Sunday, Oct. 8, 2017, Pentecost 18(full size gallery)
This week was the Blessing of the Pets in honor of St. Francis. This year we had a variety of activities – art, a scavenger hunt, the blessing and then following it the Village Dinner. In attendance were 7 dogs, 3 hermit crabs, a wounded vulture and 2,000 bees.
It was also a week of tragedy in Las Vegas where a killer killed 59 people on the Las Vegas Strip and wounded 527. We rang the bell on Tuesday in remembrance of that event.
Today was unseasonable warm under cloudy and sometimes drizzling skies. We had 36 in the congregation with about 10 families traveling. It was the first Sunday we returned to the regular Pentecost readings.
The warm weather couldn’t stop the gradual unfolding of fall. The front sycamore has leaves changing in groups. The soybean fields along Route 17 were alive with color even without the sun.
The children in Sunday School took the rocks collected last Sunday and painted them. Matthew 24 has the following verse -“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock." The statement “God is the Rock of my salvation” occurs several times in the Old Testament (Deuteronomy 32:15; 2 Samuel 22:47; Psalm 89:26; 95:1).
In today’s readings, fruitfulness is examined as the result of our relationship to God through Christ. The main motif in 3 of the 4 readings is about the vineyard which beginning in the Old Testament refers to Israel and by the Gospel to those tending it. Corruption is evident in Israel in the 8th Century BC and in 30AD with Christ. The real villains move from Israel as a country to specific groups cited by Matthew.
The sermon considered the Isaiah and Gospel passages which both consider the motif of the vineyard
The parable of the wicked tenants in the Gospel is rooted in the economic life of Galilee and continues the vineyard setting. Landowners were often absentee foreigners, resented by the local peasantry. The estate of such a foreigner was regarded as ownerless if he died without an heir, and the occupants would then have first claim upon the property. Thus, in the parable when the son arrives, the tenants may assume that the father has died and hope to claim the vineyard after killing the son.
The story is of an absent landowner who sends two sets of servants to collect rents. For the first set, they beat one, killed another and stone. The second set of servants met the same fate. He next sent his son. Believing the son to be the sole surviving heir, they kill him in hope of gaining the vineyard for themselves. If a landowner died without an heir, the land passed to the first claimant, so by killing the son (presumably the only one), the tenants become landowners and they become free.
The tenants have in fact been appointed by God. In the parable, they are hired by the landowner to protect and maintain the vineyard. They should not be marauders tearing down the fence to plunder.
The vineyard is the nation of Israel and the owner is God. The cultivators are the religious leaders of Israel, who, as it were, had charge for God of the welfare of the nation. The messengers who were sent successively are the prophets sent by God and so often rejected and killed. The son who came last is none other than Jesus himself.
The vineyard represents all places where we have been called by God to produce the fruits of the kingdom. Those places could easily include our households, our place of business, our school, our neighborhood, our clubs, and our congregations, etc
The land, the vineyard, the wine press, the abundant harvest, and the wine are all symbols of God’s peaceable Kingdom;
The key takeaway from the sermon is this -"When we forget who we are as Christians, when we forget that all we have ultimately belongs to God and that we are the caretakers, we become isolated and selfish. We build walls.
"We inevitably become violent in our dealings with others. And the fruits of the kingdom slip out of our hands like so many grains of sand.
"We lose the peace that comes from resting in our interconnectedness to God, to the earth itself, and to one another.
"We lose the joy that comes from living out of a sense of abundance rather than scarcity.
"We lose the assurance of hope; hope for now and hope for the future that only hope in God can bring.
"We lose the ability to love selflessly, with God given unselfishness.
"God’s love for us is unconditional. The death and resurrection of Jesus prove that fact. But God also hopes and expects that in response to this unconditional love, we will want to bear the fruit of the kingdom instead of becoming small and sour wild grapes, not fit for much of anything. But our temptation is to be complacent, or maybe discouraged, and to just let the vineyard of the world be given over to wild grapes as long as our little corners of the vineyard are bearing enough fruit to sustain us. These temptations keep us from growing the fruits of the kingdom as bountifully as we could.
"As disciples of Jesus, and tenants of the vineyard, we know that even one person, one church, one community, can make help the vineyard of the wider world bear good fruit for God’s harvest.
"That one person is each one of us, that one church is St Peter’s, and that one community is our extended network of this town, and our neighborhoods, families and friends, stretching far and wide. "
"We work for justice here as well, connecting with people in our community, through the food distribution, contributing when we can help financially with the problems created by various disasters that create hardships for people, and by living in and working for peace and forgiveness with one another in this church community, and supporting the work of this piece of the body of Christ with our money, by sharing our talents, and offering our time to further the well-being of one another and the world.
"We’ve just spent five weeks learning more about God, creation, and our interconnectedness with the earth during the Season of Creation. I’m hoping that we can install rain barrels and a composter here, to conserve water and to contribute to the health of the soil around the church, small acts of justice for the environment. "
This fits in with the Psalm reading which calls out for restoration This is the exile’s lament over the vineyard now in ruins. It is an expression of abandonment and a lament psalm pleading for restoration.
In the same light, we look to a more product future with Paul’s reading in building redirecting himself from the Jewish Law to Jesus. In his letter to the Philippians, Paul speaks of turning from his past and pushing on toward the prize of God. The Phillippians reading is Paul’s personal testimony beginning with his Jewish credentials and his achievements in the Jewish faith – a Pharisee, a keeper of the Law, a persecutor of the church. Yet what he discovered was that a right relationship with God was based not on Law but on a right relationship with Jesus Christ.
The particular passage before us is part of a larger section where Paul warns the church about false teachers, 3:1-21. Unlike the members of the circumcision party who continually trouble the church with their work-based piety, Paul has willingly abandoned his reliance on law-obedience to access the fullness of God’s promised new life, and now looks to God’s grace in Christ, and this through faith.
Paul has warned his readers about those who try to convince them that being a Christian requires acceptance of Jewish law, including circumcision. True circumcision is of the heart – and not of the “flesh”, i.e. following legal precepts, as in Judaism. Inner circumcision is what is required of us.
The target of his attack is not so much Jews as Jewish Christians, who dispute Paul’s legitimacy and object to his attitude to scripture. They demanded that scripture and its commands were infallible and saw Paul as watering down God’s word in the interests of winning people to his way.
We are expected to live under the authority of the Owner; to produce and give back the proper fruit. Sin is not primarily doing bad things, but an attitude of selfishness that has no need for God.