Fifth Lent

              March 25, 2007

     Charles was going to inherit a sizeable fortune when his sickly, widower father died.  He decided he needed a woman with whom to enjoy the inheritance.  Going to a singles’ bar, he spotted a woman whose beauty took his breath away.

     “I’m just an ordinary man,” he said, walking up next to her, “but in a week or two, my father will die and I’ll inherit 20 million dollars and would like to have someone with whom to share it.”

     The woman went home with Charles, and the next week she became his stepmother.

     Men will never learn that money cannot buy love.  It can buy misery; or, at least, rent it.  Shades of Anna Nicole.

     Lots of money and all kinds of material things pass from one generation to the next all the time.  The estimate is that over the next generation, as the baby boomers reach old age and pass on, something approximating nine trillion dollars will be inherited just in our country.  Those who are patient won’t have to marry for it or kill to get it.

     The Parable of the Unfaithful Tenants is about greed, deceit, not keeping a contract, and being unfaithful.  It is a parable Jesus used to teach some things about the nature of human beings and about the nature of God.  It begins with a reminder that the vineyard has an owner.  Everyone who has worked in the past, is presently working, or who may work in the future in the vineyard is a tenant.  It is not ours.  This is the Father’s world.

     Jesus told this parable to help us know at the deepest possible level the true meaning of the word “remember.”  Remember, first of all, that our life in the vineyard is a privilege.  We did not create the vineyard.  We have simply inherited clause in the covenant made by and between the owner and some original tenants.  It is neither our right nor a plausible excuse to say that we can’t be responsible for any debts other than those incurred by us personally.  That excuse is seen from time to time in the newspaper after the breakup of a marriage, one that obviously had too many credit cards.  It won’t work in this case.  We are inheritors of the covenant, whether we like it or not.

     The owner does not, and never did, stand over the tenants with a whip, making the tenants live up to their share of the bargain.  The owner continues to take a great risk in loving both the vineyard and the tenants enough to leave them in control of things.  The owner knows that love that is not based squarely on freedom is not really love at all.  Genuine love is always risky.  The owner allowed and continues to allow, indeed the owner encourages, the tenants to exercise personal freedom in using their talents and gifts while working in the vineyard.

     Remember that we cannot distance ourselves from the tenants who failed to have ears to hear when the messengers were sent to claim for the owner what was rightfully the owner’s.  We cannot plead ignorance or innocence from our role as accomplices in the death of the heir, just because we live on this side of the resurrection.  We were there plotting his death right alongside all the others.

     We also must remember our participation in the breaking of the covenant.  The sin of the tenants was that they refused to give the owner what had been previously agreed upon and what had been clearly spelled out in the arrangement.  The tenants, both then and now, wanted to control what was, and still is, the owner’s right to control.  Sin, the word that makes moderns blush and stumble and go into all kinds of emotional and spiritual gyrations, is always the failure to acknowledge and give the owner center stage in life.  It is always the end result of putting ourselves in the center of the universe and playing God with our own lives and the lives of other tenants. 

     The third thing this parable is intended to teach us is that we need to remember our responsibility.  The owner is definitely patient, but not patient indefinitely.  A day to settle accounts will come.  We will be called upon to give account of our stewardship and such accounting will have little to do with how, where, or for what we spent our money.  It will deal with the quality of our relationship to the other tenants, our concern for all the other life-forms in the vineyard, and our relationship to and faith in the owner of it all.  We may have to confess and ask forgiveness that some of our decisions put us in league with the evil powers of this world that corrupt and destroy the creatures of God.

     Of course, there is much good news in this parable.  It deals with the patience of the owner.  He does not strike us down at the first sign of rebellion.  He comes to us in many forms, many ways, making appeal after appeal for us to remember that it was and still is his vineyard. 

     The words from our baptismal covenant offer us the chance to accept our responsibility each time we renew them.  “Do you turn to Jesus Christ and accept him as your Lord?”  “Do you put your whole trust in his grace and love?”  “Do you promise to follow and obey him as your Lord?”  It is as we say, “I will, with God help,” that we acknowledge the truth about ownership and stewardship.

     Care must be taken to remember whose world this is.  The Parable of the Unfaithful Tenants is a gift to help us do that crucial kind of remembering.  It is told to help us know that we occupy a position of privilege, that we are participants in the fallen human condition, and that, Christ working in and through us, we may meet our responsibility. 

     The owner visits us again this day and makes an appeal to us in the broken body and shed blood of the heir.  Do we greet him with joy and acknowledge his claim upon all that we are and all that we have and all that we shall become? 

    Or do we reject his appeal, continue to live as if it all belongs to us, and forget that others will inherit what we have left?  We hand on to them an intact, well-used covenant or we turn over a tattered, shredded mess that leaves them shaking their heads.  It is both our joy and our burden that we are loved enough by the owner of the vineyard to be allowed to decide.  Amen.