The Rev. Austin K. Rios
14th August 2022: Proper 15
Relationships can be tricky.
This is true when the bonds of relationship are familial, and especially true when talking about the connection between humans and God.
A good portion of the Bible is about illustrating the contours of the relationship between God and God’s people, and about highlighting how that foundational relationship colors the myriad human to human relationships we have on this earth.
How we relate to God affects how we relate to one another, and how we relate to one another affects the way we relate to God.
From the beginning of scripture, we hear of all of creation—including us humans—being created in goodness, and we learn of God’s expectation that all of creation exists to be fruitful and to reflect the larger glory of God.
But that original expectation is soon undermined by our human desire for self-serving power.
In the Garden of Eden, we sacrificed the original fruitfulness embedded in God’s good creation for the empty, forbidden fruit of ego.
Instead of leaning into our nutritive relationship with God, we chose to pursue our own power and the lie that we might become like God by doing so.
Scripture tells us many stories and allows us to enter into multiple generations’ cultural frameworks and understandings.
This question of relationship is one of scripture’s most persistent themes.
We see the theme arising in our readings today, most powerfully in this section from Isaiah called, “The Song of the Vineyard,” and in Jesus’ words to his followers in Luke’s Gospel.
In this love song of the vineyard, the prophet likens God to a winemaker who has taken all the steps necessary to produce exemplary wine.
But instead of producing choice grapes that can be enjoyed and transformed into the best of wines, the vineyard has produced bad fruit—rotten fruit that cannot be eaten nor changed into palatable wine.
This agricultural metaphor is held up so that we might see in it the central challenge of relationship that scripture seeks to heal.
In Isaiah, the winemaker and planter is God, who has set up the vineyard for success.
The people of God—particularly Israel and Judah—are cast as the vineyard.
The good fruit that God expects from the vineyard is justice and righteousness—tangible signs of right relationship among the people—flowing from right relationship with God.
And yet, the prophet laments that instead of such good fruits, the people of God are producing bloodshed, injustice, and other rotten kinds of fruit.
The Song of the Vineyard is a poetic call to repent, to reorient and to restore right relationship with God and neighbors through acts of justice and righteousness.
If the people of God continue to forsake this call and to persist in the way that leads to bad fruit instead of good fruit, then the vineyard will be left to bear the consequences of its own devices instead of living into its call to be the fruitful garden it was created to be.
Jesus references this dynamic of relationship all throughout his ministry, going so far as to refer to himself as the Vine and his Father as the vine-grower in the Gospel of John[1].
And even though his language is harsh in today’s Gospel, at its heart, his call is for the remnant of the vineyard to see this bearing of good fruit as THE most important relationship they can attend to.
That is what his baptism is all about, repairing the breach[2] and righting the relationship between God and humanity, which reorders all relationships among us.
Just as the distinction between good fruit and bad fruit is clear to any wine-maker, so is the distinction between those who endeavor to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with their God[3] and those who do not.
Jesus’s mission isn’t about destroying families or division for division’s sake—rather it is about seeing all relationships as subordinate to this larger baptismal work to which he calls us.
Either we take to the work of producing good fruits, knowing that even our best efforts will fall short of perfection, or we choose the route that leads to broken relationships and bad fruit that makes God’s good creation into a kind of hell for us and others.
Over the last few weeks, we’ve talked about how in order to go about this work that brings good fruit to maturity, we need to reorient our lives on God, forsake all other idols like greed, and model our lives upon the pattern of Christ’s own.
God’s vineyard is planted in our own hearts and replicated on a larger scale in our church and world.
Each day we have an opportunity to let the good fruit of justice and righteousness grow within us and among us as a people through the small but significant acts of mercy and kindness we do.
When we allow those fruits to mature, God can transform them into something greater—the wine of the new creation.
A choice, mature vintage. Well-aged wines strained clear. A sign of faithful divine and human collaboration that tastes of a wedding feast and universal restoration[4].
Be fruitful this week, dear people of God, and choose again and again to multiply the love of God we know in Jesus Christ within this thirsty world.