I preached this sermon on Sunday, April 3 at St. Lydia's. The text is Matthew 12:1-12; read it here.
We’ve been talking a lot in the last few weeks about the season of Lent being a season of truth-telling. A season of stripping away everything that gets between us and God, and being very very honest with ourselves.
I think that this parable has a lot to do with honesty, and a lot to do with the deceptions and illusions that so often become a backdrop to our lives.
One of the words that struck me in this text is the word “lease.” And the word “tenant.” Those words bring up a whole lot of associations and memories for me, and most of them not good ones. Memories of panicked apartment hunts and complicated roommate situations and noisy, drug-taking neighbors and calling the police on the noisy, drugtaking neighbors and leaking ceilings from the bathroom one floor up and landlords who refused to fix the leaking ceiling from the bathroom one floor up...
Anyone who’s rented an apartment, especially anyone who’s rented an apartment in New York, probably has some amazing stories to tell about what it’s like to be a renter.
More than anything else, I think there’s something about being a renter that feels very, very temporary. When you’re a renter, you know the place you live doesn’t belong to you. It belongs to someone else. And you know that. There’s something about that arrangement that’s a little unnerving, but there’s also something about it that’s freeing.
The landlord in our story plants a vineyard,
and builds a fence around it,
and digs a pit for the wine press,
and builds a watchtower.
He does all of this, and then he chooses some tenants.
We can imagine that he chooses them carefully.
And he leases them the vineyard and goes away.
It’s an arrangement that’s very clear.
The tenants are to take care of the vineyard.
But it doesn’t belong to them.
They didn’t plant the vines,
or build the fence,
or dig the hole for the wine press,
or build the watchtower.
They didn’t do any of that.
The vineyard doesn’t belong to them.
It belongs to the owner.
But they get confused about the arrangement and decide that this vineyard should belong to them. So they start rejecting all the messengers the landlord sends. And then he sends his son, and they kill him.
Jesus tells this story to a bunch of scribes and elders in Jerusalem. A bunch of religious leaders who have done a pretty terrible job of being good tenants of the vineyard God entrusted to them. They were supposed to maintain and nurture Israel’s spiritual and religious life, but Jesus points out that that’s not what they’re doing at all.
And part of the problem is that the scribes and the elders have gotten confused about who the vineyard belongs to. In the beginning, maybe they remembered that the vineyard, that Israel, belongs to God, and their job was to take care of it.
But somewhere along the line, they got confused. As one commentator put it, they “mistook the leadership of Israel for their ownership of Israel,” and rather than pointing Israel toward God, they keep just pointing to themselves.
That’s why I think this passage is all about telling the truth.
Because it’s easy to get confused.
It’s easy to forget that we’re not the owners.
We’re just the renters.
And everything we’ve been given,
our jobs and our friends and our relationships
and our income and our wealth
and our talents and our abilities
and this very earth
and the sustenance it provides through food and water,
none of it belongs to us.
It all belongs to God.
We’re renters here.
And there’s something a little unnerving about that,
but there’s also something marvelously freeing about it.
God owns it. We just have to care for it.
And give thanks for it.
All we have to do is tread lightly for the time that we’re here.
I don’t often use the word sin, because I think that it brings up a whole lot of stuff for folks that isn’t what I mean when I say sin. So I’ll tell you what I do mean when I use the word:
Sin is what happens when we get confused.
And start to think that we’re the owners
and not the renters.
Sin is what happens when we mistake ourselves for God.
And we do it all the time, because we’re human,
and it’s just part of who we are --
but sin,
sin is this propensity to think that we can do it all on our own.
That we don’t need anyone and we certainly don’t need God.
That we planted this vineyard and it belongs to us.
There’s this amazing question that hangs at the center of this parable,
as a sort of hinge:
The tenants kill the landlord’s beloved son, and Jesus asks,
What then will the owner do?
And the answer is so strange and complicated,
and the last thing that we might expect.
He will come and destroy the tenants
and give the vineyard to others.
The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.
The stone that the builders rejected,
the son that the tenants rejected,
the teacher that the scribes and elders rejected,
is, in the end, is hung on a cross to die.
Because God is a very strange landlord.
A landlord who,
having sent slave after slave to be beaten and executed,
sends us her son: a part of her very self
to hang on a cross
and give up his life
that we might live.
What then will the owner do?
She will show us that love is stronger than death.
Will show us that power lives in places of great weakness.
Will show us that every day we are dying and rising,
and that no matter how many times we get confused,
God will destroy that part of us that wants to stay in the grave,
and will bring us into new life.
We live in a world that is perishing,
but every day holds a promise
that God is remaking us again and again.
Peeling away the deceptions and illusions
that make up the backdrop to our lives,
so that we might see the truth:
That it’s all fading away, but God is eternal.
To remind us, over and over,
that the lease we’ve been given is temporary.
And though there’s something about it that’s unnerving,
there’s something about it
that’s incredibly freeing.
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