Wild Grapes in the Fields of the Lord
The Rev. Amy Morehous
Proper 15, Year C
Church of the Ascension
August 16, 2010
What words we have before us in the scripture readings today, the ‘love-song about a vineyard’, according to Isaiah. Trampled. Ravaged. Burned. Rebuked. Tortured. Flogged. Stoned. Killed. What on earth could we find of meaning in these accounts of desolation, and violence and rebuke? However could we reconcile a loving God with these words of warning, and judgement, and violence? Particularly knowing that Paul means for some of those horrific words to be reassuring. You think you have it bad now, you Hebrews ! Just remember what your predecessors went through, and be reassured! I don’t know about you, but that is sometimes the kind of comforting I can do without.
Like most families, today I’m focused on new beginnings - new classes, new teachers. In fact, in a few moments, we will bless all the children headed back to school, to face all those shiny new pencils, shiny new friends, and shiny new anxieties that each year brings. But our lectionary this morning is insistent that the readings we heard today have something to say to us, that these harsh words that disturb us still have meaning in our lives...even though we would rather not hear them. So, this is our ‘love-song’ to contemplate this morning. One of hurt, and pain, and brokenness before God.
I don’t know Heather Moffitt at all, but I wish I did. She’s the daughter of a pastor, and a parent. Like most of us, when she became a parent, she had a whole houseful of expectations of what her parenting experience would be like. While she “didn’t expect her children automatically to exhibit angelic behaviour in church,” she did expect them to “learn how to comport themselves,” and she looked forward eagerly to having her children “worship with the people of God, and learn the Bible stories that had shaped her.” However, like most of us, she soon found that reality and expectations soon part company, where our children are concerned.
She writes of the time when she and and her husband joined a new church. Their son was only 14 months old. Just weeks later, their son “began to exhibit debilitating behavioral challenges. He had violent and unpredictable outbursts, making it difficult to take him anywhere, much less church.” She and her husband spent most of their time in church pacing the halls, “trying to find a place where our son’s screams couldn’t be heard in the sanctuary.” Their son was diagnosed with what she calls “a virtual alphabet soup of conditions: ADHD, ODD, ASD, and more.” They would “pull into the parking lot of the church, and (she) would be in a state of prayer - praying they could get through an entire service before they had to leave, praying that he wouldn’t have an epic tantrum in the pews, praying that he wouldn’t attack other children, and praying that people would be nice to them.” It is no surprise that most of her feelings about going to church “ranged from embarrassed to humiliated.”
From the church she received lots of well-meaning advice. Her child needed more discipline. He needed less. He was with her too much. He didn’t have enough time with her. But, overall, she says that people were kind. “We were never shunned because of our challenging child. Instead, people prayed over him, with love. Our pastor would get down on his knees to meet him at eye level every week and talk to him. One lovely couple even offered to keep our son some Sunday afternoons so we could have a break.”
What she slowly realized was “that this church was a manifestation of God’s grace to us, for it was not a church where everyone arrives with a Sunday-morning mask of perfection over the heartbreaks of life. A challenging child in church forces everyone - parents and other parishioners - to confront whether we value compliance over compassion.”
She points out that while she always knew “how to behave in church”, what she had to learn to accept was “how to be broken in church.” While she wanted to be “praised for her parenting, and admired for her control of her child, what she really needed was to healed from her hurt”. She thought she was seeking spiritual formation for her son, but what she discovered was that she needed it for her own soul.
We don’t always allow for brokenness - in church, in our own lives. We sometimes pass that perception on to our children, even without meaning to. When I was about 12, my parents finally divorced after years of separation and turmoil. Afterwards, my mother stopped going to church events for over a year. She would drop my younger sister and me off for Sunday school, or youth group, and then go back home. When I complained about her absence, she said, “Church is only a place for families, and we aren’t a family anymore.”
Because that’s what we’re talking about in all these readings. Brokenness. Division. “We aren’t a family anymore.” While they aren’t pretty, those issues and griefs are part of many people’s reality. We live in a society that values self-reliance. Keeping it “all together”. Being well-adjusted. I don’t know about you, but I desperately want my child to be “well-adjusted”. I don’t even know exactly what that means, but it sure sounds really good. We all suffer from the sin of sufficiency - we’re “good enough, smart enough” In fact, we’re all just fine, thanks for asking. We’re Americans - we can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, and we don’t need anyone’s help. We put on our smiles, and we come to church on our good days, but not on our bad ones. Our children come to learn that we only come to church when we have time, or when we’re feeling okay. But we don’t come to God’s house on the bad days - the broken days, the angry days, the ‘bad hair’ days, the “I don’t love my neighbor days,” the sinful days. In doing so, we can pass on the message that church is only for perfect people, who do all the right things, think all the right things, say all the right things - wear all the right things.
We believe in a God who is a loving parent. Isaiah talks of the tender care of the Lord for his vineyard, for his people. He also describes how the people responded - with selfishness, and injustice. He says that our loving God “expected justice, but saw bloodshed; righteousness, but heard a cry!’ What did the people do to feel God’s wrath? Why is Isaiah so upset? If you keep reading just one more verse, Isaiah says, “Ah, you who join house to house, who add field to field, until there is no room for anyone but you, and you are left to live alone in the midst of the land.” (5:8) Isaiah points out that thinking only of our own selves, only of our own needs will yield its own punishment: “The Lord of Hosts has sworn in my hearing: surely many houses shall be left desolate, large and beautiful houses without inhabitants.” Large and beautiful houses....
There’s a reason for the difficult passages of the Bible. They aren’t there just to make us uncomfortable on Sunday mornings, when we’d rather hear something else. They’re there to make us uncomfortable all the time. Why? Not because our God is a vengeful, angry judgemental God, but because the Christian faith is one of redemption, and of healing. But if we don’t acknowledge our slavery, and our brokenness, and our wounds, then we can’t see the redemption and the healing that follows. It is in the times we are most broken when we are the closest to God. Don’t misunderstand me - God does not wish brokenness on any of us. Our God is not a God of punishment and retribution, who breaks us in order for us to learn to love. But our God is a parent - a parent who loves us enough to let us make mistakes. A parent who understands that our first reaction is not always the charitable one. That our choices are not always good. That we do things to ourselves, and our environment and to others that cause suffering. Jesus didn’t come for perfect people, with no problems. Perfect people have no need of a Saviour. Jesus didn’t come to promise that our lives would be rosy, that we would spend all our time tiptoeing through the tulips of life. Jesus came for a people that suffered, for a people that didn’t always make the right choices, for a people that weren’t always good to their neighbors. People just like us.
Festo Kivengore said that “Resurrection is not for upright people. It’s for brokenhearted people, the defeated and shattered....Before Christ died and rose again, suffering was meaningless, empty, a shattering experience which made life bitter. Then Jesus died in suffering and in pain, and he covered suffering with love - victorious, holy love. This kind of love will never be conquered!" Festo Kivengore was an Anglican Bishop from Uganda in the late 1970s. He spoke those words on Easter Sunday of 1977, just months after the Anglican Archbishop Janani Luwam was murdered for opposing Idi Amin’s regime. Festo Kivengore was a man who had seen division, and oppression, and bloodshed. He knew how very wild those wild grapes could grow...but he still found hope in Christ’s victory over bitterness, over suffering.
As for me, I believe that church is a place of redemption and healing. It is a place for families. It’s a place for all kinds of families, with all kinds of children - even the broken and imperfect ones. Especially the broken and imperfect ones. Why? Because we are people of redemption and healing - a resurrection people. We believe in a Christ who was beaten, who suffered, and who died. There’s nothing pretty or comforting about that picture - Jesus himself is honest about the suffering he will undergo. “I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed!” His blunt honesty about difficulties and divisions is shocking to us, because today we like to put pretty faces on top of unpleasant truths. Jesus is unwilling to sweep those under the rug. But to stop with this reading, to pull it out of context as we have done today, is not to follow it through to the end. The end of the story is not in strife and division, but in resurrection.
And our deep need for being sufficient, for being “good enough?” Our need for keeping up appearances, and being ‘well-adjusted’...those will lead us down the path of loneliness, and fear, and inadequacy, and want. We will be left desolate ourselves, like large and beautiful houses without inhabitants. And expecting our children to be perfectly well-behanved, ‘well-adjusted’ members of society carries it’s own dangers. Martin Luther King once said that “Everyone passionately seeks to be well adjusted. ...But there are some things in our world to which (people) of goodwill must be maladjusted.” He argues that it is the call of every Christian to be “creatively maladjusted.” I hope our children never become “adjusted” to injustice, or prejudice, or hatred. I hope my daughter never measures another’s self-worth by their net worth. I hope she never lets the bully tower over the smaller kid on the playground - even if it gets her in trouble.
My prayer for my daughter - indeed, for all our children, is that we are not raising them to expect that they must be perfect. To not expect that life will be perfect. Not papering over the broken pieces of our lives with well-meaning platitudes. Not solving all their problems for them. Not pressuring them to fit in, to be like everyone else, to not to ever stick out, or question authority. I hope we are honest about our own limitations, and difficulties. I hope we value compassion, and not just simple compliance. Not throwing “a Sunday-morning mask of perfection over the heartbreaks of life”.
We will bring our children forward today, as one people, and bless them and send them forth in faith, and with hope. And we will come to the Eucharistic table today, in unity, as one people, despite our divisions, our pains, or our private griefs. While our human story may be one of “pain and tears and brokenness..,” we affirm that it also is“a story of love, joy, and hope that ends in wholeness, in the world coming to know just how high and broad and deep God's love and blessings for Creation are.” (Sarah Dylan Brewer) Because despite division, and deep grief, and the destruction that we manage to visit on each other, God does intend good for all God’s people. The Good News of Christ today is that while death and suffering and separation are realities in our lives, they can never be the last words. The resurrection is the last word, God’s eternal ‘Amen’ to the brokenness in each of our lives. “Restore us, Lord God,” and heal us; “show the light of your countenance, and we shall be saved.” Together, we proclaim our own brokenness - we lay it at the altar, and we name it, and it will have no power over us, because we are a resurrection people.
Amen, and amen.
Proper 15, Year C
Church of the Ascension
August 16, 2010
What words we have before us in the scripture readings today, the ‘love-song about a vineyard’, according to Isaiah. Trampled. Ravaged. Burned. Rebuked. Tortured. Flogged. Stoned. Killed. What on earth could we find of meaning in these accounts of desolation, and violence and rebuke? However could we reconcile a loving God with these words of warning, and judgement, and violence? Particularly knowing that Paul means for some of those horrific words to be reassuring. You think you have it bad now, you Hebrews ! Just remember what your predecessors went through, and be reassured! I don’t know about you, but that is sometimes the kind of comforting I can do without.
Like most families, today I’m focused on new beginnings - new classes, new teachers. In fact, in a few moments, we will bless all the children headed back to school, to face all those shiny new pencils, shiny new friends, and shiny new anxieties that each year brings. But our lectionary this morning is insistent that the readings we heard today have something to say to us, that these harsh words that disturb us still have meaning in our lives...even though we would rather not hear them. So, this is our ‘love-song’ to contemplate this morning. One of hurt, and pain, and brokenness before God.
I don’t know Heather Moffitt at all, but I wish I did. She’s the daughter of a pastor, and a parent. Like most of us, when she became a parent, she had a whole houseful of expectations of what her parenting experience would be like. While she “didn’t expect her children automatically to exhibit angelic behaviour in church,” she did expect them to “learn how to comport themselves,” and she looked forward eagerly to having her children “worship with the people of God, and learn the Bible stories that had shaped her.” However, like most of us, she soon found that reality and expectations soon part company, where our children are concerned.
She writes of the time when she and and her husband joined a new church. Their son was only 14 months old. Just weeks later, their son “began to exhibit debilitating behavioral challenges. He had violent and unpredictable outbursts, making it difficult to take him anywhere, much less church.” She and her husband spent most of their time in church pacing the halls, “trying to find a place where our son’s screams couldn’t be heard in the sanctuary.” Their son was diagnosed with what she calls “a virtual alphabet soup of conditions: ADHD, ODD, ASD, and more.” They would “pull into the parking lot of the church, and (she) would be in a state of prayer - praying they could get through an entire service before they had to leave, praying that he wouldn’t have an epic tantrum in the pews, praying that he wouldn’t attack other children, and praying that people would be nice to them.” It is no surprise that most of her feelings about going to church “ranged from embarrassed to humiliated.”
From the church she received lots of well-meaning advice. Her child needed more discipline. He needed less. He was with her too much. He didn’t have enough time with her. But, overall, she says that people were kind. “We were never shunned because of our challenging child. Instead, people prayed over him, with love. Our pastor would get down on his knees to meet him at eye level every week and talk to him. One lovely couple even offered to keep our son some Sunday afternoons so we could have a break.”
What she slowly realized was “that this church was a manifestation of God’s grace to us, for it was not a church where everyone arrives with a Sunday-morning mask of perfection over the heartbreaks of life. A challenging child in church forces everyone - parents and other parishioners - to confront whether we value compliance over compassion.”
She points out that while she always knew “how to behave in church”, what she had to learn to accept was “how to be broken in church.” While she wanted to be “praised for her parenting, and admired for her control of her child, what she really needed was to healed from her hurt”. She thought she was seeking spiritual formation for her son, but what she discovered was that she needed it for her own soul.
We don’t always allow for brokenness - in church, in our own lives. We sometimes pass that perception on to our children, even without meaning to. When I was about 12, my parents finally divorced after years of separation and turmoil. Afterwards, my mother stopped going to church events for over a year. She would drop my younger sister and me off for Sunday school, or youth group, and then go back home. When I complained about her absence, she said, “Church is only a place for families, and we aren’t a family anymore.”
Because that’s what we’re talking about in all these readings. Brokenness. Division. “We aren’t a family anymore.” While they aren’t pretty, those issues and griefs are part of many people’s reality. We live in a society that values self-reliance. Keeping it “all together”. Being well-adjusted. I don’t know about you, but I desperately want my child to be “well-adjusted”. I don’t even know exactly what that means, but it sure sounds really good. We all suffer from the sin of sufficiency - we’re “good enough, smart enough” In fact, we’re all just fine, thanks for asking. We’re Americans - we can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, and we don’t need anyone’s help. We put on our smiles, and we come to church on our good days, but not on our bad ones. Our children come to learn that we only come to church when we have time, or when we’re feeling okay. But we don’t come to God’s house on the bad days - the broken days, the angry days, the ‘bad hair’ days, the “I don’t love my neighbor days,” the sinful days. In doing so, we can pass on the message that church is only for perfect people, who do all the right things, think all the right things, say all the right things - wear all the right things.
We believe in a God who is a loving parent. Isaiah talks of the tender care of the Lord for his vineyard, for his people. He also describes how the people responded - with selfishness, and injustice. He says that our loving God “expected justice, but saw bloodshed; righteousness, but heard a cry!’ What did the people do to feel God’s wrath? Why is Isaiah so upset? If you keep reading just one more verse, Isaiah says, “Ah, you who join house to house, who add field to field, until there is no room for anyone but you, and you are left to live alone in the midst of the land.” (5:8) Isaiah points out that thinking only of our own selves, only of our own needs will yield its own punishment: “The Lord of Hosts has sworn in my hearing: surely many houses shall be left desolate, large and beautiful houses without inhabitants.” Large and beautiful houses....
There’s a reason for the difficult passages of the Bible. They aren’t there just to make us uncomfortable on Sunday mornings, when we’d rather hear something else. They’re there to make us uncomfortable all the time. Why? Not because our God is a vengeful, angry judgemental God, but because the Christian faith is one of redemption, and of healing. But if we don’t acknowledge our slavery, and our brokenness, and our wounds, then we can’t see the redemption and the healing that follows. It is in the times we are most broken when we are the closest to God. Don’t misunderstand me - God does not wish brokenness on any of us. Our God is not a God of punishment and retribution, who breaks us in order for us to learn to love. But our God is a parent - a parent who loves us enough to let us make mistakes. A parent who understands that our first reaction is not always the charitable one. That our choices are not always good. That we do things to ourselves, and our environment and to others that cause suffering. Jesus didn’t come for perfect people, with no problems. Perfect people have no need of a Saviour. Jesus didn’t come to promise that our lives would be rosy, that we would spend all our time tiptoeing through the tulips of life. Jesus came for a people that suffered, for a people that didn’t always make the right choices, for a people that weren’t always good to their neighbors. People just like us.
Festo Kivengore said that “Resurrection is not for upright people. It’s for brokenhearted people, the defeated and shattered....Before Christ died and rose again, suffering was meaningless, empty, a shattering experience which made life bitter. Then Jesus died in suffering and in pain, and he covered suffering with love - victorious, holy love. This kind of love will never be conquered!" Festo Kivengore was an Anglican Bishop from Uganda in the late 1970s. He spoke those words on Easter Sunday of 1977, just months after the Anglican Archbishop Janani Luwam was murdered for opposing Idi Amin’s regime. Festo Kivengore was a man who had seen division, and oppression, and bloodshed. He knew how very wild those wild grapes could grow...but he still found hope in Christ’s victory over bitterness, over suffering.
As for me, I believe that church is a place of redemption and healing. It is a place for families. It’s a place for all kinds of families, with all kinds of children - even the broken and imperfect ones. Especially the broken and imperfect ones. Why? Because we are people of redemption and healing - a resurrection people. We believe in a Christ who was beaten, who suffered, and who died. There’s nothing pretty or comforting about that picture - Jesus himself is honest about the suffering he will undergo. “I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed!” His blunt honesty about difficulties and divisions is shocking to us, because today we like to put pretty faces on top of unpleasant truths. Jesus is unwilling to sweep those under the rug. But to stop with this reading, to pull it out of context as we have done today, is not to follow it through to the end. The end of the story is not in strife and division, but in resurrection.
And our deep need for being sufficient, for being “good enough?” Our need for keeping up appearances, and being ‘well-adjusted’...those will lead us down the path of loneliness, and fear, and inadequacy, and want. We will be left desolate ourselves, like large and beautiful houses without inhabitants. And expecting our children to be perfectly well-behanved, ‘well-adjusted’ members of society carries it’s own dangers. Martin Luther King once said that “Everyone passionately seeks to be well adjusted. ...But there are some things in our world to which (people) of goodwill must be maladjusted.” He argues that it is the call of every Christian to be “creatively maladjusted.” I hope our children never become “adjusted” to injustice, or prejudice, or hatred. I hope my daughter never measures another’s self-worth by their net worth. I hope she never lets the bully tower over the smaller kid on the playground - even if it gets her in trouble.
My prayer for my daughter - indeed, for all our children, is that we are not raising them to expect that they must be perfect. To not expect that life will be perfect. Not papering over the broken pieces of our lives with well-meaning platitudes. Not solving all their problems for them. Not pressuring them to fit in, to be like everyone else, to not to ever stick out, or question authority. I hope we are honest about our own limitations, and difficulties. I hope we value compassion, and not just simple compliance. Not throwing “a Sunday-morning mask of perfection over the heartbreaks of life”.
We will bring our children forward today, as one people, and bless them and send them forth in faith, and with hope. And we will come to the Eucharistic table today, in unity, as one people, despite our divisions, our pains, or our private griefs. While our human story may be one of “pain and tears and brokenness..,” we affirm that it also is“a story of love, joy, and hope that ends in wholeness, in the world coming to know just how high and broad and deep God's love and blessings for Creation are.” (Sarah Dylan Brewer) Because despite division, and deep grief, and the destruction that we manage to visit on each other, God does intend good for all God’s people. The Good News of Christ today is that while death and suffering and separation are realities in our lives, they can never be the last words. The resurrection is the last word, God’s eternal ‘Amen’ to the brokenness in each of our lives. “Restore us, Lord God,” and heal us; “show the light of your countenance, and we shall be saved.” Together, we proclaim our own brokenness - we lay it at the altar, and we name it, and it will have no power over us, because we are a resurrection people.
Amen, and amen.
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