A Love Song After All
Isaiah 5:1-7
Rev. Richard R. Wohlschlaeger
Swarthmore Presbyterian Church
August 15, 2010
We had a couple of hours before our scheduled departure from New York City. Kathy and I had been celebrating our anniversary in the city last weekend. Lisa was kind enough to preach so that we might have that time together. Theatre, museums, an unexpectedly lovely August afternoon in Central Park, good food, time together – one of our better anniversaries I would say. So what should we do with the last two hours? We chose a Matisse exhibit at the MOMA – the Museum of Modern Art – which was across the street from our hotel. We could do that and still depart on time.
Modern art as you know can often be discordant, upsetting perhaps, jarring in its stark and brutal reflection of contemporary life. And so it was at the MOMA last weekend in a peculiar kind of way. Even before we entered the exhibit we had come to see, I heard it from a floor below. A scream. And then another. At first I thought someone was in trouble, crying out from pain or confrontation with another person. But the guard reassured me that it was merely part of a Yoko Ono exhibit on the second floor, made to be audible throughout the museum. You couldn’t get away from it. Occasionally over the sounds of shuffling feet and muffled conversations would come a piercing scream. Each time it took me off guard, even though I found myself waiting for it like the next bark of a dog in the night. Artistically, I suppose, it was effective. But also a discordant note to end the love song of our weekend.
And then early in the week I ran straight into this morning’s text from Isaiah, a “love song,” the speaker says, but a strange-sounding love song as it continues, a love song ending in a cry. What’s it all about?
Let’s look first at the historical perspective. This writing from the prophet Isaiah comes from the second half of the eighth century before Christ, a time of great turmoil in Israel, a time of war and anguish. Foreign aggressors were having their way with them. But as prophets often do, Isaiah didn’t see the situation as a simple one, good guys against bad guys. Speaking on God’s behalf, the prophet sees a troubled relationship long standing between God and God’s people, chosen and called to live out God’s way in the world.
Walter Brueggemann notes that in times of crisis the Old Testament prophets challenge us to hold certain traits of God together in tension. Such traits as judgment and healing, desolation and consolation, grief and hope. And in the prophet Isaiah we have two parables about vineyards that illustrate that tension. The first of the two parables is the one we have this morning. That one shows God’s judgment, illustrates the feeling of desolation, and brings to bear the experience of grief. I’ll get to the second parable in just a few moments.
But the first one – one that professes to be a love song as it begins – focuses on God’s despair over Judah’s failure to yield fruits of social justice and righteousness. In the background is another cry – a cry God heard over the harsh sounds of repressed life in Egypt. God heard that cry and delivered the people from bondage, expecting from them a life lived in justice and righteousness. Yet in time Israel’s ruling elites proved no less hungry for power and privilege than the oppressors they had known, no less devious in getting their way, and, worst of all, no less heartless toward the poor and disadvantaged than leaders of other nations. So the parable in Isaiah 5 expresses God’s judgment, desolation, and grief over the rotten fruit his lovingly planted and cared-for vineyard has produced. What could be more outrageous than for God’s own vineyard to yield cries of bloodshed and oppression instead of the justice and righteousness it was meant to produce?
The news isn’t good, for the one who has invested so much in this vineyard will sadly remove the protective hedge built around it, stop fighting the losing battle with the weeds and lousy fruit that have taken over, and let nature take its course. For Isaiah this is not the decision of a wrathful God but of a heart-broken one for “[God] expected justice, but saw bloodshed; righteousness, but heard a cry.”
As human beings we can understand such heartache, can’t we? Anyone who has tried her best to help a person or group fulfill its promised potential knows or dreads the desolation that comes from seeing those efforts failed. Anyone who has seen his continued efforts to help turn into unhelpful enabling knows there is no decision more painful than to step back and let loved ones face hard consequences. To those who have known such anguish Isaiah promises that God knows it too.
But that’s something we may have more trouble understanding when it comes to God. Where’s our faithful God, “slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love”? That God is still here, my friends, but like the people of old we in the church today especially need ears that truly hear and eyes that clearly see.
These are undeniably difficult times for much of Christ’s church in the world. There are places that look and feel as if the protective hedge of God’s care has fallen away. Buildings that once inspired reverence have fallen into awful disrepair with too few members to support their upkeep. Denominations that once seemed strong have lost prestige and influence as well as staff and members. Where this loss and pain are being felt most acutely it can be difficult to engage hard questions about how our situation reflects God’s judgment on the Church. On the other hand, it is wishful thinking to believe that the Church can truly heal without facing judgment. For how can there be real healing without acknowledgement and accurate diagnosis of the sickness?
A friend of mine who seeks to be faithful to the Church in which he was reared and in which he continues to find solace and challenge in worship every Sunday morning yet confesses feeling somewhat foolish at times in supporting a body that has dealt so poorly with issues of sexual and other abuses of power by religious leaders and authority figures. How can he reconcile “belonging” to a body that has failed to live up to the prophet Micah’s injunction to love justice, do mercy, and walk humbly with God? Or to Jesus’ great commandment to love God and to love our neighbors as ourselves?
And in our own denomination and others similar to ours we spend so much time and energy trying to draw tighter lines of exclusion and then wonder why fewer people turn up at our doors with hope that they might find refuge.
And there’s the individual dimension as well. In J.D Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, Zooey teaches his sister that all of us are carrying the kingdom of heaven around inside of us, where we are all too stupid and unimaginative to look. God has planted a vineyard within each of us and has planted the choicest vines. From these vines God expects a harvest of sweet grapes of justice and goodness, but time and again we bear only wild grapes of estrangement, injustice, bloodshed, sinfulness, and selfishness. Instead of the pursuit of justice, we pursue pleasure, act selfishly, and shun the call of our neighbor. We live with the illusion that we belong to ourselves and not to God, the one who has created the vineyard and planted every vine within it.
The destruction of the vineyard in the parable may seem harsh and unreal as it appears to portray a willful God who punishes out of vengeance. But bringing the vineyard to its ruin reveals a powerful truth to us. There are consequences to our selfish actions, to our failure to harvest from ourselves a rich crop of goodness, to our failure to use God’s gifts for divine glory instead of our own self-satisfaction, and to our deaf ears to the cry for justice and equality for our sisters and brothers. The ruination of the vineyard signifies our own self-destruction and the catastrophic consequences of our ignorance and delusions. We condemn ourselves to life in a world without windows, to a world that is empty except for ourselves, a world quickly transformed into despair. A barren hell where even the rain is commanded not to fall.
In his time the prophet Isaiah sought justice and goodness. In our culture where the individual seeks to triumph over and without community, that same prophetic spirit must remain alive. We in the church are charged particularly with that task. We must seek the harvest of justice that Isaiah sought by caring for the gifts that God has planted within each of us and by using these gifts for a more just and humane society, a society that makes the owner of the vineyard proud of the fruit of righteousness it produces.
In Galatians, several centuries after Isaiah, but clearly in that same tradition, Paul notes the fruit that a good vineyard yields in abundance. The “fruit of the Spirit,” he says, “is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”
Oh, and that second parable of the prophet Isaiah. It comes in chapter 27, for in the prophet’s perception healing always comes after judgment, consolation always after desolation, and hope always after grief. So in the second parable a new day is promised:
On that day:
A pleasant vineyard, sing about it!
I, the Lord, am its keeper;
Every moment I water it.
I guard it night and day
So that no one can harm it;
I have no wrath.
If it gives me thorns and briers,
I will march to battle against it
I will burn it up.
Or else let it cling to me for protection,
Let it make peace with me,
Let it make peace with me.
In days to come Jacob shall take root,
Israel shall blossom and put forth shoots,
And fill the whole world with fruit.
And that’s the good news for this morning. Amen.