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March 28,  2004;  The Fifth Sunday of Lent, Year C
    The Rev. Harold "Skip" Comer, Rector

I received the winter edition of Crossroads, a periodical of Seabury-Western Seminary on Wednesday.  Maybe I should give them a call and let them know that spring officially arrived a week ago yesterday. 

What caught my eye was an article on the front page, Anti-Racism, A High Priority at Seabury[i],  “Fulton Porter, an African-American Senior, who is also a physician, reflects the view of the Seabury community when he observes, ‘In the U.S., racism is one of the biggest problems we face.  Until we move forward with the healing process, it will be impossible for the country to live up to its stated values and promise.’”  We would like to believe that after forty some years of battling racism in our country, that the prejudices and hatred toward African-Americans, and for that matter any minority, would have been overcome.  But the reality is that while attitudes have improved, racism is still alive in our country and the Episcopal Church.

Were you aware that our Gospel reading from Luke for this morning was, for a period of time, used by Christians to justify a slave’s obedience to his or her master?  The Rev. Dr. James Kodera states, “Some thought that the owner of the vineyard paralleled the slave owners in the South and said so in order to remind the slaves of the almighty power bestowed upon their masters by God.”  During the Civil War many denominations split over the issue of slavery.  In the Episcopal Church there wasn’t any real soul-searching or debate on the issue; they simply decided to look the other way.  Some in the church even argued that there was no need to bring the gospel of Christ to the slaves, because they did not have a soul. [ii]

But then, all of us know that Jesus did not tell this parable to condone the punishment and killing of slaves, let alone putting someone into slavery in the first place.  It just goes to show how people, if they look in the Bible long enough can justify almost any position or action.  Certainly, today we have a better grasp of the message of Jesus Christ and view scripture through him in order to understand the meaning of Bible passages.

The scribes and chief priests clearly understood what Jesus was talking about when he told the Parable of the Vineyard.  He was talking about Jews; specifically the Jews who were rejecting him.  Aha!  Anti-Semitism.  It’s the Jews who killed Jesus!  We should hate the Jews for killing God’s Son.  After all, doesn’t it say, “they wanted to lay hands on him at the very hour, but they feared the people.”[iii]  We know the story, we’ll hear it again next Sunday; how the Jewish leaders just bid their time until the right moment, and then they got their hands on Jesus and silenced him forever.

As we have all heard, one of the fears expressed by many people with the showing of Mel Gibson’s, The Passion of the Christ, is that the film will revive or stir up anti-Semitism.  I for one, certainly hope that we Christians realize that it was not the Jews who crucified Jesus, but the religious zealots of the Jewish religion.

We are painfully aware of the danger of religious zealots today.  This is the category that many of the terrorist that plague the world fall into.  They identify evil with those of different religions, or race, and then set about to punish or annihilate them.  There is such a movement among the Muslims, and there is such a movement or group among the Palestinians.  And, I dare say there are religious zealots in Christianity.  There are many things that have been done in the name of Jesus Christ, that are just as bad as what the terrorist are doing today.

For Christians the Parable of the Vineyard is like a two edged sword.  In the historical context of the parable, Jesus is not only condemning the chief priests and scribes of Israel, but all Jews, past and present, who did not listen to the prophets sent by God and to his Son.  It is easy to point the finger at them, them meaning not only the Jews, but everyone else who does not listen to and follow Jesus Christ.

Remember, last Sunday I said that some parables are like mirrors?  This is what Jesus did to the chief priests and the scribes.  He held up a mirror and it reflected who they really were, people who had broken the covenant with God and were preoccupied with maintaining the religious establishment the way they wanted it to be.

This same mirror, this parable, is still held up by Jesus, for a new generation of God’s chosen people (Christians) to look into and see who is reflected.  Once again it is easy to point the finger.  We can easily pick out Christians who behave badly, like the Roman Catholic Bishop who was sentenced this week for leaving the scene of the accident in which he hit and killed a lady with his car.   Or the Christians, certainly there are some among the hundreds, who subscribed to the child pornography web site that has been shut down.  The list goes on and on, of Christians not doing very Christian things.  But the mirror is for us, not everyone else.  When you look into the mirror, what do you see?  Is there reflected a faithful follower of Jesus Christ?  Or are there distortions in the reflection, times when we did not listen to God and his Son Jesus?  

These are the times that we “fall,” fall away from God and in a sense are broken into pieces.  In this brokenness though are new possibilities, the possibilities of restoration of our reflection through the forgiveness offered by Jesus Christ.  When we fall from God’s grace by sinning and turning away from him, Jesus is there offering his hand to pick us up and restore our relationship.  Jesus is there to help remove the distortions that we reflect.   I believe that the message of the Parable of the Vineyard is that we should put as much imagination, effort, energy, and action into keeping and maintaining our relationship with God as we do with so many other things in life.  The tenants stopped at nothing to gain what they wanted.  So we should stop at nothing to gain the kingdom.

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