'Of course, we are not talking about a literal vineyard and literal tenants and a harvest of fruit and grain. We are talking about what happens when the people of God do not give back praise and honor and service to God. God has given us life, he has sustained us with every good thing of the earth, he has given us his commandment that we might live in peace with our neighbors and his promise that we might put our faith in him.'
SERMON
Matthew 21:33-46
[Jesus said to the people:] 33“Listen to another parable. There
was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press
in it, and built a watchtower. Then he leased it to tenants and went to another
country. 34When the harvest time had come, he sent his slaves to the
tenants to collect his produce. 35But the tenants seized his slaves
and beat one, killed another, and stoned another. 36Again he sent
other slaves, more than the first; and they treated them in the same way. 37Finally
he sent his son to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’
38But when the tenants saw the son, they
said to themselves, ‘This is the heir; come, let us kill him and get his
inheritance.’ 39So they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard,
and killed him. 40Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what
will he do to those tenants?” 41They said to him, “He will put those
wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will
give him the produce at the harvest time.”
42Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the scriptures:
‘The stone that the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone;
this was the Lord’s doing,
and it is amazing in our eyes’?
43Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from
you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom. 44The
one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone
on whom it falls.”
45When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables,
they realized that he was speaking about them. 46They wanted to
arrest him, but they feared the crowds, because they regarded him as a prophet.
Yesterday Rebecka and I went to a farmer’s
market to get some birdseed, because the birds are eating us out of house and
home. While there, we were surrounded by the bounty of the year. Freshly picked
concord grapes, apples and apple cider, pumpkins from the pumpkin patch. I am
grateful for supermarkets, but there is something about getting your food from
a farmer’s market or a roadside stand. You are that much closer to where the
food came from, you are that much closer to the soil and the sun and the rain that
God gave for its growth and the people who by God’s gracious giving sowed the
seed and reaped the produce. The harvest is not some idea, but the real thing.
The harvest belongs to God. This is the
theme of our Scripture readings today, expressed in a negative fashion in the
Old Testament lesson and the Gospel reading. In those Scriptures we see the harvest
withheld. The prophet Isaiah depicts a vineyard which has been planted with
care and given every advantage of soil, and yet it does not yield as it should,
its fruit is bitter, it gives no advantage to anyone. In the Gospel, Jesus
tells us about history’s dumbest tenant farmers, who decide to keep all the
produce for themselves and assume that no harm will thereby come to them. In
both cases the harvest is withheld from the one who planned and planted it.
Of course, we are not talking about a
literal vineyard and literal tenants and a harvest of fruit and grain. We are
talking about what happens when the people of God do not give back praise and
honor and service to God. God has given us life, he has sustained us with every
good thing of the earth, he has given us his commandment that we might live in peace
with our neighbors and his promise that we might put our faith in him.
The harvest belongs to God. In other
words, everything belongs to him. He gets back what he has put into the world. But
so often we forget this and receive the world as if it were ours to do with as
we please.
Harry Wendt is the author of the ‘Crossways’
Bible study series, which has been used all over the world. He likes to call
God the ‘Maker and Owner.’ One of the drawings in the book is a human being
with a tag on, as it were, marking the owner. Now I’m not a visual-aids
preacher or one who uses props, so you just have to imagine yourself with a tag
on you, saying ‘God’s person.’
What would it be like if we had ownership
tags on ourselves, or even on the things we used each day? How about ‘God’s refrigerator?’
Could we not think that this is wonderful, that God lends us his refrigerator
so that we might keep our food until we can use it? Then we can heat it up in ‘God’s
microwave.’ How about ‘God’s television,’ or ‘God’s smartphone’? Does this
change how we use these things at all?
Perhaps we should have an ownership tag
on our clocks or watches which says, ‘God’s time.’ He lends us time, for our
rest, for our work, for our eating and drinking and play, for serving him and
getting to know him and what he’s done for us. What if we had an ownership tag
on our wallets? God’s money? Yes, for our sustenance and our shelter and our self-care,
and for using to benefit others and to spread the Gospel.
But really, it’s not about things or even
time or money. It’s about us. The harvest of our entire lives belongs to God.
It is his. We are called to give him what is his due. We should not hold back, as
if by holding back we could somehow keep what is his for ourselves, or because
we are afraid that if we don’t keep it, we will not share in the harvest.
For
our example, we look to Jesus. Jesus gave the entire harvest of his life to the
Father. On the cover of our bulletin today is an extremely evocative piece of
art, a depiction of Jesus in a winepress. Jesus is being pressed, squeezed, and
the ‘juice,’ if you will, of his life is his blood which comes to us in the
Holy Communion. It’s an arresting image, and perhaps it’s a little hard to
think about Jesus being pressed in a winepress. But if we think about it, his
suffering and death, the giving of his life back to the Father, yielded precious
fruit which satisfies us for salvation.
And
we too are called to give our lives back to him. If you will, our lives are
squeezed or crushed in the winepress so that which is good can be harvested for
God. This is not a literal physical act, but suffering for God’s sake, which is
prayer for and forgiveness of others and living as a Christian, is sharing in
Christ’s death. And those who share in Christ’s death do not fail to share in
his resurrection. The harvest is shared among all Christ’s people.
There
is only one thing more, and that is that some of us may feel that we don’t want
to give the produce of our lives to God because God wouldn’t want it. We might
feel we’ve wasted our chance, that our lives are too full of sorrow or sadness
or sin, that we’re more like that vineyard in Isaiah that yielded wild grapes
which aren’t good for much. But we should give God everything, even with its
sorrow and sadness and sin, for we cannot judge what God will make of us. The
harvest is his, and in Christ the harvest is beautiful, even if we cannot
necessarily see how or why. And so do not be afraid to give what is yours and even
you yourself to God who has given all that is. Amen
The
Rev. Maurice C. Frontz, III
St
Stephen Lutheran Church
October
4, 2020
