Sunday, August 15, 2010

Twelfth Sunday After Pentecost Year C

The Vineyard of the Lord

In out modern culture there has been such an abuse of authority that we have all become leery of experts. We are all aware that so-called experts can barrage us with statistics and authoritative sources and convince us of one thing, until the next so-called expert does the same thing to convince us of the exact opposite. And so we simply make up our minds in advance about the camp we'll stick with and only respect the experts that already agree with us. The days when we could rationally weigh factual evidence and come to a reasonable decision are over. If any of us genuinely try to wade through the monumental sludge pile of facts and figures to try to get at the truth of a thing we find ourselves exhausted.

Or is the truth more that the whole idea of reasonably making a decision based on facts was misguided to begin with? Isn't it more likely that in everything except perhaps the laws of physics it's not really possible to talk about facts? Isn't it more truthful to say that we have theories that seem to work and so we stick to them, sometimes even when they don't work? Don't we gravitate toward those who agree with us and avoid those who don't? Isn't our self-esteem wrapped up in what we believe to be the right map for living, so that we are genuinely offended if someone or some group convincingly challenges it?

How do we decide what's really going on? And then how do we figure out what to do about it?

I think there's a clue in Isaiah's beautiful song of the vineyard. The song is really a parable, and Jesus used it hundreds of years later in his own teaching.

You can open your bibles to it if you want to Isaiah 5. Old Testament, toward the end. The form here, this song, sounds something like a love song, something like the Song of Songs, in fact. I like to call this Isaiah's country western song. It's a lament about betrayal. God loved God's people, but the people done him wrong.

I went to visit Gene Blake last week and every time I go to see him he shows me his tomato plants. He has them in big planters on his porch. Earlier this summer he was proud to show me how big they were getting. He was pretty excited. But last week he was not so proud. "Do you know," he said, "I haven't gotten a single blossom?" And sure enough, there were the big tomato vines, just as healthy and green as you please, and not single flower on them. "Not tomato one," he said. I wondered why and he did too. He opined that it might have been for lack of bees. Who knows?

I suppose all of you gardeners and farmers out there know just what is being said here. One chooses a good spot for a garden carefully. One prepares the soil. Lots of effort goes into planting and watering and weeding, doesn't it? A good gardener has success most of the time, but sometimes, inexplicably, the whole effort comes to nothing.

And Isaiah says this is a metaphor for God's view of the then-current situation. He doesn't try to explain why the vineyard produced the stinky fruit, which is a better translation than "wild grapes." But the metaphor is a good one for describing why it is that Israel is lying in ruins to the north and Judah is about to follow suit.

We may not understand how an ordinary person can have a vision from God, but God doesn't understand how an ordinary person can't.

This is a parable about heritage. The people of God have forgotten all that God had done for them, all that God had promised them, all that God had commanded them, all of their experiences with God over many generations. And for this reason they had not seen what was really going on, and they had not know what to do about it.

If we claim our heritage as God's people, and work at remembering it, we all become prophets. It's not easy, but it's not rocket science either. Nor is there any guarantee that it will make us happy or fulfilled in the usual sense of the words. Sometimes our heritage will give us to courage to stick to an unpopular course for the sake of the truth. Sometimes it will turn even those we love away from us. Sometimes it will cost us. But the joy and peace that we derive from this heritage has to do with the salvation that God is working through us.

What our heritage gives us are the perspective we need in order to know what's really going on and just what to do about it. Our heritage gives us the ultimate vision, an idea of the right kind of soil to plant ourselves in, and the kind of grapes God is looking for.

If there was a picture album of the most influential people in your life, who would be in it? Who are the people who taught you how to figure out what's going on and how to decide what to do about it? That's your heritage. That's the vineyard you're planted in. And God is asking you and I today, is Abraham in there? Moses, Elijah, Isaiah? Is Paul the Apostle in there, and what about Luke and the early church?

With the perspective of our heritage as God's people, we can evaluate with confidence the evidence of whatever expert comes along. No we won't get answers to scientific matters. We will not be able to get clear direction on the specifics of moral questions our ancestors never had to answer. What we will get is a good idea of what we can expect of human beings, where God might be in all of it, and what the best bet is for the next right thing to do.

It's never too late to get to know the cloud of witnesses, the heritage of God's people. It's never too late to be planted in the vineyard of the Lord.

Amen.

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