To Hold in Trust
Gospel Reflection Matthew 21:33-46
“…he expected justice, but saw bloodshed; righteousness, but heard a cry!”
When I joined the Episcopal Church, I didn’t know how different it was from the Presbyterian/Reformed Churches that I’d gone to my whole life. Obviously, there was weekly observance of the Eucharist, and I loved the Eucharist, but it took me some time to figure out the other differences. In the Episcopal Church (TEC), we begin our worldview with natural theology, meaning that this just means that a day like yesterday, with the leaves turning yellow and the blue sky right behind them, or these beautiful creatures in church this morning, tells you a whole lot about God and about God’s love. But then, right after I joined TEC came 2003, and our debacles. I’m talking about the Consecration of Bishop Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop in TEC. I’m glad I was a lowly parishioner, barely on the vestry then. It was a hard time for our church. There was this thing that kept happening. Churches that deeply disagreed with this decision, churches that wanted to leave, didn’t get to keep their building. What??
This is one of those Episcopal things. Every church building is kept in trust by the diocese. Even our church. St. Andrew’s does all of the maintaining — replacing the roof (roof roof roof - an homage to the Blessing of the animals happening this morning), the elevator, re-blacktop the parking lot, make sure that the oak trees in our woods aren’t overwhelmed by the invasive bittersweet or blackthorn, replace the HVAC in the sanctuary — for “possible” examples, yet the Episcopal Diocese of the Great Lakes is still holds all of our building in trust. We can’t sell it without permission. We can’t get a loan to, say, fix the elevator, without their permission. It’s held in trust.
So are the vineyards. They’re held in trust too.
“Let me sing for my beloved, my love-song concerning his vineyard, on a fertile hill.” It was just begging for vines, to do what the earth wants to do, to reproduce, to grow grapes, to make wine so the heart is happy. But nothing happened the way it was supposed to. Wild grapes took over. Not the kind of wild grapes that make good additions to beer or ones that make interesting wine. Not muskedines. No. Bad wild grapes, ones that are good for nothing other than compost.
In this story we see the desolation of the one who planted that beautiful vineyard, the end of a love-song. The ruins. The aftermath.
Violence. Bloodshed. Horror. Nothing like the beautiful hope-filled beginning.
This was a story that everyone knew. Like the Three Little Pigs or George Washington and the cherry tree. Jesus’s listeners knew all about the vineyard, about the wild grapes and the desolation.
That’s why Jesus’ story landed so hard. They knew about the bloodshed, and so when Jesus extended Isaiah, it was like a firebomb. Miserable death indeed!
It’s another parable about land, about ownership, about hope lost, and about stewardship. And before we go there, there are a few things.
I wish there was less violence in this parable. Matthew’s gospel is full of violence and I hate it. It’s given me much to wrestle with.
It’s not Jesus who condemns — it’s his hearers who condemn themselves.
This is a parable that has been wrongly used to justify violence against our Jewish siblings. Our baptismal vows remind us of the deeper truth that we all belong to one another.
And a wondering. What would have happened if they’d admitted they were wrong? It might have been that even at that late hour, things could have gone so differently.
But back to what this might mean for our time and our place. So much, I think.
This is a parable of caution for us. It’s one about our fruit, about what’s ours and what isn’t ours, about what we hold in trust, about stewardship, about what God wants God’s people to look like. What is that we own? What is ours?
Since reading Braiding Sweetgrass, I’ve been thinking very differently about land ownership. I’ll tell you what. We Americans, living in late semi-democratic capitalism, can't imagine a world without ownership, especially land ownership. It’s just hard for us to see it in any other way. Robin Wall Kimmerer says that our Indigenous siblings see land in a completely different way, though. It’s so different from anything I had heard before. Land is a relative or an ancestral connection, a living being. Thus, it must not be bought or sold, or even used for its commodities. Land, therefore, is a gift.
I’ve thought about this idea as I own my own house, as I plant things in the backyard, as its loamy soil produces so many tomatoes, as it gives me so much pleasure. I think about this model as I add compost to the beds and plant milkweed and zinnias and eggplant and thyme and mint and worry about the roots of the tree in front of my house that I think is slowly dying.
I think about this as my house turned 100 years old in 1921, right around the time my grandparents were born. I’ve thought about what it means to live in a house and a city and a community that my family has lived in for more than100 years.
What does this mean?
Maybe ownership is overrated. In that crazy and wonderful place where I went to seminary, Sewanee, Tennessee, there is no land ownership. You lease the land for 100 years. But land ownership is only an example. We hold so much more in trust than our land.
Here are some of the things we hold in trust.
Animals. We call ourselves “owners,” but there’s so much more to that story, isn’t there? Isn’t that beautiful bumper sticker “who saved who?” That’s been really true with the animals that have lived in our house. (This morning someone told me that one way to refer to it is pet “guardianship.”)
Our Church, both in the big way as in TEC and in the small way, St. Andrew’s. Even now, we are preparing this church for the next generation, as the generation before us prepared this place for us.
Children. Now I know we would never say that we “own” our children, but it’s all too easy to mistake where we begin and the other ends. I know I’ve wanted undue influence on my children, and I’ve had to let go again and again.
One another. The horror of the Cornell 7 would never have happened if those boys had remembered that we belong to one another, that we’re all “leading each other home.” Even in a marriage relationship, we don’t own one another. We love one another. We encourage one another. We cover one another with mutual affection so that the other can be their best self. We don’t thwart or ask that the other gives up too much of themselves. The same can be said of friendship.
The earth. It does not belong to us. I’m reminded of that petition in one of the forms of the Prayers of the People, where we pray that we may have a reverence for the earth, using its resources rightly and for the common good. What if this was our standard?
Our possessions and our money. Money makes us feel safer. If we have enough, we think we’ll worry less, yet still we panic. All of the gifts we’ve been given, we’ve been given by God in trust. Being generous must be the way forward, as we give of out of our abundance. “All things come of thee O Lord, and of thine own, have we given thee,” to quote the old offering sentence.
Our beautiful and heartbreaking country. What are we passing on to the next generation? Bitter rivalries and stymied government? I don’t know about y’all, but in the past few weeks, I’ve found myself feeling deeply for two women, Lindsay Clancy and Christa Pike, both of whom struggled with mental illness and trauma. I know that working on these problems takes care and focus and may seem impossible, but we can do better. We can do better on so many levels.
I don’t want to judge. But I wonder. If we understood what it means to steward something, what it means to hold it in trust, and I mean we as a culture, we as a society, we as a church, what might we do differently?
To steward something means to love it. It means to hold it. It means to do the best for it, to love that vineyard, to know that it doesn’t belong to us, to hold it loosely without grasping it too tightly, to care for it as the gift that it is.
As a steward, we’ve got to think, not just about our time and place, but about future, about one another, about what is good not only for us, but as our Indigenous siblings say, about the next seven generations.
Today we celebrate the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi, that beautiful saint who saw a way through when others were befuddled. He’s the reason we bless animals, as he preached to the birds, cared for the creepy crawlies, and even loved a terrifying wolf. He said this well. “We begin by doing the necessary, then what is possible, and suddenly, you are doing the impossible.”
We have been given so much, so many gifts, so much to steward, to care for, to love. What a gift it is!