Below is the sermon I delivered for Creation Care Sunday on the Feast Day of St. Francis at St. Gregory the Great Episcopal Church in Athens, GA on October 4th.
Here are the Scripture readings for that Sunday:
Isaiah 5:1-7
Psalm 80:7-14
Philippians 3:4b-14
Matthew 21:33-46
We’ve had a good garden this summer and have been living in vegetable abundance: the bees shared their remarkable honey harvest with us, we had three delicious plantings of corn, eight varieties of tomatoes, including my favorite, Cherokee purple, beans, squash, okra and peas to eat and share, and a bounty of cantaloupe and watermelon.
But I will confess to you, dear ones, that this August and September, I have felt cursed. As I watched the scattered showers of August, over and over again gather, head our way, and then wither or divide and pass us by, I wondered what sin I had committed.
As I wrote this sermon, I could only pray that this time the forecast would indeed prove true, and our poor farm would receive rain. Alas, not yet.
As I planted sugar snap peas and broccoli this week, with these scripture passages rummaging around in my head, I began to muse over the relationship of faith and the land. We, of course, have a fabulous well, a well so delightful we named it the laughing well. So when these dry spells come, some remediation is possible (though there is nothing like rain). And though we prefer the fruit of our own backyard, we never fear hunger if the crop fails; we know our lives are not contingent on the next harvest.
Not so for the sons and daughters of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob.
The very core of our faith, the defining of the people of Israel, is inextricably linked to the land and the weather. Even our creation myth denotes this deepest of connections: Adam quite literally means of the land, as one scholar puts it, “mud-man.” We are earth, water, and the breath of God.
The whole of the Genesis story shows this relationship of God and the land.
The sons of Jacob make their way to Egypt because of a drought. God promises, through God’s servant Moses, the land of Canaan. In Numbers, God sets in motion the proportional distribution of the land to the 12 tribes of Israel. And as we will see today, the prophets are constantly calling us back to land. The Hebrew people’s relationship to God is indistinguishable from a right relationship to the land.
Many of us today are not very close to the land; conversely, the writers and hearers of these scriptures would hear them less as distant metaphor than as the truths of lives they lived everyday. To be blessed by God would mean to get good rainfall so the herds would have good forage; to be blessed would mean to have a good harvest, and (as our passages today denote) to be blessed would mean to enjoy the fruit of the vineyard.
Conversely, when the rains don’t come, when the crops fail, when the vineyard produces rotten fruit, what else could we imagine than that we have been cursed by God.
In this light, I want to look first at Isaiah.
The passage begins with a rhetorical deception:
Let me sing for my beloved
my love-song concerning his vineyard:
It is, it seems, a love song, an agricultural long song. But the opening is a tease, click-bait, you might say. But we’ll get to that.
The parent metaphor is this: God, the beloved, has crafted a beautiful vineyard. The vineyard is the people of Israel. God has done everything possible to make this vineyard fruitful. God found an ideal piece of land, followed all the best practices set out by the agriculture extension agent, set everything in motion for a good harvest, set up a watchtower, and even built a winery.
But in spite of doing everything right, the vineyard has produced only “wild” fruit. Like me, you might find “wild” a curious word choice. The Hebrew word bə·’u·šîm appears only in Isaiah 5 in the Hebrew Bible. The root of this word suggests “stench, rotting, spoiled or useless.” Suffice it to say, this is not the harvest God hoped for.
The love song is now the song of the brokenhearted.
Isaiah makes his metaphor explicit:
For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts
is the house of Israel,
and the people of Judah
are his cherished garden;
he expected justice
but saw bloodshed;
righteousness
but heard a cry!
What follows these lines is the condemnation of the Hebrew people, specifically those who would consolidate properties, buying up land and impoverishing their neighbors, those who are wealthy and live lives of debauchery, and the nobility of Jerusalem who oversee these injustices.
I’ll let Isaiah sing it for you:
Woe to those who call evil good
and good evil,
who put darkness for light
and light for darkness,
who put bitter for sweet
and sweet for bitter!
Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes
and shrewd in their own sight!
Woe to those who are heroes in drinking wine
and valiant at mixing drink,
who acquit the guilty for a bribe
and deprive the innocent of their rights!
Some prophecies never grow old.
With Isaiah ringing in your ears, I want to turn to the Gospel for today.
The 21st chapter of Matthew marks the beginning of the passion week, the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, the cleansing of the temple, the cursing of the fruitless fig tree, and then the teaching in the temple. The immediate context for last week’s parable of two sons and this week’s Gospel is this:
When he entered the temple, the chief priests and the elders of the people came to him as he was teaching and said, “By what authority are you doing these things?”
What follows is directed at the chief priests and elders of the people, you might say “the nobility of Jerusalem,” the wealthy and powerful.
In that context, Jesus offers this second parable:
Listen to another parable. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a winepress in it, and built a watchtower.
Sound familiar? The biggest difference between this passage and Isaiah is the word “landowner” (recall in Isaiah it is “my beloved”).
In Greek “landowner” here is the oikodespotés. Oikos means household and is the root for our words ecology and economy. The second half of the word is despotes; yes, as you might guess, it is the root for our “despot.”
Now the common reading of the parable is that the landowner is God and that God sent the prophets and we didn’t listen, then God sent God’s son and we killed him. Here, just verses before the telling of the passion of Christ, this reading rings true.
But I think there is more to it. A second reading, it seems to me, honors the rhetorical prestidigitation so common in Jesus’s parables.
Jesus tells a parable that purposely echoes Isaiah (he indeed knows the scripture): the set up is nearly identical, but the difference from Isaiah is dramatic.
As opposed to the beloved’s vineyard, here the landowner leased it to tenants and went away. He is not present, he’s not one with those who work it, he is only interested in collecting his due at the harvest.
The chief priests and elders do not see Isaiah in the passage, but rather they align themselves with the landowner, for, indeed, they ARE wealthy types who might own country vineyards from which they would expect a return on investment. They see themselves so much in this way that they fall into Jesus’s rhetorical trap.
Jesus asks them, “Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?”
The chief priests and elders reply, “He will put those wretches to a miserable death and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time.”
Jesus can’t resist rhetorically rubbing their noses in it: “Don’t you know the scripture?”
What have they missed?
Well, Jesus’s parable is a parody of God’s love song in Isaiah: this vineyard is created by a wealthy landowner, one not in and of the community, not one with the land or the people who work it. The chief priests and the elders’ response is one of power and vengeance, of injustice and bloodshed, the very thing condemned in Isaiah. Indeed, they don’t know the scriptures. They don’t hear, “Woe to you chief priest and elders, you wealthy and powerful of Israel, for you are producing rotten fruit.”
And in this light, what seems non-sequitur, now seems clear.
“Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces its fruits.”
I will confess, there are times when I love the ANGRY Jesus.
But dear ones, lest we get too comfortable, I want us to linger not so much with the wrong relationship to the vineyard (it would be far too easy to say that evil then and now is owned by the wealthy and powerful); rather, I want us to imagine the right relationship to the vineyard, what it would mean to be producing good fruit in God’s good vineyard.
On this Creation Care Sunday, I would like to offer one of my favorite American prophets (and no, for once it is not Henry David Thoreau), Aldo Leopold. Leopold writing in the 1940s sees the destruction of land we were then committing and offers a remarkable prophetic essay titled “The Land Ethic.” He writes,
We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. There is no other way for land to survive the impact of mechanized man. . .
THAT land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but THAT land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.
Here I think is a true seed of our right relationship to the land and to God. Here is the greater truth that will help us to produce fruit, both spiritually and physically. The prophet and the parable condemn those who treat the land and the people, in Leopold’s terms, as commodities. We are called, rather, to see ourselves as part of and participant in community, whether human or vineyard.
We are called to draw the circle of the beloved community wider. Isaiah, Matthew, and Leopold remind us that our beloved community includes a right relationship with our human siblings, but a right relationship with the more-than-human world as well. As Bishop Curry reminds us, in John 3:16, the love of God who sends God’s son is for the world, the kosmos, as the Greek has it. Our salvation in Christ is predicated on God’s love of this vineyard, of this blessed ecosystem, of this gracious mother, our planet.
I began this sermon in the garden and to conclude, I’d like for us to return to it. We began this sermon in a dry spell, and its not raining yet.
Ultimately I know that weather is really just physics, that this dry spell is the result of complex weather systems, that climate is physics over time, though our great sin of the rapacious use of fossil fuels will haunt us for generations.
I know you, like me, have days when you feel like you are in a serious dry spell, whether physically or spiritually, that you can’t water your garden enough, and that whatever plants you may be cultivating today (your children, your work, our church), whatever plants you are cultivating are suffering and may not be producing good fruit. The climate is inhospitable and you are exhausted. Some days this world really doesn’t feel like God’s beloved vineyard.
In our Sunday morning Bible study, we’ve been working our way through Genesis, and what a story it is. You will recall the horrific tale of Jacob’s sons dumping their brother Joseph in a pit and then selling him into slavery. It is a DROUGHT that ultimately brings the brothers to Egypt where Joseph saves them, giving them food and land, but that is not the end of the story. He easily could have used their appearance to inflict vengeance upon them. He could have treated them as they treated him, as a commodity, something merely to be bought and sold. But no, we are left near the end of Genesis with Joseph weeping for his family now restored, for his community, telling them, “Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good.”
I pray that you, with me, will look for ways to bring restoration to our broken communities, human and non-human, that you will look for ways (even when it seems that other’s actions are intended for harm) to bring about good in this world.
In God’s good garden, in the biotic and spiritual community, rain is restoration; rain is essential to the life and health of our vineyards. We need the restoration of rain. We need our communities restored. We need to remember that we are part of God’s beautiful vineyard.
Together, let’s join the Psalmist and pray for rain so that we, the people of God’s vineyard, can produce good fruit.
Restore us, O God of hosts;
show the light of your countenance, and we shall be saved.
Turn now, O God of hosts, look down from heaven;
behold and tend this vine;
preserve what your right hand has planted.
Send the rain, O God,
And help us to produce good fruit.
I welcome your thoughts about rain, our lives with the land, and community.