Gloria Dei Lutheran Church

Text: Matthew 21:33-46

Dear friends in Christ, grace and peace be with you today and always. Amen.

Joyce Rupp is a member of the Servite (or Servants of Mary) community and a wonderful spiritual writer. Every fall, when the seasons start to change, I reread her book called Praying Our Goodbyes, specifically a chapter called, “The Ache of Autumn in Us,” which begins with a poem she wrote. Here’s an excerpt:

Every autumn, nostalgia fills me;
Every autumn, yearning holds me.
I cling to the ripeness of summer,
Knowing it will be many long months
Before I can catch a breath of lilac,
Or the green of freshly mown grass.

And so I begin my fallow vigil,
Remembering the truth of the ages:
Unless the wheat seed dies
It cannot sing a new birth.
Unless summer gives in to autumn
Springtime will never embrace me.

She goes on to describe the feelings of vulnerability and nostalgia that autumn brings up in her; the truth that life is fragile; that there is always some dying in living. She writes about one October day when a linden tree outside her office window lost all its beautiful leaves in a matter of less than an hour when a strong wind blew. The move from summer to winter can feel abrupt. Are we ever ready for it?

Autumn reminds us of the impermanence of everything; of material possessions, of moments, of relationships, of life. It is the truth of the ages: we own nothing, not even our selves.

The tenants in Jesus’ parable today get confused about the concept of ownership. They demonstrate the potential for wickedness that exists in all of us. And the more the landowner shows them extraordinary generosity, the wickeder they get.

The landowner carefully and lovingly creates his vineyard, putting a fence around it, digging a winepress, and building a watchtower to protect it. There’s significant investment put into that vineyard—both personal and financial. The landowner sets everything up so the tenants have a lovely vineyard to care for—and it’s probably easier to care for this vineyard than others—they don’t have to run off critters (there’s a fence!) And they have a watchtower to use to keep it safe. The landowner leaves all of this to the tenants—a place for them to enjoy and that should be prosperous.

The tenants, after spending some time working in the vineyard, start to forget it’s not theirs. The landowner has trusted them to work without him constantly watching over them, and this feeds their false sense of ownership. They decide they deserve the vineyard and its fruits.

Harvest arrives, and the landowner sends his servants to collect his produce. The tenants resort to violence, beating one, stoning another, and killing another. The landowner sends more servants, and they’re treated the same way. Then, he sends his son, saying to himself, they have to respect my son!

The tenants—weirdly—believe that by killing the son they will somehow receive his inheritance. So they throw him out of the vineyard and kill him.

This is one of the few clearly allegorical parables in the gospels. The original readers and hearers of the parable could identify who each character represents—God as the loving landowner, and the son as Jesus. Jesus even tells the religious leaders that they are the tenants who kill the son—that they’re the ones who disobey God.

There are two absurd parts of this parable. The first is the continued generosity of the landowner. The second is the belief of the tenants that they’ll somehow inherit the vineyard after their awful behavior.

They’re confused about ownership, about what truly belongs to them. Even if they behave like they own the vineyard, that doesn’t make it true. Everything they have belongs to the landowner, just as everything we have belongs to God.

How easy it is to forget this. Our need for ownership is strong. Yet when we get confused about ownership, that’s when we get in trouble.

We hold things tighter.

We see others as competition instead of companions.

We believe that the more someone else has, the less we have.

Justice is interpreted as us getting what we deserve, rather than the presence of God’s kingdom in the world, where the last are first and the first and last, and there is more than enough generosity for everyone to thrive.

Last Wednesday evening the 7th and 8th graders discussed the first three commandments in Confirmation class. When they talked about the 1st commandment—I am the Lord your God, you shall have no other gods—one of their activities was to list all the things that God provides for us. They started off naming our families, our bodies, our homes, our pets, and food. It quickly became clear that the list is endless. God provides everything. That’s where the commandments begin, and it’s where we begin too.

Our priorities and our faithful lives are shaped by this simple yet profound truth: all we have belongs to God.

Joyce Rupp’s reflections on the “ache of autumn” remind me of the truth that we own nothing in this world. “There is an ‘ache’ of autumn that is also within each of us…” she writes. “It is a tender, nostalgic desire to to gather our treasures and hold them close because the ache tells us that someday those treasures will need to be left behind.”

Watching the maple trees shed their last leaves for the season fills me with a sadness I can’t describe. I want the brilliant colors of the maple leaves to stay forever. I suppose it’s knowing that time is moving forward whether I want it to or not.

-It’s realizing my son is taller than me.

-that my dog is getting gray on his muzzle, and when we take him to the vet, she says, “Wow, he’s really showing his age.”

-that I’ve been in my current house for 13 years—13 autumns that started with babies and a brand new swing set, that is now looking worse for wear and doesn’t get nearly as much use as it used to.

Time moves on, even when we try to hold our treasures tightly.

It only makes our arms ache.

Yet we hold to the promise that spring will come again, that the power of resurrection always wins, that we have an eternal hope that we don’t have to create ourselves.

We pray that our lives produce the fruit of the kingdom despite our best efforts at ownership. May we carry God’s vision as we care for the vineyard, that it may overflow with the fruits of love and justice and generosity. Amen!