A Vintage Tale
copyright
© 2012 Robert J. Elder, Pastor
Twenty-second
Sunday in Ordinary Time
September
9, 2012
Mark 12:1-12
A man planted a vineyard,
put a fence around it, dug a pit for the wine press,
and built a watchtower;
then he leased it to tenants and went to another country.
Whose vineyard is it, anyway? It’s a question put by Jesus – by means of a
parable – to those who questioned his authority. Isn’t a parable an odd sort of
way to address a question about authority? Maybe. But I’m guessing, since it’s
Jesus doing the teaching, not in this case.
To understand Jesus’ parable, the first thing we have to think about is
what it means to be tenants. Some of us probably rent homes or apartments. Some
others of us probably own our homes...or imagine we do, until we have to send
in that monthly mortgage check to the people who really own our homes. We may be more like tenants than we like to
think, unless the house is completely paid off. And even if it’s paid off, just
try withholding property taxes for a few years and see whose house it is then.
I have been a renter and I also have “owned” 6 different homes in my
lifetime. Though, I have to admit, I never really owned any of them, don’t
really own the one I live in now, the mortgage lender always has and still does
own a pretty large interest in my home. In many ways, I am a tenant on someone
else’s property.
These random musings about ownership of property might help us begin to
make connection with Jesus’ teaching on authority through the parable of the
wicked tenants in an absentee owner’s vineyard.
I remember my first years of ministry, living in what Presbyterians call a “manse.”
Methodists and others call them “parsonages.” Whatever we call them, they are
church-owned homes in which pastors are invited to live during the time they
are serving a particular church. In the last half century, many churches have
sold their manses in favor of a housing allowance for pastors. Still, when
ministers gather, even if it’s been years since they occupied a manse or
parsonage, there is almost invariably a time when tales of woe from bad
experiences in the church manse are shared. I recall the story of a pastor
friend whose wife had the audacity to move the sofa in their church manse from
one room to another, only to suffer the wrath of church members who had
collectively donated the sofa specifically for the room from which she had
moved it. A great uproar ensued, and eventually the pastor and his wife moved
the sofa back where it had been. Then, as soon as possible, they found another
church to serve that did not have the “benefit” of a manse.
That little fracas involved, of course, a question of authority. Whose
manse was it anyway? The title deed had the church’s name on it, and the church
authorities had charge of the stewardship of it, and only by their leave did
the pastor and his or her family live there. “By what authority are you moving
that sofa?” the elders wanted to know. And, of course, they held all the cards,
the authority over property in the church was theirs to exercise. “By what
authority are you doing these things?” the priests, scribes, and elders asked,
after Jesus had come riding triumphantly into Jerusalem, moving the
moneychangers’ furniture on the Temple grounds. Jesus wouldn’t say, instead he
told this story.
God’s kingdom is something like a vineyard, Jesus said, which an owner
planted, improved with a new fence, wine press and watchtower. Then he leased
it to some tenants and for reasons all his own, he went to another country,
which is to say, out of sight and, judging by the rest of the story, pretty
soon out of mind.
A few years back the newspaper carried a front page story about a
California company, Premier Pacific Vineyards, that had purchased and developed
six vineyards in Polk and Yamhill counties here in Oregon, as an investment on
behalf of the retirement system for California public employees. Now I doubt
that any of the front office folks at Premier Pacific come up here on a regular
basis to cultivate and water the vines in their vineyards. My guess is that
they hired vineyard managers who, in turn, hired workers to till and cultivate
the vines. My guess is also that if a day dawned when the vineyard managers and
their workers decided that they could just keep all profits from those
vineyards for themselves, the parent company would put a quick end to their
folly.
But that’s not how it went in Jesus’ parable. In his story, the tenants
enjoyed the vineyard and all the owner-financed improvements for a while, and
then began to develop a proprietary sense about the place. It wasn’t their
vineyard, never was. They didn’t purchase the ground, had made none of the
original improvements on it. They enjoyed the fruits of a vineyard established
by someone else, who had invited them to live and work there on his behalf.
That’s how things stood until that day, that seemingly normal day like other
days, when the owner sent someone to collect the rent that was due to him for
the benefits they derived from his property and its improvements.
Incredibly, the tenants in the story responded as if they were owners
rather than renters. They shamelessly beat the representative the owner sent to
collect the rent. The incredibly forbearing owner sent another unsuspecting
servant to collect the rent, money which was clearly due him. What did the
wicked tenants do? They pulled out the brass knuckles and baseball bats, beat
him, and, for good measure, added insults to his injuries, and tossed him out
the gate.
Unbelievably, the long-suffering owner sent a third unlucky servant to
collect the rents, but now feeling empowered in their evil, they killed this
one. Jesus said, “so it was with many others; some they beat, and others they
killed.” By now, we may recognize the servants as representations of the Old
Testament prophets, and the land owner as a representation of God.
In exasperation, the owner sent his own son – and now we begin to see the
parallel with the story of Jesus – the owner sent his own son to set things to
right, but the tenants, consistent in their evil, killed the owner’s son,
unceremoniously pitching his lifeless body outside the property. They believed
that now, with the owner’s heir out of the way, they would inherit the property
themselves, perhaps by squatter’s rights. What would you expect that the owner
of the vineyard would do to these tenants? You know the rest of the story, and
it wasn’t a happy ending for those tenants
Why did Jesus tell this story? It’s a parable that appears in Mark,
Matthew, and Luke, and each reports that it was told in response to a question
about authority. By what authority, the presumptive authorities had asked
Jesus, do you do these things? But Jesus knew whatever authority they had was
only derivative. If the priests, scribes and elders had authority over matters
civil and religious in Israel, it was like the authority of the tenants in the
vineyard, derived, granted by another, by the God of Israel.
When pastors or musicians select a hymn or anthem for a Sunday morning, we
frequently ask ourselves, “Do the people know this hymn? Do they like to sing
it? Is it good music?” Rarely do we ask, “What does this hymn say about God?
Will God be pleased with our singing of it today?” When we fail to ask these
other questions, we are guilty of acting as if this were our church, our vineyard,
owned by us and the members who
gather here. It goes along with sentences like, “This isn’t the pastor’s
church, it’s our church,” or “This church doesn’t belong to the session, it
belongs to the people.” In truth it belongs neither to pastor nor session nor
people. We are the tenants. God is the owner who has called us to come and till
this corner of his vineyard for a time.
If we plan Sunday worship, or anything else in the church for that matter,
saying, “What do we want from this worship or this activity,” by the measure of
this gospel parable, the questions we ought to be asking instead are, “By whose
authority do we do these things that we do? What does God require? Whose church
is this, anyway?”
This teaching goes beyond the worship and fellowship life of the church, of
course. In our confessions and by our study of scripture, we believe that the
whole bountiful, beautiful earth is not ours to use for our own pleasure. We’re
all tenants in this garden of delights, in spite of the fact that we often use
and abuse the earth and its creatures as if we were gods unto ourselves, owing
nothing to anyone else. In the end the church doesn’t belong to elders,
pastors, or people, but to God. Easy to say, more difficult to live as though
it’s true and we believe it.
Some have called Jesus’ parable of the wicked tenants a parable of
judgment, but is it really? Could it be that it’s a story of grace? When we ask
ourselves, “What do I want from this church? What do we need to do to keep this
congregation going, to make worship meaningful, to keep being faithful?” Ought
we not to be asking ourselves, “By whose authority is all this singing,
serving, and speaking done?” This is not our
church, this place is God’s. This church is ours on loan. The one who created
this church paid for it with the death of his Son.[1]
There is grace in this message. A pastor can’t keep a church going. Nor can
anyone sitting in a pew in the congregation or choir. This church is God’s.
Worship leaders can’t make “it” happen for you on Sunday – whatever “it” is –
no matter how hard we work on music, anthems, prayers, sermons. If something
worshipful happens, it’s a gift of God. The church is gathered under the
authority of God, not as a self-generating society of unfulfilled expectations.
A Methodist friend of mine shared
the following story of a family he knew, visiting in a university town in
California where the father was teaching for the summer:
When they entered town, they passed by a large, impressive
Methodist church. Of course, this story could as easily be about Presbyterians
or Lutherans as about Methodists:
The father said to his family, “Let’s go to that church on
Sunday.”
On Sunday they got up, got dressed, and walked to church. As
they came near to the building, they could hear music, loud music, guitars,
drums, emanating from the neogothic building.
“What kind of
church is this?” his son asked. The father replied, “Well, it’s one of ours,
you’ve got to remember that we’re in California....”
A smiling usher greeted them at the door. When the door
opened, they could see that the service had begun. In the service there was a
band in full swing. People were clapping and swaying to the music, people of
all ages, of every color of the rainbow.
“Is this a Methodist
church?” they asked.
“Oh, no,” the
usher said. “We rent this sanctuary from the Methodist church. If you like, I’ll
take you to the Methodist church.”
And the usher took him around the corner of the building to a
small chapel where there gathered a huddled, small group of … people, plodding
through a traditional service. On the way back home, as they made their way
through a sidewalk filled with people emerging from the larger service around
the corner, the father looked back at that emerging throng of all ages,
nations, and races, and said to his family, “That was the Methodist church.”
It’s important that we never fail
to remind one another that our church is not ours. We just work here in the vineyard for the time being. It’s a
vineyard which, if it belongs to anyone, it belongs to God.
Copyright © 2012 Robert J. Elder, all rights reserved
[1] From “Taken
and Given to Someone Else,” a sermon preached by William Willimon at the Duke University
chapel.
