Isaiah 5:1-7 (first published 15 August 2004)
Mustang grapes played a small but not insignificant part in the summertime adventures of young boys growing up in South Texas in the 1960s and 70s. Grapevines were ubiquitous in the trees alongside the Guadalupe River, and they invited us to take to them in imitation of Tarzan, proving our bravery by swinging far out over the river and back again, or sometimes just letting go and plunging into the cool water. (Warning: do not attempt this at home! Grapevines can break--I speak from personal experience!) When not visiting the river, small shoots of grapevine were highly desired in certain circles, alongside rope, as a free but (I'm told) inferior alternative to cigarettes. Finally, the grapes themselves were highly desired for munching on while walking by a stream or in the woods. However, there was a drawback. Some mustang grapes are extremely sour, and once you got the flavor in your mouth, it was hard to get it out again. Isaiah tells a parable in which God plants a vineyard of domesticated grapes, but it yields wild grapes instead, despite God's careful attention. In response, God vows to remove the wall protecting the vineyard so that it will be trampled and become a wasteland, and furthermore God will command the clouds to withhold rain from the vineyard. What is the reason for this harsh judgment? "He expected justice, but saw bloodshed; righteousness, but heard a cry!" This passage contains two plays on words in Hebrew: justice (mishpat) vs. bloodshed (mishpach), righteousness (tsedaqa) vs. a cry (tse'aqa). God demands that his people treat others with justice and compassion. Too many Christians are railing against things like gay marriages, stem-cell research, flag burning, and gun control, and not enough are speaking out against preemptive wars, anti-democratic public policy, poverty, and lack of access to health care. The former issues offend some people's sensibilities; the latter kill and maim those who are weak and vulnerable. If God were to apply this parable to the people of God today, which set of issues would rank highest on God's agenda?
The economic news in the U.S. over the past couple of weeks is not
encouraging. Investment banks--and, increasingly, regular banks--are
going out of business. Homeowners are suffering foreclosures at record
rates. Unemployment is at a multiyear high. Congress has just passed a
huge bailout of Wall Street, which may or may not benefit ordinary
people (I have my doubts that it will). Economists no longer debate
whether the U.S. is in a recession; now they discuss how deep it will go
and how long it will last. On top of this, the stock market is
suffering massive setbacks. While all this is going on, voters are
trying to decide on which presidential candidate to dump the current
mess. It's not surprising that many people feel abandoned by the
government, and possibly even by God as well. The psalmist writes in a
time of political and probably economic distress. After recounting
God's blessings in the past, he wonders why God has abandoned the people
in the present. The answer some theologians would have given in that
day is that the people and their leaders had abandoned God, and perhaps
they had. On the other hand, as some contemporary theologians would
point out, their emergence in the land (or conquest, as they saw it)
displaced the original inhabitants, so perhaps divine retribution was
indeed in order. I have a problem with using theories of either divine
retribution for sins or divine blessing for punishment as an explanation
for current events. The fact of the matter is that all nations have
elements of their history of which they should be proud and other
matters of which they should be ashamed. When times are tough, though,
the question people should ask is not "What have we done to deserve
this"? but rather "How should we respond to the present crisis?" The
psalmist turns to God and seeks God's favor, and that's a good place to
start. The difficulty with blaming the problems of the nation on that
nation's failure to follow God is that it is almost always the poorest
and weakest inhabitants of the land who suffer the most. In the present
economic crisis, rich CEOs may lose millions of dollars, but they still
have millions socked away for a rainy day. Meanwhile, those with
considerably less money find themselves without jobs, in mortgages that
they cannot pay, and unable to pay for gasoline. When the nation
suffers, it is the poor and marginalized who suffer the most. The
psalmist reminds us, however, that God cares about all of us, especially
those least able to care for themselves. As people of faith, we need to
remember first of all that God loves us, and second that God wants us to
love those who are suffering in these uncertain times.
Philippians 3:4b-14 (first published 2 October 2005)
As people this week began to return to New Orleans to survey the damage
and to evaluate whether to rebuild, two comments by evacuees struck me.
First, many people talked about suffering a total loss: of homes, jobs,
churches, and schools. Second, many spoke of looking forward with hope to
the future. New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin has moved aggressively (his
critics contend too aggressively) to repopulate the city. Nagin's plan is
to allow businesspeople and residents to return, according to a schedule
based on safety concerns and the availability of services, and to
determine for themselves whether or not it is time to come back home. In
today's reading from Philippians, Paul tells his readers that the
successes or failures of the past are less important than looking to the
future. Paul says that he has "suffered the loss of all things" for the
sake of Christ, yet he is not discouraged. As he looked at his life
before his encounter with Christ on the Damascus road and compared it with
his life in the present, he realized that little was left of who he was at
that time. His perspective had changed, and his understanding of God had
changed. Though his résumé could compare with the best of
his contemporaries', his past achievements no longer mattered to him.
Instead, he said that he was "forgetting what lies behind and straining
forward to what lies ahead." If New Orleans will be rebuilt, it will be
rebuilt by people who are able to set aside their losses, forget the past,
and forge ahead in hope. Of course, we never really forget the past, but
if our focus is on the future, the past holds less and less sway over our
present lives. This lesson is also important for those of us who do not
have to try to rebuild shattered lives. One lesson of Katrina is that
what we have today we may not have tomorrow. If we put too much value in
possessions and personal achievement, our loss of everything might be too
great to handle. On the other hand, if we put our trust in the God who
inhabits the future, as Jürgen Moltmann says in his Theology of
Hope, we have a formula that will allow us to live lives that are
meaningful, authentic, and joyful.
Matthew 21:33-46 (first published 2 October 2005)
When Christians in the first century told the parable of the Wicked Tenants, they probably thought of the tenants as the Jews, to whom God sent first the prophets, then Christ the Son of God. The rejection of Jesus as the messiah by the majority of the Jews was justification for the early Christians' belief that God would take the kingdom away from the Jews and give it to believing Gentiles (cf. v. 43, unique to Matthew, which enunciates this view; the word often translated "Gentiles" is translated "a people" in NRSV). It wasn't long before an understandable reaction against Jewish rejection and occasional persecution of Christians was replaced by a virulent anti-Judaism, long after the church had become largely Gentile and separated itself from Judaism. After the end of the first century or so, when Christians repeated the parable and associated the wicked tenants with the Jews who rejected Christ, they were misinterpreting it, for now they had become the wicked tenants, because they were rejecting Jesus' message of love and forgiveness and replacing it with a vicious hatred of the Jews. In our day, most Christians who read the parable continue to associate the tenants with the Jews, though (for the most part) without the concomitant hatred of modern Jews. Again, I believe that they are missing the true meaning of the story. If first-century Jews were guilty of rejecting Jesus, many twenty-first-century Christians are guilty of the same. When we fail today to show God's love to Jews, Muslims, or homosexuals, we are rejecting Jesus. When we fail to care for the poor in our midst, we are rejecting Jesus. When we are blissfully ignorant of the cries of the oppressed around the world, we are rejecting Jesus. When we support preemptive war that kills thousands of people in another country (not to mention our own), we are rejecting Jesus. As Clarence Jordan noted three decades ago, Christians make a serious mistake when they try to apply the parables of Jesus to other people without first trying to see themselves in them.