WE ARE THEY
A sermon by Rev. Dr. Jack E. Skiles

October 5, 2008

Isaiah 5:1-7; Matthew 21:33-46

This morning we have been gifted in our lectionary Biblical cycle with a story, a parable of the wicked tenants, that I don't like because of its traditional interpretation. It is a story that tells us according to tradition why Jews are bad and Christians are good. Most of us know better than to buy that traditional yarn. But the yarn has been woven so tightly into the written stories that it seems we must constantly be about pulling it apart for our newest listeners and to remind ourselves that multiple millions of Jews have been slaughtered through the centuries by Christian individuals and Christian governments who convince themselves that the Jews killed God in Jesus and thus remain expendable people on the dung heap of religious bigotry.

In the Gospel according to Matthew's parable of the wicked tenants we have an image of a vineyard that was established by a landowner. Once the hard work of establishing the vineyard and building the press and watchtower was done, the landowner takes off and leaves tenant farmers in charge who are to tend the vineyard, harvest the crop and remit the profits to the landowner, who will then pay the tenant farmers their wages.

You know the rest of the story, painfully so. In Matthew's telling, when the landowner sends servants to collect the profits and to pay the tenant farmers their wages, they are simply beaten up and some of them killed. The tenants are saying, “Hey, we've done all the work and we are going to keep the farm for ourselves.” Like any bad joke where the listener has to wait painfully through three repeating refrains, this happens twice and then on the third time the landowner's son comes to collect, expecting to be respected, and of course he is killed also.

God is the landowner of earth and the Jews were the ones given the keys to the Kingdom of God on earth and they were greedy, grubby tenants who even after being sent the servants, the prophets they killed them. So finally, this Christian story says, God had to send God's only son and the Jews out of disrespect killed even Jesus. Amen. End of story. Cue the holocaust.

Matthew was writing this story as a Jewish Scribe who had chosen to separate from traditional Judaism and was attempting to show his audience of other traditional Jews why they should separate from the mothership of Judaism and join these followers of Jesus. Beware, Matthew's Jesus says, the landowner will bring the wretched Jews to a wretched end.

The people who first heard this story of Matthew's were living in an age where a group of terrorists had, just a mere decade earlier, come into the vineyard, Israel and Jersusalem, and torn down not just the Temple, but left the whole city without one stone still upon another; then all the Jewish inhabitants from all over the country of Israel, not just city inhabitants, the whole country's citizenry, were hunted down and killed. The only survivors were those in other countries. It was Rome 's imperial hope that if you wipe out the vineyard and kill all the tenants that maybe peace would come to the land.

The wailing wall in Jerusalem , where millions flock today as a religious pilgrimage, is all that is left standing from Rome 's act of terrorism against the freedom-loving Jews. Even that wall had to be uncovered and excavated. The Jews were never again a nation from the year 70 until 1948 when the UN Charter re-established Israel as a sovereign state. That was one thousand and fifty years, roughly, that the Jews were in exile in foreign lands.

For all those years this morning's parable of the wicked tenants has been used to support Jews being kept out of Israel . They were bad tenants. I'm not going to spend much more time in this area this morning, except to challenge us that we, as progressive Christian voices in Bloomington and Indiana's Christian community, must be bold leaders in standing forth and standing firmly in not only rejecting this traditional interpretation but also in providing protection for our Jewish friends and teaching others a viable Christian alternative interpretation to the traditional story.

Most everyone does not want to believe that God ever deserts any of God's people to purposeful destruction. What kind of God worthy of service would be so immoral? Most common folks that we encounter every day hate the blame game, putting one group down and standing on top of them to be higher. They know that is just base-level wrong and that if God is worth anything, God would not support such behavior or call people who do such behaviors as specially chosen ones, God favorite ones, in fact. People know better. But, they have to be offered alternatives that make good common sense after centuries of being told that God does give up on people after awhile. It is our job from the vineyard that is ours to cultivate and grow to not only seek to correct past mistakes and interpretations, but to produce faith and belief in God inside ourselves and in our children that are fresh and full of a vibrancy that is fully informed of not only the riches of our past but also the best of our present.

There is a bit of cosmology in this parable of the wicked tenants that must be challenged. You caught it. If God is the landowner who comes in and plants the vineyard and sets it all up to produce…, where does God go in the story? Away and then comes back to collect the profits and pay us what we are owed. Let us never be afraid to disagree with the stories that are told.

That God started creation in whatever method, a big bang is good for me, and that then God went on to do something else, is not a sufficient cosmology or theology for me and I would urge all of us to ponder if it is sufficient that God is nothing more than an absentee landlord who uses a collection service to receive rents. Our sacred stories are multiple and they don't all tell the story in the same way. They are the same general story, men and women, you and I, trying to make sense out of God and the world which is our lives.

God is not nearly as far away as some people fear and as some people hope. Our and others' sacred stories are filled with the movement and the placement of God. The Greeks and the Romans had their Zeus and Jupiter on Mt. Olympus . The earliest stories in our chapter of holy tales has Moses finding God on Mt. Sinai , in the clouds, in the midst, in a tower of flames. Somehow they got God in a box and put God in the ark of the covenant and hid God in the Holy of Holies in the temple.

By the time of Jesus things were changing as far as perception of God, and Jesus said that God is not some distant parent, but more like a tender, loving up close mommy or daddy, Abba. Jesus suggested that God is as close as our loving mother and father, and that we should talk to God, unafraid of using intimate terminology.

One of the errors, in my humble opinion, is that Christianity tried to put God in Jesus and then, of course, he got killed and we had to get him back so we talk about God the spirit, which I really do like. But church has had a tendency to say that God's spirit only fills you when you do the right rituals and believe the right stuff. Many groups of Christians put God in their Bible and then try keep it shut as much as possible. The Bible has become for many just another ark of the covenant and our coffee tables and bookshelves have become the rarely entered holy of holies.

God is neither an absentee landlord nor a rejecting parent who chooses to have favorite children and condemns some to humiliation and rejection. God has never been successfully contained in box or a book on put on a shelf. God's spirit has no admission costs like a carnival ride.

Our day, our age, our vineyard calls upon us to firmly and clearly repudiate many ancient beliefs that seek to control access to the Divine and that further seek to define the divine by concepts that no longer fit in the vineyard of our understanding of the Universe in 2008.

Remember that encounter a couple weeks ago between Jesus and the Samaritan Woman? The southern Jews worshipped God in the temple in Jerusalem and the northern Jews in a temple on Mt. Garizim . Jesus announces to the woman that God is to be worshipped and served in spirit and in truth in any and all locations, not just the traditionally identified vineyards made and designed by human hands.

We are called in this morning's scripture story, not to blame the Jews, the Russians, Wall Street financiers with golden parachutes, Republicans, Democrats, academia, our partner, the military industrial system, lousy parents, our boss who is not even grounded on this planet or even the crazy liberal preacher. We are the ones, we are they, those who are responsible for the vineyard, the garden, the planet. We are to make sure that when God walks down our street and stops at our house we do not miss God.

It is so much easier to blame or worry about everyone else knowing God adequately. But, the reality is we are the ones who have to ask, what does it mean to be God's tenants, right now, in our places? What does faithfulness look like? Martin Luther King, Jr. showed us. Dietrich Bonhoeffer showed us. Dorothy Day showed us.

The call to be tenders of the vineyard of God starts here but it doesn't end here. To do it well takes reaching out and holding hands and hearts to our brothers and sisters and even strangers and enemies.

A child came up missing one day in the fields of a Midwestern town. The neighbors rallied and set out in search in many different directions. Long after midnight folks came straggling in cold and defeated when the child had not been found. So someone yelled into the darkness, “Let's join hands and make big sweeps across the fields.” They did and not too long afterwards they stumbled upon the dead child who had succumbed to the cold. Person after person lamented, “If only we had joined hands sooner.” Emily Dickinson once said, “let us all join hands so that no one will get lost.”

When I am finished I want to leave a world, leave a family, leave a church family that I have helped move forward by holding hands with as many as possible and that we have worked together to be good tenants of the vineyard while I lived here. It is the legacy I want to leave the next generation. Let us ponder as we move toward communion the mystery of joining hands in God's hands.