St. Andrew’s Pictou, October 2^nd 2005 World Wide Communion Sunday

 

No Escape

Exodus 20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20

Matthew 21:33-46

 

There is no limit to the number of ways that we human beings try to escape the natural ongoing process of life. We will do anything that we can to escape taking responsibility as mature adults for our personal actions and for being a member of life and society.

 

We will take drugs, get drunk, devour video games, TV, pornography, expend great energy in sports, (ironically mostly watching sports) drown ourselves in work (men are exceptionally good at this addiction) drown ourselves in sex or gambling, or even commit suicide, rather than face life squarely in the face, and live it as the powerful and authentically unique human beings God has created each of us to be.

 

Somehow in the church, we have failed in the task of presenting to people the great transcendent realities of life that permit people to respond in life-giving ways.

 

If we want the Christian faith to be understood as a source of meaning, hope and healing to address human issues, we have to look at how it got there; how Christianity came into being.

 

No committee of presbytery or General Assembly could ever in your wildest dreams come up with the Ten Commandments.

 

I wrote and article a few years ago for The Presbyterian Record and in it I said that one of our sins was “form over substance.” We are obsessed and consumed over “how” we do things rather than “the result.” They refused to print it. Today, we are looking at “substance.”

 

Moses goes up the mountain by himself and with deep humility and reverence in his encounter with God, came back with The Ten Commandments, etched on stone tablets.

 

The Ten Commandments came to us from a transcendent God, (something beyond ourselves) not a politically correct committee, yet these Commandments have in the past, and presently form the basis of the moral and ethical code for billions of people.

 

The big issue here for the Commandments is that they impose limits on us on our relationship with God and with other people; they say that in order for us to function personally and as a society, the transcendent God says that we need to have and define our limits.

 

Take any commandment you want and see where we have gone in 3500 years:

You shall have no other Gods before me. (Cocaine, Heroin, Entertainment Religion)

You shall not steal. (Enron, The Sponsorship Scandal.)

You shall not kill. (We read about murder every day.)

You shall not commit adultery.

You shall not covet anything of your neighbour’s,

… and you will see that all of those boundaries and limits are gone and have been substituted with another new more modern Commandment: “Anything goes.”

 

Do not romanticize the past. Do you think that these people were any different than people are now? The people didn’t want to hear what God had to say, they said to Moses when he brought the Commandments to them, “You speak to us and we will listen, but do not let God speak to us or we will die.”

 

The people were just like people today, they wanted to escape life’s responsibilities; in moderns times we just have so many more ways of supposed escape today than they had.

 

But Moses told them they didn’t have anything to fear, God just didn’t want them to sin.

 

Sin is what separates us from God, others and self.

 

So the purpose of the Commandments was for us to be at home with ourselves, our neighbour and God; to achieve communion. Doesn’t sound all that bad, does it?

 

God’s intention is Communion: with self knowing that you and I are the beloved of God, that we have other people who love us, and we have intimacy with God.

 

But I hope that you can see the amazing irony of humanity: we are trying to escape from the very thing that is best for us, individually and corporately.

 

But… there is no escape… from life. (We are not giving suicide any weight as an option.)

 

As long as we are here and breathing, there is no escape: life is here and absolutely demands … to be lived.

 

Even if you have enough money to drink yourself into oblivion: “detox” awaits. The choice is sobriety or death.

Even if we have brutalize our bodies and minds with drugs: body breakdown, isolation, and aging await. Eventually we do have to grow up.

Even if you drive yourself and your bodies to win the highest sports achievements, you have to retire in your 30’s.

Even if you kill yourself working, when you die every single penny you have goes to someone else.

 

We can burn ourselves out in any number of ways, but we will and do find that only the communion of love in our lives matters: communion with God, self, and others.

 

For those of you who think of “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild” you might find this “Parable of the Wicked Tenants, “quite a jolt to your understanding.

 

The prophet Isaiah had used the vineyard as a metaphor for “the people of God,” and Jesus uses the vineyard owner (God) as showing disappointment at the lack of response from his people and develops the disappointment into a parable.

 

An owner leases a vineyard to his tenants and then goes traveling. When he sends his servants to collect the expected produce they experience violence and one is brutally killed by the tenants. The owner tries twice with the same brutal results. Now the owner sends his son expecting that they will surely honour him, but in fact, they see killing his son as surety that he will not inherit the vineyard, leaving it to them. So they kill him too.

 

The master teacher Jesus then asks a poignant question: “Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do with the tenants?”

 

Not realizing that they were the tenants in the story, and that they were offering their own sentence for their own crimes committed, they said, “He will put those wretches to death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at harvest time.”

 

Bingo! The crowd just gave a judgment by themselves, about themselves, and on themselves.

 

Jesus seized the moment: “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.”

 

A vineyard produces grapes which are used to make wine: a source of wealth.

 

So if you and I are to produce “fruit” in the kingdom of God, what is it that you are I are to produce?

 

“Fruit” was traditionally seen as what Israel owed to God, being God’s people;

“fruit” was God’s righteousness.

 

(Is love, God’s righteousness? Isn’t love then, “a justice issue” for each of us?)

 

Does not the fruit carry the seed to continue life? If we stop producing the fruit, we stop the process of life and work against God’s righteousness. Does not love and life propagate more?

 

We can each use this parable to assess our own religious/spiritual life.

 

There is no escaping the fact that we are to produce life and to support all of the things that give life: parenting and teaching children, friendship, acceptance, welcome, forgiveness, sharing, love and healing, so that we can experience communion.

 

We can burn ourselves out in many ways as was mentioned above, and even loose the gift of life we have each been given to receive.

 

God’s bottom line intention for us is “communion:” with ourselves, our neighbour and with God in Christ who offered himself this bread and this wine for our spiritual use and edification.

 

The symbolic act of receiving the bread and wine today parallels our own growth and maturity being fed on “the Word of God” for everlasting life.

 

There is no escape: we are drawn inevitably to this table, as we are drawn to life, itself.

 

“O taste and see that the Lord is Good.”

 

AMEN                                                             Rev. Alan Stewart