There is a place in the New Testament where St. Paul speaks regarding the relative maturity of Christian believers. He uses the analogy that some believers need to be fed milk while others require meat. Today's readings give us a sampling of both. Interestingly, in the Jewish kosher dietary laws, milk and meat are never eaten together; so I suppose if we were being kosher we would have to make a choice between the two.
When we present our faith to children we spend a lot of time talking about the good things that God does for us. If you are a child—whether you're really young, or even a little older—we want to let you know that God provides for you, God shares with you, and God loves you more than anything. Also we ask you to consider sharing your things and loving others by being kind to them. We ask you to think about what Jesus would do and to consider doing the same kinds of things for your brothers or sisters, your classmates, and your teachers.
For an example of how we live this out we don't need to look any farther than our religious education building to see that we really like to use beautiful, easy to swallow, images to represent God. We use rainbows, flowers, and beautiful scenes of greenery. Our art for children presents an eternal Eastertime. It all goes along really well with St. Paul's letter to the Philippians today where he tells us to have no anxiety but to think on whatever is true, honorable, just, pure, and gracious. It even makes a nice meditation for Respect Life Sunday, which is also today, since it reminds us of how precious and beautiful life is.
However, much to the contrary the Old Testament reading for today seems to present an image of a God with whom many people would be uncomfortable. The image may not be of the God that, frankly, we necessarily would want to present to children. It may be an image that we would be tempted to reject overall or to relegate to the ancient past. He is the God who in judgment tells the people, "Because of your failure I'm going to take away what I've given you and let it fall to waste. I'm going to take the beautiful green vineyard that I've given you and let it be ruined with thorns and briars, and I'm even going to command the clouds not to rain on it." I've got to tell you, when I read this I thought "Oh boy, this isn't going to go over well at all here in Texas."
However, I've also got to tell you that I absolutely love the reading we have from Isaiah today. In fact, literature like this is my favorite from the whole bible. You're probably thinking, "Well, Deacon Dan, that sure tells us a lot about you." I really hope that it does, because this reading and others like it show us that God is a relenting and merciful God. The same God who pronounces judgment, the same God who says in Psalm 95 "I swore in my anger they shall not enter into my rest," is the merciful and relenting God who sent Jesus into the world. He is the same God who so loved the world that he spared not his own Son but sent him to us not to be our judge but to be our savior.
There was a time when Christians would have heard the readings we have today and understood them as a judgment against the Jewish people, who they may have believed were responsible for the crucifixion of the Lord. They might have said, "Oh that part of the bible wasn't intended for us. It's obviously addressing the people of Israel who disobeyed God. After all, doesn't the Lord himself draw a parallel in the gospel making it clear that it refers to the ones who were going to kill him?" However, we might want to consider that the Church fathers understood us to be the vineyard—Israel—in a spiritual sense. We might also think of the vineyard as our world on the whole, and we might want to consider what humanity has done with this garden that God has so graciously given us. If we're honest we're going to admit that it's gotten pretty messed up. We live in a world where God's gift of life really doesn't get a lot of respect.
When I was teenager, before I became a Catholic, I was a Baptist. I was actually baptized at age 12 by my own request in a Baptist church. Afterward I attended a Baptist Sunday school class for a few years. One Sunday morning the teacher of the class asked if we knew who it was that crucified the Lord. Most of the kids said it was the Romans, after all it was a Roman soldier who actually drove in the nails and of course it was Pontius Pilate who gave the order. There were a few who said that the Jews, or maybe the Pharisees, were responsible because they brought Jesus to trial. The teacher then took small mirror off the wall and passed it around asking us to look at the reflection. "The person you see in the mirror," he said, "is the responsible party." However, he continued that it's even more important to realize that God unconditionally loves the person we see in the mirror.
In his book What's So Amazing About Grace, Philip Yancey tells the story of Will Davis Campbell, a Southern Baptist minister who was caught up in the turmoil of the civil rights unrest in the mid-1960s. Campbell was asked by a journalist to sum up the essence of the Christian message in a short sentence. The journalist had a lot of doubts about Christianity and its ability to address the situation. He had seen so-called Christians committing acts of violence and crimes against their fellow human beings. After giving it some thought Campbell gave his reply: the essence of Christianity is that we are all bastards but God loves us anyway. This realization isn't the milk of Christianity, it's the meat.
The message for us really has to do with transformation. That's why we come here in the first place. We come with a hunger in our hearts that only God can fill and we receive Jesus as the imperishable food that leads to an abundant life overflowing with blessing. We come that we might bear fruit, not of our own accord but by grace. We are able to receive only when we realize the depth of our need.
For most of us, trying to prepare the next generation for life in the 21st century, there's a big temptation to have anxiety. Yet God's word tells us to have no anxiety. When I was a small child I prayed for my own will to be done—whatever fanciful things I might have thought of. Needless to say, my prayers weren't answered too often. As I became older and I grew in faith I learned to pray for God's will in my life. I actually prayed that way for a very long time. A lot of stuff happened and some of it wasn't necessarily comfortable. Growing up seems to hurt quite a bit at times.
Recently I have had a realization. Instead of praying for God's will in my life, I pray for something else: I pray for my life to be in God's will. Now, as long as I continue to pray like this I can be assured that my prayers are answered one-hundred percent of the time. No anxiety, just a sense of peace. In the end it's God's vineyard that bears fruit, not ours. However, it's always our choice which vineyard we choose. Grace isn't about losing personal responsibility either, it's about gaining it. Grace is all about letting God be God and realizing that despite all the difficult things we've heard, despite the tough piece of meat we've been handed, we're actually offered something that's really easy. We're offered something that's truly amazing.
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