Who Owns What?

Reverend Kirstin Springmeyer

Oct 6

5 min read

Matthew 21:33-46

First,

this parable has one of the most troubling histories

of any passage in the gospels.

This parable has been used,

thoughout Christian History,

to justify some of the ugliest things Christians have ever done.

It has been used to say

that God rejected the Jewish people

and gave the kingdom to the Christian church instead.

That reading

fueled centuries of Christian and anti-Jewish violence.

Violent attacks on Jews by non-Jewish populations.

Ghettos. Expulsions. Bombings. Open Gun fire in synogogues.

The complicit silence of many churches during the Holocaust.

I’m not telling you this

not to make anyone feel bad.

I’m telling you all of this because

when a passage has done that much damage in the world, we, clergy

have to handle it with unusual care.

And Christ Episcopal

deserves to hear the parable

in a way that refuses the harm the church has done with it. Let me tell you what I think the parable is doing and not doing.

We know from last week

Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey.

He has cleared out the money changers,

has been challenged by the religious authorities,

and now, in the middle of that confrontation, he tells this parable.

The landowner plants a vineyard, fences it, digs a wine press, and builds a watchtower.

He does everything a good farmer does. And then he leases it to tenants and leaves.

Notice this:

Every Jewish person listening to Jesus

would have recognized this opening

because it comes straight out of Isaiah, chapter 5.

Isaiah sang a love song about a vineyard—

a beautiful vineyard God had planted—

and Isaiah used it to critique the leadership of his own people.

The failure of justice.

Jesus is not inventing a new attack

on his own people.

Jesus is quoting his tradition,

and speaking Israel’s own hard truth. This is not a Christian condemnation.

Jesus loved his people enough

to tell them the truth,

in the voice of Isaiah they were new and revered.

Jesus was calling his own people,

from within his own people,

to remember whose vineyard it actually was.

All the killing

occured because the tenants thought

the vineyard belonged to them.

All the produce and inheretance is theirs.

The tenants rented the vineyard,

and yet they did not see themselves as lessees.

Sit with the tenants for a moment,

because the parable is about them.

And the tenants had one fundamental problem.

They forgot they were tenants.

And what happens when they forget they are tenants?

They become people

who cannot bear the reminder that they are not owners.

The owner’s son showed up to remind them

that they were stewards of something

that had been entrusted to them,

and they killed him

rather than let go of what was never theirs.

Here is where the parable becomes uncomfortable for us.

Because it is not just about religious leadership

in Jerusalem 2000 years ago.

It is about every human community

that has been entrusted with something

and started to think of it as their own.

It’s about all of us

who have received something from God—

our lives, our gifts, our families, our communities, our faith—

and we have quietly begun

to think of it as ours.

For example, using our God given gifts

for self-importance,

looking down on those with fewer opportunities.

No one chooses their genetic lottery or birthplace.

Our minds and bodies are ultimately rented property;

we are simply caretakers of the life moving through us.

The tenants in the parable are not villians from another world.

They are what any of us can become

when we forget the vineyard

was never ours to begin with.

Jesus, having told the parable,

asks the leaders a question

“When the owner comes what will he do to those tenants?”

And the leaders’ answer is severe.

The tenant will put them through a wretched death.

Jesus doesn’t tell them they are wrong.

He says something harsher than it needs to be,

“Therefore I tell you

the kingdom of God will be taken away from you,

and given to people who produces fruit for the kingdom”.

This is where the Christian tradition

made the mistake I said at the beginning.

We read taken away from “you”

as “the Jewish people,”

and “a people who produces fruits”

as “the church, world leaders, privileged communities.”

And that reading has done terrible things

and is doing terrible things.

Jesus was talking to the chief priests, the Pharisees, the elders naming the accountability of the leaders,

and the passage ends

that they realized he was speaking about them.

Finally, after all the parables the last few weeks,

they finally get it.

Jesus Quotes Psalm 118, a passage they know well, “The stone that the builders rejected

has become the cornerstone.

That line means,

the systems of power

rejected often becomes what God builds on.

The builders rejected Jesus.

In Jerusalem, in that week,

the builders, temple leadership and religious authorities arrest, sentence, demand Jesus’ crucifixion.

He would be rejected,

And that rejected stone became the cornerstone.

That rejection became new life.

Sit with this

because I think it names something important

about how God works.

God does not always build on what the world thinks is foundational. God often builds on what the world has thrown out.

The people the powerful have rejected.

The ideas the influential have dismissed.

The lives that religious leadership

has quietly considered too small to matter.

If you are one of those people this morning—

one of those people who has felt rejected

by systems of power,

one of the people

who has been made to feel

that you do not belong

in whatever room you find yourself in,

one of the people

the builders have quietly thrown out— hear the good news.

God tends to build on stones like you.

The very stones the builders rejected.

This parable speaks to me

because of being involved in my hospital colleage,

Ayman’s detention.

Ayman’s message, a stone who had been rejected,

is being used by God to talk about justice,

and sharing religious similarities

in Christian, Jewish and Muslim faiths

instead of the differences.

This parable reminds me there is a call to everyone of us, every community,

every church,

to remember we are tenants and not owners.

We were planted.

We did not build ourselves.

We were called.

We did not credential ourselves.

We were welcomed.

We did not earn our seat.

We are tending something that belongs to God

and one day the owner will ask us for the fruit.