by Marjorie D. Grevious, Evangelist for Spiritual Healing
Click here to watch the sermon recording on YouTube.
In this early fall season we pause to pay attention to the colorful dramatic changes that unfold in nature as sunlight wanes and the air becomes brisk. The earth prepares for her great and beautiful pause into a long rest. Its cozy season, the time of warm tea, soft clothes, comfy blankets and cuddles with the ones we love. It offers space for us to consider, how are we being good stewards to all other living things on earth? Now I have a confession to make that may turn many of you off from me: I am not a pet person. I live with a near fatal allergy to cats and I feel nothing for dogs, birds, turtles, fish, hamsters, or any other living creature people keep as house pets.
In my early 20s, at my first grownup job I worked as a bank teller at Norwest Bank in downtown Minneapolis. A coworker once took a day off to console her sister who had lost her cat. When I heard the cat died from swallowing rubber bands I doubled over in howling laughter. All of my co-workers and both supervisors looked at me as if I were a monster. I called my mother crying that I had ruined my new career as a young black woman in a bottom rung position in corporate America. My mother calmly told me we just weren’t born with that gene and because of my severe asthma and allergies to count it all blessing. Now to be fair to my family, this apathy towards domestic pets only applied to me and my mother. All of my siblings and all of her siblings and both sets of my grandparents and most all of my cousins love animals and have had several pets over the years.
I, on the other hand, cross the street when I see people walking towards me with their dog. Because one of two things happen, they slow down as many expect that I may want to pet their dog, or, my greatest pet peeve, they allow their dog to approach my physical person, gleefully saying how loving, gentle and sweet their pet is in wanting me to touch them, with my bare hands. Now animals do love me, and often approach me when I enter a space where someone has a pet, I just have no affinity for them. Now I know this makes me a dark unredeemable soul to many, but God made me this way, so I think I’ll be alright.
Now I do love a garden, and all the pollinators and tiny creatures that make it bloom and bear fruit and vegetables. Many have complimented our garden while exclaiming how they could never devote the patience, care, and time it takes to cultivate a delightful landscape. When my hands are deep in the warm soil of the earth, I think of gardening as holding hands with God, helping to nurture that which was created before I was. Even with all the planning in the world there is always a little surprise at what grows and flourishes and what does not, making me feel like a tiny part of the divine mystery.
I am not blessed with the gifts of the monk, mystic, and poet St Francis of Assissi who is most remembered for his profound love for animals and nature. St Francis gave up great wealth to live a life of simplicity, humility, and in service to the poor. He believed that all of God’s creatures were sacred and he is the honored patron saint of ecology and animals. He staged the first ever live nativity scene in 1223 in Greccio Italy to help others visualize the birth of the Christ child. He believed in living simply and in poverty, since true joy came from God and by loving and respecting all of God’s creation. He is quoted as saying “preach the gospel at all times and, if necessary, use words”—meaning actions matter more than speeches.
This brings us to today’s gospel in Matthew and the old testament reading in Isaiah. Both specifically use a vineyard to make a point about the power of actions over words. Grapes and vineyards were not luxuries in biblical times. During that time in history people lived close to the land and were often less than one degree separated from everything they ate and drank every meal, everyday. What they did not farm or tend themselves in crops and animals their neighbors did. A trade and barter economy was the standard. Grapes were an economic staple in ancient times. Grapes were eaten fresh, dried into raisins for cooking, pressed into juice for drinking or as a sweetener, and also fermented into wine. Jesus’ first recorded miracle is turning water into wine at a wedding celebration where running out would have caused great embarrassment and showed a lack of hospitality, as wine for guests was an act of radical welcome.
This made grapes and vineyards essential, just like the cornerstone also mentioned into today’s gospel. A vineyard is hard work and may take several years to bear fruit, and a healthy and hearty harvest. Once it does, it provides financial stability for the present, and accumulated family wealth for generations to come. It created economic security not only for the owner, but also for those who worked the land for them. Wine was used in temple drink offerings, religious rituals, and served to guests in the home. Biblical law required farmers to not strip their land in order to allow the poor and immigrants to glean the fields for leftover crops. Spiritually, a lush and healthy vineyard represents peace and prosperity. It is a common image in the visualization of the blessed Promise Land, which was often depicted by beautiful acres of vines, and cornucopias filled with juicy grapes.
Isaiah’s first few verses read like a love song turned to heartbreak as we are given a symbol of God’s abundant grace turned bitter by wild grapes. In this imagery of the vineyard God tills the soil, clears the rocks, plants high quality grapes, builds a watchtower for protection and digs a winepress in anticipation of a bountiful harvest. This is symbolic of how God prepares us for life with spiritual protection, nurturing, and His divine purpose. God provides all that we need to thrive. We cannot blame God for our lack of fruit, or bitter fruit as we are provided all the divine resources we need to spiritually prosper, yet often choose our own way and then blame God for, as Isaish writes, the wild grapes that grow and must be laid to waste.
Despite giving us everything we need to bear good fruit, grapes turn wild and even God is left to wonder what more could God have done for us to bear fruits of justice over war, and righteousness instead of distress. Sin is abusing the grace of God to our own selfish benefit, making bitter fruit. Divine grace is free but requires us to live with righteousness and justice. Righteousness is living right and moral in our connection to God, while justice calls us into action to make things right that are wrong in the world. Dr. Cornell West is quoted as saying that “Justice is what love looks like in public.” Are we living publicly and openly as the love of God in the world around us? If you know anything about grapevines, you know that they grow everywhere. They are trained to grow in a controlled way on fences, trellises, and stakes, but can easily grow untamed over and under things for acres and acres. Shouldn’t our justice, that public love of God be like an invasive species of sweet grapes spreading from us in every direction? Are we fencing in our vines of justice a little too close to home, saving them only for those we deem worthy? This will turn our grapes bitter and require a destructive clearing as God is looking for us to cultivate fairness, goodness, and mercy everywhere we are and everywhere we go. God has already built a hedge and watchtower, we need not create false security to shelter a lesser grace. Be ridiculously abundant with your vines of justice and righteousness to all people, this will bear a sweet and pleasing fruit. Righteousness does not make us better than others, but rather brings us in right alignment with God, just as justice is not punishment, but is about righting the injustices of the world with love, grace and mercy.
In the gospel of Matthew, God acts as a landowner who entrusts his carefully constructed vineyard to tenant farmers; who represent the religious leaders of the time. They beat, kill, and stoned the servants, who represent the old testament prophets, that the landowner(God) sent to collect his share of the grape harvest. The harvest is fruits of the spirit such as obedience, and righteousness. The landowner sends even more men a second time and the same thing happens to them. Then the landowner sends his own son, symbolizing Jesus, thinking that surely they will listen to him, and yet, the same fate befalls the son who is cast out and killed. Now the landowner is left with no other choice but to execute those he entrusted with his vineyard so that he may bring in new farmers to grow and give him his harvest. The story then goes immediately to the stone that some builders rejected and the Lord makes into the cornerstone. The cornerstone is the first foundational and essential block, serving as a reference point on which a structure, system, or idea is built.
Jesus was making the point that God will take from those who think they have power and give it to the powerless, or those believed to be less than, and they will produce the fruit God is looking to harvest. This verse in Matthew reads: Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom. The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls.
The spiritual and religious leaders of that time knew that Jesus was talking about them being broken, just as the people knew that he spoke about them being those who will produce the fruit of the kingdom. Jesus is the cornerstone on which unnecessary traditions and beliefs will be smashed or crushed, and set the essential foundation for what God is building new.
When we think of our earth, what have we done with what God has entrusted to us? Are we responsible and accountable stewards of this creation? God provides everything that we need but are we grateful and satisfied? or do we get caught in always wanting more? Faithful use of our divine gifts requires humility and gratitude and not believing like those tenant farmers in the parable that it belongs to us to do with it what we will. God continually sends us spiritual messengers to remind us of who God is and yet we reject them, and wonder why life starts to feel like resistance instead of oneness with God. We must take the time to listen to God especially because God has planted in us divine gifts that God has entrusted us with to bear fruit. God comes to collect a spiritual harvest so that divine abundant love can be shared with those without it. In our own 21st century ways we kill the voice of God calling on us to fulfill our purpose, as we are meant to spread the spiritual harvest of God’s goodness.
This gospel in Matthew is clear that God will find others to bring about a fruitful harvest, while Isaiah is clear that the vineyards will be cleared of wild grapes so that the mercy, righteousness and justice of God can grow freely and be shared extensively. The Son gets rejected at the vineyard just like the builders stone, but yet God makes Jesus the redeemer of all, meaning Jesus is the essential cornerstone on which God is building the kingdom. God is always building something new, even from that which we may find unworthy or weak.
Jesus’ relatively short life, like a vineyard, symbolizes a cycle of death, renewal, and hope. Just when we believe that death has the last word, then our hope is resurrected again and again. Just as a new harvest returns year after year. We must be mindful to not confuse belonging to God as being the same as being faithful to God. Our faith requires action and that action is harvesting and sharing the fruits of justice, righteousness and mercy. We must examine ourselves, our motives and our works continuously so that we don’t get caught up in believing we did this ourselves. We can become part of the cycle of renewal and hope through tangible acts of equity, honor, kindness, and care towards others and all of creation. As faithful stewards of the earth and all that dwell within it we must be good to it and each other. We must be a recycler like God who takes what we throw away in ourselves and each other and makes a new and marvelous thing. This is the continuing cycle of hope and renewal. God’s vineyard is entrusted to us so that it may bear the fruit of justice and righteousness; we must remember that when we reject God’s call, we are sabotaging the divine harvest.
