Rules of the Road

I’ve been spending some time around high schools the last two weeks. I was up at a Broadwater last week for a scrimmage and got to see some of our Franktown Vikings in the field. Over at Northampton I saw in the gym the girls volleyball team gearing up for action. And, out on the field and in the band room, the marching band has been logging a lot of rehearsal time.

All of that is happening because school is getting ready to begin and playing seasons are ready to begin and all of these students are trying to get their minds and bodies ready for action. I was a basketball player in high school and I remember summers where I spent hours just trying to put together the mechanics of a layup. It’s not as simple as it looks. At least it wasn’t for me. An efficient layup involves timing, coordination, and awareness of what’s going on around you so that you can make split-second adjustments.

It also involves body memory. It just takes doing the thing over and over and over until your muscles and your mind can do it without thinking. They just know what to do because of the training. That’s why all of these sports teams are out there on the practice field. That’s why the band is out there. So that when the time comes to perform, most of the stuff that you have to do will be so second nature that you won’t have to think about it.

Your Christian life is no different. It takes practice to be a Christian. It takes regular exercise of the muscles that you use to be Christian. And it takes a great coach who keeps reminding you that you can do it. That we can do it.

The letter to the Hebrews ends with a kind of coach’s pep talk to the community that the author was addressing. The verses we read this morning feel like a kind of laundry list of things the community ought to remember to do. And maybe they seem like a pretty obvious list to us. Of course, these are things that we ought to do. We take it for granted that this is what Christian life looks like. But you know what happens when you get off your training for a few days, a few weeks, a few months. You lose your muscle memory and it takes a lot of work to get back to where you were.

We shouldn’t take this list from Hebrews for granted, though. First of all because we’re not doing all the things that this list commends. But secondly because we can’t assume that these values, which we think of as human values, will continue if they are not practiced.

“Let mutual love continue.” That’s the heading under which this whole list of practices comes in the 13^th chapter of Hebrews. But what does that look like? We all have our own pictures for that. Like that comic strip in the newspapers that has the heading “Love is…,” every day it can be filled in with some new example. But Hebrews has some very specific ways to illustrate this.

The first command is to hospitality. “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.” Radical hospitality is something we have been talking about a lot over the past two years here at Franktown. We recognize it as one of the primary ways that churches remain vital because they are constantly welcoming new people in.

One way that has been happening through this summer is at the community dinners on Wednesday night which have been sponsored by the Word Up group. It is more than a free meal that has been happening. It has been outreach through food and new community being built over food. And it is causing problems. Good problems. There is a strong sentiment from a lot of folks that we’d like to see this continue into the fall. But that means that Wonderful Wednesday will have to look differently. Can we sustain a free meal? Can we maintain our kitchen staff consistently? Can we live with a more simple menu? The feeling is that we can if we take our mission seriously. If we see this meal as more than a meal…if we consider that we are entertaining angels through our hospitality…then something radical can happen.

The second way that Hebrews commands us to mutual love is through remembering the prisoner and the tortured. In the day when this was written, those prisoners and tortured persons were likely other Christians who were suffering for their beliefs, but Jesus urged his disciples to visit the imprisoned, too, without qualification. However they got there, there is a need for transformation and good news in prisons as well.

When we were doing our survey on our new mission statement earlier this year, a few of you wrote that ministries in our jails might be an area to explore. The Vision and Design Team has been looking at that and we have discovered that there do seem to be some real needs among prisoners here on the Shore that are not being addressed. Maybe God is calling some of us to get involved. Maybe all of us should keep the prisoner as a constant in our prayers.

“Let marriage be held in honor by all.” This is another area we have been talking about in the Vision and Design Team. What does marriage mean in a day when so many marriages are broken, when the definition of marriage is being stretched, and when more and more young people see no need for marriage? Honoring marriage means more than giving it lip service – it means developing practices to keep it strong. It means regular time together. It means shared experiences. It means spending time in the marriage bed that Hebrews talks about. It means mutual respect. Christians should be saying something to the world around them through the quality of their marriages. There is the potential for a lot of pain in our marriages. When we open our lives to others we are always vulnerable. But there is also the potential for deep joy and so we pray for our marriages.

The final command in this section is to stay free from the love of money and be content with what you have, something that also deserves its own sermon. In a culture where so much of meaning is built around the desire for material objects, this may be the most counter-cultural thing Christians are called to do. But Hebrews goes on to say that our living free from the love of money is a way to express our reliance on God. If we do not put our trust in money, then we are free to trust God for the things we need.

Those are the things that Hebrews calls for, but there is something deeper I want to get at. I said that these values can’t be taken for granted and they can’t be. They are not so natural to us that they can’t be lost. They could easily be replaced by an alternative story or an influential movement. In fact, those stories and movements are out there. There are plenty of Hollywood movies that have no room for mutual love. Your average action/adventure hero is a loner motivated by revenge and all too willing to use violent means to secure it. Marriage is suffering from a number of things, the most important of which is that those who support it have trouble saying why it is necessary or even what it is. Living simply is troubled by every advertisement we see. Mutual love is not a given in human life.

I’ve been haunted this year by a book written by David Bentley Hart called Atheist Delusions. In it he traces the Christian revolution back to its earliest days in the Roman Empire and says that our modern notions of compassion and the sanctity of individual lives can be credited to the message of Christianity. “Conscience, after all, at least in regard to its particular contents, is to a great extent a cultural artifact, a historical contingency, and all of us today in the West, to some degree or another, have inherited a conscience formed by Christian moral ideals.”[i] And what sustains that conscience? What keeps our understandings of mutual love from fading away? What keeps our culture from falling into new bad habits and ways of being that may make a mockery of things like hospitality, solidarity, fidelity and simplicity? Nothing but practice and a grounding in Jesus who is the same today, yesterday, and forever.

I never excelled in basketball, but the little bit of proficiency I got was due to those hundreds and thousands of layups I did on the driveway of my house with the basketball goal. If Ben Holland throws a touchdown pass it will be because he’s thrown a thousand passes in practice. If Jordan LeCato spikes the ball for a point it will because she has learned though hundreds of rotations and set-ups just where to be. If we are going to create a place in which mutual love can continue it will be because of the countless hours we have spent in worship, in fellowship, in prayer, in study, in homes, in jails, in face-to-face encounters with others – doing the quiet, sometimes boring work, of loving. God will ultimately bring about the new day. Christ will come regardless. But what will we say when we are asked what we did to let mutual love continue on this earth? What the world needs now is that kind of love. Thanks be to God.

Hebrews 13:1-8 [NRSV]

Let mutual love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.

Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured.

Let marriage be held in honor by all, and let the marriage bed be kept undefiled; for God will judge fornicators and adulterers.

Keep your lives free from the love of money, and be content with what you have; for he has said, "I will never leave you or forsake you." So we can say with confidence, "The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can anyone do to me?"

Remember your leaders, those who spoke the word of God to you; consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever…Through him, then, let us continually offer a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that confess his name. Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.

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[i] David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies, [Yale University Press: New Haven, 2009], ebook location 2250.

Born to the Burden and Beyond

Milton Martin, better known as Milty to everybody who knows him, was looking at a picture of himself as a child and not liking what he saw. His mother loved it because to her it was a reminder of that brief period of time when Milty had been a child. The little boy bouncing up and down if you even hinted at a trip to go get ice cream. The little boy with the gap-toothed grin always waiting on a visit from the tooth fairy. Those two themes sort of came together in the picture because it was a picture of a 7-year-old Milty standing in the backyard of their home on a summer afternoon, face lathered in Marsh Mud ice cream with a huge gaping smile. It wasn’t quite as bad as the naked baby in the bathtub pictures most parents harbor in their homes, but for Milty, who was now 22 years old, it might as well have been.

It was Saturday night. If he were back in Richmond, where he was going to college at VCU, he would be out with friends or playing games on his roommate’s new X Box or having some great philosophical discussion over questions like, “What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it’s all about?” Instead he was back home in Mattaponi, waiting for his mother to return from a dinner, wondering what Tara Tucker was up to, and staring at the mantelpiece over the fireplace. That’s where the embarrassing picture was.

That’s also where his mother kept his 8^th grade basketball trophy and a funny little ceramic statue she had once made. It was fairly roughly done and all in an interesting shade of green, but you could make out two figures in it—one a man with a stethoscope around his neck, the other a small child which the man was holding aloft. Milty had never understood the statue, but it had been there his whole life.

Now all of the stuff on the mantel just reminded him of how hard it was to come back home. The transition to college hadn’t been easy. He’d had to work his way there through community college and lots of odd jobs. Once he got there, the course work didn’t come easily, even though he was a good student. But through it all there had been an excitement that he hadn’t known before. He was challenged, but he could feel himself growing, could feel his whole world stretching and expanding, could feel like he was finally discovering what it was like to be him, on his own, making his own decisions, charting his own future.

Coming home was like going back in time now. He liked Mattaponi. He had enjoyed growing up here. He still got along pretty well with his mom. But he didn’t want to go back to the snaggle-tooth days, didn’t want to be reminded of the times when he was dependent on other people for everything; didn’t want to be a child anymore. And as well-meaning as everybody in his hometown was, they had a hard time believing that their little Milty was all grown up. They weren’t quite ready to let him be the adult he knew he was becoming. And that included his mom.

Milty checked his phone for texts. None. Then he stared back at the mantel, bored. That’s when his mom came in the house. “Milty,” she said, “anything moving on that mantel?”

“I wish there were something moving. It’s a pretty slow night around here. How was your dinner? I didn’t hear any bagpipes.”

Magdalena, after fifteen years as a single parent, had finally been out on a date. Angus McPherson had invited her out to the annual Tartan Day celebration at the firehouse. It was a wonderful occasion when all the folks who had or imagined they had Scottish blood running in their veins would get together to play bagpipes, wear kilts, sing “My Bonnie Lies Over The Ocean,” and, of course, to eat haggis, that Scottish delicacy that looks like an oblong balloon and is made out of…well, it’s best I not mention what it’s made of, but let’s just say that someone once described it as a sheep turned inside out, and that’s not far from the truth. At any rate, that’s where Magdalena and Angus had been, although the tradition was relatively new in Mattaponi and the celebrations tended to be less than authentic.

“Oh, Milty,” his mom said. “The bagpiper came, but I wish he hadn’t. He had some minor surgery yesterday and the anesthesia hadn’t fully worn off, so when he played ‘Auld Lang Syne’ it sounded like a goat trapped in barbed wire fence. You know, Milty, there is no more beautiful sound in the world than the sound of a bagpipe…hitting the accordion at the bottom of the trashcan.”

“Sounds like a painful experience, Mom.”

“And that’s not even the worst of it, Milty! T.P. Tolliver was supposed to fix the haggis, but he forgot to get to the butcher’s yesterday and, you know, it’s the centerpiece of the dinner. Well, at the last minute he substituted an old football. Not that I really wanted to eat any anyway, but still…”

“So the date was a bust?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that.” Magdalena had a twinkle in her eye. “Angus promised me dinner again next week, this time with no sporting goods or wounded goats. But what about you? You came all the way home for the weekend and I waltzed out on you. I hope you haven’t been too bored.”

“Well…” Milty’s voice trailed off.

“Why did you come home this weekend, Milty? Not that I’m complaining.”

“I’m not sure myself, Mom. I guess I wanted to tell you about a big decision I’ve made, even though I’m not too comfortable with it myself yet.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, you know I’ve been trying to sort out my major and all. I don’t know how in the world we’ll ever pay for it, but, Mom, I think I want to go pre-med. I think I’m going to be a doctor.”

Magdalena’s eyes lit up and she smiled a smile that seemed to say, “I knew it!” But she didn’t say that. What she said was “What brought this on?”

“I can’t say for sure. It wasn’t like I sat down and wrote down all the pros and cons. It wasn’t even that I’m doing super well in my biology and chem classes. I just have this sense that it’s what I’m supposed to be doing. I’ve been fighting it. I don’t really want to go to school for the next ten years. I know I don’t want to do all the extra jobs to get me through and take on a lifetime of debt. I just kept thinking about Grace and Isaiah Gilmore. They went to med school and they did something really wonderful with it, going off to Bolivia as medical missionaries. I want to do something to help children, too, like I’m doing with that child care center in Richmond volunteering. But more than that, too.”

“Sounds like you’ve gotten a call,” Maggie said.

“A call? What are you talking about, Mom?”

“You know, like a prophet or a disciple in the Bible. You got a call from God.”

“This is hard enough as it is, Mom. Don’t make it into a mission from God.”

“But, of course, it’s a mission from God, Milty. This didn’t just appear out of the blue. You didn’t just decide to do this. You’ve been meant for this.”

“What do you mean I didn’t just decide to do this? I just decided this week, Mom. That’s why I came home.”

“Milty, you didn’t look at that mantelpiece long enough. Go pick up that statue and bring it to me.”

Milty was totally confused and a little irritated that his mother was talking to him like he didn’t know what he was saying and now ordering him around. But he went to the mantel and got the weird green statue and brought it to his mother.

“I never told you this, Milty, but I made this while I was pregnant with you. All the time I was pregnant I had the most incredible dreams and I decided I needed to get them out somehow, so I took some pottery lessons and made a few little figures like this. Most of them were pretty sad looking. Some of them broke. But I always liked this one. After you were born, I took a marker and I wrote on the bottom of it.” She carefully turned the statue over. “It’s kind of worn out over 22 years, but you can still make it out. See what I wrote there?”

Milty looked at the pale black lettering on the base of the figure and made out the letters: M-I-L-T-O-N, his name. His name was on the bottom of the figure of the doctor and the child. He looked up at Magdelana. “But which one am I?”

“Well, I always thought you were the child, Milty. I never understood the doctor part. It was just part of my dream. But all of a sudden, I’m beginning to think you’re the one with the stethoscope. Milty, I think you have been on this course for a long time.”

Milty didn’t know what to say. He was speechless and then he was angry. “No. No way, Mom. That’s a great story and it kind of gives me goose bumps, but I’m not going to let you take away the work I’ve done to get to this point. I mean, all that struggle has to mean something. You can’t tell me that my future has been sitting on this shelf all along, gathering dust, waiting for me to wake up and smell the Betadine. What kind of call is that if it ignores everything that’s happened to me for 22 years? Do you think God just determines everything for us? No, I want to believe I had something to do with this!”

Magdalena looked at her son who now towered over her. Behind him she saw the photo of the chocolate ice cream mask on the beautiful child, but in front of her was someone no less special, but no longer a child. She put her finger gently to his lips. She shook her head. “Milty, when you were born, you couldn’t talk. You cried and I often wondered what you were trying to say. When you got older you started to copy me. You’d toddle around the house saying, ‘What’s the story here?’ just because you heard me saying it. When you learned to speak on your own, you still used my words, but suddenly they were yours. You found your voice--your own, unique voice—and suddenly my words had a whole new meaning because of what you put into them.

“Just because I had a dream doesn’t mean your struggle was meaningless, Milty. It just means that now the dream is yours.”

The next day Milty went with his mother to the Mattaponi United Methodist Church. They were having a special service because the church had just bought a new electronic organ and they were baptizing the Tolliver’s new baby girl. The organ was amazing. The church had never had an organ before and this one could do everything. Hazel Jenson, the choir director, could even play through a song and record it so that on Sunday she could press a button on a remote and the organ would play itself while she directed the choir. She had done that for this consecration service and when the time came for the choir to sing she pulled out her remote and pressed a button. Everyone stared at the organ, waiting for it to spring to life. Nothing happened. Hazel pressed the button again. Still nothing. But this time T.P. Tolliver, who was sitting by the window, called out, “Hazel, I think you’ve got the wrong remote. I just saw the trunk door fly open on your Buick.” Hazel turned bright red, but she found the right remote and this time the organ impressed everybody.

A little later, Rev, Eleazar Filbert was standing by the baptismal font holding little Constance Tolliver. He looked out at the congregation and said, “This is a crazy thing we’re doing here today. We’re going to take this water and place it on this child’s head and what we’re saying is, ‘Constance, God loves you and God accepts you just as you are.’ Now that’s a daring thing to say to a baby that can’t even turn herself over yet. Who knows what she’ll turn out to be?

“And how will she feel that she has been marked in this way? Before she could choose it for herself? Before she gets a chance to exercise her free will?

“But you know what? She’s going to have free will because God has claimed her. She’s going to be able to choose life because God has chosen her. She’s going to be free to be who she was meant to be because God has known this child since before she was born, and God is not going to let her go. When she gets older, because all of you are going to help her remember this day, she’ll be able to claim God’s love for herself. But today, before she even has a chance to prove herself, we’re going to baptize her, because even today she is God’s own child. And so are you.”

When he said those last words, Rev. Filbert seemed to be looking right at Milty. This kind of took him back for a minute. He looked over at Magdalena who had noticed it, too. She just smiled. And Milton Martin left that service a little more confused than he had been before he arrived. He drove back to Richmond that afternoon thinking about his mother’s dream and his preacher’s glance and he still felt a little angry that no one could accept that he was making decisions on his own now. He was an adult now and didn’t like to think he was in the same position as Constance Tolliver, even though the preacher made it sound like he might be.

But he wasn’t as angry as he had been. And he had to admit that there was something comforting about trusting that God had marked him from the moment of his birth to be something special. He felt just a little more assured that underneath all the hard decisions he had to make and all the struggles he was going through there was an intention, a goal. He began to think that maybe he was able to speak now in words that were as ancient as God’s own word of creation, and yet which now were his. And he began to believe that whoever he became he would always be God’s.

When he unpacked his overnight bag in the dorm room he found that his mother had placed a box in it. He knew what it was before he even opened it. Sure enough, inside, underneath the bubble wrap, was a roughly done green statue of two figures. He put it on his desk next to his computer monitor. He stared at it for a few moments and for the first time realized that both the doctor and the child were smiling.

“Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, and before you were born, I set you apart.” Those were God’s words to the prophet Jeremiah and they are God’s words to you and me. We can be many things, but the thing we are meant to be is God’s own. Thanks be to God.

Jeremiah 1:4-10

The word of the Lord came to me saying:

“Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you

And before you were born I made you holy;

As a prophet to the nations I appointed you.”

I said, “Ah, Adonai Yahweh, look, I don’t know how to speak because I am just a youth.”

But Yahweh said to me:

“Don’t say, ‘I am just a youth;’

because you will go to all to whom I send you

and you will speak all that I command you.

Don’t be afraid of them,

because I am with you to deliver you, says Yahweh.”

Then Yahweh put out his hand and touched my mouth. Yahweh said to me:

“Now, I have put my words in your mouth.

See, this day I have set you over nations and kingdoms

to pluck up and to pull down,

to destroy and to overthrow,

to build and to plant.”

Vintage Faith

I am not the gardener in our house. Anyone who knows us knows that my wife holds that distinction. Left to my care plants wither and die. At my last appointment Suzanne tried to get me to keep a plant in my office and I think she finally just gave up, knowing that the poor thing would end up brown and dead if it got into my clutches.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate gardens and plants, though. I do. It was a special pleasure a few years ago when I got a fig tree as a Father’s Day gift. I really like figs. They’re biblical. And the idea of eating figs from trees you have planted is one of the biblical images of God’s blessings. The prophet Hosea talks about the delight that God takes in us by saying that God’s people were like grapes in the wilderness or the first fruits of the fig tree in its first season [Hos 9:10]. God loves grapes and figs.

So we planted this tree behind the parsonage and it has flourished. Last year was the first time that it produced anything worth eating, but the other day I was out in the backyard with Suzanne and we just went over to check to see if there were any ripe ones. Lo and behold, the tree was loaded! We picked 4 quarts of figs before we were done. The other night I made a fig cobbler. I didn’t know how to make fig cobbler but I improvised off of an old recipe and it was wonderful.

All of this to say that I really admire what happens this time of the year when gardens that have been so carefully prepared and weeded and watered through the months since spring suddenly start producing tomatoes and squash and potatoes and all sorts of good things. And things that require even more cultivation, like grape vines and fig trees, are even sweeter. I can’t take credit for the cultivation, but I enjoy it.

God is a lover of fruit. That’s what I get from the story we read from Isaiah for today. It’s an interesting passage because it sounds like other biblical stories. “Let me sing for my beloved my love-song concerning his vineyard.” When we start to hear about love-songs and beloveds our minds turn immediately to Song of Songs – the Bible’s great love song which also talks about vineyards and figs as signs of a passionate love. We might also remember Jesus at his baptism and again on the mountain when he was transfigured and in both cases a voice boomed out from the heavens saying, “This is my beloved in whom I am well-pleased.” Again these were times when God was reaching out in love and expressing God’s presence in love.

In Isaiah, the beloved is God and the vineyard is the house of Israel, God’s people. We know that because that’s what the text tells us. God has planted a vineyard and is expecting great things. God chose a fertile hill to plant on. God has dug up the ground and removed the rocks. God chose the best vines. Built a tower to keep watch over the vines. Dug out a wine vat to turn these choice grapes into choice wine. And, just in case we have missed the point by now, Isaiah tells us that God was expecting good grapes, but the vines yielded wild grapes – or worse yet in some versions - thorns.

How can that be? The vinegrower had picked the best spot, prepared the ground, chosen good vines, watched over the growth and these choice vines produced wild grapes. It’s as if they had never been told that they were expected to be good fruit. It’s like they’ve never heard that they were picked out special. It’s like the vineyard owner planted grapes for a fine Bordeaux and got the grapes for ripple. How can that be?

Have you ever seen people do this with their lives? They have this awesome potential. They are given every advantage. And then when they are given the chance to shine, none of that potential shows up.

There are innumerable athletic examples we could pull from. The phenom pitcher who comes streaking through the minors. The scouts are talking him up. “You gotta see this kid throw. He’s a flamethrower. He’ll turn the league on its ear.” But the flamethrower flames out and everyone asks, “Where did it go? What happened?”

But let’s hit closer to home. Because we’ve been that person, too. Maybe you and I have never been that phenom pitcher or the can’t-miss rookie, maybe you’ve never thought of yourself as the person with all the potential or all the advantages, but there is one advantage you have had since the day you were born, beloved – you were loved by God. Everything you have needed to be the person you are called to be you were given. Every resource you need to be all that you can be, you’ve got. God prepared the soil, removed the rocks, planted you, a choice vine, in that rich soil.

Methodists like to call this prevenient grace – the grace that goes before, the grace that prepares the way, the grace that undergirds our existence, the grace that offers us salvation long before we ever could imagine deserving it, the grace that seeks us out, lifts us up, believes in us, loves us. We talk about this prevenient grace every time we baptize a child here. We lift up that child and we recognize that God takes a risk, just like every parent does in welcoming a newborn. Who knows what that child will turn out to be? She may have a really nasty temperament. He may be a cad, a bandit or a thief. She may be a politician. Who knows? But God, like that parent, welcomes that child and says, “I claim you. I name you. I will give my life for you. Because you are my own and I have no good reason for any of this save love.”

That’s prevenient grace. But it calls forth a response. And the grace God gives to claim us and to move us into relationship comes with a grace that moves us to more. Remember, God loves fruit.

Augustine of Hippo, the great bishop of the early church, used this passage from Isaiah in his instructions to the newly baptized. He said, “Let me warn you, holy seedlings.” I love the way he calls them holy seedlings. “Let me warn you, holy seedlings, let me warn you fresh plants in the field of the Lord, not to have it said of you what was said of the vineyard of the house of Israel: ‘I looked for it to produce grapes but it produced thorns’…Produce grapes, live good lives.”[i]

The love song that Isaiah sings is a strange sort of love song. It starts out with so much hope, but it ends with tragedy. Everything is there for the production of great wine, but when the harvest comes in bad, the owner abandons the vineyard to its wild state. The hedges are torn down. The walls destroyed. Pruning and hoeing come to an end. The vines, when they do not respond to the expectations of the owner, revert to a wild state. They are choked with thorns and briers.

In Isaiah’s day, the problem was the lack of justice. God expected that Israel, God’s chosen people, would respond to their salvation from slavery in Egypt by establishing a state in which the poor were cared for, in which justice was meted out with equity for all. Instead the cries of the needy continued to call out.

The care of a community, of a society, is a lot like the care of a garden. It takes constant attention, constant cultivation. I wonder how attentive we are to the fabric of our community. There is a lot of shrillness in the air. We shout at one another from opposite ends of the political spectrum, but how are we using our resources to meet one another and do the hard work that will build our community…build our nation. Whose voices continue to cry out? The folks living in substandard housing just down the street who have no running water? The youth who see no future on the Shore and who have been abandoned by the adults around them? The imprisoned and the addicted…those whose own actions have branded them as lost…but who need to know there is another way, another day? The privileged whose lives seem so glossy on the outside but so pale and empty on the inside? These voices don’t go away.

This has been Vacation Bible School week here. We’ve sung a lot of great songs this week. They stick in your head and it’s hard to get them out. A great preacher once said, “People seem to be under some sort of compulsion to sing the words of a catchy tune again and again.”[ii] That preacher was John Chrysostom writing in the 4^th century. Chrysostom was wondering why the vineyard song was a song. Finally he determined that, even if it had a tragic ending, Isaiah cast his message as a song because, “As they repeat the words of this song, they will constantly be reminded of their sins, this making it easier to teach them virtue.”[iii]

There’s within my heart a melody, Jesus whispers sweet and low. There’s a song that’s singing around you, within you, at times through you. It’s a love song that speaks of the greatest love you can imagine – the love of a passionate gardener who takes delight in our very being, our very existence. It always begins with a promise and an invitation to grow and dance. No matter what we look like or how we feel about ourselves, it’s an open invitation. But the question is always – will we be what the gardener tells us we can be and are? Or are will we be wild grapes, thorns and weeds? Will we be so captivated by sin or so deaf to injustice that we won’t bear fruit?

The love song is playing holy seedlings. Let’s bear fruit. Thanks be to God.

Isaiah 5:1-7 [NRSV]

Let me sing for my beloved my love-song concerning his vineyard: My beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill. He dug it and cleared it of stones, and planted it with choice vines; he built a watchtower in the midst of it, and hewed out a wine vat in it; he expected it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes.

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? When I expected it to yield grapes, 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, and it shall be overgrown with briers and thorns; I will also command the clouds that they rain no rain upon it. 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!

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[i] Augustine, quoted in Isaiah: The Church’s Bible, trans. & edited by Robert Louis Wilken, [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007], p. 59.

[ii] John Chrysostom, ibid., p. 54-5.

[iii] Ibid., p. 55.