Our texts today give us the comforting picture of God as a farmer tending to a vineyard, but they also contain ominous words about God breaking things down. What does it really mean for us to be broken by God?

Vicar Jessica Christy
The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 27, year A
Mount Olive Lutheran Church
Texts: Isaiah 5:1-7; Psalm 80:7-15; Matthew 21:33-46

Loving and living God, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of every one of our hearts be acceptable to you, our rock and our redeemer. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.

It’s hard to find the good news on a week like this.

This is one of those weeks when we share stories that confront us with judgment and violence. In both Isaiah and the psalm, we read about the Assyrian invasion of the Promised Land. The psalmist cries out for help, begging God to save Israel from a terrible foreign power: “Turn now, O God of hosts, look down from heaven; preserve what your right hand has planted!” But we know from history that God didn’t show up to save Israel. The northern kingdom was conquered. Its tribes were lost forever – and many of the people of Judah were also killed or enslaved. So we look to the Gospel reading for some comfort, but in Jesus’ parable, we encounter a tale of greed, betrayal, and murder. And just to make matters worse, Jesus’ explanation of the parable has been misused for centuries to hurt our Jewish brothers and sisters. There isn’t a lot of hope shining out of texts like these.

And this is also one of those weeks where it’s hard to see the good news at work in the world. Our nation has been hit with a series of heartbreaking disasters, but it’s not just the human suffering that’s hard to bear. It’s the fact that none of this is inevitable. We don’t have to live in a world with so much injustice and violence, but it’s the world we keep choosing for ourselves. From where we stand this week, it looks like storms are going to keep getting worse, and our responses are going to be insufficient to meet the needs of those most vulnerable to a changing planet. It looks like guns are going to maintain their chokehold on the spirit of our nation, and they’re going to be used to end human lives. It’s hard to find healing when we have every reason to believe that we’re going to let all of this happen again. It’s one of those times when it rings a little too true when we read that God “expected justice, but saw bloodshed; righteousness, but heard a cry.” It’s hard to find the good news on this kind of week.

But there is good news here. There is always good news here, and we see that in the faith of Isaiah, because as disaster looms, Isaiah tells us that God is a gardener. The prophet is staring down the world’s most fearsome army, and even though he believes that the coming invasion is a sign of God’s anger, he describes God not as a judge, nor a warrior, nor a king, but a humble tiller of the earth. And he calls this gardener his beloved, and sings about God’s marvelous works. Isaiah is sad and scared and full of fury about how things have gone wrong in his nation, but even then, he addresses God with a love song. He tells us that God looks like a farmer who sweats and toils in the hope that life will emerge from the promise of the fertile soil.

And the psalmist goes even further than Isaiah. The author of Psalm 80 doesn’t just talk about God preparing and tending a vineyard; he remembers how God once brought the vine of Israel out of Egypt. It’s this beautiful, intimate image of God’s hands gently holding the beloved community. God, the creator of the universe, personally carried them out of slavery so they might flourish in peace and freedom. Even on the brink of losing everything, the psalmist reminds the people of the promise that they are carried in love.

We too are like that little vine. We are so fragile, so very vulnerable to the elements and to those who would harm us. The good things we create together are so easily destroyed. All too often we don’t produce the good fruits that we hoped to make for the world. But God holds us in love, and cares for us, and gives us all a chance to grow. We feel our gardener’s love in the richness of the soil. We feel our gardener’s love in the unfurling of tender leaves. We feel our gardener’s love in the sun and the turning seasons, in the world’s abundant beauty that surrounds us and sustains us and brings peace to our troubled spirits. Because we have a God who gardens, we know that we are never alone.

Now, that promise doesn’t magically erase the fear that these stories carry for us. We can’t escape the fact that Isaiah, the psalmist, and even Jesus all use some violent words to describe God’s work. Today, we hear of God tearing down the wall around the vineyard, leaving it vulnerable to the world outside. We hear of God’s cornerstone breaking those who stumble on it, crushing anyone who gets in its way. Those are hard words. It’s much easier to sing about a God who heals than a God who breaks.

But what does it really mean to be broken by God? To answer that question in faith, we must look to the cornerstone, to Christ. When Jesus broke those around him, did he bring justice down on the heads of his opponents? Did he kill, or injure, or seek revenge? No! He broke down the self-righteousness of those who thought they were without sin. He broke open the lonely, corrupt lives of tax collectors like Matthew and Zacchaeus. He shattered the worldview of the Roman centurion, who could look at a criminal hanging dead on a cross and proclaim, “truly, this was the Son of God.” He broke down the divisions between male and female, Jew and Greek, slave and free. He gave up his own body to be broken, and in the end, he broke open the tomb, freeing us all from the jaws of death, forever.

In Christ, we see that even the boundary between God and humanity was forever destroyed, for when God became human in Christ, we learned that God is not just the gardener, but also the true vine that abides in us every day. Christ is with us and in us, teaching us that brokenness is how God brings life. The spirit breathes hope into the world’s most broken places, and breaks apart its callous triumphs. Like a farmer tilling the unyielding earth, God is at work in us, turning over our hard, unforgiving places until they are transformed into gentleness and possibility. When we try to close ourselves off, to harden our hearts, God is cracking us open to new realities, new relationships, new ways to live.

None of us want to be broken. In a world that demands success and strength, we hate the idea of letting ourselves be torn down. We are taught to hate the way of the cross. We might say we love the cross, but our world tells us to despise it, and we are very good at listening to the world. We want to keep our walls high and strong. We greedily hold on to the parts of ourselves that we know need to be pruned. Even when we can barely live with ourselves, we are afraid of letting go of what we have and living into what we could be. Change is a fearful thing, so when we hear that God is transforming us, we’re tempted to hear that as a threat and not as the promise that it is. We think that, in changing us, God is going to take things away from us, but that’s not right at all. The Gospel tells us that God is giving us the chance to give ourselves away. We want to flee the cross, to flee weakness and loss, but it is only in losing ourselves that we will find Christ growing in us. God is inviting us to see that the cross is the tree of life.

When we feel God tilling our hearts, we are being given a chance to let go of our defensiveness, to be free of our fear. We can hold tight to our hardness, we can choose to produce bitter fruit, or we can become the garden we were meant to be. We can delight in this beautiful vineyard Earth that God has planted for us. We can rejoice in the abundant mercies that sustain our every breath. In the living vine of Christ, we can grow fruit to feed the world, and in giving ourselves away, we can be fed with all our souls desire. We can let the good news burst through the life we have known, and nurture us into something more wonderful than we could ever imagine.

Sometimes it is hard to find that good news, but we know that, no matter what, we have a gardener who is making all things new. Out of our brokenness, God will let us grow. Out of our brokenness, God is already growing.

Amen.

God’s grace and goodness is hard to see with our bad eyesight both to the truth of God’s love and the truth of our brokenness; but God can heal eyes.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 25, year A
Texts: Matthew 20:1-15; Jonah 3:10 – 4:11

Sisters and brothers in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

Does my being good make your eyes sick?

That’s what the vineyard owner really asks. Jesus uses a common expression, and the translation, “Are you envious because I am generous?” is a fair interpretation. In that world, to have a diseased eye, an evil eye, a sick eye, was to be jealous or envious.

But stick with the colloquialism: it cuts to the heart of our problem with God. We simply don’t see as God sees. Maybe we don’t want to. Maybe we can’t. But our eyesight is diseased, clouded, and we don’t see God’s astonishing grace. We don’t see the truth about ourselves. We don’t see that God’s way is better than our way.

And so we don’t see a world that looks like the world God intends.

So what’s wrong with our eyesight, anyway?

Well, we can’t see this parable clearly.

First, we always reduce it to a moral tale about heaven after we die. How many times does this parable inspire the question, “You mean you could live your whole life however you wanted, and if on your deathbed you asked forgiveness, God would forgive?” The answer is, yes, of course. But that question itself exposes our eye disease.

Second, we’re pretty sure we’re the early workers in the day. We don’t often hear this with a sigh of relief, saying, “I feel like I got to this whole Christian life thing really late; I’m so grateful God’s love is fully for me.” We don’t see ourselves as latecomers to God’s work.

Third, whenever we hear this parable, we immediately criticize God’s economic sense. The first thing we think is, “fine – but what’s going to happen tomorrow? This guy’s not going to get anyone to work at six a.m., that’s for sure.” We can see all the problems such a way of doing things would have in the “real” world.

But this parable is about God’s realm now, about God’s justice today.

The parables envision life in God’s realm which exists here, now, wherever people follow God’s way. Heaven, where God’s realm also exists, can literally wait. Jesus has more important things for us to consider.

So we can’t dismiss this parable’s economic system. Maybe this is exactly how God means the world to work. What is right for this vineyard owner is that every worker gets a full day’s wage, every one of his workers’ tables gets food that night. Regardless of work hours. But, we protest, that just wouldn’t work.

Oh, yes? God says. Tell me, how well is your system working? Is everybody fed in your economic system? Everybody have a roof over their heads? Everyone have a job? Our system works well for those of us who, to borrow an old political barb, were born on third base and think we hit a triple. We were born in the richest country in the world, with an economy that’s pretty good for the middle class, even if we have worries. We’re pretty hard workers. But in the world economy, we’re definitely the folks that show up at 5 p.m and get all we want. Most of us have no comprehension of what it means to work harder than humanly possible to feed our family, to watch children suffer and die because we can’t provide. To work three shifts a day and still not have enough.

If we had healthy eyes, we’d see that for God, justice is when everybody eats tonight. When no child goes to bed aching with hunger. When all are satisfied by the world’s abundance. If we don’t see this as viable, that’s how diseased our eyes are.

We can’t see Jonah’s story clearly, either.

So here’s some context. Nineveh is the capital of Assyria. Assyria was no worse than other ancient world empires, but it was plenty wicked. It destroyed Israel, the northern kingdom, and subjugated Judah. Lots of innocent people were killed in Assyria’s wars, and Jonah’s people rightly hated them. So God asks Jonah to go into the heart of the beast, the capital city, and declare to them their sins.

You know what’s wrong with our eyesight? We don’t see that we’re Nineveh in this story, not Jonah.

Modern day Mosul, in Iraq, actually sits just across the river from where Jonah sat under his bush. After 9-11, in retaliation for the murder of nearly 3,000 innocent people in our country, we went to war with Iraq. There was and is no evidence they were responsible for 9-11. But because, like Assyria, we have serious military power, we killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Even if Iraq had planned 9-11, hundreds of thousands for 3,000 is hardly just retaliation. This region continues to be unstable, and many in the Middle East would say we are the great enemy of their people.

Imagine God found a Jonah in Iraq today, and said, “go into the heart of the beast.”

“Go to Washington, D.C., and declare to that wicked people that God is judging them for their sin. Call them to repent.” If Jonah could even get through immigration here, how do you think he’d be received? Would we Americans do what the Ninevites do, admit our sin, repent in dust and ashes, ask God’s forgiveness? What do you think?

Now we can understand ancient Jonah’s desire for God to crush Nineveh. Imagine modern Jonah coming here, remembering his burned out village, the dead children in the streets. The destroyed hospital. How would today’s Jonah react if God said, “You know, I’m going to forgive these people”?

The harsh truth that we are Nineveh is even harsher when we realize how blind we’ve been, you and I. For the past 16 years we’ve gone about our lives, doing our things, trying to be good, helping where we could, and never really owning up to what our country did. We are good people. But we go about our days as if none of this really happened, as if we’re not individually to blame. And Iraq is only one of our great sins.

But here’s our hope: If we are Nineveh, God’s words to Jonah about Nineveh are God’s words about us.

“Should I not be concerned about America, that great country, in which there are more than 324 million persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?”

Our blindly ignoring our participating in what we have done to so many other peoples is like not knowing our right hand from our left. And, thank God, there are lots of animals here. And, thank God, God won’t give us up. Much to Jonah’s rightful dismay, God can’t stop loving.

But it is worth remembering that Nineveh repented. They sought new eyes to see the truth, and new lives to live the truth. The cross tells us that God’s love comes first, even before we repent. But how can we live with ourselves once we start to see the truth, if we don’t also turn back to God?

We need God to heal our eyes, so our lives can also be healed.

Heal our eyes to see that God’s love is for all people, all animals, all creation, and it has nothing to do with who deserves what.

Heal our eyes to see how quickly we assume we deserve God’s love and how easily we assume others don’t.

Heal our eyes to see that our economic system is unjust and wicked, and that we stay blind to this because as long as we benefit, we don’t have the energy to change it.

Heal our eyes to see the truth about our nation so we can work with each other to make this a nation that lives up to our ideals of justice for all.

Heal our eyes to see as God sees, unable to throw anyone away, not even us, always reaching out in love, even if it costs everything.

Heal our eyes to see the truth and repent, turn back, begin to live in God’s realm, God’s way.

It’s hard to argue that we see a better way.

Imagine a world where everyone earned a full day’s wage, no matter if they were male or female, no matter the color of their skin, no matter where on the planet they were born. Where no child ever went to bed crying for the pain in their stomach. Where all had homes to shelter in.

Imagine a world where there was no revenge, no retaliation, no destruction of enemies. Where the cycle of hatred and killing finally stopped, broken, no further steps. And reconciliation and love broke out between all peoples.

I’d really like to live in a world like that. I’d really like to see a world like that.

So would the Triune God. It’s what God’s realm on this earth is meant to be.

So, let us pray God give us eyes to see, and wills to do, that God’s realm would actually come among us.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen