© 2023 Evan D. Garner
Audio of this sermon can be heard here. Video of the entire service can be seen here.
In today’s gospel lesson, Jesus tells another parable about the kingdom of God. This time, God’s reign is depicted as a vineyard, painstakingly prepared by the landowner and then leased to some less than honorable tenants. Sometimes Jesus’ parables are hard to understand. This isn’t one of those parables.
Tenant farming was common back in Jesus’ day. Landowners would lease their property to resident farmers and then send someone to collect their share of the produce at harvest time. Occasionally, a dispute would arise over how much produce the landowner was due, but the law was pretty clear in those situations. And, in situations like the one that Jesus describes in his parable, there was no doubt how things would turn out.
When it was time for the harvest, the landowner sent his slaves to collect what was due, but the tenants refused to pay up. In a brazen sign of rebellion, they beat, killed, and stoned the landowner’s slaves. So the landowner tried again, sending more slaves, perhaps unaware why the first group had failed. The second group fared no better than the first, and they, too, were beaten, killed, and stoned to death. Something else had to be done, so the landowner sent his son—the heir, his legal agent—who, unlike a slave, would be in a position to contact the authorities and declare his father’s arrangement with the tenants in abeyance. He would have the authority to boot the tenants off the land and have them arrested and punished and then lease the land out to someone else.
But the tenants had another idea. When they saw the landowner’s son, they said to themselves, “This is the heir! Come, let us kill him, and then we can keep the vineyard for ourselves.” It doesn’t take a legal scholar to know what will happen next. Using a common rabbinical technique, Jesus asked his audience what the owner of the vineyard will do when he comes to town, and their answer invited judgment upon themselves: “He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time.”
They know what the parable means, they know that Jesus is telling it about them. They know that God will not allow the kingdom to be hijacked by those who would keep it to themselves. It’s not hard to figure that part out, but what is hard is figuring out what this parable means for us. To understand that, we need to try to hear this parable not as one of Jesus’ disciples but as if we are the targets of his unveiled criticism. And I don’t think that’s as hard as it sounds.
This whole situation started when the chief priests and Pharisees came to Jesus to ask where he got the authority to challenge their leadership. But let’s back up a little further than that. When Jesus arrived in Jerusalem at the beginning of Matthew 21, he went straight to the temple, where he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons. Effectively, Jesus forced the religious apparatus at the center of Judaism to come to a halt. Then, Matthew tells us, with worship interrupted, the blind and the lame came into the temple to find Jesus, who healed them. The buzz about this controversial figure quickly grew to a fevered pitch. Even the children in the temple were spontaneously crying out, “Hosanna to the Son of David!” attributing to Jesus a title with clear messianic implications.
When they heard the children’s cries, the religious authorities became indignant. This was too much. Not only had Jesus asserted himself into the center of his people’s religious life, but he had done so in ways that left the people wondering whether he might be the Lord’s anointed—the messiah, the Christ—who had come to deliver them from the tyranny of the Roman Empire. Sure, he was popular among the crowds, but what had he done to earn the right to disrupt the careful balance of power between the Jewish and Roman authorities? What gave this carpenter’s son from Nazareth the right to displace the recognized religious leaders in favor of a new kingdom of God and install himself upon the throne?
I think we tend to discount the questions and objections of the religious leaders because we know how the story will end—because we know that Jesus will be vindicated in his resurrection on the third day—but, if we were in their place, wouldn’t we ask the same thing? Wouldn’t we insist on some sort of proof before we allowed a renegade stranger to throw away everything we know to be good and right about our church? Think of it this way. Whose criticism of our parish would we take to heart? What sort of outsider, with no connection to the history, tradition, and leadership of this church, would we invite to dress us down and tell us what we’re doing wrong? Whom would we allow to walk down that aisle and bring our Sunday worship to a halt?
In this tradition, we know where to look for someone with that kind of authority. We are accustomed to listening to the clergy, who are ordained and, thus, set apart for the work of proclaiming God’s word to our congregation. Vestries are elected by the members of the parish and entrusted with the responsibility of setting a budget and taking care of the buildings, so, in a sense, we listen to them every time we put something in the offering plate. Bishops have surprisingly little authority when it comes to the affairs of an individual parish, but, when the woman or man with the pointy hat shows up, we tend to listen, even when they say something controversial.
Some people in our parish have considerable authority even though it comes from unofficial sources. Volunteers like Albert Gray, without whom the church could not operate, are understood by many to be the authority on countless details. Parishioners who have worshipped here for more than fifty years are the ones we ask to help us understand our history. And those who show up and help out every time that help is needed—like the members of St. Spat’s—are the authorities we look to when we need to know how to take care of this place and each other. If any of those authority figures stood up and called us out, we’d at least give them a listen. But what about someone we didn’t recognize—someone who hadn’t put in the time to get to know us and how we do things?
When the religious leaders asked Jesus to explain where his authority came from, he didn’t waste any time or breath justifying his prophetic actions or tracing his messianic lineage. Instead, he told them some stories—stories about what it means to do the will of God and what happens when we forget that it is God whom we are called to serve: “The kingdom of God is like a landowner who planted a vineyard…[and] leased it to tenants and went to another country.” In this parable, Jesus teaches us that the authority of every religious institution and every religious leader is measured only by the extent to which they bear fruit for God.
In a church as old and beautiful as ours, in a denomination as tradition-rich and pretentious as ours, we must be careful that we do not confuse the fruit we have placed in our storehouses for the fruit we are called to give back to God. We have been tenants in this vineyard for a long, long time—so long that it is easy to forget that the vineyard does not belong to us. We are only leasing it from God. If we want to know whether we are being faithful tenants, we must listen not to the religious elites but to those whom Jesus came to serve. It is the poor, the oppressed, the incarcerated, and the marginalized who will tell us whether we are sharing our produce with God or trying to keep it all for ourselves.
If a guest at Community Meals stood up to tell us that we have our priorities backwards, would we listen? If one of the people who sleeps at night beside the playground interrupted our worship to show us that we aren’t getting any closer to God’s reign, would we allow them to speak? If Jesus came to the door and asked us by what authority we claim to be the Body of Christ—his hands and feet in the world—what would we say?
I think our parish does a lot of good in this community, and am I proud to be the Rector of St. Paul’s. To the people of Fayetteville, I think we represent hope and love and welcome for all. I think we are known to be a church that doesn’t just talk about helping others but a place where that talk becomes action. Over the years, we have produced a lot of good fruit for the kingdom of God, and we can’t stop now. Going forward, we must remember that the only true measure of our success is whether we bear fruit for God, and we must be willing to let those who operate outside the power structures of this church and our society tell us when we’ve lost our way.
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