Replanting: Isaiah 5:1-7
Ordinary Time
Let me sing for my beloved
my love song concerning his
vineyard:
My beloved had a vineyard
on a very fertile hill.
2 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;
and he looked for it to yield grapes,
but it yielded wild grapes.
3 And now, O inhabitants of Jerusalem
and men of Judah,
judge between me and my vineyard.
4 What more was there to do for my vineyard,
that I have not done in it?
When I looked for it to yield grapes,
why did it yield wild grapes?
5 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.
6 I will make it a waste;
it shall not be pruned or hoed,
and briers and thorns shall grow
up;
I will also command the clouds
that they rain no rain upon it.
7 For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts
is the house of Israel,
and the men of Judah
are his pleasant planting;
and he looked for justice,
but behold, bloodshed;
for righteousness,
but behold, an outcry! (ESV)[1]
It may be that
some of you are very excited for Nancy to return and preach on something that
is not the gloomy aspects of ancient prophets.
Last week,
Isaiah fumed against those who were worshipping with hearts full of greed and
apathy toward the people being crushed by the systems of the wealthy and the
powerful. This week, Isaiah makes his
ire broader; it is not just the powerful who have fallen away from
righteousness, not just the wealthy whose hearts have turned from God. It is all of Israel. Despite all of God’s hard work, they are only
producing wild grapes—in Hebrew, buh-OO-sheem, which is also translated as
stinking, worthless things.[2] In anger and sorrow, God—the keeper of the
vineyard—declares that it is not worth saving the vines that produce such awful
fruit. Tear down the walls, let the
things rot where they are; clearly a people like this are not worth protecting
from the world around them. Israel can
fall apart, for all the Lord of Hosts cares anymore.
I had a
teacher tell me once that, as a preacher, I should always find a way to preach
the Good News. I’ve never forgotten that,
but I gotta tell ya, I fought all week with these verses to find good news in them. It’s in other places in Isaiah, to be sure;
Dennis Bratcher points out that in Isaiah 27, “even the Isaiah tradition itself
reverses this imagery of the vineyard and later speaks of a new vineyard that
God will again plant in the land”.[3] But here, where God says, “I will break down
its wall…I will make it a waste”? Where
it seems that, actually, God can get so exhausted by us that God walks
away? Not particularly great news, that.
Which is
precisely why it needs to be something that we talk about. No matter where we place ourselves as
Christians on the spectrum of conservative to progressive or high church to low
church or whatever, we all cherry-pick the Bible. We do; it’s almost impossible not to, given
how much there is and how many years of different contexts and viewpoints are
in it. It’s tempting to pull out the
parts of the Bible that are cheerful, or uplifting, or fit well onto wall
plaques in elegantly curled script. But
we have to wrestle with the parts like this, the parts where the vineyard makes
the gardener so mad, he lets the whole thing be destroyed. The Bible is, after all, about how to be faithful
humans, and part of being human is recognizing that we are not always faithful.
So if we have
to talk about it, let’s talk about it.
What, exactly, is going on with this vineyard full of sour grapes? Professor J. Blake Couey writes, “The beloved
turns out to be a vineyard owner, who spared no labor or expense to ensure the
productiveness of his vineyard. Despite his efforts, it produced inedible
grapes. Verse 3 introduces another shift, as the vintner now speaks in the
first-person (‘me and my vineyard’). Despite the absurdity of bringing a
lawsuit against a vineyard — although it is no more absurd than singing a
love-song about one! — he convincingly argues that he bears no responsibility
in the vineyard’s poor production (v. 4) and is within his rights to destroy it
(vv. 5-6). By now, the audience must be thoroughly confused.
“Verse 7 resolves much of the
tension. The vineyard owner is God, and the vineyard is the kingdoms of Israel
and Judah. The bountiful harvest for which God hoped was a just society, but
the inedible grapes that God received instead are violence and oppression. In one
of the most celebrated wordplays in biblical poetry, the Hebrew words for ‘justice’
and ‘righteousness’ are mishpat and tsedaqah, while
the words for ‘bloodshed’ and ‘[out]cry’ are mispakh and tse‘aqah.
It is difficult to recreate the wordplay in another language, but the New
Jewish Publication Society translation captures something of the effect:
He hoped for justice,
But behold, injustice;
For equity,
But behold, iniquity![4]
It is,
perhaps, not much of a stretch for us to understand the heartbreak of wishing
for justice, for equity, for righteousness, and instead finding whole vines’
worth of iniquity. It is a particular
kind of pain, that disappointment. Maybe you haven’t grown a vineyard,
recently, but you’ve spent a lot of time on a relationship that you realize is
never going to get healthier, or you worked toward a promotion that went to
someone else when they had not earned it, or you aligned yourself with an
organization that turned out to have shady motives and actions. We humans who are made in the image of God
have a deep capacity to put a lot of our selves into a thing and to be deeply
upset when that time or energy or love or whatever feels like it is
wasted. How much more so when the
carefully crafted vines of the people of Israel gave back injustice, bloodshed,
covetousness, and pain to the God Who had entered covenant with them. How terrible of Israel to do such a
thing! How fortunate that we, surely,
are much sweeter grapes!
This past Tuesday
was the 77th anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki, Japan. Last Saturday was Hiroshima. I didn’t realize until a friend of mine said
something about it because my history classes never made me memorize those
dates; we learned about Pearl Harbor—December 7—and Victory in Europe, VE
Day—May 8, but not August 6, or 9. I’m
not surprised. Whatever your opinions on
the bombings themselves as a way to force Japan to surrender, I can’t imagine
an Indiana public high school would be all that thrilled about making
sixteen-year-olds memorize the fact that the United States dropped 21 kilotons
of plutonium onto a Japanese city mostly filled with civilians, killing somewhere
between 40,000 and 75,000 people instantly and severely injuring another
60,000.[5]
“Let me sing
for my beloved / my love song concerning his vineyard; / 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”. We are not the people of Israel carving out
space for ourselves in the volatile politics of the Ancient Near East. Nor are we the Allies in a desperate war that
wrapped around the world and unleashed power people had only seen in nightmares
before. But we are quite the vineyard, we
21st century faithful. We
know all too well what it looks like for God’s creations to seek justice and
find bloodshed, to hear an outcry where they searched for righteousness. We are unendingly creative in how we tell
each other you are less, you are unlovable, you are inhuman, you are expendable. It may be tempting for you, citizen of two
worlds, to quietly cheer the idea that God or some other force would remove the
hedge so this mess can be devoured, or break down the wall so all the wildlife
can come and tear it apart. A clean
slate of this mess we humans have made with our exclusions and our excuses.
And yet.
In preaching,
the preacher must always remember that no set of verses—called a pericope, if
anyone wants fancy homiletic terminology for use at brunch later—stands
alone. Yes, we cherry-pick the Bible,
every one of us, but that doesn’t mean that the rest of the tree isn’t
there. The overarching message of the
Scripture we as Christians claim is that God does not leave; God does not give
up; God does not stop caring for the creation God made; God always replants. That is what my teacher meant when he told me
to always preach good news—not that all sermons need to be relentlessly upbeat,
but that all sermons contain the spark of hope that never goes out because the
Light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not, will not overcome it.[6]
Professor Mark
S. Gignilliat writes, “John 15:1-11 is a robustly Christological take on the
vineyard motif. If we as the branches are connected with Jesus the vine, fruit
will be produced. This is a classic expression of faith leading to works of
justice and mercy. Our righteousness is at first a gift of grace received by
faith that in turn enables and engenders righteous acts. The vineyard of
Christ’s church produces fruit only when the church is in complete dependence
on the vine.
It is a powerful image: God the Father before the cross with
dead vines in his blistered hands. In the final analysis, God in a triune act
of love destroyed his choicest vineyard — this is my beloved son — for the sake
of planting a vineyard of love and grace in the whole world. Or as St. Paul
said, ‘You have heard of this hope before in the word of the truth, the gospel
that has come to you. Just as it is bearing fruit and growing in the whole
world, so it has been bearing fruit among yourselves from the day you heard it
and truly comprehended the grace of God’ (Colossians 1:5-6).”[7]
God created a
garden and we decided that wasn’t enough; God saved a people who said the new
freedom needed more; God acted as lord and the people demanded a king; God spoke
through the prophets and we stopped listening; God sent Godself and we killed
Him; God broke death’s power and gifted us the Spirit and we drop bombs on each
other. We go through this litany of the
sour, worthless grapes of our history every time we take communion, and we
follow the list with the proclamation, “Holy, holy, hold Lord, God of power and
might…hosanna,” which means save us.
And God will. The vineyard is
never left trampled and desolate; this harvest of putrefied grapes is never the
last harvest that God gathers. The story
continues as God reaches out again and again with infinite grace because that
is the very nature of the God we serve.
We continue in
our series of “The Awakened Traveler” and this wrecked vineyard invites us to
consider what journeys we may be on that need to be scrapped entirely and begun
anew. Where have you become callous and
cold for whatever reason, a bitter grape in a vineyard, in need of replanting
yourself where you can grow into compassion and trust? Where are you putting in energy to help the
vines thrive only to receive, over and over, sour and worthless fruit? Where have you sought justice and found
iniquity, or been part of injustice where there should have been
righteousness? Where is God telling you
to tear down the walls, let the field lie fallow for a while, and start over? How could destruction be good news for you,
this week?
Isaiah’s
allegory is not cheerful, and will not be entirely welcome on a calligraphic
plaque in the living room, but it matters that we see a moment in which God is
so invested in us that it matters when we are not who we are called to be. It matters when we do not live with each
other in a way that allows the full vine to unfurl. There is planting, and watering, and
cultivating, and protecting, and waiting going on for you—and there is ripping
up and composting and replanting going on for you. God does not leave the vineyard; Christ
becomes the vine.
May we have
the courage to uproot that which is toxic, the humility to accept our own
replanting, and the grace to see God at work in and through all the ways we
grow. Amen.
[1]
Isaiah 5:7 The Hebrew words for justice and bloodshed sound alike
Isaiah 5:7 The Hebrew words for righteous and outcry
sound alike
[2]
בְּאֻשִׁים, Strong's Hebrew: 891. בְּאֻשִׁים (beushim) -- stinking or worthless (things), wild grapes
(biblehub.com)
[6]
Cf. John 1:5.
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