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.
The prophet would have been talking to people who knew about vineyards. They knew what was required and they would have appreciated the care this attentive vineyard owner had shown. He had done everything right - and ended up with wild grapes? That’s not right. That’s not how it should be. He should do something! Isaiah is a master here. He has his listeners exactly where he wants them. Appreciative of the vineyard owner and troubled by the injustice of it all - wild grapes? He’ll have to do something!
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?
The voice changes . . . suddenly the vineyard owner was addressing them directly. The questions were on target. Wild grapes? You did not deserve that. No, you did not deserve to be treated like that.
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.
This was a harsh judgment but deserved, definitely deserved. But . . . commanding clouds? Stopping rain? This was no ordinary vineyard owner. This was - God. And this message, in the end, was not about grapes at all . . . Oh-Oh! Then Isaiah did what prophets did best . . . he lowered the boom!
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!
And it should not be that way. This is you my friends. Beloved - yes - and betrayers of my vision. You . . . you . . . must change. Wild grapes abound and you’ve done nothing. What began as a nice poem ended in pain - the pain that insight can bring.
This oracle of Isaiah is one of his best known and was one of John Wesley’s favorites. He referred to it often in his own preaching and, in one of his sermons, he applied it to his disappointment in his own Methodist movement. His vision, of course, was that Methodists would change the world through discipline, faithfulness and care for the poor. And, while the movement began with that focus, caring for the poor, working toward economic justice for all and attention to spiritual disciplines too easily fell by the wayside. Even in the early days. Even now. Wild grapes can take over at any time.[3]
He expected justice but saw bloodshed; righteousness, but heard a cry. God’s expectations of faithful people are expectations of action. Righteousness - decent living - treating people kindly - respect. Acts of charity. Faithful people are to do all of that - regardless of political party or status in life. And they are to do justice. There are different kinds of justice but the justice most at the heart of the biblical story is economic justice. Over and over - often through the prophets - God challenged the people to work toward a world where all have enough. Where those who have don’t just share (which is righteousness) but also work for justice - for a system where the poor are not exploited and where there is a more equal sharing of wealth. The concept of stewardship in the Bible - which we talk about every year in our giving campaign - does not begin with money. It begins with the awareness that everything we have is a gift and we have not so much a right to it but a responsibility for it. Good grapes are for everyone. Wild grapes are poison and the prophet wanted the people to know they had become toxic. Only interested in themselves. They didn’t like the message anymore than we do - but the question is no less pertinent today . . how are we doing in the justice and righteousness - or mercy - department? This is not easy to talk about in mid-August when we’d much rather just have time in our vineyards.
The second scripture text today - much shorter - is from Luke describing the words of Jesus who stood firmly in the prophetic tradition of Isaiah:
(Jesus said) "I've come to start a fire on this earth - how I wish it were blazing right now! I've come to change everything, turn everything rightside up - how I long for it to be finished! Do you think I came to smooth things over and make everything nice? Not so. I've come to disrupt and confront!
And you thought Isaiah was blunt! What are we to make of these rather jarring words - words that I’d put in the category things I wish Jesus had not said. Like you, I’d prefer the stuff about love and peace and joy. I like to think about do-not-worry and do-not-fear and your-faith-has-saved-you. But, here’s the deal, Jesus was not killed because he walked around playing guitar and singing Kum-ba-yah. He was killed because he was a threat and he was a threat then for the same reasons the gospel message is a threat today. For the same reasons the prophetic message is a threat today. It is about fundamentally changing the ways we live in the world. It is about working for justice and acting with righteousness. It is about working for a community, a country and a world where all have enough which is economic justice. It is working for a community, a country and a world where all men, women and children are treated with dignity, kindness and goodness which is righteousness. It is about admitting that we have allowed wild grapes to sprout and we must do something about it. We must ‘disrupt and confront.’ We must heal and make whole.
I just finished reading a provocative, troubling and inspiring book. Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by NY Times columnists Nicholas Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn. The book has been acclaimed by a wide variety of people - f rom Greg Mortenson to Tom Brokaw to Angelina Jolie to Khaled Hosseini (author of The Kite Runner). It is a compelling and heart-wrenching read. But it is a read with a purpose - a purpose firmly in line with the prophetic tradition of the Bible. It is the book I thought of when I realized these were our scripture texts today. The purpose of the book is to inspire people like us to change the world. Their focus might be considered a rather narrow one - the oppression and persecution of girls and women but, as Mark Twain once said what would men be without women? Scarce, sir, mighty scarce.[4]
Or, as the authors say in Half the Sky: ‘sex trafficking and mass rape should no more be seen as women’s issues than slavery was a black issue or the Holocaust was a Jewish issue. These are all humanitarian concerns, transcending any one race, gender or creed.”[5]
This is the stuff of wild grapes and, in God’s vision of the world, it must end no matter where it is found. From the introduction . . .
Honor killings, sexual slavery, and genital cutting may seem to Western readers to be tragic but inevitable in a world far, far away. In much the same way, slavery was once widely viewed by many decent Europeans and Americans as a regrettable . . . feature of human life. It was just one more horror that had existed for thousands of years. But then in the 1780s a few indignant Britons, led by William Wilberforce, decided that slavery was so offensive that they had to abolish it. And they did.[6]
In some ways, those three simple words and they did do not do justice to the incredible feat that Wilberforce and others did to challenge the longstanding custom and economic system of slavery. The end of it did not come easily and it had tremendous social and economic costs and it only happened because good people dared disrupt the comforts of life and confront the evils of human trafficking. Sitting here at our comfortable distance in time, I think we’d all agree that slavery was wrong and that it was worth whatever it cost to fight it. But, do you know what it cost to fight it? I didn’t. I knew there was a moral cost, of course. Like all good Americans, I knew about Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation and such. But I didn’t know the whole story. From the book . . .
In the 1780s, slavery was an unquestioned part of the global landscape - and then, astonishingly, within a decade, slavery was at the top of the British national agenda. The tide turned, and Britain banned the slave trade in 1807 and in 1833 became one of the first nations to emancipate its own slaves.
For more than half a century, the British public bore tremendous costs for their moral leadership. On the eve of the British abolition of slave-trading, British ships carried 52 percent of the slaves transported across the Atlantic, and British colonies produced 55 percent of the world’s sugar. Without new slaves, the British colonies in the New World were devastated, and Britain’s great enemy, France, benefitted enormously. So did the United States. Sugar production in the British West Indies fell 25 percent in the first thirty-five years after Britain’s abolition of the slave trade, while production in competing slave economies rose by 210 percent.
The British navy led the way in trying to suppress the slave trade, both in the Atlantic and within Africa itself. This led to the loss of some five thousand British lives, plus higher taxes for the British people. And such unilateral action was costly diplomatically. . . Putting ‘Britain in open conflict with rival military powers. . . yet Britain did not flinch. Its example ultimately prompted France to abolish slavery in 1848, inspired the American abolitionists and the Emancipation Proclamation . . .
Two scholars . . . calculate that for sixty years Britain sacrificed an annual average of 1.8 percentage points of its GNP because of a moral commitment to ending slavery. That is an astonishing total, cumulatively amounting to more than an entire year’s GNP for Great Britain (for the United States today, it would be the equivalent of sacrificing more that $14 trillion), a significant and sustained sacrifice in the British standard of living. It was a heroic example of a nation placing its values above its interests.[7]
And the amazing thing was that slavery itself did not exist in Britain proper. It existed in their colonies but for the average English family, slavery was something they read about - like sex trafficking in India or the stoning of women in Iran or the ongoing slave trade of girls in Africa is for us. But, through the courageous efforts of people like William Wilberforce, John Newton, Thomas Clarkson - and many others - slavery became an issue of justice and righteousness. Wild grapes that could no longer be allowed to grow in the vineyard no matter how far away they were planted. People of faith were on both sides of this issue but, in the end, it was people of faith on fire (like Jesus) and inspired by the prophets who made the difference. Methodists were not the only ones involved, but they were a significant part of the movement to abolish slavery because - remember - John Wesley was preaching at this very time about the vineyard and the dangers of wild grapes! People came to the conviction that their good life in the vineyard wasn’t meant to be built on the backs of slaves, even slaves that lived far away. Ordinary people like you and me paid higher taxes, changed their lifestyles and experienced a fair amount of insecurity in order to do what was right. And that is the kind of action to which prophets always call us. We don’t have to like it but we cannot ignore it. Jesus came to disrupt and confront the unjust powers of the world. To ‘light a fire.’ To speak truth to power. He was not killed because he fed people. He was killed because he fed people and challenged a system that kept people hungry. And, like it or not, that is the challenge presented to us by Isaiah and Jesus today.
Are we willing to make the sacrifices that our faith demands? Will they someday say about us - like they said about Wilberforce - the scourge of homelessness, the stigma of mental illness, the sex slavery of girls and women, genital mutilation, honor killings, acid attacks, the denial of basic education, forced marriage, high maternal death rates - it all existed at the beginning of the 21st century, but indignant people of faith decided it was so offensive that it had to end - all of it - and it did. Three little words that demand action. Glenn Beck notwithstanding, social justice is central to Christianity. We are to be about the work of justice and righteousness and, if we do it, it will make people uncomfortable. And it may not always serve our own best interests of personal comfort and economic ease. But as people of faith, we understand ourselves to be living in God’s vineyard, a vineyard we share with all humankind. And we have a responsibility for it. We all know that there is work to be done in this vineyard. May we have the courage to do our part to ‘turn things rightside up.’
