowing what was coming. I had it backwards. A prophet is an attorney with a single client. I don't mean a lawyer, although we think of them as the same thing. An attorney is an authorized representative of another party, a "mouthpiece," if you will, for that person in an official context. A prophet is an attorney, plain and simple. The difference is that a prophet's client is God. In first-century Palestine, the Jews knew what that meant, and the chief priests and scribes who were challenging Jesus definitely knew what that meant. So they didn't dare respond either way, and just said "We don't know."
He then told the "Parable of the Two Sons," which the crowd couldn't answer. That caused Jesus to tell them, "I tell you the truth, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you." Remember the context, we are inside the courtyard of the temple at Jerusalem. This is one day after Jesus has tossed the money changers out, and he is in an adversarial posture with the officials of the temple. And then comes today's text.
Gospel text read
Jesus was on a roll here. If ever there was a time when Jesus had the influence, thet all-important momentum, to challenge the power structure of the time, this was it. Admiring crowds accepted him as a prophet, the designated representative of God. And what he was saying was not that Israel had lost favor with God, but that the religious leaders of Israel had lost favor. They were not bearing fruit. The chief priests hadn't seen the withered fig tree, but the disciples had, and a good part of the crowd may have.
This connects wonderfully with the epistle lesson for today:
Epistle text read
Paul, at least as Saul, had been a favorite of the temple leadership. He had worked tirelessly to break up this upstart, challenging religion. I've never heard that he was interested in his own power and position, as the temple hierarchy surely was, but he was building a perfect person. He knew he was special. A Hebrew born of Hebrews, circumcised on the eighth day, trained in the scriptures and admitted to the elite, the Pharisees.
That wasn't enough. In fact, it was nothing. Paul was prepared to call his high status a loss, despite a life dedicated to being the perfect Jew. He had it made! He was accepted by the greatest religious leaders as having touched all the bases, heading for home. And on the road to Damascus he was convinced that his life quest was irrelevant.
Let's go back to the parable. The story is rich with Old Testament references, echoes of Isaiah and Micah and Ezekiel. Throughout the scriptures, it was common for the vineyard owner to represent Yahweh, and that clearly is the case here. Allegories to vineyards usually refer directly to Israel, the audience in this case would certainly have understood it that way. The servants who were sent to collect the rent are the prophets of old, many of which were hardly treated well in Israel.
When the Gospel writers included this parable, and Mark and Luke include it with very little difference from Matthew's account, they knew a different meaning than the crowd did. As Dan said last week, we need to read a parable in the context of those that heard it originally. I would suggest that this is an exception to the rule. Jesus knew - full well – that he would be crucified within days. He knew that those who were listening to the story would remember it a week later. The chief priests would remember the story that the upstart carpenter's son told in his last week, and they would recognize him as the son in the parable.
Would they change their behavior? Of course they didn't. They continued to make their deals with the kings. They continued to make their accommodations with the Roman governor. They continued to oppose and persecute the renegades who clung to the memory of the cross. And less than forty years later their precious temple was leveled by Roman troops led by Tiberius Julius Alexander, himself a Jew from Egypt. No they learned nothing.
So where are we to take this? Will we learn more than the most learned, if corrupted, scholars in the year 33?
First, we clearly are not the tenant farmers in the story. The religious hierarchy that had been leading Israel represented the tenant farmers. They wanted to take the inheritance by violence, they had abused the prophets.
However, we are free to become the tenants if we choose. We could build a marvelous facility like this, and then take the thirty grand we give to world hunger every year and use it for better office furniture. I keep the computers over in the office running on a shoestring, and I know we could make Robin and Carolyn happier by diverting some of that money we just throw away on hungry strangers now.
We could stop letting the world in to share our facilities. We could stop making this a hospitable place for all comers. We could stop being the first choice for community groups needing a meeting place. We could stop welcoming those who don't look like us - you know, the ones with long hair, shaggy beards, and uncovered knees. Also the poor, the invalids who can't contribute much, those with un-Lutheran lifestyles, those with AIDS, essentially all those that would have been grouped with the beggars, prostitutes, and tax collectors of two millennia ago.
But we don't. That would be holding back the rent we owe the vineyard owner. That would lead us to ignoring or killing the prophets who demand we be true to the one who gave us the vineyard to work.
Second, we worship, love, and serve that stone. That stone that was rejected by the builders, that stone is to be the cornerstone, some translations read capstone. Either word carries the same intent. It is our work on this mortal coil to build a temple of our life. In that temple, Jesus Christ is the most important piece, and the only necessary piece. As Paul said, everything else is loss.
Amen.