Sermon Opoho Church Sunday 8 October 2107 Pentecost 18

Readings:  Psalm 19, Isaiah 5: 1-7,  Matthew 21: 33-46

We pray:  O God open to us your word from scripture – may we hear your truth for us and take it into our hearts and minds, forever changed, forever challenged, forever encouraged.  In Jesus name we pray.  Amen.

The parable of the wicked tenants. One of the more bloodthirsty parables of the Gospels, our reading for today is graphic in its challenge.  Innocent people killed and greed and power prevailing.  It has an obvious and pointed message – the prophets and then the son killed by the people who they wanted to restore into right relationship with God.  They didn’t want to know.  Like all the stories that Jesus tells, we are compelled to engage and dig deeper, and with this parable in particular all the more so as it is remarkably helpful for us as church today – this is not a story we can leave in the mists of a less enlightened time but one we need to bring right into the living rooms of today.

The analogy of the vineyard is not new in the scripture – and we have heard today the same imagery from Isaiah where we have a God who is perplexed and weeping over the destruction of his vineyard, of Israel.  A vineyard planted with all tenderness, nurtured with love, all the supports put in place, but despite the preparation and the care, the vineyard turns toxic - producing thorns and briars – ruin and destruction because of unfaithfulness. 

Jesus is drawing on this teaching from the Hebrew Scriptures as he paints a picture for the people of his time.   And we too need to put ourselves into the contemporary vineyard that is God’s place of welcome and provision in the 21^st century.  And we find some unsettling moments when we do.

And so we begin to unpack the parable of the wicked tenants in our history and for today.

John Calvin, writing 500 years ago certainly saw the significance of this parable for his time – and identified two main points that a church of any time should consider:  one is that we are to expect rejection of the Gospel, rejection of Jesus not just from people outside the church but also from those within, from religious leaders who are given responsibility for making Jesus Christ know but who in fact completely reject the cornerstone of their church and go the wrong way.  Secondly Calvin reminds us that, whatever contrivances are mounted against the church from inside or from without, God will be victorious.

Let us think about the first of these propositions – that of rejection. And the first thing to define is what is being rejected.  The rejection is not in the end of the bible or a system of ideas or propositions inviting assent.  It is instead a rejection of the defining issue of our faith – a rejection of Jesus.  The tenants did not kill an idea, a principle or a system of doctrine, they killed the landowners son!  The gospel comes to us as a person. 

So how might we be rejecting the person of Christ, the cornerstone of our faith, today?

Of course we know well the attack on faith, any faith, from without - people especially swallow the persuasive words of those who aggressively and in the name of rationality reject any form of ‘greater than’.  Their books are on the best seller lists these days, in the airport bookshops, make the news online.  We don’t see nearly as much space given to the well thought out and engaging writings on faith or belief. They’re just boring unless they are extremist writings in which case they are either placed in with comedy on the shelves or labelled terrorist and, whichever way, usually the entire faith community is tarred with the same brush.  And then there is the other effective rejection -  the apathy, mockery, irrelevance, ears unable or unwilling to or not bothered to hear.

The attack from within, though, is much more insidious and dangerous.  For we trust those in leadership generally, and this parable is a timely reminder that it is so easy for us to be led (or lead) by the nose into paths that are completely at odds with the way Christ leads us.    

‘Let us kill him and get his inheritance’ takes on a dark meaning when we see the tenants in the light of leadership in the church today – money rules, hatred, violence, self praise.  But we are not like that are we? Oh yes.

I have a story that beggars belief but one that point us to the distance we can put between Jesus love for the world and the way in which so called Christian leaders have usurped that to their own understanding, killing the landowners son again and again and again.  Hear this and weep:

Written by an evangelical pastor in the U.S.:

Sitting at a dining room table full of fellow evangelical pastors, I asked how many were “carrying” (a euphemism for being armed with a concealed handgun). They all raised their hands. Then I asked, “What determines when you draw your gun and prepare to shoot another human being?” There was awkward body language and mumbling. After a few seconds passed, one older man said, “I’ll tell you what determines whether I draw the gun or not. It’s the man’s skin colour”.  And he went on to say black people don’t belong and are so much more dangerous for thinking they do – so I shoot ‘em.  Everyone around the table nodded in agreement.  The writer was unable to reconcile that he was one with them in faith but not, as he put it, in guns and race.  But I would challenge that – and say that their faith has gone toxic if it allows them to justify such attitudes in the name of Christ. By all that is holy, church leaders who act like this are not Christ followers.

Perhaps this story to us is just an anathema – too outside of our experience to begin to comprehend – but there will be things we are doing and attitudes we are living by that are also abhorrent to the one who is the cornerstone of our church.

Some thoughts (and I suspect you will have more):

Ø  Where preachers and leaders have made the rules of being church in direct conflict with the teachings of Jesus’ for example feed the hungry, look after the poor – then we are turning on our fruitful vineyard into desert. 

Ø  Where we are only concerned for self or denigrate those who think differently, we have lost sight of the complexities and rhythms and differing talents needed in the vineyard – then we are turning the nurturing soil into wasteland.

Ø  When we preach hatred and division, supremacism rather than equality and violence rather than peace – well then we have truly become the same as those wicked tenants – actively killing all that is right and good and loving and replacing them with our ideas of right inheritance – actually not so far from that story from the States after all.  Think the holocaust, slavery, subjugation of women, Soviet gulags, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, treatment of Maori in this country….

But before we get too down, let us remember that Jesus does not leave us in the depths of despair, nor does he allow that God gives up on us.  He reminds the leaders of the church of the day that those who choose their own way over the way of Jesus will fall, and that others will be found who will produce the fruits of the kingdom, who will follow the teachings of the person of Jesus, who will persevere, will be faithful because they see the purpose of the vineyard owner through the son who comes to reconcile and heal.

The cornerstone is secure, nothing will move it.  The attack on Jesus is ultimately fruitless – because, we are told,  nothing we can do will alter that fact that God has provided the vineyard that will bring forth fruit for the kingdom.  And those who think they can change the nature of that fruit to their own purpose will fail.   

God has prepared everything we need for fruitful living – planted a vineyard for us that offers us all we need and placed Jesus at the centre of it - it is for us to respond, welcoming and walking in the way of Jesus or rejecting him in false living and blind teaching.   

And only each of us can answer what our response will be – but please let us not be the tenant farmers, blind to the approaches of a God who loves us, nurtures us and delights in us, people who have lost sight of the one who gives us all that we could ever want or need. 

It seems right to finish with the words of the psalm, the words that remind us of God’s gift to us, the people of God.  The law of God is perfect, reviving the soul;  the decrees of God are sure, making wise the simple;
the precepts of God are right, rejoicing the heart; the commandment of God is clear, enlightening the eyes;
the fear of God is pure, enduring for ever; the ordinances of God are true and righteous altogether.
More to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold; sweeter also than honey, and drippings of the honeycomb. 

Margaret Garland