March 26, 2004

Tenants

Lent 5C 2004

“A man planted a vineyard, and let it out to tenants… ”
(Lk 20.9)

When Jesus was telling this parable, surely he wondered how many times he must tell and how many changes he must ring on the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden before we get it.

Such is the way with parables. Whether about apples or fig trees or talents or Noah’s ark or good shepherds is really a side issue. Unlike allegories that often lead us around the block to look under every rock for meanings that are nearly always off-the-wall and usually wrong, a parable is a story with only one ax to grind. And further, like Jesus once advised his disciples about parables, they’re not told to create faith and understanding, but to require and challenge faith and understanding (Lk 8.10).

The Parable of the Vineyard is not about grapes. It’s at least about accountability. It challenges not only each and every one of us to be accountable, but all of the public and private institutions we inform and shape and think up to serve and govern, as well.

As an integral part of this Judeo-Christian heritage and its stories that we claim as our own, this Parable especially challenges the church. We’re tenant farmers, the lot of us, and our vocation is to be the very paradigm of accountability. How could there be a greater meaning to evangelism than to pray that we get good at that.

This very week, the long overdue and some say stonewalled 9/11 Commission laid the groundwork for hearings on accountability. As they got underway, there was the usual “he said, she said” meandering.

Then came Richard Clarke, antiterrorism chief in this and several past administrations, who lit up the Commission’s center stage with his winsome and courageous admission to the families of the 9/11 victims and to the nation at large. “Those entrusted with protecting you, failed you,” he said. “And I failed you.” Then, he asked to be forgiven.

One cannot avoid being drawn by the power of that moment, by the profound sense of relief for those grieving families who’ve yearned so to hear those words, and for the sudden, if only brief, refreshing transformation of what continues over and over to be a morass of self-serving ineptitude.

God speaks to the church in such exchanges. In them, God challenges our faith and understanding that we may see and hear him calling to us. We must not only witness to this encounter of Clarke and Commission as of the essence of a gospel of reconciliation, we must find in it ourselves.

We’ve been created by and given a gospel to care for. We live our most faithful stewardship not when we stake claims on it as our criteria to judge others right or wrong. No. We live it most faithfully when we embrace its message of peace and justice, love and inclusion, confession and forgiveness, and when we become such a community in ourselves. It is this stewardship for which we are held accountable and to which we must attest in these times.

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