What to Do with Sour Grapes

WHAT TO DO WITH SOUR GRAPES Isaiah 5:1-7; Matthew 21:33-46 A sermon preached at First Presbyterian Church by Carter Lester on October 8, 2017

A football coach has led his team to new heights of success. There are some real stars on the team and the victories are piling up. But there is a sourness beneath the sweet success. The athletic director learns that there is considerable hazing of younger and less talented players, with the head coach’s knowledge. Even worse, there have been a number of sexual assaults perpetrated by some of those stars, but the head coach has refused to discipline his stars. The athletic director decides he must fire the coach. “Success on the field is great – but not at the expense of such rottenness at the core,” the athletic director declares. Can you blame him?

Two parents work, scrimp, and save so that their daughter can attend college.

They gulp when they see the cost of her first choice, especially when compared to a smaller school that would offer her a generous scholarship. But they want what she wants and they send her off with great joy and hope. At school, the daughter finds time for the parties, but not for classes. There is a trip to the hospital for alcohol poisoning and her grades are abysmal. The parents tell her at the end of the year that one more semester is on their dime – but if there is not significant improvement in her grades, then she is on her own. They were glad to invest in her education, but there is a limit to how much they will spend if she doesn’t do her part. Who can blame them?

An ancient vineyard owner pours his labor and money into a new field. Stones are cleared. Choice vines are planted. At considerable expense, a permanent tower is erected where the owner can oversee the vineyard by day and a watchman watch over it by night. At more expense and labor, a large vat is hewed out to receive the harvested grapes. But after all of that time and expense, the grapes are never sweet, 2 only sour. They are good for nothing. The owner gives up on that field and lets it turn wild again. Who can blame him?

That is the question that the prophet Isaiah essentially poses here in chapter 5, in the first passage, we heard today. It really is a rhetorical question for there is really only one answer: no one. No one living at the time of Isaiah would expect the vineyard owner to keep on planting grapes if the yield continues to be sour despite all of his investment. It would be foolish to do otherwise.

This being the Bible, we know that the prophet is not just talking about vineyards and vineyard owners. No, the vineyard is Isaiah’s home country and he is speaking to the Israelites. God has chosen the Israelites. God has invested in them, delivering them from the Egyptians, bringing them to their own land, and watching over them in this new land, protecting them from outside enemies. But the leaders trust more in the alliances they can make with outside powers than they do in God. Instead of looking out for the poor as God has commanded, the rich prey upon the poor. Instead of doing justice, those with power abuse the powerless.

God is faithful and loyal, Isaiah tells the people, but there are limits. In light of all that God has invested in these people, and in light of the sour fruit they have produced, who could blame God if God permits the Israel and Judah to be overrun by their enemies?

Jesus also uses the image of the vineyard in Matthew 21, the second passage we heard. The setting is Jerusalem and the last week of Jesus’ life. Jesus knows what is going on, of course. He knows that his enemies among the religious and political elite 3 are encircling them. His arrest and execution are only days away as he tells another story about a vineyard. The story in Matthew 21 is Isaiah 5 on steroids.

This time the focus is not on the grapes but on the tenants. And these are wicked tenants. When slaves come to collect the rent, the tenants kill them, one after another. Then when the owner sends his only son, the tenants kill him too. Similar to the prophet Isaiah, Jesus tells the story in a way that can only evoke one response.

“Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” Jesus asks the crowd. With one voice they respond: “He will put those wretches to a miserable death and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time.” Who can blame the owner?

The religious leaders who stand at the edge of the crowd listening to Jesus are no dummies. They know he is talking about them. Jesus is comparing them to the wicked tenants. Here is another reason they can use to justify having Jesus arrested and silencing his voice forever.

These two vineyard stories are powerful stories and are well-told by Isaiah and

Jesus. But they have often been misunderstood and misused. These passages and others like them at times have been used to justify and celebrate the replacement of the

Jews by the church as God’s chosen people in a way that fueled the fires of anti-

Semitism. A disturbing number of Popes, bishops, and Protestant leaders have then gone on to say that because the Jews rejected and killed Christ they were a reprobate people, deserving of condemnation and even violence.

But such an interpretation of this passage is wrong at two levels. First, the Jews are not rejected in either passage. Isaiah calls for repentance and prophecies defeat if 4 the people do not repent. But that defeat is not a sign of God’s permanent rejection.

The Israelites remain God’s people, and the defeated exiles eventually will return and rebuild Israel.

And Jesus is not comparing the wicked tenants to all Jews. He is not rejecting all of the Jews – only the powers that be who undermine his message and attack his authority. Jesus was a Jew after all, and all of his first disciples were Jews.

But second, at a deeper level, we have to recognize that these passages are primarily addressed now to the church, rather than to Jews. Religions, including

Christianity, are at their worst when they aim passages of judgment towards others and ignore themselves. When they do so, they fall to the temptations of self-righteousness and scapegoating of outsiders. That is exactly what Jesus criticizes in the religious leaders of his day. No, Jesus wants us to be aware first of the log in our eyes before we take out the speck in someone else’s eyes.

So then, let us aim these passages first at ourselves by asking, in light of God’s investment in us, in light of the cross and Jesus’ death for us and our sins, is God getting a good return on God’s investment? Are we bearing sweet fruit – or sour grapes? Are we doing justice – or ignoring the cries of the powerless and downtrodden?

When it comes to speaking about God’s judgment, there are many Christians and many branches of the church that like to treat God’s judgment in binary terms: are you saved or not? Are you going to heaven or hell? Will God give you a thumbs up – or thumbs down? 5

But as a friend once said, “Jesus is not just interested just in converts. He wants disciples.” Jesus loves us as we are – but Jesus loves us too much to want to leave us where we are. God’s judgment is more than a simple thumbs up or thumbs down decision. God’s judgment is the purifying judgment of a refiner’s fire that burns away all that is impure and contrary to love and justice. God’s judgment in Jesus Christ is the discriminating judgment of the vineyard owner that roots out vines that fail to produce good fruit, because there is no place for sour grapes in God’s kingdom.

At the cross, Jesus did not just die for our sins. Jesus also died that we might live new lives. Or, in the words of the theologian Viroslav Volf, “the cross is not forgiveness pure and simple, but God’s setting aright the world of injustice and deception.”1 God’s cleansing judgment unmasks deception, sets things right, and rebalances the scales of justice by lifting up those who have been ignored, oppressed, and mistreated. God judges, but for the purpose of justice and restoration.

If we are the vineyards, how will we be judged? Consider the fruits that Paul lists later in Galatians: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Are we bearing these fruits? Are the lives we are living worthy of God’s investment in us? What needs to change so that we are more fruitful?

Are we willing to be pruned of all that prevents us from bearing those fruits?

Or consider the cry of the prophet Isaiah for justice. Justice in the Old and New

Testaments is caring for the least of these, for those on the margins of society, the poor, minorities, aliens and refugees, the old, the young, and the vulnerable. How are we doing here? How are we working for justice – in the world and in the United States to 6 be sure – but especially in our own zip codes? Where do we need to change to be fruitful, to be more just?

When it comes to doing justice here is something to note: the quest for justice always begins with listening and paying attention, because God’s justice requires us to listen to those others are ignoring. We have lots of people shouting their opinions these days, whether on television, the internet, social media, or in face to face conversations.

But to do justice we have to be willing to close our mouths and open our ears – and minds. We have to be willing to learn something new so that we can do something new.

For example, no man fully knows what it is like to be a woman in the workplace.

No white person knows fully what it is like to be a person of color in our society. No person who has never worried about having food on the table fully knows what it is like to be unsure if next week there will be food on the table or a roof over your children’s heads. No person with full use of eyesight, hearing, mobility, or memory, fully knows what it is like to be physically or mentally challenged. We can only learn by listening before speaking, setting aside our prejudices and opening our minds to new ways of thinking, and opening our hearts with compassion and a willingness to grow and change.

Doing justice, bearing good fruit will require change, and changing can be hard.

It is usually easier to remain the way we are, to hold on to the same assumptions and prejudices, to keep acting with the same bad habits. Change can be painful – but that pain is like the pain of surgery that makes us feel worst at first so that we can be made well in the long run. 7

Isaiah 5 and Matthew 21 are passages of judgment. Jesus did not come that we might escape judgment, the discerning and sorting out by God to put things right. Jesus came and died and was raised so that we might be transformed. Because this is what

God’s love does. As Frederick Buechner has written, Jesus is our judge, which means that “the one who judges us most fully is the one who loves us most fully…Christ’s love so wishes our joy that it is ruthless against everything in us that diminishes [that] joy,” in us, or in any of God’s children.2

What do we do when we read these passages and recognize ourselves in these vineyards and these tenants? We fall on our knees and see where our grapes have been sour, where we have failed to bear good fruit. We fall on our knees with regret, penitence, and humility. But we do not stay on our knees or wallow in guilt. Because

Jesus has come down to raise us up.3

Friends, we have been saved. Let us be sweet fruit worthy of the investment of love that God has made in us through Jesus Christ. Let us go forth and recommit ourselves to serve God, love others, and work for justice! Amen. 1 Viroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), 298. 2 Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 48. 3 Suggested by the words of Carolyn Sharp, “Isaiah 5:1-7: Exegetical Perspective,” in Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary,, Year A, Volume 4 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2011), 127.