Cast your mind back to the summer of 2018, when most of Western Europe was experiencing a heat wave and drought. One curious result of the weather, was that the parched land revealed some long forgotten secrets. This was certainly true in the British Isles. In England, beneath the brittle blades of a dry lawn, emerged the design of a dismantled Victorian garden. The outlines of ancient Roman forts became visible in Wales. And in Ireland, from beneath the neatly plowed furrows of a once emerald field, the circular geometry of a 4,500 year old henge showed itself.
Interestingly, many henges (those mysterious circular prehistoric monuments) were not made of stone but were made of wood. And the reason that the ghost image of the henge in Ireland appeared in time of drought was that in those places where the wooden posts had been sunk into the ground and then rotted away, the earth retained more moisture, as if unwilling to let go of the memory of what had once been there.Anyway, it goes to show that you can be sitting right on top of something and not even know it’s there. In many of these recent drought-related discoveries, it was the perspective made possible by drones flying over the landscape that enabled us to see what is right under foot.
Today, the Gospel fulfills that purpose, for it reveals to us that we are sitting on top of something, but we don’t seem to know it’s there. And we need the Gospel to provide us with the right perspective so that we can see what has become hidden to us, and respond accordingly.
St. Matthew doesn’t make it easy. This little passage is full of interesting tidbits that we could focus on. There is Jesus in the Temple: it’s his second and last appearance at the Temple - the heart of Jewish life, and the epicenter of God’s presence. On his first visit to the Temple, the day before, Jesus drove out the money changers. So expectations are high when he returned.
Then there is the question of authority, which is a great question, especially in our own day and age when authority is so widely questioned. Jesus is asked: “By what authority are you doing these things?” Oh, there’s a sermon in that question, maybe even a chapter for my book, “Great Questions of the Bible.”
And then, we get to the Parable of the Two Sons. And here is a where the clue to our hidden secret is to be found... but not, perhaps, where you expect it. For the secret is not to be found in the point of the parable, or its moral, if you will. No, that is pretty easy to figure out. Obviously it was not the son, who said, “ I go, sir,” but who did not go, whose example we are meant to follow. Obviously it was the son who said, “I will not go,” but who ended up going anyway, who did the will of his father. And we should do likewise. OK. We got that out of the way.
But here is the clue that gives us a perspective that enables us to see what we have been sitting on top of, without knowing that it’s there.The clue is this, it’s found in the instruction that the father gives to both his sons. For, in turn, he goes to each of them and says, “Son, go and work in the vineyard today.”
Did you catch it? It’s as if Jesus sent a drone up over Locust Street, so that we could see a pattern emerge from beneath the grid of the streets of Philadelphia, beneath the lawns of Rittenhouse Square. And don’t you see it? Right beneath us, where we have seen only concrete sidewalks, and asphalt streets; a fountain over there in the Square; and manhole covers, and sewers, and light posts, and hotels, and restaurants, and townhouses, and apartments.... it’s been there right beneath our noses the entire time: the sometimes meandering, but always careful rows of a vineyard.
“Oh, please!” I hear you say. “Enough with the flights of fancy, the secret vaults that don’t exist, the islands made of mulberry trees.” You know full well that there were never grapevines planted beneath our pews. That there are no furrows of a long-forgotten vineyard to be discovered and remembered beneath these city streets. Perhaps. But this church was built to remind us of ancient memories. And I have long contended that one of the problems we face in the church is that we too often forget about the vineyard as a model for the church and the Christian life.
Why a vineyard? Because a vineyard is a place of promise and transformation. The rows of vines might be pretty to look at, but they are not planted for their looks. And it’s true that the fermentation process that turns grape juice into wine takes place in the winery. But it all starts in the vineyard. You need a fruitful vineyard if you are going to make wine. And a fruitful vineyard takes a bit of tending. It needs pruning, and the trellis needs to be repaired from time to time, and the leaves of the vines need to be managed, and pests have to be kept away. And of course the grapes need to be harvested, which at many vineyards is an annual community task, with all hands on deck. Some vineyards need to be watered, requiring irrigation. But many of the best and oldest vineyards do not require watering, because their roots go deep into the soil to get the water they need. And these old vineyards, I suppose, are the ones whose memories become apparent to us when we are aided by the perspective of the Gospel.
The point of a vineyard, of course, is to produce wine, which is the stuff of celebration, of sacrifice, and of sacrament. And wine only gets made by a process of transformation, as the sugar from the grapes ferments, turning the juice into something entirely different: complex, flavorful and long-lasting.
The church, of course, is also meant to be a place of promise and of transformation, where things that had been consigned to darkness are bathed in light, where people lost to selfishness turn their hearts to others, where sinners lost in our own devices turn toward the will of God, where the weight of sadness can be turned into songs of joy, where stuff that had been left for dead can awaken to new life!
Inexplicably (to me) the church so often forgets her fundamental ministry of transformation, which is vineyard work, since if you can grow the grapes, all you really need is a barrel and you can make wine. But without the grapes, you can’t get anywhere. It all starts in the vineyard. Any good winemaker will tell you that all good wine is really made in the vineyard, where the grapes are grown.
So, wine-making, is, in a sense, the work of the church; which is to say, transformation is the work of the church. It’s what you should be looking for here, what you should expect for yourself and for others. And it’s what we should all be working for - every single one of us. Which is why it is so important to hear what Jesus is saying when he tells a story that begins with this instruction: “Go and work in the vineyard today.”
Here’s the thing. If you come to church, or tune in online, looking only to be served, looking only to get something that you have come for, expecting the church to be a dispensary of a product made for you, then you are missing out. And these recent months of so much passivity in the life of the church have tended to leave the strong impression that the church could be this: a drive-up window that you come to in order to receive your ration of whatever you think you asked for.
But thank God for this perspective from the Gospel that reminds us what it is we’re sitting in: not just a city, not just pews, not just a comfy seat on the other side of a screen, but a vineyard - a place meant for growth, and for transformation, and for celebration that unfolds year after year, harvest after harvest.
An actual vineyard, of course, produces only one thing: grapes to be made into wine. But the vineyard of the church can yield fruits of many types: voices raised in song for the glory of God; hands put to work to care for the poor and the hungry; minds trained on the scriptures to seek the wisdom of God; hearts given over to others who need care and compassion; time shared with those for whom the rest of the world has little time; labor undertaken for those for whom no one else will work, and who couldn’t afford it anyway; commitment to fight for justice for those to whom it has been denied; and, yes, service in the temple, at the altar of God, whose worship takes place among the vines in every season of the year.
What do you think? A woman had two children, and she said to them, “Go to church!” And they said, “Mom, are you kidding us? We are not going to church.”
So she said to them, “Then go and work in the vineyard!”
And they said, “Mom, what are you talking about? Have you totally lost it? There is no vineyard.”
And the woman said, “There is a whole world out there that’s a vineyard where grapes grow waiting to be made into wine. Some people are going to make the wines of celebration, sacrifice, and sacrament. Other people are going to make wine so they can get you drunk, take advantage of you, and steal your wallet. We need a lot more of the first kind of winemakers, and a lot less of the second.
“Every vineyard needs tending. It needs pruning, and the trellises need to be repaired from time to time, and the leaves of the vines need to be managed to get the most from the sun, and pests have to be kept away. And of course the grapes need to be harvested so the wine can be made.
"But as long as you don’t think there’s even a vineyard out there, who do you think is going to make the wine - God’s servants working for celebration, sacrifice and sacrament, or the fiends who want to get you drunk, take advantage of you, and steal your wallet?
“Now, open your eyes, and go and work in the vineyard!”
The roots of the vineyard of the Lord have grown deep into the ground, so that even when we pave them over, build on top of them, and starve them with drought, the earth remembers, the church remembers. And I, for one, am unwilling to let go of the memory of a fruitful vineyard wherein we can make the wine of celebration, sacrifice, and sacrament. Let us go together, and work in the vineyard of the Lord.
Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
27 September 2020
Saint Mark’s Church, Locust Street, Philadelphia
A worker in the vineyard somewhere in Extremadura along the Via de la Plata, one of the route of the Camino de Santiago de Compostela.