Wait For It
Exodus 20: 1-20 (NIV)
And God spoke all these words: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. “You shall have no other gods before me. “You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments. “You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name. “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. “Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you. “You shall not murder. “You shall not commit adultery. “You shall not steal. “You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor. “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.” When the people saw the thunder and lightning and heard the trumpet and saw the mountain in smoke, they trembled with fear. They stayed at a distance and said to Moses, “Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die.” Moses said to the people, “Do not be afraid. God has come to test you, so that the fear of God will be with you to keep you from sinning.”
Matthew 21: 33-46 (NIV)
“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. Then he rented the vineyard to some farmers and moved to another place. When the harvest time approached, he sent his servants to the tenants to collect his fruit. “The tenants seized his servants; they beat one, killed another, and stoned a third. Then he sent other servants to them, more than the first time, and the tenants treated them the same way. Last of all, he sent his son to them. ‘They will respect my son,’ he said. “But when the tenants saw the son, they said to each other, ‘This is the heir. Come, let’s kill him and take his inheritance.’ So they took him and threw him out of the vineyard and killed him. “Therefore, when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” “He will bring those wretches to a wretched end,” they replied, “and he will rent the vineyard to other tenants, who will give him his share of the crop at harvest time.” Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the Scriptures: “ ‘The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; the Lord has done this, and it is marvelous in our eyes’? “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. Anyone who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; anyone on whom it falls will be crushed.” When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard Jesus’ parables, they knew he was talking about them. They looked for a way to arrest him, but they were afraid of the crowd because the people held that he was a prophet.
So this morning, in the way of our Old Testament lesson, we hear about Moses finally making his way back from Mt. Sinai, after 40 days and 40 nights, with the Law in hand. And the first and most important piece of that Law that he delivers to the Hebrew people is the Ten Commandments.
Before I go on with what I have to you this morning, I have 2 disclaimers:
- If you, like me, don't like people telling you what to do, this might be a harder Sunday for you. Bear with me, because there's a method behind all of the rules in the Law. And you know how us Methodists feel about our methods. There's a much bigger picture at work behind all the "Thou Shalt"s and "Thou Shalt Not"s.
- We're intimately familiar with at least the idea of the Ten Commandments. And the tragic irony is that that familiarity doesn't necessarily help us actually follow the Ten Commandments. We may know this Bible story, we might even know it well, and we might be able to name most or all of the Commandments. But between our popular culture's interpretation of the sacred statutes, and all of our ongoing public controversies about whether the Ten Commandments should be posted in schools and court rooms, we can start to lose sight of what God is actually commanding of us. So even though this can be really hard to do, I invite you to try to hear the words of this morning's Old Testament lesson not like they're words you've heard many times before, but like they're words you're hearing for the first time.
So Moses finally returns to the Hebrew people after being gone on Mt. Sinai for so long that they were positive he was never coming back. The text says it was "40 days and 40 nights", but we know that that's what the Bible always says when what it really means is "a really really long time". And when Moses comes back, he emerges from this very long talk with God wherein God just laid out thousands of laws that he wants his people to follow, the most important of which are these Ten Commandments.
How would you feel if someone that you frankly don't even know that well, someone that just dragged you away from the only home you've ever known and led you out into the middle of nowhere, only to take off for practically forever, handed you a giant list of rules you suddenly have to follow, all to appease a God you've never heard of and don't believe in?
If you can try to imagine that, then you can imagine how the Hebrews felt in this morning's story, after they got served with the longest list of rules you've ever seen in your life. And, just in case you don't know what I mean when I talk about this "long list of rules"--Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus Numbers, and Deuteronomy, the first five books of the Bible that we sometimes call the Pentateuch make up what people of the Jewish faith call the Torah, or the Law. So if you pick up a Bible, and flip through just those first five books, and you see just how many words and just how many pages that is, that is the Law. That is what Moses told the Hebrews they were going to have to abide by, or else face serious consequences.
But about those consequences. In this morning's Gospel passage, Jesus tries to shake up his listeners by telling them one of his more unsettling parables. We're back in the vineyard, where his parables have taken us for the last 2 weeks, and Jesus is telling us about some very disobedient tenants of the vineyard--people that were entrusted to care for the vines, but turned around and killed the servants who came to collect the fruit of the vines. Jesus gives us the chilling lesson that we're as bad as those tenants, and deserve the same punishments as they do, if we fail to grow fruit in our vineyard, and more importantly if we fail to be respectful tenants and return that fruit to our landlord.
Sometimes when you really need someone to follow your instructions, but you know they might not get it, and you know they might not be mature enough to take your word for it and just do what you asked, and especially if that person you're giving instructions to doesn't trust or respect you enough to take you at your word, you have to frame those instructions as rules. And, unfortunately, sometimes you know the other person won't follow those rules unless you emphasize the punishment they'll get if they break the rules.
So for example, you tell your kids be home by curfew or you're grounded. You don't do that because you want to be mean, or because you want to see your kids stuck at home and miserable for a week. You do that because you need to know you're kids won't stay out all night and get into trouble, and you know they won't obey you unless there's a punishment they want to avoid. When you grow up, the police tell you click it or ticket. In more words, if we catch you driving without your seatbelt, we're fining you. The police aren't trying to be punitive, or to ruin your day, or to wreak havoc with your money. They're trying to protect you. They want everyone wearing a seatbelt so that you'll be safer if you get in an accident. But they know that a lot of people simply won't bother unless there's a punishment for violating the law.
This is how it was between God and the Hebrews. They were all grown up, but spiritually they were very immature. They didn't know God. Their ancestors worshipped God, but they worshipped idols. God was a stranger to them. They didn't believe in him, and they didn't trust him. They didn't have the kind of close relationship with God where he could tell them to do something, and they would obey just because it was the word of God. There had to be a punishment for disobeying God, and it had to be a rather serious punishment. After all, these people were recently slaves. God had to lay down a rather harsh punishment or the Hebrews simply wouldn't have cared.
And more importantly they were incredibly vulnerable. They were homeless, and living off of nothing but the water and manna God provided them. They were in the middle of the wilderness, and would be for a long time. They had a leader they just barely tolerated, and they didn't know where he was taking them. There were dangers lurking around practically every corner as far as God was concerned.
So, when you take care of little kids that have the potential to do a lot of damage, you have to set a lot of rules. When you drive on a really busy street, or a street that's had a lot of accidents recently, you have to follow some strict driving laws. And when you have a chosen people that you're trying to rescue from slavery and establish in your Promised Land, and there's a lot at stake, you lay down a lot of laws.
The Hebrews weren't ready to be their own free agents yet. They weren't ready to make their own decisions and be autonomous. So they needed rules about every aspect of living until they were ready to live with a little less structure.
Thousands of years later, we don't abide by the vast majority of the Law of Moses, because we have an established relationship with God and we don't need all that structure. But we abide faithfully by our Ten Commandments. Now, remember when I told you to bear with me if you're not much for rules because there's something bigger going on here? That "something bigger" is the covenant between us and God.
The covenant. The purpose of those Ten Commandments is to lay out the terms of our covenant with God.
A covenant is a sacred relationship based on a mutual promise. When you're in a covenant, you're making a promise that you'll do certain things if the other person promises to do certain things. But if one of you breaks your promise, and doesn't hold up your end of the deal, then the other person isn't obligated to keep their promise anymore and the covenant is broken. As a modern example: a marriage is a covenant. When you get married, you promise to love, honor, and be faithful to your spouse if they'll promise to love, honor, and be faithful to you. Marriages thrive when both partners respect the vows they made to each other, but sadly often fail if one partner doesn't uphold their vows. A divorce is often a broken covenant, or one partner saying to the other that because you didn't keep your promise to me, I don't have to keep my promise to you.
In ages past, when our spiritually immature ancestors couldn't grasp the gravity of being in a covenant with God, God had to break it down by saying that there were a bunch of rules his people needed to follow, or they would be punished.
But for us here today, we can hear the bigger picture. We are the bride of Christ, and we are in a covenant with God. And God's promise to us is his Kingdom. Our promise is to show God's love to the world in everything we do and don't do. We're God's people, and we have to act like it. We have to be a vine that grows fruit. That means worshipping nothing and no one but God, and respecting God and his name. That means taking a break from the frantic speed of the world around us, and taking time to renew our spirits. That means respecting people in authority, even when you're a grown up. That means valuing life, respecting other people's property, being good for your word and being grateful for what you have, not jealous of what you don't.
If we can't keep that promise, then we have to understand that God doesn't have to keep his. And if we don't grow fruit in our vineyard, and if we don't offer that fruit back to our own Creator, then there are serious consequences for that. And a lot of people of faith focus on the consequences of not obeying God, because it makes for a strong incentive to keep our promise.
What Jesus talks about in this morning's parable is the consequences of breaking our covenant with God. But we don't have to make that our focus. We don't have to focus on the punishment for breaking the rules. When we grow up spiritually, we can focus instead on the benefits of keeping our covenant with God.
We can focus on the fruit of the vineyard. We can focus on how much better, how much richer, how much more prosperous our lives will be if we dwell in God's Kingdom, with God's blessing and protection over us. We can focus on the joy we will feel in knowing the greatest love there is. We might not get to feel all of those benefits at once right now, but if we wait for it, we will see God face to face in a world that reflects his image.
Amen.
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