The Vineyard (18th after Pentecost, 4th October 2010)

18th after Pentecost October 4, 2010: The Vineyard
Copyright W. Kirchmeir

May the words of my lips and the meditations of all our hearts be ever acceptable in your sight, O Lord.

Dear Friends in Christ,

     Today I want to talk about both the psalm and the gospel. The psalm is about the heavens, and some very interesting things have happened in astronomy this past month. The gospel is the parable about the vineyard. I think what links them is the idea of God the Creator, and I’ll offer a few thoughts about what that means for us.

    The psalmist says, 1The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. 2 Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. 3 There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. 4 Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world. In the heavens he has pitched a tent for the sun, 5 which is like a bridegroom coming forth from his pavilion, like a champion rejoicing to run his course. 6 It rises at one end of the heavens and makes its circuit to the other; nothing is hidden from its heat.

    Psalm 19 is one of my favourites, because of this wonderful opening passage. It expresses the awe we feel when we look at the night sky and see the stars. It expresses the comfort of seeing the sun rise and set day after day.
    Our history as humans begins not with writing, which is a mere 6,000 or so years old. It begins with the stone circles and stone tombs set up to capture the rising and setting sun at the spring and winter solstices. We don’t know how people kept track of the sun, and figured out this astonishing regularity. But somehow they devised a calendar. Calendars are older than writing.
     We still look at the skies with awe and wonder. We know more about the universe than even our parents knew, and we want to know more. We want to know what knowledge the heavens display. We pay astronomers to record and interpret the data that their telescopes deliver.
     About three weeks ago, a team led by Jane Greaves of Cardiff University announced that they had probably found phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus. Phosphine is a gas. They had not expected to find traces of it. Phosphine, as far as we know, is made only by living organisms. That includes us humans, who make it and use it for some industrial processes. But phosphine is made naturally only by certain bacteria, who produce it when they eat dead things.
     The astronomers who found the phosphine traces are scientists, so they are cautious. Very cautious. Perhaps there is no phosphine after all. Perhaps there is some unknown inorganic process that’s making phosphine. That would make this discovery an interesting addition to our knowledge of chemistry.
     But if there is no other way to make phosphine on Venus, it would be a totally unexpected discovery. We may have found ET, and it’s a microbe.
     The psalmist of course knew nothing of this. He didn’t know how huge the universe is. His description of the sun’s passage across the sky probably means he didn’t know that the Earth moves round the Sun.
     But when he looked at the sky, he felt awe and wonder. What’s up there testifies to the creative energy that brought the universe into being, a creative energy that we believe comes from our God.
     Our indigenous brothers and sisters refer to God as the Creator. I think the Psalmist would have felt total sympathy and agreement with this emphasis on God’s creative power. One reason I think so is that in the second half of the psalm we read, The law of the LORD is perfect, reviving the soul.
     The psalmist connects the knowledge of the heavens with the knowledge of God’s law. For the heavens show regularity and order. The sun rises and sets every day, the moon grows from nothing to a bright disk and then shrinks to nothing again, the seasons follow a cycle marked by the Sun and the Moon and the stars. It looks like the heavenly realms obey God’s law. That obedience makes for order, for beauty, for certainty.
     The obvious thought is that we too should obey God’s law.
     Which raises the question: What is God’s law? We’ll come back to this question later.

     The Gospel tells us of a man who bought a vineyard, dug a winepress in it, and rented it out for a share of the crop. When the grapes were ripe, he wanted his share, so he sent some servants to collect it. But the tenants beat the servants, killed one, and drove the rest away. So the owner sent more servants, but the tenants beat them too. So he sent his son, thinking that the tenants wouldn’t dare to lay a hand on him. But they did. In fact they killed him.
     Then Jesus asked the chief priests and the Pharisees what will happen to the tenants. “They will be arrested, tried, and executed,” they said. Jesus then alludes to a passage in the Talmud that speaks of righteous punishment. The Pharisees know he means them: They are the tenants working in God’s vineyard, and they have not been faithful stewards of the crop entrusted to them.

    It would be easy to point fingers at them, and interpret this parable as one more piece of evidence that the Pharisees were in the wrong. But it’s not just the Pharisees who are bad stewards of the vineyard. We are, too.
     The vineyard is a symbol. It’s been interpreted many ways. I think the key to understanding it is to pay attention to what the tenants want. They don’t want to pay the rent. They want the whole crop for themselves.
     This may remind us of Jesus’s cleansing of the temple, where he charged the priests with profiteering instead of serving the people by performing the sacrifices as required.
     Or it may remind us of the televangelists who use their preaching skills to get money from their audience.
     More generally, this parable may remind us of all the many ways that people who have responsibilities of care and nurture instead exploit and abuse the people in their care.
     More generally still, it may remind us that we are stewards of God’s creation, but instead of nurturing the Earth, we destroy it with our heedless greed and selfishness.

     It’s that last reminder that connects Psalm 19 to Jesus’s parable. The Psalmist sees the heavens, and they remind him of the Creator. They remind him also of the Creator’s Law, which he loves. And that in turn reminds him of his sin, his repeated disobedience. He pleads for help: Keep your servant also from wilful sins; may they not rule over me.

     The first reading this morning tells of how Moses brought the Law to the people. Try this experiment: Look at the commandments as reminders of what to do and what not to do in order to live together peaceably.
     Start with the prohibitions. Don’t steal, don’t murder, don’t lie, don’t commit adultery, don’t covet – these are all reminders that selfishness and pride destroy our relationships with each other, for if we all did those things, our community would fall apart pretty quickly. If you can’t rely on each other to keep the peace, what’s the point of living together? Yet each of us alone is a naked wretch, with very little chance of living a long and happy life.
     Then there are the exhortations. Keep the Sabbath, for our communal life depends on communal celebrations. Honour your father and mother, for they brought you into this world, nurtured you, and taught you their hard-learned wisdom. Respect those who built our community.
     Then consider the commandments relating to our spiritual life, that part of us that yearns for meaning and purpose. Don’t make idols because focusing on the wrong things will lead us astray. Don’t swear reminds us that there is no magic formula to make things happen the way we want.
     Make God the centre of your life, and everything else will fall into place. Even when you don’t fully understand, God’s presence will comfort you with the assurance that your life has meaning and purpose. When you gaze at the night sky and wonder at the stars, when you feel the warmth of the sun, you will know that there is order and harmony in the universe, and that you are part of it.

     Like the Pharisees, we too often focus on the customs and traditions of our religion as if they were what it’s all about. In doing this, we neglect to tend God’s vineyard. We don’t nurture and care for his people. But his people is all humankind. For Jesus came into the world save us all.
     Nor do we nurture and care for his creation, instead arguing about how to balance the needs of the environment against our own whims and desires. As if nature were some theme park that we are obliged to maintain. As if we could exist without nature. For we too are creatures, and like all creatures, we depend on each other in an intricate web of connections with the rest of creation.
     That creation includes the heavens. We now know that when a star explodes into a nova, that explosion creates the elements of which we are made. Carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur, iron, phosphorus, and the rest. Our very existence as living beings on this planet depends on the heavens above us.
     The heavens that declare the glory of the Creator.
     The Creator whom we recognise not only as the source of our being, but the source of the love that sustains us.

     Let us pray.
Lord God, Creator, when we look upon your creation, give us the grace of knowing its order and harmony, that we may perceive in it the love that you bear for us and all your creatures. Give us the grace to know how to nurture it, and how to take our proper place in it, that we may be good and faithful stewards of the bounty you have granted us. We pray in Jesus’s name, the firstborn of all creation, whose life and death and resurrection assure us of your love. Amen.