PASTOR'S MESSAGE

 

God’s Vineyard

Isaiah 5:1-7 

A man was shopping in a large supermarket one day, when he approached a very beautiful young woman and said, “Excuse me, miss, but could you help me, please?  You see, I’ve lost my wife somewhere here in the supermarket and I can’t seem to find her.  Can you talk to me for a couple of minutes?”  “Why?” asked the young woman.  “Well,” said the man, “because every time I talk to a beautiful woman, my wife appears from out of nowhere.”

Apparently that wife felt like she had to keep her husband on a rather tight leash, keep an eye on him, lest he stray and do something he shouldn’t.  In a similar way, that’s how God felt about the Children of Israel in our text for today.  And with good reason!  You see, our text is like a love-song about God and His people.  In a way, it’s like one of those classic Country/Western songs about disappointed love, a ballad about the jilted lover.  For although the Children of Israel were God’s beloved bride, they often strayed away and did what they should not do.  That’s the point behind the Song of the Vineyard.

According to Isaiah, God is the owner of the vineyard, the Vintner or Gardener, if you will.  And the people of Israel were the vineyard itself.  Notice how tenderly and lovingly the Gardener cares for His vineyard.  We’re told that the ground in Palestine is very rocky.  So the first thing He does is clear away all the stones, so that He can then plough the ground.  Next, with those huge rocks and boulder He builds a great stone wall around the vineyard to protect the vineyard from wild animals and predators like wolves or coyotes.  After that, He erects a tall watchtower in the middle of the vineyard, from which the vines can constantly be guarded, so that none of the fruit is stolen.  And finally after all of that loving care, He would plant the grape vines.  They were usually placed in rows ten feet apart, and as they grew the clusters of grapes were propped up with forked sticks to keep them from being trampled underfoot, kind of like how we use a trellis nowadays.  That was the kind of diligent care that the Gardener provided for His vineyard.

Dear friends, what a beautiful picture that gives us of the kind of diligent, loving care that God our Heavenly Gardener provides for you and me.  Like a Vintner, He has planted us as the choicest of grape vines.  In other words, He created us with an amazing body and a marvelous soul, to be in communion with Him.  As Martin Luther said in his explanation to the First Article of the Apostle’s Creed:  “I believe that God has made me and all creatures.  That He has given me my body and soul, eyes, ears and all my members, my reason and all my senses.”

But thankfully, God did not stop there.  He didn’t just plant us, and then walk away and leave us on our own.  Instead, as Luther said, “He still preserves us.  He daily and richly provides me with all that I need to support this body and life.”  He not only removes the rocks and stones, the dangerous obstacles and impediments to our faith and life, but He builds a great wall of love around us to protect us from harm and danger, daily giving us clothing, food and shelter to take care of all our needs.  And He guards us from His watchtower on High, sending out His holy angels to take charge of us, so that the wicked foe may have no power over us.  Best of all, He props us up with the Means of Grace, the Word and Sacraments, to establish and strengthen us in our faith.

Now certainly the Heavenly Gardener has every right to expect some good return from His vineyard.  Or as Luther put it:  “For all which it is my duty to thank and praise, serve and obey Him.  This is most certainly true!”  In other words, God wants us to bear good fruit for His kingdom.  For instance, to be gentle and kind with each other, to be patient when things go wrong, to be faithful to Him in all our endeavors, an to be in control of the passions of our flesh.  As Galatians 5:22 reminds us:  “THE FRUIT OF THE SPIRIT IS LOVE, JOY, PEACE, PATIENCE, KINDNESS, GOODNESS, GENTLENESS, FAITHFULNESS, AND SELF-CONTROL.”

Unfortunately, though, you and I stray away from God’s Word and do the exact opposite.  As God, the Heavenly Gardener says in our text:  “WHEN I LOOKED FOR GOOD GRAPES, WHY DID IT YIELD ONLY BAD?”  Instead of bearing the good grapes of righteousness and truth, we all too often bear the bad grapes of rebellion and pride.  As a matter of fact, in the Hebrew text the word for ‘bad grapes’ actually means:  ‘stinky, worthless things,’ kind of like a wild grape vine, that only bears rotten sour grapes – that kind that make you shudder and spit them out of your mouth.  Because of our inborn sinful nature, we are harsh and cruel with one another.  So often, we get impatient and lose our temper.  We give into our lusts, instead of controlling them.  And we are unfaithful to God in our neglect of prayer, worship and Bible study.  In short, instead of producing the fruit of the Spirit, we often give into the deeds of the flesh, for as St. Paul says in Galatians 5:19-20, “The acts of the sinful nature are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like.”

In a strange way, it reminds me of the father, who was visiting Niagara Falls with his little daughter.  For some unknown reason, he took her in his arms and gave her a playful swing over the falls.  The child, in a paroxysm of fear, gave a sudden jerk and fell with a shriek into the great abyss.  Whether or not that story is true, I don’t know.  But this much is certain, when we play around with the deeds of the flesh, we are headed for a deadly fall, the headlong fall into the abyss of hell, for that is the penalty for our sin.  To put it simply, because we produce the bad grapes of unrighteousness, the kind that set your teeth on edge, God would have every right to shudder and spit us out of His mouth.  More than that, in the words of our text, He has every right to pull down the wall of His protection and let us be trampled to death, laid waste by our guilt and shame.

Thankfully, though, that is not what God has done.  Instead, by the miracle of His grace, He has transformed us into something brand new.  You see, as God looks out into His vineyard, He sees one grapevine that is different from all the rest.  It is producing the sweetest, most luscious grapes imaginable.  It’s a perfect grapevine, bearing only good fruit.  This perfect grapevine is, of course, our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.  As Jesus said in John 15:1, “I AM THE TRUE VINE.”  Indeed, Jesus Christ is the only vine that has ever produced the spiritual fruit, which is acceptable to God.  Jesus in the only Righteous One, who has every completely obeyed God’s Word, the only Sinless One, who ever walked the face of this earth.  And when God the Heavenly Gardener looks at Jesus His Son, He is well-pleased!

However, the miracle that God has performed is this:  like a gardener, He gently and tenderly grafts us into Jesus, the True Vine.  That’s what Jesus was talking about in John 15:5, when He said:  “I AM THE VINE AND YOU ARE THE BRANCHES.”  We have been transformed from rotten, stinking sour grapes into sweet, precious, beautiful fruit for God’s kingdom.  We have been changed from sinners, condemned to hell into saints bound for heaven.  We have been altered from guilty, unrighteous castaways into God’s holy and beloved, pure and forgiven children, by the saving and cleansing blood of Jesus Christ.  That’s the miracle that Jesus accomplished for us by His death on the cross.  He’s the Son in our Gospel lesson, who went into the vineyard, knowing full well that He was going to be slaughtered by the tenants, but going anyway, because of His great love for you and me.  And the reason He went, was to rescue and redeem us from that deadly fall into death and hell, so that we could be transformed into His precious bride.  That’s what we receive through the gift of faith, when we are connected as branches to Jesus Christ the True Vine.  And that’s the miracle that happens in our Baptism.

You see, in the waters of Holy Baptism our old sinful Adam was buried with Christ and drowned in the depths of His love.  Our sin was swallowed up, our guilt was washed away, and we were made into brand new, forgiven people by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.  The old, rotten grapevine that we once were is gone and forgotten, and we have become a new, perfect vine, grafted into Jesus Christ.  We are actually united to Him by faith, which means that everything Jesus possesses, we now possess.  The same righteousness that Jesus has, we also have.  We have His holiness to cover up our sin.  And for that reason God accepts us back into the vineyard of His heavenly kingdom.  And that amazing transformation is granted to us by the miracle of His grace as a free gift through Jesus Christ our Savior!

The story is told of a Christian grade school teacher in the southeast, who decided to take her class of Second graders out Christmas caroling.  They went to a number of places, where the people were homebound and ended up at the community’s only nursing home.  There, the teacher with her children in tow, wandered the hallways, sharing a song at the doorway of each resident.  Only then did she notice that one of her more enthusiastic singers, had accidentally rewritten the words to one of the songs.  Instead of singing, “Noel, Noel,”  he was belting out for all to hear:  “No hell, no hell, born is the King of Israel.”

Although we may question his methodology or his choice of words, there is no questioning his theology.  Indeed, Jesus Christ our Savior was born into the vineyard of this world to redeem us from the curse of death and hell and to transform us into His pure and forgiven children.  And so, like that young singer, we need to show a little more exuberance, to demonstrate and gratitude and thanks to Jesus, by gladly going out into the vineyard and bearing fruit for Him, by supporting the work of the LWML, not only with our prayers and our donations, but with our time and our presence, by witnessing for the Lord, inviting our friends to church, sharing the love of Jesus, wherever He gives us the opportunity, in order to bring more people into God’s vineyard, for His name’s sake.  Amen.                

           

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