2008
Sermons
Dez 28 - The Costly Gift
Dez 24 - The Whole Story
Dez 21 - Disrupted!
Dez 21 - Blessed be God, anyway
Dez 14 - Signpost People
Dez 7 - Turn Around!
Nov 30 - Lament
Nov 23 - Seeing Jesus
Nov 16 - Treasure
Nov 9 - Good News, or Bad?
Okt 12 - Now We Join in Celebration
Okt 5 - Is All Lost?
Sep 27 - No reason to brag
Sep 21 - At the Right Time
Sep 14 - The Holy Cross of Christ has set us free!
Sep 7 - Responsibility for One Another?
Aug 31 - Extreme?
Aug 24 - Questions
Aug 17 - Inside, Outside, Upside Down
Aug 10 - Against Giants
Aug 3 - You Are What You Eat
Jul 27 - Whose Treasure?
Jul 20 - ...and the Harvest
Jul 13 - God, Seed, Growth, Harvest
Jul 6 - Burden and Yoke
Jun 29 - The Big Question
Jun 22 - Death and Life
Jun 15 - Priestly and Holy
Jun 8 - Lord, Have Mercy
Jun 1 - And it will be hard
Mai 25 - Just One More....
Mai 18 - Good...very good!
Mai 11 - Transformed!
Mai 4 - It's a battle..............
Apr 27 - In the conversation
Apr 20 - We are...we will be....
Apr 13 - Worship and Life
Apr 6 - Just Talking
Mrz 30 - Resurrection of the Body
Mrz 23 - This New Day
Mrz 22 - Blessed be God!
Mrz 21 - It is finished!
Mrz 21 - Died, For Me!
Mrz 20 - This Do!
Mrz 16 - Good News for those who flunk the test
Mrz 9 - To Laugh, Yes, To Laugh!
Mrz 2 - Together in Christ - Glenn Lunger
Mrz 2 - Why?
Feb 24 - Bigger than we thought
Feb 17 - Abraham the Player, Nicodemus the Spectator
Feb 10 - Saying NO
Feb 6 - In deep conversation with the Father
Feb 3 - How close to God?
Jan 27 - What? Who? Where? When?
Jan 20 - Behold, the Lamb who takes....
Jan 13 - It Just Might Happen
Jan 6 - The Gift of You
Is All Lost?
Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost - October 5, 2008
One could become disheartened when hearing this Gospel section today.
Is all lost? we might ask.
Let's go down the list of characters in Jesus' parable and see if we can identify with any of them.
--tenants, who act violently toward those sent to collect the rent due.
--servants who are sent to do the collecting, and are mistreated or killed.
--son, who should have been received with great honor, but is also killed.
--other tenants, who get the benefit of the work of the others without payment.
--and finally the owner, whose trust in the first tenants is misused,
-- whose servants and son are killed,
--who must search for new tenants,
--who may have lost the crop in the meantime,
Not a very promising list, is it?
There is trouble on every side.
Let's just focus on the first part of the reading, which is the parable itself, and not the applications that were added to the story.
We are so often in a hurry, and want to focus on that later part rather than the story itself.
I get the impression, though, that Jesus was not in that much of a rush.
He would give a parable and let it strike the ear of the hearers, and then wait for it to penetrate far enough to affect that hearer's heart as well.
So, let's hear the story again, weighing the words carefully.
A man lays out a vineyard:
this is a tremendous amount of effort,
--clearing the land,
--perhaps terracing it if it is a hillside,
--working out the spacing of the vines so that there will be enough nutrients and water for each,
--surrounding it with a stone wall not only to declare ownership, but also to keep out those who might harm the vineyard and also to control the winds.
The owner has invested a lot of time, money, and effort in setting up the vineyard.
And next, he chooses tenants, puts them in charge of things, and leaves.
It is going to be years before the vineyard produces a crop.
If we are like those in Jesus' first audience, we might feel sympathy for those poor tenants.
There were many absentee landlords in the Galilee in those days, often making life very hard for the workers who struggled to survive from day to day.
So when the master's servants who come to collect the product of the harvest are beaten, we might secretly cheer a bit that the rich owner has been bested.
A little class war going on here!
It was only a temporary victory of course, because the owner cannot let this go unchallenged, or else no one else would every pay rent if they could get away with it.
[No bailout available to them!]
The owner sends a second servant who is also beaten.
Now our reaction to the owner shifts and we become disgusted with him.
Is he a wimp?
He should demand vengeance, but instead, what does he do?
He sends his son, who is murdered.
What kind of master is this?
The story ends with that question in our minds.
What kind of master is this, who has no rent, no honor, no servants, and no son?
What kind of master is this who has not immediately reacted with violence toward the greedy tenants?
The other puzzle in the story is why the tenants think that they can get away with it at all?
It is completely irrational.
They say, “Let us kill the son and seize the inheritance.”
It makes no sense as long as the master lives.
Perhaps Jesus told this detail in the story to remind his hearers about another time that the workers said, “Come, let us kill him and take what is his.”
Remember the story in Genesis of Joseph and his brothers, where the jealous brothers almost murder him, and sell him into slavery which they assume will lead to an early death, so that they can have the affection that their father Jacob lavished upon Joseph.
Much later in the tale,, when Joseph has risen to a powerful position in Egypt, and his brothers come to Egypt to buy grain during a famine, they do not recognize Joseph, but he recognizes them!
At length, Joseph reveals his identity to his brothers, and says to his terror-stricken and dumbfounded brothers: “You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.”
“You meant it to kill me, but God used it to get me into the right position in order to save your lives now.”
If that is indeed in the background of Jesus' story, it profoundly changes our reaction to the relationship of the characters in Jesus' story.
Instead of a simple sympathy for the downtrodden worker, and then disgust for a wimpy master, now we have moved to ponder the mystery of a patient master.
What kind of master is this, who has this much patience?
What good can come because of the master's patience?
What are the master's intentions in all of this?
And the story ends right there.
Is all lost?
This is a tragedy: servants beaten, son killed, vineyard overtaken, and us with lots of questions.
So now, upon reflection, is this the story of God's patience with us?
How much can God endure?
The rest of Jesus' life all the way to the cross seem to be part of the answer:
tremendous patience!
God could, and justly should, destroy us.
Much of our behavior toward God and toward our neighbor is twisted up with evil, or at least self-centeredness.
We ought to see it as irrational as the behavior of the tenants toward the master.
So much has been entrusted to us, to use for the profit of the owner.
It is not right to regard things around us as museum pieces; they are to be used.
[Remember another story Jesus told about the servant who hid the treasure away instead of using and investing it, and how the treasure was taken away from him and given to someone who would use it.]
We are to use the things and relationships in order to further what God wants to happen.
On the other hand, we are not to regard these things as our own possessions.
One of the chief ways that we do that is when we say “It's my body and I'll do with it as I please.”
No, our bodies are God's instruments for life; our own, our children, our neighbor too,
so that each can glorify God in his or her own way,
each can be a living part of God's story of his life with his people,
each can receive and give in a symbiotic way.
How many marriages flounder because we cannot keep that in mind?
How many friendship are broken because one tries to use another instead of helping and encouraging the another?
How many business deals lead to disaster when the attitude is “It's all mine and I'll do with it as I please!”?
[Surely the current financial mess is in large part due to old-fashioned greed on the part of legislators, regulators, financiers, investors, home-buyers, and more.]
Each person needs to understand that he or she has a responsibility to God for one another.
Peter Marty says:
Certain privileges and responsibilities go with being related to God and God's sovereignty.
Trying to rewrite the terms of those privileges, or escape the responsibilities that accompany them, may engender a momentary feeling of freedom.
But God remains the sovereign owner of everything we are and have, regardless of how we act.
And not even coercion and cruelty can wrest from God what belongs to God and somehow make it our own.
Each time that we try to do that, great pain ensues for the Lord Jesus, for us, and for those whom we trample,
just as is did for
--Joseph, his brothers and father,
--Jesus and the fickle crowd at the entry into Jerusalem,
--and so many more places throughout scripture and the rest of history.
Such patience God has!
He waits and waits for us to come to our senses
His patience is not a sign of weakness as some think, but a demonstration of his determination to reach out to us no matter how much it costs.
His patience makes room for Good News to reach us and change us.
One day Jesus told a story.
But it shall not turn out to be a tragedy, because he is actually leaving room for a different outcome than we thought.
All is not lost; there is still time.
What shall we do with it, to the glory of God? AMEN.
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Please note: The preceding sermon is provided as a resource for the thought, prayer, and meditation of the members and friends of St. Mark's. It is the residue of a verbal event, and thus it does not have academic footnotes and other details that would be expected in a written document. The writer gladly acknowledges the prior thought and work of many Christians before him. |