Trinity Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)

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Sermons

October 2002 (click here to return to "October 2002 Sermons" page)

27th Sunday in Ordinary Time (October 6, 2002)

World Communion Sunday

“The Kingdom of God Is Like a Fruit Salad …” Dr. Julie Adkins

Text: Matthew 21:33-46

SERMON

Jesus begins simply enough,

with yet another vineyard metaphor..

He obviously enjoyed those,

since this is the third week in a row

we’ve gotten to hear one of his vineyard stories:

laborers in the vineyard,

two sons asked to go work in the vineyard,

and now, rebellious tenants in the vineyard.

Now, it is a pretty useful image …

just from the three examples I just cited,

it’s obvious you can do a lot with it …

And besides all that,

Jesus could be certain that his hearers were familiar with it.

Listen to Isaiah, chapter 5 –

a text they all would have heard in the Temple or in the synagogue

at some time or another:

“Let me sing for my beloved

a love song concerning his vineyard:

My beloved had a vineyard

on a very fertile hill.

He digged 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 looked for it to yield grapes,

but it yielded wild grapes.”

A few verses later, the prophet explains the story:

“For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts

is the house of Israel,

and the people of Judah

are his pleasant planting;

and he looked for justice,

but behold, bloodshed;

for righteousness,

but behold, a cry!”

Well, Jesus has taken that image from Isaiah 5

and made it into a story.

He hooks you, and draws you into the parable,

and you don’t catch on until too late

that the punch line is gonna punch you!

Well, he did it to them, back then,

and even now, two thousand years later,

his stories still have much the same effect on us.

For starters,

we can no longer limit the idea of the vineyard

simply to Israel and Judah of Old Testament times,

or even to the Jewish people of Jesus’ day.

It has to refer to any who believe themselves to be

called and claimed by God in some special way.

Anyone whom God has cultivated,

and to whom God has paid special attention.

Jesus shifts the metaphor a little, though.

In his story,

God’s people are themselves no longer the vineyard;

they are the tenants of the vineyard.

It’s as if he’s trying to make clearer the distinction:

the vineyard belongs to God, not to us;

we are only there because God has put us there, or allowed us to be there.

But we are responsible for whatever fruit the vineyard produces.

So this parable forces us to ask the question,

what kind of tenants are we?

In the first place,

we are tenants who, most of the time,

don’t like having to admit that we are tenants.

We want to be owners,

with all the attendant privileges of ownership.

We are uncomfortable with

having to answer to anyone else.

And we may read, in the psalms, where it says,

“The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof,”

and we think,

“How nice. What lovely poetry.”

But to watch the way we live, most of the time,

often you would never guess that we believe

that the earth is the Lord’s.

You want proof?

Just listen to the subterranean rumblings in any church

round about the month of November,

when all the issues of church budget arise,

and we are ask to plan or estimate our giving for the coming year,

and the preacher or the stewardship chair or someone says,

remember, the biblical standard is the tithe.

And you can bet on hearing some or all of the following:

“Hey, don’t try to tell me

what to do with my money.”

“It’s none of the church’s business

how I spend my money.”

“Where does God get off thinking

I should give him 10% of my stuff?”

I’m afraid that many of us balk at this point.

“The earth is the Lord’s,” we say,

but we also add our own version of fine print,

“except for the part of it that’s mine.”

And because we we’ve learned to look at it that way,

what we fail to see is that what’s really operating all the time

is God’s generosity.

Imagine that you’re a farmer

You own your land free and clear,

you have all the equipment you need and it’s in good working order,

you’ve bought the seed,

and you go out and find some people

who will live on the farm and tend it for you.

And after the growing season and the harvest,

you surprise the socks off ‘em by saying,

“Guess what!

I’ve done a bunch of calculations,

and I’ve decided I only need 10% of what we’ve harvested.

You keep the other 90%.”

Well, that’s the kind of deal God makes with us

every day of our lives.

We just have to re-learn to see it that way.

The vineyard belongs to God.

Now, if we continue to explore the question,

“what sort of tenants are we?”

it opens up another aspect we have to consider.

This wasn’t particularly an issue in Jesus’ day,

so the parable doesn’t address it directly at all,

but it’s a huge issue now.

And we largely have only ourselves to blame for that,

because not only do we like to forget that the vineyard belongs to someone else;

we also like to pretend at times

that we are the only tenants living in the vineyard.

This shows up in a lot of ways.

Here’s a “big-picture” example:

Americans constitute a little less than 5% of the world’s population,

but we consume 25-35% of its resources.

And over time, we have grown so accustomed to this standard of living

that we now consider it our right.

We have forgotten about the other 95%

of the tenants in the vineyard.

And that, perhaps, is a sermon for another day.

What concerns me more on this World Communion Sunday

is, paradoxically, a much “littler picture.”

The traditional picture of World Communion Sunday

requires a wide-angle lens:

people all over the whole world,

sharing the Lord’s Supper at the table on the same day.

We imagine people not only

coming from east and west, and from north and south …

but people who live east and west, north and south,

people who may be very different from us.

And we try to imagine what their worship is like,

and what their lives are like,

and maybe on this particular Sunday we even

sing different music or hear different languages,

to try to get a flavor of “worship around the world.”

We’ve done those things here before.

However, this World Communion Sunday,

we need a narrower lens.

Because what has been harder for us to recognize,

and sometimes even harder still to accept,

is that the world has come to our corner of the vineyard.

At one level, that’s nothing new –

we know that the United States has been a nation of immigrants

at least since not long after 1492!

But at another level,

the way in which we experience this diversity has changed.

For most of this nation’s history,

people of similar background and heritage have tended to group together.

So in large cities,

you’ve had corners of the vineyard known as “Chinatown,”

or “Mexican town.”

You’ve had small towns that were almost entirely made up of

people from one nation of origin –

like Fredericksburg, West, New Braunfels.

African-Americans lived on one “side of the tracks,”

and Anglos on the other.

We knew in our heads that there were different people out there,

some of them not very far away …

but we didn’t interact very much on a day-to-day basis.

That has changed.

The tenants of the vineyard are a much more mixed bunch, now …

and a lot of that change has happened in our lifetimes.

We now have neighbors whose skin is a different shade from ours,

who may speak a different language amongst themselves,

who may have different tastes in music from ours,

and different ideas about the volume at which is should be played!

different ideas about what looks good in a front yard,

different notions about how many people can and should

be living in a three-bedroom house,

and on, and on.

So, are we tenants who gladly share our corner of the vineyard

with others of God’s tenants who haven’t been here as long as we have?

Or are we resentful of them?

Frightened of them?

Irritated by them?

Do we wish they would go away,

and leave us to pick our grapes in peace?

Toward the end, as Jesus explains the parable,

he warns his hearers that those who don’t produce fruit

will have the kingdom of God taken away from them,

and it will be given to those who do bear fruit.

I’m warning you now

that I’m going to mix up my metaphors here,

but stick with me, ‘cause this is important.

We talk a good talk about “bearing fruit” for the kingdom of God,

and we also talk about diversity in the sense of

each of us having different gifts and skills and talents,

and each of us bearing different kinds of fruit.

And by “we” I don’t just mean this congregation,

I mean most of the Christian world, okay?

By talking about differences in our gifts and talents,

we persuade ourselves that we are more diverse than we really are.

We see ourselves as bearing all kinds of fruit,

when, really, at best most of us can be said to be bearing

different varieties of the same fruit.

The Presbyterian Church (USA), just for example,

is by and large a bunch of white folks.

And we do bear fruit for the kingdom of God,

but it’s as if we are bearing just a lot of different kinds of apples, let’s say.

Some of us are Delicious (!), some are Jonathan, some are Granny Smiths …

but we’re nearly all still, at a basic level,

much more alike than we are different.

While our corner of the vineyard now has tenants

who are very different from us,

and who bear different kinds of fruit altogether,

we still tend to band together

with our apple-bearing cohorts.

On this World Communion Sunday,

we have to pay attention, once again,

to the rest of the fruit trees.

Not just all around the world,

but right here next door and just down the street and in the next zip code.

The kingdom of God is not like an apple pie,

with just one kind of fruit contained in it.

The kingdom of God is like a fruit salad,

with not only our apples, and the grapes from our vineyard,

but also kiwis, and mangos, and starfruits,

and stuff we’ve never even heard of,

much less tasted!

Our corner of the vineyard ... our corner of the Kingdom …

is a place of incredible variety,

and incredible people.

Though most of them are not at this table with us today,

let us be sure that they and their gifts will always be welcomed,

in this fruit salad recipe of God’s kingdom.

In fact, let’s go find them,

so our banquet can be complete.

Amen.