Giving Back to Jesus
Pentecost + 16, October 2, 2011
Several years ago, Mark Alan Powell, a professor of mine at seminary, wrote a book called Giving to God, and in it, he tells a story about how he and his wife sometimes go away, and need someone to come stay at their home – both to keep an eye on their house and belongings, but also to take care of their cats. Typically, he says, they would find a responsible seminary student to do this, and they encouraged the student to treat their home like it was their own. They could eat the food, listen to his extensive music collection (this was before everything went digital), watch their movies, etc. And having been a poor seminary student living in the adequate, but less-than-spacious dorm apartments, I can tell you, this type of arrangement would have been a welcome change!
Now, Dr. Powell says, that of course, none of the students who house-sat for them took unfair advantage of the situation. When Dr. & Mrs. Powell returned to their home, it was always in as good of shape as they had left it, the cats were fed and well-cared for. But imagine, he suggests, coming home to find that a student had taken literally their request to treat the Powell's home as their own – and had rearranged the furniture, dug up the landscaping, changed the locks! Obviously, they would have misunderstood what the arrangement was. They would have forgotten what they were supposed to be doing and whose house it really was.
That's what's going on in the parable that Jesus tells in the gospel. A landowner plants a vineyard, puts a fence around it, builds a watchtower, and then leases it to some tenants & goes away. He puts them in charge. He invites them to treat the vineyard as their own. And so they do. They work hard there. They put in a lot of sweat equity to make sure that the vineyard has a bountiful harvest. But by the time that harvest comes in (which I read somewhere could have been as long as 5 years after the vineyard was 1st planted), but that time, the tenants have long-since forgotten whose vineyard this is anyway. They've put in the long hours, they've worked and slaved in the sun, they've tended those grape vines as if they were their own – so when the owner sends his servants to collect his due, they do some unimaginable things. They beat one, kill another, and throw stones at the 3rd as he runs away. So the landowner sends another round, Jesus says, and they treat those servants the same way. So the landowner decides to send his son, thinking somehow that they will respect him – but just the opposite happens. The tenants figure if the heir dies, they will stand to inherit the land – so they kill him. “And what do you think the landowner will do to the tenants when he comes,” Jesus asks?
Now the Christian Church has generally understood this parable as an allegory, where everything in the story stands for something else – so here the landowner equals God, the vineyard is the people of Israel, the tenants are the religious leaders of Jesus' time, the servants are the prophets of God, and the son, of course, is Jesus. But it is good for us to put ourselves into this story and to ask, who are we? What does God have to say to us? And I don't know about you, but I know that I tend to fall into the same camp as the tenants. I'm like Dr. Powell's house-sitter who mistakenly comes to believe that the invitation to treat his home as my own means that the house is literally mine to do with as I wish. I tend to act as though all the things God has given to me really belong solely to me – and I resent it when I realize that the landowner actually expects his fair share of the produce. I expect that's true of most of us. Especially in this economy, we work hard for what we have, and we don't want anyone, even God, to take any of it away from us. It's easy for us to forget who everything belongs to – who all of this stuff we value so much came from.
And I'm not just talking about money. I'm talking about our families and our health and our unique gifts and abilities that we put to work in our employment and our recreation. (Which is not to say that we don't usually get hung up on the money part, of course. We do.) God expects a share of all of that back – certainly of our money, but God also expects to have a part in our relationships and to have some of our undivided time and attention – that whole remember the sabbath thing, you understand...
And so time and time again, God speaks to us. God sends servants to remind us of what God has given us, and what we owe in return. It's there in the stories of the Bible, from creation to Revelation, it's in the promises of our baptism, it's in the words of the Holy Meal we share each week. We have an obligation to give back to God out of the abundance God gives us. But lest we rise up in mutiny and revolt, let me remind you that God's gifts come first. The gift of creation – the planet we live on, the air we breathe, the water we drink, the bodies we inhabit. The gift of covenant promise – when, as the water is poured over us, we hear God's word that we are beloved children, that God claims us forever as God's own, that God will never abandon or forsake us, no matter what. The gift of communion – Christ's own body and blood, given and shed, for you! – All of these things sheer gift before anything we can say or do, given in love, but also given to be shared, given so that we might live out our lives in relationship and response to the One who gives us his very life.
See, that's the thing about this parable. Jesus asks the Pharisees and other religious leaders what they think the landowner will do after the servants and the son have been mistreated and killed, and they understandably, logically suggest that he will kill the tenants off and hand over the land to a new batch. And that works in the story – but it's not what God did. Because God did send the Son, and we humans did put him to death, thinking that somehow that would set us free. But instead of retaliation and revenge, God raises Jesus the Son to new life, and he comes once again to us all, offering us another chance, dying and rising again so that we might enter into that new life with him, so that our relationship with God the Father might be set straight, put right. In Jesus, God makes us heirs with him, so that all God has may be ours. He gives us the house keys and says, come on in, make yourself at home. It's crazy. It's not what we expect. It's not what we deserve. But that's how much God loves us – enough to send the Son to die, enough to offer us forgiveness over and over. May we offer our whole lives in return.
Amen.
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