October 2, 2008
Rescue
Pentecost 21/22A (Mt 21.33-46)Vineyards get a lot of mileage in the Bible.There must be something about vines that appeals to preachers. “Meanwhile, back at the vineyard… ” It’s as good a metaphor as any, I suppose.And so we have today another vineyard story. But this time, the story is not about vines. At a deeper level, it’s uncannily about greed. And what could be more appropriate for our times, for this very moment, than greed? Seven hundred billion dollars worth of greed as if something that simple could bail us out.It’s about greed, and being about greed, it’s inevitably about violence. And we’re all very familiar with those twin evils — not only in Jesus’s time, but for sure in ours, for they go hand in hand. They’re going hand in hand at this very moment at this here and now.Our morning story recounts a householder who sends his servants twice to check with his sharecroppers about the status of his grapes. The croppers not only don’t report, they throw out the owner’s emissaries and murder them. So he sends his son. Out of their absurd overconfidence and misjudgment, they kill the son in the strange reasoning that this way, they can take possession of the entire inheritance. Greed.Remember the scene in the l987 movie “Wall Street” where the protagonist Michael Gekko is CEO of a major brokerage house. He’s addressing the board and stockholders of a large paper company. After berating them at some length about their careless and malicious management of money, he concludes: “I am not a destroyer of companies. I am a liberator of them! The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed — for lack of a better word — is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.”Greed, in all of its forms — greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge — has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed — you mark my words — will not only save (your paper company), but (as well) that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.”It is a shocking scene. The suspense is palpable, even in the theatre audience. It is as if the character Gekko has actually turned and indicted us. Perhaps it is the last place we’d ever expect to feel like we’d encountered an Old Testament prophet face to face, least of all his character. For not a one of us has not experienced at least a moment of greed or been the victim of someone else’s greed. Of the seven deadly sins, greed goes by the fancier name avarice, has a most impressive staying power, and is not easily forgot.It’s not an unfamiliar pattern. But it’s no longer grapes. It’s oil. It’s not vineyards. It’s global warming. (I saw a bumper sticker. It said, “I love global warming.”) It’s refineries and SUVs and road rage. It’s not farming. It’s international chaos and poverty and genocide and corporate welfare resenting care for the poor. But at the seat of it all, it’s still greed, greed issuing in violence and even more tragically in some politicized cover-up.George Hunsinger of Princeton Theological Seminary writes that George Orwell talked about this in his famous essay on “Politics and the English Language.” He spoke of how we use language to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Perhaps it might be something like this:An invasion is engineered on false pretenses, hundreds of thousands are killed or maimed, no one is safe in the streets. It’s called “collateral damage.” Homes, hospitals, and mosques are blown up. Water, electricity, and other services are cut off. Civil society is destroyed. Half the population is left without any means of livelihood. Detainees are tortured and humiliated. Prisons are filled with people picked up off the streets. Cities are targeted and destroyed. And the insurgency is blamed on outside elements. All this is called “bringing democracy.”"Political language,” Orwell said, ” — and with variations this is true of all political parties — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder sound respectable and to give an appearance of solidarity to pure wind.”And so here we are. Somehow in the midst of all this we’re to find a way to contend with it and to incarnate the covenant we made at our baptism. It has never been easy to be a follower of that Way — the Way, that lovely word the early disciples of Jesus used to describe themselves and their purpose. After all, greed for power coupled with violence crucified their Lord and likely could easily crucify them. He made that very clear for them and for us. Every time we are signed with the cross do we take up and embrace the cross, the symbol of greed and violence and paradoxically of grace and justice.But let us recover Jesus’s metaphor of the vineyard for a moment. I confess it would be difficult to find a better one. For the irony of our time is that we are the sharecroppers and also the servants sent by the householder. And we are his heirs. We not only bear the Christ, but are asked to seek and serve the Christ wherever and in whomever.Meanwhile, back at the vineyard…
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