Amazing Grapes

Proper 22A

“God, you are always more ready to hear than we to pray, and to give more than we either desire or deserve.” Let me invite you to pay attention to the collect—that’s our opening prayer for Sunday Eucharist—which changes every
week. Some weeks it’s about the season or time of year; sometimes it’s related to the scriptures we read in church, and some Sundays it’s just a holy surprise. I am not sure if this particular opening collect was intended to
illuminate the readings today, but it did surprise me with something I wasn’t expecting. God gives and gives and gives. Vineyards and vines, if we listen to the Old Testament reading or the Psalm, the righteousness that comes through faith if we listen to Paul, and the cornerstone that amazes us, according to Matthew. What God gives us is growth and chances and amazement. Or perhaps better said, growth in capacity to be amazed.

So many of us are struggling right now. Looking for work, caring for beloved ones who are sick, wondering how to get by in one of the most expensive cities in the world, and grieving losses. I myself am grieving some significant losses to Trinity leadership right now. So amazement may seem like the last thing we are feeling. Let’s take a  moment to check in with ourselves. What are we feeling? Happiness or sadness? Boredom, frustration, anxiety or fear? It’s all OK: these are part of the human condition. And what I know for sure is that none of you are alone in whatever struggles you may have at the moment, or whatever feelings may accompany them. God knows all that, and God is right here with us anyway.

But here’s the deal. While God may be with us in the messy trenches of life, God isn’t going to leave us there. God is just going to keep trying to amaze us right in the midst of our mess. That’s the very definition of grace. God will give us amazement over and over until we are able to receive it. “Have you never read in the scriptures,” Jesus said, “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is amazing in our
eyes?”

This is Jesus’ commentary on the parable we heard this morning. Now I don’t know about you, but amazement was not my first reaction upon reading it. Remember the outline of the story? There’s an absentee landlord who keeps
trying to collect from his tenants, even though they repeatedly kill the rent collectors. So he sends his son, whom the tenants also kill. Then Jesus leaves his hearers—chief priests and the Pharisees—with the provocative question about what should be done with these murderous tenants. They reply that they should all be killed, and then they become aware that they have just pronounced judgement upon themselves. Exactly who in this scenario is feeling amazed?

Well, here’s one possibility. Maybe the tenants in the parable were amazed. Maybe they were like so many of Jesus’ ordinary listeners—not the temple elite—who knew what it was to live under Roman occupation and absentee
landlordism that left them in a perpetual state of subsistence. No matter how hard they worked, they would never have any rights to or ownership of the land that God had given for the good of the people. So maybe they simply got fed up with having almost all of the crops they had labored over taken from them. They killed the slave who came to take their produce. Now as a pastor and a parent used to giving advice, I gotta say that may not have been their best choice. But then—amazingly—the absentee landlord did not retaliate. And it happened again and happened again and still no retaliation. The landlord even—albeit unwisely—entrusted his own son to those disaffected and dangerous tenants. Amazingly naïve, or maybe just amazing, that master.

And notice Jesus himself never said that he would put those tenant “wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time.” He let other people offer their interpretation. Of which many are possible, because that’s the art of the parable. The lesson sounds different if we identify with the landowner, with the tenants, or even with the slaves or the son. Which may be exactly the point. Jesus knew that not everyone had ears to hear his teaching: he had already made that plain in earlier conversations with his disciples. But in this extended series of teachings from the Jerusalem temple—when the threat of crucifixion hung heavy in the air—Jesus just kept offering parables to both the humble and the powerful, until their hearts might be broken open. Until the vineyard—which was always a metaphor for the people Israel—might bear and share fruit enough to satisfy all people.

Some hard things have happened at Trinity recently. There have been changes in leadership that none of us wanted. And here’s what makes it even harder: people are hurting, and there’s nobody to blame. Our vestry—that’s our governing board—is not at fault, I am not at fault, and you certainly are not at fault. Painful and sad things, well… they happen in human community. We wound each other without intending to. And it is to a vineyard just like ours—a field of joy and sorrow, love and disappointment—that God sends good news. And just keeps sending messengers until we can hear that nothing—nothing, nothing, nothing—can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

So in the Spirit of Jesus—who just kept sending parables into the vineyard of Israel—let me offer us yet another way to look at this one. What if Trinity Cathedral were itself the persistent bearer of good news, to the messy vineyard
that is San Jose? Home of hard workers and absentee landlords, such as our city is, and also the site of an extraordinary harvest of wealth, albeit not always shared fairly. What if our church—despite our modest size, our complicated history, and the challenges of this moment—what if we were still the ones called to share all the abundance of God’s kingdom? As we’re beginning to do ever more creatively and bravely every day.

Look at us! With the help of Octavia Derby and the compassionate ministry of Octavia’s Kitchen, and with the likely partnership of Front Door Communities, we are poised to become a center for meaningful service to our unhoused
neighbors. We are a beacon of beautiful music and a home base for the teenagers of Hillbrook High School to grow their gifts for performing arts. We are a field where good things grow, and our very presence and persistence is good news in a city that really needs it. Cultivating Gospel change takes time and forbearance, and forgiveness when we stumble. But God’s shalom—that’s the Hebrew word for peace and restoration of wholeness—is not punitive. It is patient. And that’s simply amazing.

The vineyards of our lives—our families, our workplaces, our cities and our churches—they’re all kind of a mess. Life is hard, and landlords and tenants alike have been known to behave badly. None of our churches are the same as
whatever we imagine “before” was, and the Bible itself is ancient and confusing. We won’t like every parable that comes our way any more than we like every person or pastor, change or challenge. But here’s what I know for sure:
God loves every one of us passionately, and is extraordinarily patient with usb as we grow into our best selves. So maybe if we take the time we are given—which is always more than we desire or deserve—to pray, practice compassion, and persist, we might just find our sorrow transformed, our hope restored, and our cornerstone in Jesus the Christ. Let anyone with ears, listen.