October 4, 2026 (Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost) - Rev. Mark Lawson

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Technical note: Due to an error, the first several seconds of this sermon were missed.

The most transparent story Jesus ever told.

He was in Jerusalem. He was teaching in the temple. And if you know that the prophet Isaiah, centuries earlier in the reading that Mary Ann shared with us, had famously compared Israel to a vineyard carefully planted and tended by God, then you know that Jesus was drawing on the same image, which was familiar to the people.

And if you know anything at all about the tension between Jesus and the religious bureaucracy running the temple, tension that only days later would result in Jesus’ crucifixion on a Roman cross, then there’s absolutely no mystery about the meaning of this parable.

When Jesus finished the story, people did not scratch their heads and wonder, “What does this mean?” They knew exactly what he meant.

Unlike most of Jesus’ stories, this one is an allegory, which means that every character in the story represents a real person. Every event in the story corresponds to something that has happened or will happen.

Following the parable in Isaiah 5, the landowner who planted the vineyard represents God. The vineyard represents Israel, or, in this case, the descendants of the nation Israel. In the Roman province of Judea, the tenants to whom the vineyard was leased represent the religious leaders who were charged with caring for Israel.

The servants whom the landowner sends to collect the harvest represent prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah and Amos and Micah, whom God had raised up to call to account the religious and political leaders of their day for how they were using or misusing their authority.

Those prophets were rejected, just as the landowner’s servants are rejected by the tenants in the story.

And so the landowner says, “I’m going to send my son. Surely they’ll listen to him.”

Well, that’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? The son is also rejected and killed outside the vineyard, just as Jesus would be killed outside the city wall.

With this story, Jesus was declaring that the religious leaders in Jerusalem were under God’s judgment. They had abused their authority. They had sought to seize control away from God, to claim God’s vineyard for themselves. They were complicit in the oppression of God’s people, which, of course, was a direct violation of their responsibility to care for the people.

Just as their ancestors rejected the prophets, they were now rejecting Jesus. They had stopped listening to God’s Word because they were more interested in protecting their own power.

According to verse 45, the religious leaders realized he was speaking about them. There was no question that this parable was a thinly veiled attack on them.

Now, you may or may not know that in the Middle Ages, this story was misinterpreted to mean that Jesus was declaring judgment on all Judaism, and that the Christian faith would replace Judaism as the one true religion. And that interpretation provided part of the justification for the medieval Christian church committing genocide against the Jewish people.

Not only is that interpretation wrong and, in my view, evil. It’s just stupid.

Jesus was standing up for the Jewish people who were being misruled by the wealthy elite in Jerusalem, who were in cahoots with the Romans. He wasn’t condemning Judaism. He was condemning abusive, oppressive religion.

So let’s be clear. This isn’t about the superiority of Christianity over Judaism. It is about the danger of any religious authority which values control over listening for a new word from God.

Now, we here at Grace Church, we can get down with that message.

I’ve been coming here for about four years, which isn’t really a very long time, but it’s long enough for me to know that Grace Church is a refuge.

I’m sure there are many lifelong Episcopalians in this congregation. But I wonder if there might be just as many folks who are in recovery from some other brand of Christianity, who walked away from another experience of church that was abusive or exclusive or controlling or judgmental.

Grace might have been your church of last resort, the last chance you were giving the Christian faith before you walked away from it entirely.

And to your surprise, here you found real inclusivity and genuine radical hospitality. You found a place where you knew you could belong.

So my goodness, it seems Grace Church has rejected all the same things Jesus rejected in this parable. Good for us.

But let’s be careful, because if all we get from this parable is personal and communal affirmation, and if our worship stops with thanking God, “We’re not like those other Christians who drive us crazy,” then we risk squandering all the good that grace, in both senses, has made possible.

This parable challenges even those of us who are liberated from bad religion.

Jesus indicted the temple priests as poor tenants, poor tenants of God’s vineyard. But the parable also asks us, what kind of tenants are we?

Now, first, that’s a question we need to ask of ourselves personally. Are we the kinds of tenants who trash the property we inhabit, hoping not to be bothered by the landlord? Are we the kind of stewards who act as though we own what has been entrusted to us, who refuse to be held accountable for our stewardship?

In Jesus’ story, the landowner kept sending servants to the vineyard, but the tenants wanted nothing to do with them. They seemed to believe they were on a rent-to-own plan, that the time would come when they could claim the vineyard as their own and run it the way they wanted to.

Well, maybe that’s the way we view our lives. Maybe we think of growing up and becoming mature adults as a process of earning the right to do things the way we want to, without having to answer to anyone.

But that is a distortion of reality.

None of us ever earns the right to seize our lives away from our Creator. None of us has the right to misuse what God has given us.

You don’t have the right under God to abuse your body or pollute your mind. You don’t have the right to live with no thought for the earth you inhabit. You have no right under God to judge those you don’t understand, or refuse to listen to others who see the world differently just because it makes you uncomfortable or challenges your assumptions.

In a sense, your life is a vineyard carefully planted by God to produce good fruit, and your life is marked by many moments when God sends servants, whether in the form of friends or teachers or pastors or even strangers, to see how you’re doing tending the vineyard of your life.

Have you paid attention to all the ways that God is speaking to you? Or would you rather not be bothered? Do you resist accountability?

That’s a personal question.

But Grace Church, we together need to remember that every church community is a little vineyard carefully planted by God, and the life of every congregation is marked by moments when God sends people to enrich our fellowship and open us up to a new word.

And if we are more concerned with protocol than prayer, more concerned with form than with faith, then we are in danger of rejecting the Word of God to us.

You say, “Oh well, that would never happen here.”

But I’ve been around long enough to know that even progressive Christians are not immune from the temptation to get too comfortable with one way of doing things, or to believe that because we’ve already broken through barriers of exclusion, we have arrived and have no further journey to make.

We don’t get a pass on this question. Nobody does.

What kind of stewards are we of what God has entrusted to us?

I want to press this question further and draw our attention to one line in the story that really bothered me for a long time.

The landowner, who represents God, leased the vineyard to tenants and went to another country.

Many biblical commentators say that here Jesus is drawing on the familiar image of the absentee landlord. And it’s true, there were lots of absentee landlords in ancient Judea. And their tenants resented them for good reason. They didn’t care about the well-being of the people farming their land. All they cared about was collecting the produce and selling it in other markets.

So tenants were working hard, only to have most of the fruit of their labor taken from them by somebody who was never around.

Why on earth would Jesus compare God to an absentee landlord?

That seems so contradictory to other things Jesus taught about God. He taught us that God is present and accessible, that we can always pray and be heard, that God cares intimately for each of us. So much so that God knows everything about us, right down to the number of hairs on our heads.

He talked about a God who clothes us, who feeds us, who provides us with all we need.

How can such a caring, present God be fairly represented by an absentee landlord?

Well, it turns out that this phrase, “he went to another country,” translates just one word in the Greek New Testament. And that same word is found in the other versions of this story, in Mark and in Luke.

And oddly enough, English translations render this one word, apodemeo, with different phrases in each Gospel.

But apodemeo had a specific meaning at the time it was employed in the New Testament. It meant to go on a journey, and the construction of the word implies that the one going on a journey was leaving the place where he or she lived.

Well, that’s not something you would say about an absentee landlord.

Jesus is describing a landowner who typically lives on his own land, but then has need to make a journey. So he leases the land to tenants who will care for the vineyard while he is away.

And as I ponder the use of this one word, apodemeo, my thoughts turn to the parable of the lost sheep, in which the shepherd leaves the ninety-nine sheep to go find the one who is lost.

And I remember that in John 10:16, Jesus said, “I have other sheep who are not of this fold.”

And I think of the crowd that gravitated toward Jesus. It was a strange mixture of people that included scruffy fishermen and former prostitutes and a couple of terrorists, and at least one tax collector and some desperately poor people.

The religious leaders in Jerusalem were not impressed. In fact, they were offended by this odd band of misfits, many of whom were probably, by their reckoning, unclean.

Jesus was not comparing God to an absentee landlord. He was describing a God who has places to go, a God who is constantly on the move, embracing outsiders and those who belong to distant countries.

And if that’s a fair way to read this parable, then it becomes a story about how to serve a God who’s always moving, always traveling.

And the message is pretty straightforward.

Don’t ever stop listening for God’s Word. Don’t ever imagine you have heard enough that you don’t need to listen anymore.

Because God is always moving. We’ve got to keep moving as well.

We heard the words of the Apostle Paul in his letter to the Philippians. He said, “I press on. I am straining forward to what lies ahead.”

I gotta keep moving.

The first time I ever entered this sanctuary, I was immediately taken with the arrangement of the furniture, the pews, and you around the altar table.

Now, in truth, this arrangement is similar to many contemporary worship spaces. But what makes it so striking here is that the old altar, the one that is high and apart from the people, is still there, providing a constant visual reminder of a huge theological shift.

Communion here is not just different; it is powerful in its symbolism.

We do not form a single-file line, ascend the altar, and kneel to receive the host and the cup. We stand in a circle facing each other, and we make sure that includes everybody who wants to do it.

We stand in a circle facing each other in all of our messy and beautiful diversity, claiming both our own dignity and the dignity of all with whom we gather.

Because in this community, we believe that God is not high and apart from the people, waiting for us to approach, but dwelling in the midst of the people, binding us to one another in a circle that will not be broken.

This arrangement and practice speaks to the liberating theology of Grace Church. It speaks to how an earlier generation recognized that God was on the move, and so the church moved with God.

In order to continue living out of this same theology, we have to keep moving.

We must continue asking: Where is God leading us next? How is God speaking to us now, in this time and place?

We are often reminded this table is not ours. It is the Lord’s.

This church is not ours to control. It is God’s to lead.

I don’t presume to know where God is leading us, but I do know that God is always moving. And I also know that God always moves forward and never backwards.

Grace Church is a good place to be, isn’t it? It’s kind of an exciting place. I sense ferment. I sense the movement of God.

And so I urge that we be open, that we dare to discern and dream, that we face forward without fear and never stop listening for God’s Word to us.

Amen.