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Sermon - October 4th, 2008
God's Guests
Rev. Gwen Drake
Scripture: Matthew 21:33-46
I’ve been preaching a mini-series on vineyards. The first vineyard was full of grace. That was two Sundays ago. Everyone who worked got paid the same no matter how much time they spent in the vineyard. Last Sunday the message in the vineyard was: okay, now that you have grace, what are you going to do with it? Jesus said, don’t just stand there, do something. This Sunday’s parable takes place once again in a vineyard and it is the most disturbing of them all.
Once upon a time there was a rich businessman from Seattle who came down to Oregon and bought a derelict apple orchard near Hood River. He pruned the trees, fertilized them, fixed up the sales shed and put a brand new sign on the highway. Then he leased the place to a local family for less than market value with the understanding they would give him ten percent of the apples. Then the rich landowner got into his Toyota Prius and drove back to Seattle and no one in Hood River ever laid eyes on him again.
The tenants loved the place like their own. They went out to tend the trees at dawn and stayed out each day until after dark. They used all organic methods in their tending. They hauled water by hand during the summer drought and when the first frost was predicted before the apples were ripe, they built small fires throughout the orchard and stoked them all night long, so that the trees stayed warm under a blanket of wood smoke.
Come October, the air smelled like applesauce. The trees were heavy with fruit and it was time to harvest. The tenants worked hard picking the apples. Mountains of apples rose from the wooden bins in the sales shed: Golden Delicious, Winesap, Braeburn. The tenants let out an exhausted sigh, admiring the fruits of their labor. Then they heard gravel crunching under tires behind them. They turned around to see a sixteen-wheeler with Washington plates backing into the shed. Two big guys with bulging biceps got out and started loading apples into the truck. One of the tenants went up to negotiate the ten percent business. A big guy just picked him up and set him out of the way and continued loading.
So the tenants held a quick huddle and decided to introduce the truckers to the mountain version of the People’s Court. Once of them cranked up the Bobcat while the others got hold of some pitchforks and pruning hooks and before long they had persuaded the landowner’s men to return to Seattle with an empty truck. “Get lost,” they said and the big guys did just that.
Now, we know the tenants were in the wrong. It was not their orchard. They had made a deal. The orchard owner deserved his share of the product. However, there is something about this parable that just does not sit right with us. Maybe it is the mention of slavery that seems to be taken for granted in the parable. Maybe it is because no one likes an absentee landlord. Maybe it is because some of us had parents or grandparents who were sharecroppers and have heard their stories of a hard life: tending someone else’s land, bringing in someone else’s harvest, making someone else’s profit.
It is not the American way. From the very beginning, this country has fueled the dreams of disenfranchised people from all over the world who have come here looking for a second chance, looking for their dreams to come true, looking for their own small piece of paradise. My own grandparents moved from family and home in Salem to a desolate, remote land east of the Cascades to start a new life homesteading, working the land until they made their dreams come true.
It’s the American way. Own your own land and home. Make your own way. Be the rugged individual. We believe in ownership, autonomy, and self-reliance. Those are the values we have been taught and those are the values we strive to live by. And we have such a difficult time admitting that this way just might not be working anymore.
If we take this parable seriously, we can see clearly that our American values are not the values of the Kingdom of God. Ownership of the vineyard is not the issue. The vineyard is not for sale and it never will be. The owner is not looking for buyers; the owner is looking for tenants who will give the owner a share of the produce at harvest time.
We have all worked hard for what we have, whether it is a hundred acres or a single-wide mobile home on a rented lot. We have deeds and titles and fence lines to prove our ownership. We have registered land plots. We have mortgage payments and tax bills with our names on them. We have gone to a lot of trouble to get these things and hanging on to them requires no small measure of financial courage and sacrifice. But according to this parable, we are simply deluding ourselves.
Our ancestors became divine tenants so long ago that most of us have forgotten the circumstances. Somewhere along the way someone misplaced the tenants’ agreement and wrote up a deed instead. The landowner spent most of the time in another country, after all. The landowner was surprisingly easy to handle. When the landowner sent messengers to remind the tenants of their agreement, all it took was a little burst of violence and those who were still alive ran away empty-handed. The owner could have sent the police or recruited an army of thugs. The owner could have returned violence for violence, but did not. The owner just kept sending messengers, one after the other, each of them pleading with the tenants to come to their senses and honor their original agreement.
Finally, when there was a whole row of unmarked graves full of messengers outside the walls of the vineyard, the owner sent his son—unaccompanied and unarmed—to teach the tenants some things they had clearly forgotten or distorted. The son reminded them that ownership was a game they were playing. The son reminded them that they were guests on the land, not rulers. The son reminded them that this was good news not bad news. The son told them that being guests relieved them of certain responsibilities they were not equipped to handle, like deciding who got to be rich and who got to be poor and who got to work and who did not and whose claims to full humanity should be honored and whose should be denied.
The son reminded them that being guests placed them in relationship with a host who placed them in relationship with each other, and that once they got over their delusions of ownership, those relationships could be based on gratitude, not competition, so that everything necessary for life could be shared and there would no longer be too little for some because some had too much.
The son reminded them that as guests they had free access to far more than they could ever have earned for themselves. Instead of a vineyard full of one-acre parcels divided by barbed wire, they had acres and acres at their disposal—not to own but to use and enjoy—through the generosity of the owner. All the owner asked was that they take good care of it and give back a portion of what they produced, not because the owner needed it. The owner took that portion and turned right around and gave it away. The tenants needed to give the owner a portion so they would remember who they were—grateful guests, guests who took their lives into their hands like wrapped and ribboned gifts and who returned the favor by giving themselves away to others.
But we know what happened when the son said all these things. The tenants killed the son; except, the Son did not stay dead. To this day, the Son is haunting the vineyard, reminding us that we are God’s guests. We are welcome on this planet and will be welcome as long as we remember whose it is and how it is to be used. Yes, we can love it as our own. We can water it by hand and build fires against the frost and take deep pleasure in the harvest. We can even will pieces of it to our children, naming them our successors in the stewardship of the vineyard.
All we may not do is reject the owner and persecute the owner’s messengers, because the consequence of that is to court our own destruction. To do that is to forget who we are and where we come from. We are God’s guests on this planet. We are God’s sharecroppers. We tend the earth and its riches on God’s behalf. We are expected to represent God’s interests. And God’s interest is that we are generous with each other as God is with us. We are not the owners. We were never meant to be.
This is the Kingdom way and let me tell you something, the harvest will take your breath away!
Amen.