Sermon for the 16th Sunday after Pentecost
October 3, 2011
For audio of this sermon go here: The Cathedral Church of St. John’s Sermon Archive and look for October 2, 2011
Our Old Testament reading this week is curious. In it the prophet Isaiah says, “Let me sing for my beloved my love song concerning his vineyard.” He describes the vineyard, but then informs us that instead of the expected harvest of grapes, the vineyard has yielded wild grapes. Because of this, God—the beloved Isaiah speaks of—breaks down the hedge and tears down the wall and lets his vineyard get ruined. Furthermore, God says, “I will make it a waste…I will also command the clouds that they rain no rain upon it.” Now I’m not a musical expert, but it doesn’t seem this love song has a much of a chance at the Billboard top 40.
Verse 7 makes sure that the metaphor will not be misunderstood:
“For the vineyard of the LORD of hosts is the house of Israel and the people of Judah are his pleasant planting; He expected justice but saw bloodshed; righteousness but heard a cry!”
What a chilling statement. In Hebrew, it’s a play on words, but even that doesn’t make it less scary. The Hebrew word for justice here is mishpat while the word for bloodshed is mishpah; the word for righteousness is tsedeqah, the word for cry is tseaqah. Bloodshed then is a subtle pervsion of justice, and a cry of despair is what happens when righteousness is perverted.
These wild grapes that God is so upset about, then, are precisely these perversions of justice: turning justice into bloodshed and righteousness into a cry of suffering. That Yahweh, the Lord of Hosts is preeminently concerned about justice, and is really, really upset about the perversion of justice is a primary theme for the prophet Isaiah as it is for most of the Old Testament prophets.
Isaiah 5:16 tells us that:
“The LORD of Hosts is exalted by justice, and the Holy God shows himself holy by righteousness.”
Throughout the book the children of Israel are condemned for their unjust deeds and exhorted to make them right, like in chapter 1:
“I have had enough of your burnt-offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts. I do not delight in the blood of bulls or of lambs, or of goats…
Rather, God says further in that same chapter:
“Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.”
In chapter 10 verses 1-2 we find this:
“Ah, you who make iniquitous decrees, who write oppressive statutes, to turn aside the needy from justice and to rob the poor of my people of their right, that the widows may be your spoil, and that you may make the orphans your prey! What will you do on the day of punishment, in the calamity that will come from far away?”
Just another verse of that love song.
Turning to the rest of the Old Testament we find passage after passage, injunction after injunction, statement after statement about God’s concern for justice: the Psalmist says,
“He loves justice and righteousness; the earth is full of the loving-kindness of the LORD.” And “Righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne.” Moses tells the Israelites, “Justice and only justice, you shall pursue that you may live and possess the land the Lord your God is giving you.” Amos says, “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” (Amos 5:24); In chapter 22 of Jeremiah, King Jehoiakim is reminded that doing justice and righteousness, and rightly judging the cause of the needy is what it means to know God.
But as we see in our passage and many others, it did not go well for the people of Israel when they did not do justice. The Old Testament paints a picture of God’s dealings with the ancient Israelites as a cycle: God tells the Israelites they must do justice, and worship only Him. They fail to do these two things, he sends prophets to warn the people and get them to repent. They don’t. God judges them, and bad things happen. Then the people repent. Then God rescues and restores them, tells them to do justice and worship only Him and the cycle begins again. This is the story that Isaiah calls a love song.
Then Jesus comes along, and he tells the parable we heard this morning, clearly evoking the passage about the vineyard in Isaiah 5. But in this telling, there are tenants—which represent the religious leaders, the scribes and Pharisees and priests of Israel, some of whom just happened to be present as he tells the story.
Jesus tells how when the servants of the landowner, came to the tenants to ask for the fruit owed to the landowner, they were beaten and thrown out. These servants represent the prophets like Isaiah, Micah, Jeremiah, and Amos. And so it becomes pretty clear that this parable is describing this long cyclical story, the history of God’s dealings with His people. And then Jesus does something brave. He inserts himself into the narrative: the Son, who is sent by the patient landowner as a last ditch effort to reconcile the unruly tenants to Himself. Jesus is unabashedly calling himself the son of God. But the Son is thrown out of the vineyard and killed. Rejection, betrayal, murder; the building blocks of all good love songs.
There are at least two exceptional things about this story that I want to point out.
First, is that Jesus takes the focus from the vineyard as a whole being unruly, producing wild grapes, etc., and puts it on the religious leaders of his day. For Jesus, the blame is on them. He was a prophetic voice in the very truest sense, calling these guys out and telling them who they were, and forcing them to pass judgment on themselves. Notice they are the ones who suggest that the landowner come back and destroy the tenants, and then they realize that they are the tenants. Did they also see the irony in their reaction to finding out that Jesus was talking about them, that they immediately wished to arrest and kill him, the Son?
Second, Jesus inserts himself not just into this little story, but into the cosmic narrative of how God is saving His people; Jesus places himself in the context of this cycle of Israel being told by God to do justice and worship him alone—or as Jesus puts it, “To love God, and to love your neighbor as yourself.” Justice begins and ends with neighbor-love.
But Jesus is not just another in a long line prophets who come to warn the Israelites of impending doom. He is also the solution, the cycle-breaker. He is the stone the builder’s rejected which has become the cornerstone; God’s final answer to the problem of injustice, bloodshed and the disobedience of His people. The Gospel writers tells us that Isaiah is prophesying about Jesus when he says:
“Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen in whom my soul delights; I have put my spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations. He will not cry of lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street; a bruised reed he will not break, and dimly burning wick he will not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice. He will not grow faint or be crushed until he has established justice in the earth; and the coastlands wait for his teaching.”
Injustice is not an endless cycle, it has an end, and that end lies with Jesus. But it is a surprising end. Because Jesus did not come in the form of the wrath of God to destroy the unjust, he did not kill those who killed the prophets or those who had a big hand in getting him killed. Jesus’ solution to injustice is much crazier and disturbing than that. His solution to the injustice of the people is to offer himself over to that injustice. To suffer. To die. And through his death to conquer death. The cycle of injustice and bloodshed was only, can only be broken through love, forgiveness, and self-sacrifice. Salvation, freedom, justice, and righteousness can only be acquired through love, forgiveness, and self-sacrifice.
And so it is because of Jesus and his ultimate and surprising solution to injustice, that we can look back at Isaiah 5 through the lens of the Gospel and say, yeah, that is a love song. The whole narrative arc of Scripture, when it is seen through the interpretive lens of Christ, is nothing less than the greatest love song ever written, a love song of a God who yearns to reconcile all His people, all creation in fact to himself.
Through his life, teachings, death, and resurrection Christ has inaugurated the reign of God on earth, and it is a reign of justice and of peace. As Isaiah prophesies again:
“His authority shall grow continually, and there shall be endless peace for the throne of David and his kingdom. He will establish and uphold it with justice and righteousness from this time onwards and for evermore. The zeal of the LORD of Hosts shall do this.”
And yet this kingdom remains not fully consummated. There is still much injustice and bloodshed in this world. All of creation still groans for the day when this justice and righteousness and peace and love of God will flow like an ever-flowing stream.
It’s as if the Son, Jesus, has gone off to a distant place and has left tenants in his vineyard until his return. We, Christ’s followers, are the signs and the symbols, the first-fruits, the representatives of that now-but-not-yet Kingdom. We are the tenants in the vineyard of the Kingdom of God. Our task today then is the same as it was in Isaiah’s day: to worship only God, and to tend to the vines of justice and righteousness, to bring about the fruit of love and reconciliation in our little corner of the vineyard, in our community, and our families and our church, so that with hope and joy in our hearts, we can all anxiously await the arrival of the landowner’s Son. Amen.
Sermon for the 6th Sunday of Easter
May 30, 2011
I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinegrower. He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit. You have already been cleansed by the word that I have spoken to you. Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing. Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch and withers; such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned. If you abide in me and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples. John 15:1-8 (NRSV)
Holy and righteous God, you are the author of life, and you adopt us to be your children. Fill us with your words of life, that we may live as witnesses to the resurrection of your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
My snappy introduction (Dr. Watson would be so proud) involved the old-time radio program Fibber Mcgee and Molly, and ended with the joke: “As the fly said when he got stuck in the strawberry preserves, I’ve been in much worse jams than this.” Much pity laughter ensued.
In our Gospel reading this morning, Jesus makes another one of his I am statements that He is so famous for in the Gospel of John. Earlier in the book he said, “I am the light” “I am the bread of life” “I am the door.” “I am Good shepherd.” In last week’s reading he said, “I am the way the truth and the life.” And, now, as he prepares his disciples for his imminent arrest, torture, death, and resurrection, He says, “I am the true vine, you are the branches…” further on, he states, “Abide in me as I abide in you.”
Like the other I am statements, this one is a rich metaphor which gives us insight into Christ’s true character. We don’t have time to unpack all of the gems that this metaphor offers us, but I would like to focus on several aspects of one of the key words in the passage. I want to dwell on the word “abide.” In this passage Jesus uses the word “abide” over and over; 9 times in 8 verses. Clearly, he wants to emphasize to his disciples the importance of abiding, of remaining, of showing up and sticking around. But, it seems like a rather odd thing to say to them right after he finished telling them that where he is going they cannot follow, and right before leaving them in the hands of the people who wish to murder him. So what did Jesus mean when He said, “Abide in me as I abide in you?”
To understand this a little better I want to look at another passage in John’s Gospel where Jesus uses a related metaphor, and in which our word abide plays a prominent roll. In John chapter 6, starting in verse 51 Jesus says,
“I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” The Jews then disputed among themselves saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” So Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.”
This bread of life passage together with the true vine passage sparks in us a powerful image of what it means to abide in Christ. Because we believe that mystically, mysteriously Christ is present in the bread and the wine of the Eucharist, when we consume the bread and the wine we are in a way following Christ’s admonition in John 6 to eat his flesh and drink his blood. But this Eucharistic meal is not like any other meal. Yes, we consume it, we put it in our mouth, chew and swallow, but then it, or more exactly Christ which is present in it, consumes us. Through consuming we are consumed by the love and peace and presence of Christ. The Eucharist is a way that we are connected to Christ. It is a way to abide in Him, as He abides in us. In fact, when we use the word Communion in place of Eucharist, we can see the connection: To commune with someone means to abide with them. Through Communion we abide with Christ. But of course, there is another dimension of Communion that we also see in our Gospel reading. When we participate in Communion we are not only communing with God, but with each other. The disciples at the last supper were not just eating with Christ, they were eating with each other as well. We are not isolated from each, here on these altar rails when we receive the Eucharist. We are participants in the mystical body of Christ which unites all believers, all Christians everywhere and in all times.
Father Terrence Lee, a beloved former canon here at St. John’s, tells the story of the first time his grandfather set foot in the Episcopal church. It was in the South, during the height of segregation. When Fr. Terrence’s grandfather entered the church, he was surprised to find that there were both black and white members of the congregation present. When it was time to go down and take communion, he and his wife went down and knelt at the altar; on either side of them were two white men. When the common cup of wine came their way, the man next to Terrence’s grandfather drank, and then Terrence’s grandfather drank from the cup, and then his grandmother, and then the white man next to them drank, without hesitation or pause, and then on down the line. That was day Terrence’s grandfather became an Episcopalian. He was shocked he had been allowed to drink from the same cup as these white men. At the altar rail, he had not been treated differently because of his skin. In the midst of a culture of separation, of distrust and of hate, he found at Communion, a different reality of unity, trust, and love. That is what communion is about. That is what abiding is about. We cannot abide in Christ unless we also abide with each other. This is sort of a radical concept; as branches we cannot be rugged individuals trying to go it alone. Who ever heard of a vine with only one branch? If such a thing exists it certainly isn’t healthy.
Coming back to our Gospel passage, when Jesus says that those who abide in him will bear fruit, we see from the context of the passage that one of the things he specifically has in mind is love for one another. Just a couple verses later, in verse 12, he says, “this is my commandment: that you love one another”. And throughout Jesus’ farewell address in John 13, 14, and 15, He says it over and over, “Love one another.” This is echoed in our epistle reading from 1 Peter, “Finally, all of you, have unity of spirit, sympathy, love for one another, a tender heart, and a humble mind.” When we abide in Christ, this will invariably be the fruit, that we will also abide in love with each other.
We must not forget in all of this, that today is the sixth Sunday of Easter. The events described in our Gospel reading occur before the Resurrection, but they were written down afterward, and because we are a Resurrection people, we come to this reading with our Resurrection goggles on. If you leave out the Resurrection, our text is a rather confusing and disappointing one: Christ tells his disciples to abide in him and that he will abide in them, and then he goes off and dies, and his disciples abandon and deny him in the process. The end. But, fortunately for the disciples and for us, the story does not end there. Christ came back to life, and this One event changes everything, it marks the everything that we do and say and read and listen to.
Reading this passage through the lens of the Resurrection is not without precedent. Listen to a meditation on the image of the Vine as it relates to the Resurrection written in the fourth century by St. Cyril of Jerusalem:
“A garden was the place of His Burial and that which was planted there said, I am the vine! He was planted therefore in the earth in order that the curse which came because of Adam might be rooted out. The earth was condemned to thorns and thistles, but the true Vine sprang up out of the earth, that the saying might be fulfilled, Truth sprang up out of the earth, and righteousness looked down from heaven.”
I love this image. The true vine, chopped down by death and buried only to shoot forth out of the ground again with new life. This is our hope. This is reason we are here. The reason we are Christians. This is the reason we sign for this in the first place. In little while there will be a baptism here, and the Resurrection is what Baptism is all about. Baptism represents dying to the old life and being reborn anew in Christ. It is the sign of a new creation, a new Resurrection reality.
We are called as branches abiding in Christ to be participants in this new reality. When we abide in Him, we have no other choice; healthy branches make fruit; and that fruit is our witness of the new reality of Christ’s Resurrection, our witness to the all-powerful, death-defying, reconciling love of Christ for all the world. The world is a dark place, full of death, and hopelessness. The world needs our witness, our fruit born of Christ’s new reality. War, natural disaster, oppression, and sickness: the world could use the joy, and hope that the True Vine offers through us, his branches. As Barbara Johnson puts it, we as Christians are called to be Easter people in a Good Friday world. This is why Peter admonishes us to love one another and to live in unity of spirit, why we must not repay evil for evil, why we must keep our tongues away from deceit, turn away from evil, and pursue peace. These things, love, truth, unity and peace are the hallmarks of Christ’s new reality. These things are the fruit we are called to bear, and they just so happen to be the fruit the world so desperately needs. Not the grapes of wrath—we have the grapes of wrath—but the grapes of love and reconciliation.
But as Jesus says, we can do nothing, unless we abide in Him and He in us. The good news is that we don’t have to worry about Christ keeping His end of the bargain. We may choose NOT to abide. But Christ never chooses this. He has promised never to leave or forsake us. In a way we are stuck with Him and He is stuck with us. But, there are truly worse jams than this. [more pity laughter] I am reminded of the wonderful Easter hymn (youtube/oremus hymnal) that we have been singing, particularly the fourth verse which is based on Romans chapter 8, verses 38 and 39:
Jesus lives! our hearts know well/
nought from us his love shall sever;/
life, nor death, nor powers of hell/
tear us from his keeping, ever./
Alleluia!
Through his resurrection Christ has conquered the disease of sin, and the drought of death, and has therefore enabled us, his branches, to abide in him, the True Vine, now and forever. Amen.
A Sermon for the Second Sunday of Easter
May 2, 2011
Here is the homily I delivered this last Sunday at St. John’s Cathedral – for those morbidly interested in such things. Sometimes the church posts audio on its web page – if so, I’ll update with a link.
O’ Lord, help us to hear your Spirit in our hearts, though our ears listen to human words; give us the humility to obey your word and the strength to perform your will. Amen.
My first real crisis of faith came to a head in the passenger seat of a Saturn SL nearly twelve years ago. My tour of duty in Bible College was nearing its end, and a series of negative experiences had sent me into an existential tail spin. I had long been at odds with the particulars of life as an ultra-conservative Evangelical, but as is often the case; it was an untimely death that had me questioning the basic assumptions of life and faith. Its funny how life’s biggest questions are the easiest to ignore when things are going well, and how those questions fight their way to the surface of our lives when we ignore them for too long.
And, so, as I argued with a friend in the car that evening about such lofty questions as the problem of evil and the weaknesses of Anselm’s ontological argument; I waxed eloquent, building the best case against the existence of God that my burgeoning education could muster. After an extended period of such ranting that close friend, who was sitting in the driver’s side seat, gently corrected me with an unexpected response. It was the very response that Jesus gave to Thomas in this morning’s Gospel reading. My friend, Jeremiah, actually had the audacity to reply to my argument by saying, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”
That response was so unexpected that my rhythm was broken and my ranting stuttered to a stop. I stared at him in stunned silence as the words he spoke sank in, and rage began to boil up in my heart and spill out of my mouth. I was, I thought, building a case against God that even Job would be proud of, and here was Jeremiah suggesting that I was blessed, – blessed! -because I, unlike Thomas the Apostle, had little to no hope of ever experiencing God in such a tangible way.
I wasn’t angry, because the statement was painfully true (though, it was) or because the statement contained some kind of parochial wisdom that flew in the face of my highly sophisticated and philosophically secular doubt (though, it surely did). I was angry, because those words, first spoken by Jesus, carried the same indictment that he directed at the Pharisees earlier in his ministry. In that moment of indignation, I imagine I felt like the Pharisees must have when Jesus told them that it is a wicked and adulterous generation that seeks a sign. I was angry, because like the Pharisees, I sought to apprehend truth on my own terms – to possess it like a piece of personal property, to manipulate it, to make it do my bidding. I wanted to have a relationship with God that was based on my own knowledge, where he made displays of his existence and of his power at my whim for my comfort and for my peace of mind.
While all of us have undoubtedly struggled with the existence of God or the reality of Jesus’ presence in our own lives, I would never suggest that everyone here has doubts for the same reasons that I do. Let’s be honest, though, who here has not fantasized about how much better we would be as Christians, if only Jesus would just show up in the flesh at our bedside some evening? But, of course, just as the issue was never a simple matter of intellectual certainty on my part, the interaction between Thomas and Jesus in the twentieth chapter of John’s Gospel in not simply a matter of establishing empirical evidence for the bodily resurrection. While doubt may plague us, and may at times seem insurmountable, we would be foolish to assume that doubt is not also pervasive in every other area of our lives. We would also be foolish to believe that the real danger of doubt is found in the potential that something or someone does not exist as we believe, rather than in the clear fact that if we submit to belief then we must also act accordingly. If we accept something as truth, as corresponding to reality as it really exists, then we must also be compelled to adjust the way we live in relationship to that reality. My drive home after church this morning will look quite a bit different if I develop a sudden and healthy skepticism for either traffic laws or the laws of physics.
As a simple demonstration of my point, you don’t have to go far in the Gospels to find disbelief. Indeed, the Gospel narratives are riddled with religious folk, simple folk, military folk, educated folk, well every kind of folk really who just cannot seem to understand what Jesus is up to. In the light of the overwhelming disbelief that was pointed in Jesus’ direction, I have often felt rather sorry for the Apostle Thomas and his nom de guerre, that dubious title of “doubter,” that wicked schoolyard taunt that “one of these things is not like the other.” When, in fact, he fit right in with the other Apostles in dismissing the report that Jesus had risen from the dead. I am sure the other Apostles are merely biding their time before it catches on that they all dismissed the women who first returned with the report that the tomb was empty and Jesus was raised from the dead long before Thomas had a chance to shine as the savant of skepticism. Of course, if we had a nickel for every time a man foolishly dismissed the report of a woman…
Clearly faith and belief are an issue in as much as they allude to our trusting God. And to the degree that faith and belief are concerned with the resurrection, they are essential. The Apostle Paul ties the effectiveness of the atonement and our justification to the resurrection, proclaiming that if Christ has not been raised from the dead, then we above all others are to be pitied. We see in this morning’s Lesson from 1 Peter that the Apostle Peter ties our participation in a “living hope” to the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Last Sunday Bishop Vono identified our participation in the events of holy week and Paschal celebrations as a necessary “tune-up” to our faith. We can also see, then, that the Apostle John intends his Gospel to confront readers with the fact that God has initiated the process of reconciling creation back to himself through the work of the incarnate Word– but it is up to us to walk in the light, to shun the darkness, to embrace the reality of the resurrection. Faith, especially pertaining to the resurrection, is less about convincing yourself intellectually that a person might come back to life from death, and more about being resolute in your conviction that life lived in light of the resurrection looks much different than life outside of that reality.
Bishop N.T. Wright points out that for John’s Gospel the resurrection especially matters, because “John is a theologian of creation at heart. The Logos, the Word, who was always to be the point of convergence at which the creator and creation came together, is now, in the resurrection, the point at which the creator and the new creation are likewise one.” The living hope of which the Apostle Peter speaks is the reality that we are adopted into the family of God, because Jesus has been raised from the dead. Because Jesus is alive, we can be sons and daughters of the almighty. We see in Jesus’ appearances to his disciples after the resurrection not only a substantiation of his claims to be the Son of God, but also what must have been an initially startling realization on the part of his followers that they would now have to live into the reality of their citizenship in the Kingdom of God.
This brings me back to my story about my crisis of faith many years ago, and the wry question that Jesus leaves hanging thick in the air as he squares off with Thomas. Jesus asks Thomas, “Have you believed because you have seen me?” What is, perhaps, most telling about this interaction is the fact that even though Jesus immediately follows this question with his own confession that not all of his followers will have the opportunity to “see and believe” as Thomas does, he asks in response to Thomas’ pronouncement of him as “my Lord and my God.” This is significant, according to Wright, because Thomas has now become the spokesperson for the disciples in identifying what John has been compelling his readers to identify all along; “Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and through believing there is life in his name.” Certainly, there have been many biblical scholars that have written long lists of what different political, religious and socio-economic sects within Judaism expected to see when the Messiah returned. However, it wasn’t until Thomas’ proclamation that someone saw who the Messiah was in reality. Thomas saw God in human flesh, albeit a new kind of flesh recently returned from death, with his own human eyes. Where others had looked upon the same person and saw something completely different, Thomas now acknowledged the reality that Jesus and the Word were one and the same.
We may not have the opportunity to see Jesus in the flesh with our human eyes. My friend’s use of Jesus’ declaration that those who see with only the eyes of faith are blessed was undoubtedly an indication of how God speaks to us through each other. You see, though my initial reaction was one of anger, I was able eventually to recognize that my anger came from being exposed to the light. I didn’t have trouble believing that God exists or trouble believing the Gospel’s account of who Jesus is. I was having trouble believing in a God that existed as a construct within my mind. Faith in Christ through the resurrection is a matter of learning how to live in response to that reality, how to experience that living hope. Any attempt to filter that reality or to remake God in the flesh in our own image will necessarily produce a belief system that is riddled with doubt – one that cannot withstand scrutiny. And, so, it is my hope that we all determine in our own hearts to acknowledge the reality of who Jesus is and to submit our lives to the task of living in response to the reality of his resurrection.
Amen.
Tony Hunt
jstambaugh
Shawn Wamsley
