'Jesus said, “Listen to another parable. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a watchtower. Then he leased it to tenants and went to another country. When the harvest time had come, he sent his slaves to the tenants to collect his produce. But the tenants seized his slaves and beat one, killed another, and stoned another. Again he sent other slaves, more than the first; and they treated them in the same way. Finally he sent his son to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’ But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, ‘This is the heir; come, let us kill him and get his inheritance.’ So they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him. Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” They said to him, “He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time.”
Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the scriptures:
‘The stone that the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone;
this was the Lord’s doing,
and it is amazing in our eyes’?
Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom. The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls.”
When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they realized that he was speaking about them. They wanted to arrest him, but they feared the crowds, because they regarded him as a prophet.'
--Matthew 21: 33-46
I started this blog in 2014 as a repository for my sermons, so that folks could read them if they missed a Sunday. For anyone who may be new and isn't familiar with my favorite hobby, the name of the blog - Father Prime - and its subtitle - "Wishing and working for a world transformed." - are references to the Transformers, those robots in disguise from the 1980s that turn into planes, cars, animals, and a whole host of other things. More than once they've been helpful in my preaching and teaching as a priest, and this past Sunday was another such example.
The very first commercial for the Transformers back in 1984 began with the line, “It is a world transformed, where things are not as they seem.” I’d like to think that that line, the idea of transformation, the potential for change, got lodged way down deep in my subconscious as a child of the 1980s and eventually led me to a calling, a lifestyle in which I remind myself – and others – that human eyes don’t always see the world the way God does, that there is more to this world than meets our own eyes.
The way things seem is not always the way things are. This, I believe, is what Jesus means when he tells us that we must have eyes to see and ears to hear, to see, hear, and know that which is in harmony with God’s own dream for this world; a dram of shalom (peace) and hesed (justice). To be sure, Jesus had the eyes to see and ears to hear; Jesus saw that this was, in fact, a world transformed by what he called the Kingdom of Heaven, which, as he said, has already come near, has already given us a glimpse of the God’s dream of peace and justice, even if it hasn’t yet reached its fulfillment.
An individual who understood on a deep level that the Kingdom was here, and who dared to see the world with a kind of transformed eyes, was Francis of Assisi, in whose honor St. James' Church held its first Blessing of the Animals this past Sunday. Last week the parish brought back its Healing Eucharist at noontime on Wednesdays, and – wouldn’t you know who won the pony? – it just so happened to be the Feast of St. Francis that day. We heard once more the story of Francis' extraordinary life: he was born into a wealthy merchant family, heard God say ‘rebuild my church” and thought he should use his money to literally repair and restore a damaged building, but then when he realized God meant the church with a big C, he gave away everything he had and lived the nomadic life of a bootleg preacher. Francis stirred up trouble, like Jesus before him. He saw things differently; saw them the way God sees them. He called the sun his brother and the moon his sister. He preached to the birds and brokered peace between the villagers of Gubio and a wolf that was terrorizing them because it was hungry. Francis and his sister Clare modeled something for us, which is so radical in its simplicity: that everything belongs.
An image of Francis of Assisi from Camberwall Parish.
Richard Rohr followed in Francis’ footsteps and became a Franciscan friar and has written dozens of books and while he doesn’t have a blog like a I do, he sends out a daily meditation from the Center for Action and Contemplation, which he founded in Albuquerque in 1987. One of his books is called Everything Belongs, and he says in it that “only when we rest in God can we find the safety, the spaciousness, and the scary freedom to be who we are, all that we are, more than we are.” This comes when we see the world with the same eyes as a Francis, as Jesus, who reminds us in this parable that that which we may reject, that which may seem unworthy or unlikely, is, in fact, a new foundation on which God is doing something beautiful and holy.
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Franciscan friar and author Richard Rohr, who founded the Center for Action and Contemplation.
The familiar line “the stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone” comes from Psalm 118. Hearing the story in the context of Jesus’ confrontations with the religious authorities, we may be prone to think that the parable’s saying that, while the authorities had rejected Jesus, God had not, and that therefore God had taken the gift of the Kingdom – the vineyard in the parable – away from them, the “wicked tenants.” Yet we must resist any urge to read such judgment here. The idea that God took something away from the children of Israel and gave it to the followers of Jesus is a heresy called supersessionism, and it is a harmful, sinful way of thinking, though too many preachers have preached on this parable suggesting just that. On behalf of such preachers, I am sorry.
At the core of this parable isn’t an argument between religious traditions but is a lesson about how some, especially those in positions of power and authority, can be so blind to not see how God can and does transform this world, taking that which seems unimportant and making it central.
The Resurrection of Jesus is proof enough that God can and does do this, but it’s not just in such bold, outward expressions. Living fully into this transformed world is both an inner and outer journey and requires both inner and outer work. In my experience, church folk are great at the latter, but it’s the former that’s a bit tricky, the work on ourselves from the inside-out. And so, just as Jesus illustrates for the religious authorities God’s ability to take a rejected stone and make it the corner for something new and majestic, what parts of yourself have you rejected that God might be using to transform your life and the lives of those around you?
What aspects of ourselves, of each other, do we most discard and cast off? What character traits seem unusable, unreliable? What if the rejected parts are meant to become the cornerstone of our next beginning?
To trust God fully is to trust the totality of our lives, the complex layers of each of us, and all of us together. Every single one of us has something to offer, in spite of our feelings of inadequacy. We are God’s partners in creating this holy realignment, this world transformed. Rejection itself is rejected! Because when we reject ourselves and believe we have nothing to offer, nothing anyone would want to hear, no gift that could do any amount of good, we reject Christ who dwells in us and among us. To love Christ, and to love everyone around us, begins with loving ourselves and realizing that every part of us belongs.
That radically simplistic principle is at the core of our theology of stewardship, not as something required or forced upon us like dues paid to a country club, but instead as something we do freely, as a way of showing our gratitude for what God has done and will do, through our time, our talents, and, yes, our treasure. Stewardship isn’t a season of the church, but a way of being year-round. And it starts with realizing that even when we think we have nothing to offer, God says otherwise. When we feel like the stone that has been utterly rejected, God has a use for us. We should not always be so sure that we know how everything will turn out, when God has proven time and again, that things which were cast down are being raised up, and that what was once old is being made new, and that all things are coming to fulfillment – being transformed – by Christ, who is alive in us and through us, and calls us all to see our that no matter who we are, no matter how much we reject the parts of ourselves that we deem unworthy, God calls us to tend this vineyard, build this Kingdom of justice, love, and mercy, knowing that we all have a place and everything and everyone belongs.
