Sermon: 8 October 2023 Pentecost 19A
Reading: Matthew 21.22-46
Theme: A lament for the Vineyard
Prayer: O God, take my lips and speak through them; take our minds and think through them; yet take our hearts and set them on fire. For your Kingdom’s sake. AMEN.
In my former parish of St Peter’s Box Hill, one of my Wardens, Sophia, took it upon herself to supply me regularly with copies of National Geographic. She herself has been reading these for decades. I suppose she figured I needed more nature in my reading diet. And I suppose that she would be tickled pink to know that after Janet and my recent journey to the Red Centre and Kakadu and Litchfield national parks, I must admit that I believe God spoke to me, or at the very least, nudged me in the direction of, connecting more deeply with the beauty of creation! I recall the generosity of Sophia only because I was doing a bit of a spring-clean in my office and came across a box of past issues of National Geographic. Issues that I wanted to keep for future reference. One was sitting on the top of the pile that made me think more deeply again about the issue of future of our planet.
In April 2020, National Geographic published a “flip” issue of their magazine — basically, two issues in one — to explore two starkly different futures for our planet. One half of the magazine presented the worst-case scenario: what Planet Earth will look like in fifty years if we do nothing substantive about climate change. The writer described a grim, dangerous world of mass extinctions, searing forest fires, deadly heat waves, fierce storms, and widespread suffering for the human race.
The other half portrayed a more hopeful, verdant vision: what Planet Earth could look like in fifty years if we harness our time, ingenuity, resources, and technology now to undo at least some of the damage we have already done. In this scenario, we would find sustainable ways to feed ourselves. We’d clean up our oceans, rivers, and lakes. We’d provide carbon-neutral energy for all.
We’d reimagine our homes, streets, cities, and corporations in light of the most pressing needs of the environment. We’d begin to reverse climate change, and prevent many, if not most extinctions.
“It’s impossible to know who is right,” Susan Goldberg wrote about the two contrasting visions in her Editor’s Note for the issue. Everything will depend on the decisions we make in the coming days, weeks, months, years, and decades.
In our Gospel reading this week, Jesus tells the chief priest and elders a parable about some tenants who make ghastly decisions — decisions rooted in greed, arrogance, disrespect, and selfishness. A landowner, Jesus says, lovingly planted a vineyard, leased it to some tenants, and travelled to another country. When harvest time came, the landowner sent his servants to the vineyard to collect his share of the produce. But the tenants seized the servants. They beat one, killed another, and stoned the third.
In response, the landowner sent a second group of servants to the vineyard — but the tenants killed them as well. Finally, the landowner decided to send his own son into the fray to reason with the tenants. Surely, the landowner thought, “they will respect my son."
They did not. When the tenants saw the heir of the vineyard approaching, they hatched a plan to murder him and claim his inheritance. So, they seized the son, threw him out of the vineyard, and took his life.
Jesus concludes the parable with a question for the chief priests and the elders: “When the landowner returns to his vineyard, what will he do to those tenants?”
I know that “The Parable of the Wicked Tenants,” (as this story is popularly called), isn’t straightforwardly about climate change or the environment. Jesus tells this particular story to indict the religious leaders of his day for exploiting and mistreating God’s people — the people of Israel, God’s “vineyard.” The parable is meant to expose the corruption of the religious elite and condemn their obsessions with privilege and power.
Through the pointed story of the vineyard, Jesus implies that the chief priests and elders are like the wicked tenants. They abuse their authority, dishonour God’s house, and mistreat both God’s messengers (the Prophets) and God’s son (Jesus).
At the heart of this parable, though, is a distinction that I think speaks very pointedly to our current environmental crisis. What the tenants in the story neglect to understand — or very deliberately choose to ignore — is that they are stewards rather than owners of the vineyard. When the landowner asks for his rightful share of the harvest, the tenants take offense. As if the vineyard belongs to them, and it is the landowner who is in the wrong for making a claim on the land at all. Somewhere along the way, the tenants have forgotten their place. Their vocation. Their standing in relationship to both the land and the landowner. To put it bluntly, they have forgotten that they own nothing — nothing at all. Everything belongs to the landowner. Theirs is not a vocation of ownership; it is a vocation of caring, tending, safeguarding, cultivating, and protecting — on behalf of another.
It’s worth noting here that Jesus does not describe the evildoers in the story as thieves or marauders. They are not outsiders — they are the landowner’s trusted tenants. He chose them and granted them creative license to steward the vineyard for the benefit of all. How much more tragic, then, when they abuse the landowner’s trust so cruelly.
The analogy I’m drawing is of course obvious. Have we not, like the tenants in the parable, deluded ourselves into thinking that we “own” the earth and all that is in it, when in fact, we are meant to be stewards only? Have we not, like the tenants, assumed that God is absent, or apathetic, or uninvolved — and hoarded the beauty and bounty of creation for our own selfish ease, gain, comfort, and convenience? Have we not, like the tenants, ignored and even maligned the countless messengers who have warned us over the past many years that our rapacious relationship with the planet will lead us to destruction?
The truth is we humans crave ownership. We like possessing things. We like controlling things.
We like believing that things exist primarily to please, feed, entertain, soothe, empower, and protect us. We are “rent-to-own” folks by both temperament and preference, and the idea that we don’t in fact own anything deeply offends us. Stewardship deeply offends us. It insults our core sense of entitlement, and threatens our core identity as consumers.
This is the case even when creation itself exposes the ridiculousness of our stingy notions of ownership. Have we not seen news stories about people actually going to court because they want to "own" their view — meaning, the narrow slice of Ocean visible outside their living room windows. What does it mean to own the sea? What does it mean to own a tree that existed before our great-grandparents were even born? A tree that will outlast our great-grandchildren by another several centuries?
When it comes to the planet, the bottom line is crystal clear in Scripture: we are NOT owners. We are caretakers of a vineyard God cares about deeply, a vineyard that will not thrive or even survive if we continue to treat it as a cheap, inexhaustible commodity. One need only glance at environmental news headlines — “8.8 million tons of plastic waste enter the ocean each year,” “A quarter of all mammals are currently threatened with extinction,” “Sea levels will rise by 60 to 100 centimetres by 2100,” to recognize how precarious our situation really is.
As we know, Christians around the world celebrated on Wednesday the feast of St. Francis of Assisi, commemorating the life of a 12th century monk who cared deeply about creation. We had our own blessing of the pets service at 9am last Sunday recognising God’s care for the creatures that live among us. The Sunday Scholl program is at the moment looking at Saints and Francis in particular this week. We are called to deeply pray for what the Book of Common Prayer calls, “this fragile earth, our island home.” This year, perhaps more than ever before, I think many of us will flinch at that adjective. Fragile.
Fragile indeed! We have been told to expect a bad fire season this Summer and we have noticed serious fires already across the country and its only early Spring. I want very much to believe in the optimistic half of National Geographic’s 2020 April magazine.
As a Christian, I do believe that the earth will be renewed and restored. That somehow, God’s coming kingdom will bring healing to all — even to all of creation.
But I don’t for one minute believe that we — the stewards — are somehow off the hook because the landowner will ultimately reclaim the vineyard. Our vocation is lifelong, and our relationship to the landowner is eternal. Unfortunately, reclaiming the vineyard will always meet with opposition from those who have a vested interest in keeping the vineyard broken. So, our calling isn’t even close to over. When we hoard, exploit, abuse, or ignore the work of God’s hands, we wound and reject God’s heart.
On Friday night we launched the Christ Church Institute with a stirring lecture from retired Bishop George Browning. The text is now available. He finished with words worth pondering:
We know in some precise detail what the problem is and what we need to do to reduce the impact of the human footprint. We also know that it is within our capacity to act. We know action does not take us back to the stone age, but opens up a more cooperative, more peaceful, more relational world.
The question is will we? Given our propensity for action in the protection of self-interest there is good news and bad news. There is bad news if we are foolish enough to think self-interest is delivered by capturing short term advantage. But if we wake to the reality that life shared, community built, and ecology protected is in all our best interest, then we will act – it is never too late, for the year of the Lord’s favour never ceases to be on offer.
There are countless ways — small, large, and everything in between — to steward our fragile island home.
If nothing else this week, can we just sit with the possibility that we own nothing — not this planet, not our ministries, not our churches, not even our own lives. All of it is God's, and all of it is precious beyond reckoning. But the fact that God trusts us to steward any of it? Us? That is pure miracle. The Lord be with you.