Thriving: Known By Our Fruits
I read recently about a wedding that took place in California in the late ‘90’s. I hadn’t heard about it before, but even though it has been nearly 30 years ago, no one who attended has ever forgotten it. The bride and groom seemed to be so prepared for all that marriage would bring. They had already prepared their new home. The dishes from the showers were washed and placed in the newly lined cabinets, the walls re-painted to coordinate with the new pillows and throws. New furniture had been delivered, each had moved in their favorite things. When they returned from their honeymoon, all they would need to do was unpack. The wedding itself was beautiful. The bride and her mother had thought of every detail to make the whole celebration elegant without being fussy – comfortable and classy. The couple left the reception with their family and friends cheering and waving on their way to their honeymoon cottage in Napa with amazing views of the vineyard from the terrace. Only something happened. And before they got very far away, the groom put the car in park, got out, and started walking down the road away from the bride. The bride slid over into the driver’s seat, and put the pedal to the metal…caught up with him, and ran right over him. Not 30 minutes after leaving the reception, he was dead and she was being arrested. Shocked does not even begin to capture the reaction of their guests.
No one could imagine what had happened, but everyone KNEW something did. No one was expecting the day to go from holy matrimony to homicide. Something must have happened in that car – something major – something one of them did not expect.
That’s the emotional whiplash that Isaiah creates when he writes the lyrics to the song we read this morning. He knew that when he started singing it everyone would be drawn in. It’s a love song…a lot like the love songs we find in the Song of Solomon, songs of God to us. One of the less steamy songs of Solomon invites, “Come, my beloved, let us go out into the fields 12 let us go out early to the vineyards and see whether the vines have budded, whether the grape blossoms have opened and the pomegranates are in bloom. There I will give you my love.”
When Isaiah began to sing, “I want to sing a song for someone I love, a song about my loved one and his vineyard. My loved one had a vineyard on a very fertile hill” his hearers knew he was talking about God, his loved one, and his vineyard, God’s people. God has prepared blessings for God’s people, “He dug up its stones and cleared them away, planted it with the choicest vines, built a watchtower in the middle of it, and carved out in its rock a winepress.” God has taken care of them, given them all they needed.
One commentator writes God has “done all he could for his beloved vineyard: selected the best location, painstakingly cleared away the stones, planted the best variety of vines, and even built a watchtower in it. But it did not yield grapes worth eating, much less grapes worthy of all this attention. Nothing more could have been done than was done.”
And suddenly, the love song becomes a song about unrequited love, and the verses become woes or the horrors to come as God declares his intention to destroy the vineyard. The six verses of woe outline the social and political decay of Judah that Isaiah sees is happening. The wealthy are greedy and are hoarding land, pushing others out and down and expanding their wealth. God will make their land desolate and unproductive. Social life is all the wealthy engage in – feasting with drinking and music from the time they get up until late in the night. They start picking at sinful behavior like pulling a loose string on their shirt, and before long they are dragging it like a rope with a cart behind them. They are so accustomed to their sinful lives that they have started calling evil things good and good things evil. Then Isaiah sums it up, “Woe to those seeing themselves as wise, esteeming themselves as clever….who acquit the guilty for bribes but deny justice to the righteous!”
What went so wrong? Verse 25 says, “This is why God’s anger blazed up against his people, why he stretched out his hand against them and struck them [so hard that] the hills shook, and corpses lay like trash in the streets. Even after all this, his anger remains, his upraised hand still threatens.” What is it? What happened? “They have rejected the teaching of the Lord, and have despised the word of the Holy One.”
The one who planted the vineyard is left asking, “What more was there to do for my vineyard that I haven’t done for it? When I expected it to grow good grapes, why did it grow rotten grapes?” After all that God did to prepare and bless God’s people, the harvest is worthless.
I think verse 7 is probably the refrain of Isaiah’s song. The hinge that turns the song from a ballad to a torch song. “God expected justice, but there was bloodshed; righteousness, but there was a cry of distress!” What God EXPECTED was not what God got. And Isaiah is a good song writer…in Hebrew. In English “justice” and “bloodshed” don’t really sound like catchy lyrics, nor do “righteousness” and the “crying out of a people in pain”. They aren’t lyrics you’re likely to get stuck in your thoughts. But, mishpat/mispah, mishpat/mispah, do it with me “mishpat/mispah”…that’s catchy…expected mishpat but I saw mispah…expected justice, but I saw bloodshed. Tsedeqah/tse’aqah, tsedeqah/tse’aqah, tsedeqah/tse’aqah, expected mishpat but I saw mispah, tsedeqah but I heard tse’aqah…righteousness but I heard crying out.
God expected justice and righteousness – a community that practices generative, positive social relationships without abuse or exploitation. Walter Bruggemann wrote, the blood outpouring is lifeblood – through exploitative social practice, the kinds of economic transactions that abuse, injure, slowly bleed the poor to death – “killing through economic policy against the vulnerable and resourceless.”
Now that God’s expectations have been crushed and all he got was sour. God looks at creation and sees bloodshed and vulnerable crying out. And John Goldingay summarizes what is going to happen now. “Whereas every family was supposed to own a piece of land off which it could live, some people have found ways of appropriating other people’s land by semi-legal means and depriving its owners of their livelihood. They indulge themselves in drinking and music. They don’t believe talk about God intending to act against [their nation]. They think they have insight, but they lack it. They think they’re important, but they’re dispensable. Their homes will be devastated. Their crops will fail. They will lose their land. They will die and find themselves in Sheol.”
In the Interpretation Bible study series, Gary Light wrote the one on Isaiah. He points out that it is in the very act of accumulation that God’s expectation is thwarted. God expects community. Walter Bruggemann wrote that “The vineyard failed to enact its true character.” The vineyard failed to be a vineyard. The people of God failed to be community. And now, the vineyard will be destroyed and, in the words of Walter Bruggemann, will be left “only a patch of kudzu vine.”
When Jesus is teaching in the Temple courts and the chief priests come to question him, and they want to know “on what authority” he is teaching. He responds, “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you. 32 For John came to you to show you the way of righteousness, and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes did. And even after you saw this, you did not repent and believe him. 33 “Listen to another parable: There was a landowner who planted a vineyard. He put a wall around it, dug a winepress in it and built a watchtower.” THEY KNOW THIS SONG! Jesus goes on, “Then he rented the vineyard to some farmers and moved to another place. 34 When the harvest time approached, he sent his servants to the tenants to collect his fruit.” The chief priests are the farmers and everybody in the Temple that day knows it.
And Jesus concludes, “Therefore, I tell you that the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit.” That’s us, church. God keeps singing this song that God so badly wants to be a love song. God wants the vineyard to produce good grapes. God EXPECTS the vineyard to produce good grapes. God expects that we will not accumulate wealth, that we will live in community and respect boundaries so that everyone has enough. God EXPECTS that we will all work and serve, that we will contribute to the community and be responsible caretakers of it, and that means that our social lives won’t be the center of our lives. God EXPECTS that we won’t pick at the little string of temptation until our sin becomes a rope with a cart full of it that we drag around behind us. God EXPECTS that we won’t justify evil by calling it good, or declare that the ends justify the means. God EXPECTS honest dealings. Justice, not bloodshed. Righteousness, not the cries of the vulnerable.
God’s Song has not changed. Isaiah sang it to a nation – it’s political. Jesus sang it at the Temple – it’s religious. God sings it to you – it’s personal. We are responsible for the quality of the grapes. We are responsible for the harvest of the vineyard. In our nation. In our church. In our lives.
May the chorus of the song be a warning to us, ever in our thoughts and guiding our actions. Mishpat/mispah, tsedeqah/tse’aqah. Expected mishpat but I saw mispah… justice, but I saw bloodshed; tsedeqah but I heard tse’aqah…righteousness but I heard crying out.