Deeper than Words

“Deeper than Words”

Philippians 3:4b-14       Matthew 21:33-46

Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 22, Year A, October 4, 2020

First Presbyterian Church, Sandpoint, Idaho

Andy Kennaly, Pastor

          Jesus shares parables, stories with layers of meaning.  He exposes and confronts the Pharisees and the chief priests who are living in the delusions of spiritual pride.  Jesus critiques society, culture, institutional religion, and points out the hypocrisy, corruption, and lack of spiritual vision of those empowered, who’s attitudes are settling for lesser things rather than the covenant love of God at the core of their story as a people.

The Apostle Paul is doing the same thing, critiquing the limits of institutional religion, politics, law and order, identity, and egoic thinking.  He’s pointing out that his former mindset and worldview no longer work for him as his life experiences order, disorder, and reorder.  Paul is deeply trusting God, and consenting to allow inner transformation, as faith from within wells up.  He’s discovering that experiencing the Ultimate relativizes everything else, including all those categories and identities he once thought were so important.  Paul is discovering that the only thing in life that satisfies our soul is the eternal; the living love of God.

God’s patient, eternal love and creative Spirit is at work in the world, but not just “out there.”  Allowing inner transformation helps us release the limitations of lesser things, and invites the Living Christ to grow our awareness, changing us from the inside out.

On one hand, this morning we read of Jesus critiquing the systems his context presents.  On the other hand, and at the same time, this passage has deeper meaning as the images and actions become metaphors for nothing less than total the transformation of a human life.  Let’s explore these verses as Jesus shares the blueprint for living a spiritual life.

“There was a landowner who planted a vineyard.”  Right away we see the metaphor begin.  The landowner is God, and planting a vineyard involves the creation as an expression of the Living Christ.  At my house, I’m working on a garden, with honey bees, flowers, and using Permaculture Principles to guide the design.  That garden is in many ways a reflection of my personality, values, and hopes.  Every aspect of it ties in with some part of who I am and what my experience has been and seeks to be.  This is God’s vineyard, an expression of who God is, and the character and nature of God’s life.  Every created thing is a manifestation of the Living Christ.

For us this morning, let’s say the vineyard is you, coming into being.  There is a part of you which God has known since before the foundations of the earth, and to give this expression through your human life, you are born. This is your soul, your spiritual being, given a human, bodily experience.

The landowner puts a fence around the vineyard.  Let’s say the fence is your skin, the limits of your physicality.  Unfortunately, the delusion most people succumb to is the idea of separation from everything else.  Your body is independent, and yet its not.  The molecules are infused with everything that has come before, and when your body fades, the particles transform into other expressions of life.

So here we have a vineyard, with a fence around it; a body with skin.  The landowner digs a wine press in it.  This is your heart.  A wine press, that place where grapes are gathered together, everything in the vineyard circulating around this very purpose, to crush grapes into a lovely, red liquid so it may go out from the press and be shared.  The heart pumps blood around the body, in the physical sense.  But in a spiritual sense, the heart is where transformation happens in the unseen.  Grapes get crushed, pressed, and yeast is given so sugars transform juice into wine.  Inner experience, spiritual work, takes place in the heart, where God creates the processes we need to mature and grow in faith.  Sour times, sweetness, in just the right balance, the Spirit, like yeast, entering in, and like a catalyst, calls us deeper into light and life, the very Presence of God in our heart.  The wine press is in the heart of the vineyard.

There is also a watchtower, and for us this is our head, everything above our neck.  Our brain, the sensitivity of thinking and the home of most of our senses, like sight, hearing, smell, taste.  The watchtower is what Paul calls “the flesh” in terms of egoic thinking, our self-made understanding of our identity.  Our ego is helpful, protects us, defines and defends our sense of security and survival.  Like a tower, it’s always on the lookout, judging everything as friend or foe, allowed in or resisted, even destroyed.

There are tenants in this vineyard and let’s say this is our sense of self, but like the parables before this which critique the religious leaders’ lack in living second half of life spirituality, these tenants in the vineyard are the false self, and first half of life spirituality.  The false self is inherently insecure, and the tenants are reactive when the landowner sends slaves to collect the harvest; the false self of the dualistic, egoic mind uses the watchtower but has no wine to harvest, only grape juice.

The landowner, after sending two sets of slaves, then sends the son, the heir.  God gives us the presence of the Living Christ.  The tenants, the first half of life false self, rejects this presence.  “So they seize him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him.”

In Matthew, this is part of the Pharisees and chief priests condemning themselves as Jesus critiques them and they themselves point out not only their judging mindset, their lack of unity with God, but also their blindness to the limitations of the false self, that it does not lead to life’s fullness, and their spiritual pride, their own arrogance, is blinding them.  Their watchtower sees Christ right in front of them, but their response is not welcoming, but wicked, a term they used without knowing it was for them.

The Kingdom of God is given to “a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom.”  Jesus has just shared about the chief cornerstone, the humility of being rejected yet, amazingly, holding all things together.  Producing fruit is part of the order, disorder, reorder, or life, death, life, cycles of spiritual growth.  Fruits are the fulfillment of growing.  As Christ grows in our hearts, our identity is not destroyed in a negative sense, but consummated in a positive way.  In Christ we discover fulfillment.

Jesus asks those religious leaders what the landowner will do to those tenants?  They answer by saying the landowner “will put those wretches to a miserable death.”  But Jesus doesn’t call them wretched, the landowner doesn’t seem interested in killing them.  The only result discussed by Jesus is that the kingdom of God is taken away from the first tenants and given to “a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom.”  No name calling.  No need to destroy.

Vineyards exit to create.  They are for making wine.  The winepress of the heart is where fruits of the Kingdom are crafted.  The patience of this landowner cannot be overlooked.  Three times he sends people to those tenants, likely knowing the outcome but choosing to give anyway.  That the religious leaders would think this landowner would kill the very tenants he’s trying to transform, this only shows their lack of understanding of the nature and character of God, their lack of love.

Planting a vineyard takes time and hard work.  This landowner waits for years for grapes to appear, years for enough growth to happen that a harvest is even possible, timing it just right for picking.  The grapes are crushed but not destroyed.  The patient landowner allows the wine to ferment and age just by sitting and allowing unseen chemistry to mix what’s there with just enough given from those who craft it.  “This is the Lord’s doing” as God helps reveal our True Self, our Union-with-God-Self, growing, deepening, and emerging in our soul.  It’s from this True Self that right action takes place, the “Fruits of the kingdom,” echoing God’s sweetness, truth, righteousness, goodness, grace, peace, and love.  Everything else fades away, told in the story as “being broken to pieces” or “crushed under the cornerstone.”

This parable is a blueprint shared by Christ, the archetype of life, showing us what it means to live, move, and have our being in life as we learn to let go of anything other than the eternal, unbounded and unending love of God, the very God who is both ‘out there’ in and beyond the vast cosmos, and under our own skin within the winepress of our heart and soul.  Let’s live into our True Self in Christ, consenting to the action and activity of God’s Spirit, and embrace second-half-of-life-spirituality that produces the fruits of God’s reign.  Thanks be to God for meeting us in the depths of our soul, loving through our life, and fulfilling our deepest longings in Christ.  May the loving Presence of God hold us now, and always.  Amen.