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 4th 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!
[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.
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