Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost
October 8, 2023

Sermon

Rocky Supinger
Associate Pastor

Matthew 21:33–47

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For a short season of my career I waited tables at an Italian restaurant in Riverside, California. We moved there from Kansas City for my wife, Meredith, to do a medical residency, and I had trouble finding jobs in churches. (I’d been a pastor for about three years). One day I walked into this restaurant and asked if they were hiring, and I started work there the next day.

I’ve never taken so much abuse at a job as I did those seven months as a waiter. It comes from everywhere. Customers, of course. Some of them laugh at you, while others don’t ever look at you when they’re ordering. Some yell. One time a guy waved his hand at me dismissively as I was offering him desert and told me to “beat it.”

I took abuse from the chef, too. He was a Venetian who shouted and waved his arms a lot when he spoke. He also went through a bottle of wine every night. He got fired from the restaurant the night before Christmas Eve when he screamed expletives at me and another waiter in full view of a packed dining room.

Restaurant owners can be abusive toward their staff. In my case, the owner was a burly Italian man named Giampaulo who liked to regale me with tales of his career in the secret police in Padua. Every day he would sit at a table near the window with his friend Joe during lunch eating salami and parmesan, and then he would snap his fingers and order me to bring him espresso with grappa. He changed my schedule on a whim and made me work after hours slinging drinks for an unlicensed night club the restaurant hosted.

I ended up with a lot of fondness for the owner and the people I worked with (except the chef) and the whole experience. But I took a lot of abuse.

I’m sure you’ve taken abuse at a job, and I’m sure some of the abuse you’ve seen is far worse than being told to “beat it” by a half-drunk customer. Some workplaces can inflict grievous wounds on people, physical as well as mental and emotional, even spiritual. I suspect there’s good reason we’re seeing so many labor disputes and strikes these days, from medical professionals to auto workers to television and film writers.

The former employees of the Signature Room, the restaurant across the street here on the top floor of the Hancock tower, could tell you stories of abuse, not only the abuse native to a restaurant, which I experienced only very briefly, but also the abuse of being terminated en masse without warning when the restaurant suddenly closed last week. Some of them worked there for multiple decades, and in a moment their jobs were gone, with none of the legally required warning or sixty days of wages.

I’m sure you have your own stories of workplace abuse.

The ”servants” (I’ll call them agents) of the landowner in Jesus’ parable certainly know something about taking abuse on the job. They work for a person wealthy enough to own land that he does not care for himself. Like a lot of wealthy landowners in Jesus’ day, this person rents his vineyard out to tenant farmers who tend to the vines for a portion of their produce. The rest of it — most of it — is not the tenant farmers’ to keep for themselves, but it belongs to the owner.

The agents’ job is to go and collect. They have a certain power and authority, as the representatives of their boss, the landowner. But, as we see in the parable, they’re also extremely vulnerable. There’s no police protection or even private security. And so they run into an ambush, with tragic results. Maybe they should have seen it coming or maybe they couldn’t have.

The next ones, however, have it even worse, because now their boss knows what he’s dealing with in these tenant farmers, and he sends them anyway. It seems to me this second group is victimized as much by the landowner as they are the tenant farmers. Even though there are more of them than the first group, their fate is the same. To no one’s surprise.

Their experience is almost hidden within the parable. Jesus states it so matter of factly: grabbed, beat, killed, rinse and repeat. So much of our focus is on the wicked tenant farmers that we almost don’t hear the cries of their victims. They won’t be holding a rally in front of the Hancock. We won’t see pictures of their self-made signs bearing their names and how long they worked there.

The landowner’s agents are fed to abusers and never mentioned again.

This is an allegory, obviously, so we need to take a step back to hear clearly what Jesus is really trying to say here. Allegories are effective because they are suggestive, not because they are precise. Like in lots of Jesus’ parables, it’s the big picture of the metaphor that matters more than the specifics.

The vineyard is an immediately recognizable image in Jesus’ time for God’s people, Israel. It goes back to the writings of the prophet Isaiah, which everyone in Jesus’ audience (he’s standing in the middle of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem here) would have understood.

Isaiah chapter five is the “song of the vineyard,” and it voices God’s disappointment over a vineyard. “What more was there to do for my vineyard that I haven’t done for it?” God says. “When I expected it to grow good grapes, why did it grow rotten grapes?” And then Isaiah explains, “God expected justice, but there was bloodshed; righteousness, but there was a cry of distress!”

Everyone hearing Jesus’ parable would have understood that the vineyard is God’s chosen people and that the landowner is God. They also would have recognized in the tenant farmers the religious leaders of the time (they did recognize that!), the chief priests of the temple, the Pharisees, the scribes. Finally, the abused and murdered agents are the prophets, including Jesus.

Say what you want about the meat grinder that is a restaurant, in the Bible nobody takes abuse like a prophet. The prophets of the Bible — mostly in the Hebrew scriptures — are women and men sent by God to speak truth to power, that is, to the religious leaders of their given time, to call them to account.

In the case of Isaiah, the charge is to announce that cities will lie ruined with no one living in them, houses without people and the land left devastated. Who wants that job? How do we think people will respond to that message?

The prophet Jeremiah was appointed by God to “dig up and pull down, to destroy and to demolish, to build and plant.” In Jesus’ time, John the Baptist came wearing camel’s hair and eating locusts, calling people snakes and broods of vipers, talking about the axe being at the root of the tree, ready to chop down every tree that doesn’t produce fruit.

Jesus says himself that prophets have an abusive job. “A prophet is not without welcome except in their hometown,” he says at one point. At another point he says, “It is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside Jerusalem,” meaning the spot he’s standing in right now is more dangerous for a prophet than any other.

Jesus knows well: nobody takes abuse like a prophet. He’s been taking it from these same religious authorities his entire public ministry, and he’s been telling his giddy little followers that it’s only going to get worse — much, much worse.

When we sense God calling us to speak up and to utter some hard truth people don’t want to hear, we surely bear this in mind. We might think twice; most of the prophets in the Old Testament answered God’s call on them by saying “No” first. No, I’m not a good speaker; no, I’m too young; no, I don’t want to. Perhaps the overeager prophet is sensing a call that’s coming from someplace other than God.

For the prophets of the Bible on through to the prophets of our own day, the tendency of the authorities to meet prophecy with abuse is a fact not to be minimized or overlooked. Nobody takes abuse like a prophet.

We have to remember, again, that Jesus teaches in parables, and parables are allegories. We have to remember that the landowner’s agents represent the prophets and the tenant farmers represent the religious authorities. We have to remember that.

The chief priests and the swho made up Jesus’ temple audience that day, though, they didn’t need to remember that. They understood it clearly enough. They got the joke and that they were the butt of it.

They’re right.

We need to remember that the religious authorities Jesus is attacking with this parable, the ones who are just itching to arrest him, they’re ... right. They are correctly picking up what Jesus is putting down. They get it.

Jesus’ disciples notoriously don’t get it. But the authorities, the people Jesus is saying will have God’s kingdom taken away from them, the ones looking warily at these crowds who regard Jesus as a prophet — no, they get it. You can bet they get it.

For several years I taught Bible stories to preschoolers using a Montessori-style method called “Godly Play.” You can find videos of Godly Play lessons online, and if you can find a parable lesson, you should; those ones are my favorite. They tell the story using simple one-dimensional implements like felt and paper cutouts stored inside of a shallow gold box, called a parable box.

The parable boxes all live on a shelf in the Godly Play room, and so the storyteller sits all the children in a circle on the carpet and then goes to retrieve one. She returns to the circle with the box and says, “I wonder if there’s a parable inside this box. This box is the color gold, so something important must be inside it. Parables are very important, so maybe there’s a parable inside it. This box looks a little like a present, and parables are presents, too, so maybe there’s a parable in this box.”

It's all very straightforward and wonderful.

After the storyteller has removed all of the elements of the story from the box one by one and carefully told the story, he engages in “wondering” questions. These aren’t content questions, like, “What three things did the tenant farmers do to the landowner’s agents?” They don’t really have answers at all.

I wonder which part of the parable was your favorite part …

I wonder which part of the parable is the most important part …

I wonder where you are in this parable, or what part of this parable is about you …

I suspect the chief priests and Pharisees must have experienced something like Godly Play as children, because they know exactly who they are in Jesus’ parable of the tenant farmers: they’re the tenant farmers who assault the landowner’s agents and then kill his son for his inheritance.

What about us? Do we know? Do we know which part of this parable is about us? Do we know where we are in the parable? Who we are?

Are we sent by God with a message from God that people won’t want to hear?

Are we resisting or undermining or threatening someone(s) with a message that threatens us, our status or our position or even just our comfort?

We may see ourselves in the story differently in different seasons. Or we may not see ourselves in the story at all yet.

Yet this is what a parable invites us to do: to enter it, to see ourselves within it, even if we don’t like what we see.

Because if we don’t like what we see we can change. We can always change, because we belong to Jesus, who became that cornerstone — the foundational rock holding up an entire building — though he identified himself in the words of Psalm 118 as the “stone the builders rejected.”

How? God. God did it, and it’s amazing in our eyes.

An old commenter on this parable, the sixteenth-century Reformer John Calvin, said that “we should always expect people to hinder the reign of Christ [and I’ll add that we should always pray for the courage to recognize when that’s us], and God will always be victorious.”

God is victorious as we bear fruit for God’s kingdom. Jesus said that the fruit God desires is mercy, not sacrifice. He said that the ones who are blessed are the poor and the meek and the ones who mourn. The prophet John called for fruit worthy of repentance.

So if we feel discouraged or burned out or not good enough — perhaps that is the right place to recognize the fruit that’s being born for the kingdom. Amen.

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Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church