Matthew
21:33-46
“Listen to another
parable. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it,
dug a wine press in it, and built a watchtower. Then he leased it to tenants
and went to another country.When the harvest time had come, he sent his slaves
to the tenants to collect his produce. But the tenants seized his slaves
and beat one, killed another, and stoned another. Again he sent other
slaves, more than the first; and they treated them in the same way. Finally
he sent his son to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’ But when the
tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, ‘This is the heir; come, let us
kill him and get his inheritance.” So they seized him, threw him out of
the vineyard, and killed him. Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what
will he do to those tenants?” They said to him, “He will put those
wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will
give him the produce at the harvest time.” Jesus said to them, “Have you
never read in the scriptures: ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become
the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is amazing in our eyes’? Therefore
I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a
people that produces the fruits of the kingdom.The one who falls on this stone
will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls.” When
the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they realized that he
was speaking about them. They wanted to arrest him, but they feared the crowds,
because they regarded him as a prophet.
--
A few weeks
ago, in my hometown of Memphis, over a hundred teenagers decided to swarm a
Kroger and brutally beat anybody and everybody they could get their hands on.
They were indiscriminate in terms of who they decided to beat; some of their
victims were young, some were old, some were black, some were white. We know
about the particulars because one young woman was with them, videotaping the
whole thing, laughing the whole time until she realized that one of the Kroger
employees who was attacked had been kicked in the head so many times that he’d
been rendered unconscious.
And if this
were it, if the police had gone after the attackers and everybody agreed it was
awful and should never happen again, that would be one thing. But just this
week, the local news affiliate interviewed two young men from Memphis, asking
them what they thought about the incident.
“That’s
just what our generation does,” one of them said.
“It’s fun,”
the other one said, laughing. “Nobody
cares about Jail. You go in, and you get out. If you don’t get out, you’re in
with people you know.”
And so as a
person of faith, you want to know something I’m really struggling with? I’m
struggling with the fact that this morning’s scripture lesson sounds so
familiar. I want to be able to come to the Bible and learn something new. I
want to come to church and hear the preacher open the Bible and say this is
what Jesus says and isn’t it revolutionary, but here we are with the story of
the tenants who live on the vineyard and kill every single person the owner
sends to check on the property, and this isn’t new. It isn’t revolutionary.
It’s Memphis. It’s the 5 o clock news. It’s life, so much of what we see in the
real world. We already know this story, and we experience it every time we turn
on the news and see violence, or we experience loss, or we find humanity faced
with a deadly disease. I don’t need Jesus to tell me that people are cruel,
that life is not fair. I know that very deeply.
In the
church, we call this kind of response compassion fatigue, when we know too much
and are just so overwhelmed by it all that we are rendered completely spent.
And so like the landowner who builds a vineyard and surrounds it with a wall
and a watchtower, we build walls around us, do everything we can to protect
ourselves from that cruelty, and we stand in our watchtowers and peek over the
edge so that we can sound the alarm if somebody dares approach us, if somebody
dares come near enough to speak to us, let alone to enter our lives in such a
way as to require us to be vulnerable.
On this
World Communion Sunday, the day on which we celebrate our common table, the day
on which churches all over the world celebrate communion and we talk about our
connection to one another because Jesus has supposedly torn down the walls that
separate us, I’ve got to be honest, when I hear this morning’s scripture
lesson, I am having trouble getting past the boundaries we set that stand in
the way of that connection, the walls we build, the things that block us from
relationship, and maybe we build them as survival mechanisms because we are so
overwhelmed with the problems in the world that we don’t know what else to do,
but they stand in opposition to Jesus! They stand against who Jesus calls us to
be one, especially on this day when
we celebrate the church all over the world! They stand against the oneness of
the church, our unity and our connection to one another, not just on earth, but
as the great cloud of witnesses, everyone who has gone before and comes today
and will ever come to share in the Gospel feast.
It is these
boundaries that Jesus speaks about in the story this morning, when he tells
this story to the Pharisees and scribes, the religious leaders of the day who
were far more concerned with laws and rules than love and grace. It is these
boundaries he’s talking about when tells the story of the landowner, who is
God, sending his son, who is Jesus, to check on the rich vineyard of the world,
and who, rather than being celebrated as the greatest gift humankind has ever
received, is beaten and killed. It’s not that Jesus didn’t know what he was
getting into. The world can be a rash, blunt, violent place. It’s not that God
doesn’t know. It’s that God loves us enough to come anyway, to break boundaries
that might have otherwise kept him away, to share love even in the face of
death.
There is power in that kind of witness: not just
two thousand years ago, but now! I’d venture to say that it’s a message that is
so attractive that it’s one reason this church is growing! We send out
first-time visitor surveys with a self-addressed stamped envelope to every
first time visitor and you know what most of them come back saying? They say
that one thing they just love about North Decatur United Methodist Church is
its diversity: not just in race, but nationality, and age, and temperament. For
it is the case that when we break down boundaries, when the barriers that
separate us are moved or scaled, Jesus Christ is present in that moment, for
when two or three are gathered in my name, Jesus says, I am there.
None of
this is to say that boundaries are all bad. Those of us who have spent time in
therapy know that we need healthy
boundaries, personal boundaries which tell us and those around us what is safe
and permissible behavior. These are good things. The problem is not healthy
personal boundaries. The problem comes when we create boundaries that are not
rooted in love for God and love for neighbor. The problems come when we climb
our little watchtowers and refuse to come down and say, oh, I’m just trying to
protect my boundaries, instead of acknowledging that Christ calls us to break
down walls, not build them up.
Let me give
you an example. If you call my cell phone—the number is right there in your
bulletin—and I don’t answer, you will hear my voicemail, which says that I hope
you will leave a message, but that if you are calling on a Friday, you should
know that Friday is my Sabbath day, and I try not to conduct church business on
Fridays. But do leave me a message and I will get back to you.
Now, I do try
not to conduct church business on Fridays, which I think is a healthy personal
boundary, but that does not mean I get the day off from being a Christian! I
don’t get to eat, drink, and be merry or whatever, without concern for God and
concern for you. I don’t even get the day off from being your pastor, and so if
there is an emergency, I expect you to tell me! The personal boundary is
important, but if it stands between me and loving God fully and loving other
people fully, it is not of God, for we see in the person of Jesus all sorts of
boundaries being broken: boundaries that kept people from loving one another,
that kept whole classes of people subjugated, that kept women oppressed and the
poor and the sick and the foreigner out of sight and out of mind. Jesus breaks
all these boundaries, for the love of Jesus is for everybody. Everybody.
Of course, of
all of Jesus’s boundary-breaking moments, few were as profound as that which
happened in the upper room, in the days before his death, in which he gathered
the disciples and broke down the ultimate barrier, that chasm between God and
people, and said, this, this is my body, broken for you. Eat and remember, not
just now, but always. And then he took the cup, and shared it with the
disciples, and said this is the cup of the new covenant. Drink and remember,
not just now, but always.
Friends, in
this feast, there are no boundaries. We don’t turn people away here. While each
of us may have our own preconceived notions about who gets in and who doesn’t,
about who deserves to be here and who doesn’t, Jesus reminds us in today’s
story that the stone that the builder rejected has become the cornerstone. We
may sometimes reject Jesus, but Jesus never rejects us.
In this
feast, there are no boundaries: not of nationality, of income, of orthodoxy, of
age, not even of denomination. For when the time comes, and we celebrate
together this holy mystery, in which we experience God’s grace, whatever that
means, however God happens to do it, we will do so as a community for whom the
ultimate boundary has already been broken, a community that Jesus Christ has
reconciled to God, and to one another. It’s why a couple of weeks ago, we took
the three movements of worship we do every week here at NDUMC: welcoming,
listening, responding, and added a fourth: Reconciling. We do this because
Christ did it for us, because in the kingdom of God the boundaries that lie
between us are to be broken down, for there is far more that unites us than
divides us, and even the things that divide us are no match for God.
Now, if you
have been around the church for some time, you may know that on World Communion
Sunday, it can be traditional for the pastor to preach about all the missions
we’re involved in all over the world, all the good we do and the bonds we’re
seeking to build in other countries. These things are good, and I want to honor
those bonds, and to encourage you to pray that they strengthen. But there is a
danger in this kind of thinking, because when all we talk about are those poor
people, those other people, we’re actually building higher walls rather than
breaking them down, for in Christ, there is no us vs. them. There is just us.
For scripture tells us that nothing can separate us from the love of God in
Christ Jesus, and in that love, we are all connected. Nothing can separate us,
for God does not give up on us.
This is the
good news in this morning’s scripture lesson: God did not, does not give up on
us. God kept sending, keeps sending people to walk through the hole in the
fence to meet us where we are, and we don’t always respond as well as we
should, but God keeps sending. Just as Jesus broke boundaries between rich and
poor, sinner and saint, God and humans, so does God break boundaries when he
sends us people now. God keeps sending people, even if we keep tarring and
feathering them. Even if we kill them. God keeps sending people who cross those
boundaries and show us a new way, and what’s more, God calls us to be those
people.
This kind
of boundary-breaking is not easy, and if you are diligent at it, if you truly
seek to break down the walls that separate you and other people, if you seek to
live as Christ calls us to live, you’ll find yourself feeling like you’re
running into those walls, again and again. But if you keep trying, you’ll feel
those walls crack, slowly at first, and then more radically. It takes time, and
it takes practice, but that’s why we come together so often to share Holy
Communion. This isn’t just about taking the bread and the cup, though it is
that. It isn’t just about receiving grace, though it is that, as well.
Communion is called communion for a reason—for in the act of receiving it, we
are communing with God and one another. Every time we gather at the table, we
are practicing for that blessed day on which we will cross the last boundary
that separates us, and we will all gather together as one family.
This is
practice, and so as we prepare for communion, I want to get you to think about
one thing. There are many who feel as if the church does not want them. The
barriers they see aren’t necessarily in their own minds, either, because
throughout the centuries, the church has sometimes gone out of its way at times
to make people feel unwelcome. Some people feel as if there’s a giant do not
enter sign on the front door of the church, as if what we’re doing here today
is not for them. And because this is practice, in a few minutes, I’m going to
do something strange. I am going to place a line of caution tape in front of
the altar rail: not to block you from receiving Communion, but because there
are plenty of places respectable Christians aren’t supposed to go, plenty of
people we’re not supposed to deal with, and yet in this act, we’re in communion
with them all. And so when the time comes, let’s practice crossing that
boundary together and declare, together, that there is no barrier, no boundary,
no divide so strong that it can’t be overcome by the love of God as expressed
through God’s people. As you practice this meal and as you experience Christ
with these people, may you be reminded that Jesus calls us to bring others with
us, for the table is long, and there is plenty of room. Why, there’s even a
place for you.
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