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.

New Day Coming

An interesting thing is happening in funerals these days. A subtle shift is taking place, particularly for families who may only come to a clergyperson or a church at the time of a death. Funerals are moving from a service recognizing the victory of God’s love over death through resurrection to a celebration of the individuality of the person who has died. Now there is a place for remembering the individual and the unique ways he or she revealed God’s love, but what’s happening in some cases now is that all of the service is about the dearly departed.

The British writer A.N. Wilson has seen it go much further in his country. In a recent newspaper article he quoted an English vicar who said, “I wonder why on earth I am present at the funeral of somebody led in by the tunes of Tina Turner, summed up in the pithy platitudes of sentimental and secular poets and sent into the furnace with I Did It My Way blaring out across the speakers.”[i] (Did you know that ‘I Did it My Way’ by Frank Sinatra is the most popular funeral hymn in parts of Britain?)

I haven’t felt like that vicar too often, but I do see it coming. We are a forgetful people and we live in a forgetful, more secular culture. When we lose touch with the story and the faith that makes us Christians, what’s left? All we’ve got is Frank Sinatra and a photo display of our greatest moments.

But that’s not all that there is to say. As Christians we are people who have a different notion of time and it affects what we say about death and what we believe about it. It also affects what we say about those who have died after accepting Christ’s mercy and grace.

Today is All Saints Day, one of the high, holy days in the life of the church. John Wesley, the original Methodist, referred to it in his journals as one of his favorite days of the church year. It’s a day when remember how God has used human instruments to reveal God’s glory and grace. “We have this treasure in earthen vessels,” Paul says, “so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies.” [2 Corinthians 4:7-10]. That’s what saints do – they make visible in their bodies the life of Jesus.

That sounds like a high calling and it is. It’s the greatest thing we can be called to. But it’s also not just reserved for an elite group – the Mother Theresas and Apostle Pauls among us. It is what Paul called all of the Christians he wrote to: “To all God’s beloved in Rome who are called to be saints” [Romans 1:8] “To the church of God in Corinth…called to be saints” [1 Co. 1:2]. “To all the saints who are in Jesus Christ in Philippi” [Philippians 1:1]. And if the Corinthians and Philippians can be saints, then maybe we might aspire to the same.

So today we remember the saints, we celebrate the saints, and we do something else – we look forward to the time when we will gather with the saints to praise God and to eat. Did you catch that vision from Isaiah today? “On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of fat things, a feast of well-aged wines, of fat things full of marrow, of well-aged wines well refined. And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death forever, and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces.” We are headed for something special.

That’s what makes the Christian view of time so special. We do not believe that the world is right when it says that history is an endless cycle of the same thing over and over. We do see familiar patterns and we know we make a lot of the same mistakes that human beings have always made, but this doesn’t mean that we’re not going anywhere. The arc of history does have a direction and a purpose.

So when Christians start telling the story of the world they start with a God who took the chaos of the primordial waters and started crafting a creation. God pushed aside the firmaments and made space for life to flourish. God started making fish and birds and land animals and every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth. God made spiders and centipedes, platypus and porcupines, and finally God made a man and a woman and said, “This is good. This is very good.”

That’s where this story begins – an earth where God could look upon the work of God’s hands and see that it was good. But then sin entered the world. The first humans ate from that tree in the center of the garden and anger, murder, lust, jealousy, pride, and a host of other sins began to eat away at the relationship between God and the people. There was still goodness in the earth and in the people, but it was covered over and distorted and marred by the evil that was filling the land.

So God began a liberation project. Starting with Abraham and Sarah God made covenants with the wayward people. God promised to bless the people and to make them a great nation so that all the earth could be blessed. Abraham heard the promise. His children heard the promise. They were still far from perfect people, but they knew that God had joined God’s story with theirs. God had joined God’s name with theirs. When Moses asked God in the burning bush to give him a name, God’s response was: “I am the God of Abraham and Isaac. I am the God of Jacob. I am the God who is known by whom I choose to be with.”

So God freed the Hebrew slaves from Egypt and led them across the Red Sea. God led them into a new land and made a nation out of them. God was angry when they strayed and wept over their failure, but God did not abandon them and kept talking to them through the prophets and giving them visions of who they could be if they remembered that they were God’s people. Isaiah the prophet promised a new day coming when the death would be no more and the people would feast on the holy mountain.

Then the story reaches a climax at one particular point in Israel’s history. In one moment all of God’s work in conquering sin and death was done and made plain. The liberation project was completed. The great ‘I Am’ who spoke to Moses became the great ‘I am for you’ as Jesus died on a cross.

It was God’s way to go the distance and to reveal the depths of the divine love. In Jesus we knew a God who would give up his very life to bring us home. It was a love beyond all loves.

And here we are. On this side of the cross. With the victory won and the tomb empty. The whole purpose of history has been revealed. We know God’s name – This is the God of Israel and the God of Jesus Christ. We know where it all ends. We stand on the future which is in God’s hands.

So what is the point of this time in between? This time between the cross and the kingdom feast? It is a time for us to call on God’s name and to listen for our names. It is a time for us to work to model the kingdom that is to come in the here and now.

In Steven Spielberg’s movie Schindler’s List, we get a portrait of the horrors of the Jewish Holocaust in Europe during World War Two. The movie begins with typewriters typing the names of Jews being displaced from their homes by the Nazis in Poland. Stern, Horowitz, Heinz, Pfefferberg. At various other times there would be huge lists from which the clerks would yell out names as people boarded trains for work camps and ghettos and gas chambers. Names are called out over and over.

It is much more powerful to hear names than to simply say six million people died in the holocaust. This movie tried to say Solomon Eisenstein died in the holocaust, Yitsak Mantz died in the holocaust, and many others we don't remember died as well, but they each had a name. We name them because their memory still goes with us in this life among those who remain in their struggle to find life after this evil.

The film ends with the remaining survivors coming to place a stone of remembrance on the grave of Oscar Schindler, who saved them. One more name of a flawed human being who tried to bring a little divine light into a dark world.

We each bring our own names to this service today. Names of people we know and love who continue to speak to us. God continues to use the memories of these saints to move us and form us. And as we gather these names together, as we light candles of remembrance, we lift them up to celebrate what God was able to do through them. This is not a day to praise the saints, but a day to celebrate Christ's work in the saints. That is what makes this a high holy day.

What the communion of the saints looks like beyond this life is beyond our knowing or telling. The Bible can only approach it through images and so we talk of pearly gates and streets of gold. But the most consistent image through Old and New Testaments is that of a feast. Jesus talks about a wedding banquet where even the poor are honored guests. He tells his disciples at the Last Supper that they will meet again at a similar meal in the kingdom.

In Isaiah’s vision of the feast God gathers all the peoples of the earth together on a mountaintop. And God lays out a spread of the most fattening, cholesterol-loaded food you can imagine. Everything's cooked in butter, there's real cream for the coffee and you can eat cheesecake for dessert ‘til the cows come home. Best of all God will be there among the people, among the saints, wiping away every tear from their eyes and abolishing death as a thing which can separate us. That's what this feast at the end of time is all about.

It seems so hard for us to imagine, but you know what? We get a foretaste of it every time we gather around this table. When we gather here we don't just gather as a group of people in the here and now sharing a common meal. Because at table are Christians of every place and time. At this table time means nothing and we enter a new realm where the impossible becomes possible. We participate in the communion of saints and we imagine what the world can be like if we start living like kingdom people.

Last Tuesday I went to Washington for the dedication of the new urban ministry project that Wesley Seminary is beginning with two downtown churches. Our own Shelly Newsom is moving into the residential community there this weekend. In one of the presentations a Wesley professor, Jessica Duckworth, talked about how she had two rules for the students in her classroom. One was that there was to be no whining about lay people. The second was that there was to be no talk of dying churches. She has a crucifix in her classroom to remind the students that the dying is over. Jesus opened the door for resurrection when he left that cross. So what lies ahead for every church and every person who will begin a relationship with Jesus is life.

Jesus is here at this table, arms open wide to embrace us. Inviting us to come and find out what life is all about. Eternal life is not a gift to be unwrapped after death. It is a treasure to enjoy today and now. This may look like just another ordinary table. But you know the stories we tell around this table and they are like no other stories on earth. And we can't ever look at this table in the same way again. Thanks be to God - who works through saints and makes us saints as well.

Isaiah 25:6-10a

On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of fat things, a feast of well-aged wines, of fat things full of marrow, of well-aged wines well refined. And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death forever, and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth; for the Lord has spoken.

It will be said on that day, "Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation." For the hand of the Lord will rest on this mountain.

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[i] A.N. Wilson, “Tina Turner and a ‘me’ generation no longer knows how to cope with death,” Daily Mail, 22 Oct. 2009, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1221815/A-N-WILSON-Tina-Turner-generation-longer-knows-cope-death.html#ixzz0VXaw9PO3/.