Isaiah 5:1-7 | Philippians 4:6-9 | Matthew 21:33-43 

Almighty and everliving God, who in the abundance in your kindness surpassed the merits and the desires of those who entreat you, poor out your mercy upon us to pardon what conscience dreads and to give what prayer does not dare to ask.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen. 

I think it’s not an exaggeration to say that our world is in a very precarious place.  Probably there’s more division and separation in terms of religion, politics, almost any subject.  People take extreme views, and when they take extreme views, there doesn’t seem to be any way to negotiate any kind of coming together with any kind of mutual agreement that might bring peace.  So what does this reveal to us?  What are we supposed to – what’s our reaction to a world that seems so divided and so angry and confused and somehow losing a sense of direction?  The thing that is so fascinating to me about the role that I have as a Catholic priest or as a minister of the word is to go to scripture over and over again to say, “There’s got to be something in this treasure we have of a record of a particular time in which human beings have existed for the last, basically, 4,000 years.”  We have a written story of how human beings have evolved, and it gives us a very clear understanding of what the struggle is.  And I think it’s fascinating that, when you look at this story about human nature evolving and growing and changing, which has taken place over maybe, what, 100,000 years, but only in the last 4,000 have we taken a chance – we have a chance to look at what is going on in a literal way, having a history.  And the history is surrounding an image of a God who created us entering into our life and saying, “You need me to help you do something, and I’m here for you.  Please, please open your heart and let me in to do something.  I want to form you into a community of life, a place where you can live together in some kind of beautiful way we call the kingdom of God, people there for other people.”  

So it began by calling the people together and saying, “All right, I know you know how power works in the world and how human works, and gods work in the same way.  So I’m going to show you a god that is not like any of the other gods.”  So he comes onto the scene and said, “I’m calling you into a unified body called the kingdom.  So here’s what I want to do.  I want to enter in and give you direction.  So I want you to listen to me, and I’m going to speak to your mind and your will.  Your mind understands things, and your will can make things happen.  So I’m going to tell you, I’m a God who has a desire to save you, and if you do what I say, I will save you.  And the doing is about perfecting yourself.  Make yourself a better person.”  So the Old Testament is all based on human’s ego and will, and God speaks to it.  He said, “All right, I want you to focus on yourself and make yourself into the best person, because if you don’t, I’m going to kill you if you don’t.  If you do it, I will give you life.”  Now, that’s the beginning, and think of it.  It’s the way we begin teaching a child, not that we threaten them so much with eternal punishment, but we’re saying, “Look, you do what I say, and we will take care of you and make you part of our community.  But if you don’t, we’ll reject you.”  So that’s the community God tried to form in the Old Testament, rules and laws calling on the mind to understand that it makes logical sense to do what you’re told, because you’ll be rewarded.  It’s all focused on the ego and the self, and so what comes out of it is perfection.  What do you have in the church when Jesus comes back to – the first time God comes in the flesh, male figure?  What is it?  It’s completely out of balance.  It’s not doing what it’s intended to do, or let’s just say it did enough of what it intended to do, but now there’s got to be something more.  So you have an Old Testament and a New Testament. What’s the difference?  The Old Testament focuses on mind and the will and getting things done correctly, and the danger of that is, once the will decides what is correct and another will decides something else is correct, then you have a real problem.  So there’s something about the Old Testament that can only go so far in bringing about something good, and that thing that it worked so hard for was justice.  You do bad, you’re going to be treated bad.  You do good, you’ll be treated good.  It worked.  It helped, but it never produced – it’s like a vineyard.  It never produced what it was intended to produce, grapes, wine. 

What is the symbol in scripture of wine and grapes?  Well, Jesus used it so beautifully when he said, “Wine is that calming thing that, when you take it in, it’s intoxicating, and you relax, and things seem better,” even though they’re not maybe.  But what he’s saying is, “There is something about wine that is a symbol of what I want to empower you to be, and that is a human being that creates a place of warmth, closeness and peace.  And what I did to make that clear is I did something that just flies in the face of the ego and the will.  I accepted a way of life that my mind and my will just said, ‘No, no, that’s wrong.  That’s wrong.  I am here to save the world, and I’m going to save it by doing exactly what I’m doing, and I’m going to do this work.”  And Jesus was a human being like the rest of us, and it seemed logical that that’s what he had to do.  But God said, “No.  If you’ll surrender to something that doesn’t make any sense to your mind and your will, you’re going to get closer to what I want you to be.  So surrender to something that only another part of you can understand – the heart.”  So the Old Testament works with the ego and the will and gives rules and laws, punishment and reward, and that just didn’t produce what we hoped it would produce or what our mind would think it could produce.  So he said, “No, here’s the problem.  I’m going to create another kind of vineyard, and the vineyard is that I want somehow to be able to come into that vineyard and enter into the work that the vineyard is there to accomplish.  I want you to know you need me to change you into who I know you’re called to be.”  Not that that is forcing you to be someone you’re not, but that’s the evolution of you becoming everything that God always intended you to be, like the one who created you.  The God in the Old Testament was the God of justice.  The God in the New Testament is the God of mercy, forgiveness, intimacy, closeness, understanding, compassion.  That’s in us, but it’s not in us in a way that we can get to it without some kind of support, without some kind of insight, and all Jesus is saying is, “Look, I showed you in my life what the insight is.”  How do you surrender to something that doesn’t make a lot of sense to the mind or to the will?  How do you open yourself to this part of you that’s like a seed that’s been grown since the creation of human beings that’s moving ever closer to this world that God intended us to live in, a world of peace and a world of goodness, all those words that Paul says in the that second reading?  Graciousness, love, peace, intimacy, these are the things that the new kingdom is going to bring about, not because human beings are so capable of doing it, but because they’re capable of being empowered to do it.  We have the capacity to surrender to a truth that’s bigger than us.  That’s what’s missing.  How do I surrender to something that I can’t figure out with my head?  How do I give in to a power that’s going to make me feel that I’m impotent in a world of power and control?  That’s called redemption.  It’s called transformation.  It has to be accepted.  

What Jesus does in this vision of the kingdom in the New Testament is saying there’s going to be a new covenant, a new relationship.  Jeremiah, 500 years before the coming of Christ, prophesied that something would have to happen to human beings where God would no longer tell them what to do and frighten them or motivate them by reward and punishment.  No, it’s going to be replaced by God writing his law on your heart so that nobody will be asked to learn how to live a life of peace and love and goodness.  It will be in them.  It’s there.  It’s potentially written on your heart, not on tablets of stone.  It’s interesting that Jesus calls the Pharisees dead inside.  “You have hearts of stone.  You’re not receptive to anything outside of you that doesn’t make sense to your will and your mind.”  And he’s saying, “Look, unless you let me enter into you, unless you let me be the vine and you be the branches – I will produce fruit through you, but you must let me in so that I can touch and change and renew and empower.”  It’s interesting that egos don’t necessarily want to be empowered by another force.  They want to be the source of power, and once you have that mindset, there’s no negotiating.  There’s no coming to anything, because the only way you can come to something is to give up something that you believed in, something you thought was the right way.  And that’s exactly what the death of Christ on the cross was.  He had another way that he thought he would save the world besides ending his ministry in three short years.  He had to surrender to something that made no sense, and where did he get that?  How did he do that?  He would always say, “I didn’t do it.  I can’t do it.  I don’t even want it, but I will allow it to happen if God will empower me to do it.” 

Not my will but your will, that’s the whole moment of redemption.  How do you give yourself over to something that doesn’t rely upon you, that demands you surrender to some power that’s there?  And we’re made for that kind of surrender.  We’re destined for it, and it’s going to come.  It cannot not come, because it’s promised.  If you don’t believe that we continue to move and evolve into that figure that Jesus promises we can be, you’ll be falling into despair.  So we have to see clearly the world around us, and where it’s not functioning effectively, we have to say, “Why?”  And we look at the reasons, and then we say, “Okay, how do we change that?  How do I do it?”  And there’s a voice that says, “No, I’ll do it for you.  Just trust me.  Trust me to enter into you and to other people, and when you let me in, I’ll be a force that will eventually change the world.”  It’s called consciousness.  The more people that understand it, the more people that believe it, the more people that are empowered to be a negotiator in these times of extremes, the more they appear, the more they grow, the more that your world will change.  That’s the trust that we have to have in a God who said, “I will never leave you, and my kingdom will come.” 

Father, your life is promised to be a part of us, that you want to dwell within us.  You want to transform us, but when you do it, you never take away our freedom.  You never rob us of our sense of our value, but you enhance it in some mysterious way.  Help us to believe that the salvation of the world, the growth we want to see take place in the world to bring us to a place of life and peace is something you intend, and all you ask us to do is open our hearts to you and let you use us.  And we need to trust in that to know that it can change the world.  It’s not about who’s more powerful.  It’s about who is the most open to a wisdom that you’ll share, and that wisdom will bring life and goodness and peace.  And we trust in that, oh Lord, amen.