27th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Cycle A 22-23

27th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Isaiah 5:1-7 | Philippians 4:6-9 | Matthew 21:33-43

Almighty, everliving God, who in the abundance of your kindness surpasses the merits and the desires of those who entreat you, pour 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, God forever and ever, amen.

Salvation history is fascinating. The more I study it, the more I work with the words and the images in the stories, it becomes clearer and clearer to what I’m looking at. It’s a story, a love story, about a God who created human beings at a time in their existence where they had a very, very difficult time of even understanding the basic things that God wants them to know. The very beginning was, in a way, not a disaster but certainly something that didn’t go very well. He created this beautiful garden and said, “Here, all you have to do is tend this beautiful place and just do as I ask you to do, and don’t do certain things.” And of course, they went ahead and did the very thing they were told not to do, and there was division. You look at those early years of the story of human nature. It was clear that over and over again God would say about them that they were not what he wanted them to be, even to the point of destroying all of them at one point and saving Noah and making it a covenant with people, “Okay, you guys are not who I wish you were, but I won’t destroy you again. I’ll work with you.”

So imagine, the Old Testament is the story of God trying to establish a relationship with his people, and the aggressor, in a sense, the one who is creating the need for this connection, is coming not from human beings but from God. God is in love with human beings. He loved them the minute he created them. He saw them beautiful. He saw them as reflections as himself, and he wanted a relationship with them so that they would love them freely, and he would love them, and they would live in this wonderful thing called the kingdom of God. But the stories in scripture have this rhythm to them. It’s God doing things for people, and then they respond and thank God, and they do what God asks. And that lasts a little bit, and then they turn away from God, and then God says, “Stop doing that.” They won’t do it, so he punishes them. And then the punishment lasts for a long time, and then he comes back to them. It goes over and over, God giving in to the needs of people, longing to help them to become who they need to be in order to be in this relationship with God. But the primary mover is God. God is a lover, and he’s pursuing you. He pursued these people. He wants a relationship, and he knows that, in order for that relationship to happen, we have to understand some things about who we are and why we’re here.


 So we have two beautiful images from the Old Testament about this kingdom of God, the work that God is wanting us to be engaged in, and the two are the vineyard images. And they’re beautiful, because if you look at this as a kind of allegory, parable, whatever, it’s a story about human beings and their relationship with God. And God created human beings, gave them this life on this planet, and basically that is an image of a person setting up a vineyard. The vines are planted, and then everything is set. And then it’s time for grapes to come. In the first story, it seems that there’s something wrong with the vines, because the vines that are planted do not produce grapes that are usable. They only produce wild grapes. So it’s an image, I believe of a ⎯ God is saying about the people at the time that they would not, they could not understand fully their nature, that God wanted to work closely with them. And so he had done all kinds of things for them. Think of this as the period of time when he took them to the desert. He gave them the law. He did all these things for them, but they still, themselves, were hard-hearted and were not able to produce what God wanted, which was a kind of way of life that reflected who God is. And so it’s a kind of indictment to the Old Testament times. Constantly we see that there’s a failure on the part of the very being of humanity that wasn’t ready to understand what it meant to produce something called the kingdom of God.

Grapes, what an interesting image. Why grapes? Grapes have always been around in ancient history. It’s a vine that was very much a part of it, and you realize what you’re seeing in the grape image in this vineyard story is something that comes about clearly in the New Testament. I especially think it’s interesting to think about the wedding in the feast of Cana. The first miracle that Jesus performed was producing wine for a wedding. And then you look at the Old Testament, and God says things to human beings like, “I want to marry you. I want a union with you. I want to communion with you.” And so this idea of grape as a symbol of the fruit of the work that God wants us to be engaged in with him makes a lot of sense. It’s about an intoxicating, wonderful image of a wine that is used later in the New Testament as the blood of Christ, and it’s about forgiveness, which is about being capable of being a source of unmerited love for the people around us. That’s what God wanted people to have, always has wanted people to have that.

So we look in the Old Testament image. We see definitely that there is a problem with human nature, and then in the New Testament, it’s different. It’s shifted a little bit on who’s responsible. At the beginning, it seems like it’s the problem with the vines, but in the second case, it’s the problem with the tenants, the ones that leased this beautiful vineyard that is producing wonderful grapes. But those who run it are not sharing the grapes with the owner, and so what it is, it’s an image of the Pharisees and the scribes, an indictment from Jesus that they have this gift of trying to explain to people how much the God who created them loves them, and they were not allowing that to happen. The very system that they created was robbing them of who God was. It’s a frightening thought about anybody that preaches the gospel. It’s amazing how we, as those who talk about it, can be responsible for it becoming something it was never intended to be. It’s not intended to be a burden. It’s not intended to be something that takes away your dignity and your value or forces you to answer certain issues with their answers. No, the relationship we have with God is this incredible kingdom that’s an interior kingdom of peace that resonates out through us to the people around us. It’s an amazing love story when you feel truly, absolutely, totally loved by God, not for what you’ve accomplished, not for what you have done but simply because he made you in such a way. In his eyes, you are beautiful. You are a reflection of him, and when he knows that you’re a reflection from him, he wants you to live your life in this world as he longed to live it for us. In other words, his longing is always to teach us to be loving and forgiving and caring human beings. It’s been that way from the very beginning, but it had to go through these stages of evolution and development and change.

There’s one thing I want you to take from these images. It’s what Paul is saying about this world that we live in. Yes, we have to be transformed in order to produce this wonderful, abundant thing called the kingdom, and we have to have teachers that teach it in order that we can enter into it more fully. And then he gives you the most interesting image that he’s talking about, his ministry, and he’s not shy at all about saying he’s a good minister, but listen to what he's saying when he’s talking to his brothers and sisters. He says, “Look, here’s what I want you to do. Do what you’ve learned from me and received from me and heard and seen in me. Be like me,” he’s saying. And when he’s saying that, he’s saying, “Look, this kingdom is a kingdom where the person who’s in it has found a way of experiencing God’s love so amazing and so unconditional and so abundant that he, a person who persecuted Christians, killed them, because they were following this false prophet, Jesus, he’s loved so intensely.” He’s just simply saying, “Look, if you can realize what it means to be loved like this, then you’re going to be wanting to live a loving life like this, and it’s a life that is true and honorable and just and pure and lovely and gracious and excellent.” That’s who we are, not who we have to force ourselves to be. It’s where we are meant to be, but it’s also the result of being loved, unconditionally loved. And I don't know why, but religion has a way of wanting to hold back, wanting to say, “Well, no. You’ve really got to earn it. You’ve got to do this. You’ve got to do that. You’ve got to make this happen first, and God isn’t interested ⎯ and God is very disappointed in you.” And all that is just so much unnecessary motivation, because its motivation is fear. And fear is not a motivation that will ever bring you to the kingdom. Fear just creates more fear, shame more shame, anger more anger, and there’s nothing in the kingdom that resonates with that. But the kingdom is about a goal. It has a goal. It has ⎯ it needs to be fruitful. Religion has to be, by its very nature, something that creates something that comes from us that’s abundant, full, rich, intoxicating, freeing, life-giving. It’s what we’re here for, to receive in order to become. Amen.

Father, you promise us a kingdom of peace, a kingdom of knowing how important we are and how blessed we are with your presence flowing through us. Keep us from focusing on our faults and more on who you are and how your love transforms everything. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.