Isaiah 5:1-7
Hebrews 11:29-12:2
Luke 12:49-56
God be in my words and in my speaking; God be in our hearts and in our understanding. AMEN.
As I read and pondered the Scripture lessons appointed for this week, I found myself reflecting that each lesson wasn’t quite what it, at first glance, appeared to be. Take the passage from Isaiah, first. “Let me sing for my beloved my love-song concerning his vineyard…” it begins, and we settle in for a description of the loving toil invested in the vineyard on the “very fertile hill.” As a gardener (in the all too short, high gardening season), I can relate to this. A garden — or a vineyard — is a labor of love. The gardener nurtures the plants, the soil, and in return is rewarded with something that feeds the soul and the body: a source of nourishment; a place of tranquility, beauty, and harmony. As a metaphor for the relationship between God and the children of Israel (as Isaiah and the psalmist use it), it is both comforting and apt. But then, in today’s passage, there’s a sudden change. “He expected it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes.” The gardener had lavished care and attention on the vines, but they failed to produce good fruit — and the love-song turns into something quite different: “And now, inhabitants of Jerusalem and people of Judah, judge between me and my vineyard. What more was there to do for my vineyard that I have not done in it? …why did it yield wild grapes? And now I will tell you what I will do to my vineyard. I will remove its hedge, and it shall be devoured; I will break down its wall, and it shall be trampled down. I will make it a waste; it shall not be pruned or hoed.” The love-song sounds suddenly like a paean of retribution; the patient, caring gardener has turned vindictive. And to make sure everyone gets the point, Isaiah sums things up with this: “For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, and the people of Judah are his pleasant planting; he expected justice, but saw bloodshed; righteousness, but heard a cry!”
The image of God as the gardener is usually a comfortable one for us — but that is because we imagine ourselves to be the plants, and not the weeds. In this passage, the prophet Isaiah is challenging his people to see themselves in a new way; to identify themselves not, in the expected and traditional way, with the good vines — but as the wild grapes. From the point of view of a weed, a gardener is a very, very different figure. The people of Isaiah’s time didn’t want to think of themselves as weeds, as wild grapes; but Isaiah shows their behavior in a different light than how they prefer to see it: “[God] expected justice, but saw bloodshed; righteousness, but heard a cry!” It’s quite possible that we in the industrialized West are not yielding the good fruit that God expects of us, either. If God expects justice and righteousness of us, what is God in fact seeing? Bloodshed and violence? Ecological destruction? Economic disparities? Heedless adherence to a wasteful and unsustainable way of life? As a culture, in the eyes of the Divine gardener, are we plant or weed, grape or wild grape? It may be important for us to consider these questions, and to ask ourselves — as individuals, as a community of faith, as the wider society — how we can change, how we can turn back toward producing the good fruits God expects of us.
In today’s passage from the letter to the Hebrews, the author starts out by citing the amazing, miraculous accomplishments of people of faith: “By faith the people passed through the Red Sea as if it were dry land … By faith the walls of Jericho fell after they had been encircled for seven days. By faith Rahab the prostitute did not perish with those who were disobedient, because she had received the spies in peace.” He goes on to make reference to a few others of the myriad characters in Scripture who, by faith, worked miracles or evaded terrible dangers. But the author doesn’t stop there. He goes on to point out that other people of faith suffered appalling fates: “Others were tortured…others suffered mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned to death, they were sawn in two, they were killed by the sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, persecuted, tormented…” The author of the letter to Hebrews is making the point that faith doesn’t automatically translate into ease, comfort, success, or renown; and he sums up his theological argument thus: “Yet all these, though they were commended for their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better so that they would not, apart from us, be made perfect.” The ‘something better’ to which he alludes is the salvation offered through Jesus Christ, “the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.” It isn’t that the people who have faith are rewarded with the good things of life — or even with Heaven after death; it is, instead, that faith is the agency through which humans are enabled to do amazing things, whether those amazing things are miraculous accomplishments, or strength and courage in the face of suffering and hardship. “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us…” Perhaps the message for us, in the context of the reading from Isaiah, is that the race set before us is to figure out how to bear good fruit, how to evade the myriad crises and disasters that seem poised to destroy us, how to build a just and equitable society that allows us to care for all of God’s children and the intricate, fragile, and beautiful Creation which is God’s gift to all of us.
Jesus, too, in the passage from Luke’s Gospel appointed for this morning, seems to be saying that it’s not what you think. “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth?” he demands. “No, I tell you, but rather division!” and he goes on to describe not the expected divisions between tribes and nations, but unexpected, unthinkable divisions among family members. The divisions Jesus is talking about are within his community, and it is important to notice that he talks about divisions — “father against son … mother against daughter … mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law” — divisions between generations and within gender lines. He doesn’t have a thing to say, here, about the divisions which already existed between the Roman overlords and the Hebrew people, between the rich collaborators and the oppressed poor; instead, he holds up shocking examples of divisions among people whom his audience (and we) would consider natural allies. Kinship ties are surely one of the strongest connections human communities know — and yet, here Jesus is promising to disrupt them. “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!” My mission, my ministry, he seems to be saying, here, is not what you expect.
In making sense of this Gospel lesson, I think it’s important to consider the word ‘peace.’ There are many kinds of peace: the inner peace which comes from knowing that we are held in God’s love, no matter what external difficulties beset us; political peace, which can be understood as the absence of war; and what I think of as “surface peace” — the appearance of consensus which results from people not speaking out for fear of disrupting things. Inner peace is something one can experience in the midst of strife and conflict. Other people can’t always see it in us and it does not look like peace on earth. It’s the kind of peace faith engenders in the faithful but persecuted people about whom the author of Hebrews writes. I think, perhaps, that inner peace is the peace of which Jesus is prince. Political peace — the absence of war — is often not a real peace. All too often, the underlying tensions and issues persist, and political peace is really much more like a ceasefire than a resolution.
Surface peace may be the trickiest for us. As Christians, we run the risk often of confusing peace with appeasement. We tell ourselves that disagreement — division — is unchristian, and so we hold our peace, we do not express the inner truths we embrace; but this does not make the divisions go away: it just makes them really hard to find and to address. Haven’t you ever participated in a meeting where, while there are no expressed divisions, there is anything but deep, authentic consensus? In those kinds of situations it can be seriously difficult to cut through the tensions and address the real problems, because surface consensus is very important to us; it’s more comfortable than open disagreement or debate. But Jesus’ harsh words remind us that that kind of “peace” is not genuine. In a surface peace, where people aren’t saying everything they believe, the things that are said are likely to be only the things we want to hear, the things we want to think, the things we want to believe — rather than the uncompromising truths to which God calls us. People who insist on speaking the truth as they understand it, no matter how uncomfortable it may be to their listeners, are often denigrated and reviled — no matter how right later events prove them to be.
For me, these harsh words of Jesus serve as a reminder that as Christians, we are not called to preserve a surface peace. Too often, we confuse Christian behavior with Thumper’s mother’s advice from Disney’s “Bambi”: “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” But that is dishonest. Unless we express our differences, unless we enter into honest dialogue about issues and concerns where we may not agree, we have no way to address and heal our divisions. If we simply assume that everyone believes exactly the way we do, if we confuse appeasement with peace, we run the risk of letting our community, our church family, splinter apart if disagreements ever come to the surface. Divisions — “father against son … mother against daughter … mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law” or friend against friend — divisions, no matter how uncomfortable and scary, pose a real opportunity for growth and change. Essentially, in this passage Jesus is calling us to embrace division, to accept and recognize that there will be differences. When we do that, we can acknowledge differing opinions, we can recognize that maybe none of us has arrived at the complete truth — and then, we can learn from one anther and be reconciled.
Remember: God is in the questions; if we invite it, God is present and active in the process of defining ourselves, building our community, living out our faith. Divisive issues are more destructive, in my experience, if we deny them in order to preserve the outward calm. True reconciliation, true peace, requires honesty — otherwise, it’s only a thin, fragile veil stretched over seething differences.
It is my prayer for all of us that God grant us the courage to embrace our divisions and to address the issues and concerns that divide us. May we not confuse appeasement with peace, absence of active dissent with consensus; and may God give us the strength to speak out boldly, and the patience to listen compassionately, that our differences may teach us about the deeper identity we share.
In the Name of God, AMEN.
Sermon preached by Beth Hilgartner
at St. Barnabas’, Norwich, Vt.