Bad Wine

Propers: The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 27), AD 2020 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Three out of our four readings this morning are variations on the same theme, the same image, repeated throughout the Bible: that of Israel, of the people of God, as a grapevine cultivated in a vineyard.

Now I don’t know about you, but I have never seen an ugly vineyard. From the terraces along the Rhine to the wedding venues here in Perham, vineyards are always beautiful, soothing, celebratory places. They perfectly blend the earthy and the sweet, the natural and the agriculture. It’s hard not to be happy in a vineyard; or at the very least, it’s hard not to be at peace.

Yet whether we are singing the Psalms of the First Temple, or reading the words of the Prophet Isaiah, or listening to Jesus tell parables in those very last days before His death, we note that something has gone wrong with God’s vineyard. It has failed to yield up its fruit. The Psalmist says that the vineyard has been vandalized; Isaiah, that it has gone wild; and Jesus, that its own stewards have betrayed it from within. Regardless, the result is the same: no more wine.

In the biblical narrative, throughout the Hebrew Bible, grain is the sign of sustenance, of daily bread. Oil is the sign of abundance, connoting health and sleekness. But wine is the sign of joy. Wine is the symbol for what makes life worth living. “Thou dost cause grass to grow for the cattle,” the Psalmist sings, “and plants for man to cultivate that he may bring forth food from the earth and wine to gladden the heart of man.”

So if the people of God are a vineyard, and God Himself has lavished them with protection and nurture and care, then His perpetual complaint against us, against His people, is that we have failed to yield up our crop of joy. We have no joy.

But how could we? Many adjectives have been used to describe the Year of Our Lord 2020. “Joyful” has certainly not been prevalent among them.

Once upon a time there was a certain Christian bookstore into which I would occasionally wander, and which always made me feel uncomfortable. Not because it was a bit outside my wheelhouse, being neither Lutheran nor Catholic nor scholarly. But because everyone in there was always smiling, showing their teeth. They always greeted us a little too enthusiastically. They always had bright, cheerful, cartoony videos playing on monitors glaring down throughout the store.

Everything was smiles—plastered on posters, on book jackets, on children’s toys. And it was creepy. This is coming from a guy who loves horror movies and haunted houses: that Christian bookstore weirded me out. Because it was fake. Because it was desperate. Because it took a faith founded by a God tortured to death on a Cross and turned it into an endless litany of roses and sweet cream in the gardens. My mother used to walk into places like that and say they would rot her teeth.

Christian joy, biblical joy, is not some lobotomized optimism. It isn’t about always acting cheery, always feeling like you have to smile, always being passive aggressive as though that were somehow better than outright hostility. Real joy cannot mean pretending to be happy. Saccharine lies are the bitterest of all.

So what then is this joy that God would have us yield forth for the world, as the fruit of His labors, as the wine of His harvest? It cannot be merely emotion. It cannot be merely feeling happy, feeling joyful. For who could control that? Who could force that? Emotions are such ephemeral, unreliable things. That’s why I never trust a religion of emotion. We think that as soon as we don’t feel like love, we stop loving. We think that as soon as we don’t feel Jesus with us, He is gone.

True joy is based on something much deeper, much firmer, much more honest than emotion. It is based on the faithfulness of God. Joy is our calm in the midst of the chaos. Joy is the confidence, the sure knowledge, the sure promise, that Christ is with us always, even unto the end of the age; that all the things which afflict us—war, strife, poverty, instability, cancer, pandemic, pain and fear—all will pass away. All will burn in the fires of the Spirit.

Death has no claim upon us, for Christ has called us as His own. And all the losses we experience in this world, all the sins and regrets and accidents and ailments, all will be set right in Him. Every tear will be dried. Every wound will be healed. Every wrong will be set right, no matter how impossible that may sound to us here below. And most wondrous of all, everyone we’ve ever lost will be reunited in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ our Lord. And Heaven will be a feast of joy forever.

And so the joy that God would have us yield is the joy of inner peace—not some false-faced giddiness, but an honesty about the brokenness of the world; true sympathy for the suffering of others; and confidence in the promises of God in Jesus Christ. Christian joy has faith that all things will be set right in the end: that God does not will our suffering, does not cause our brokenness, yet nonetheless stands by us in it, takes our burdens on Himself, and twists the wickedness of this world so as to extract good from it, that our suffering may have meaning and purpose and hope.

Joy is knowing that God is all good, that He keeps His every promise, that He is with us always and loves us all the way to hell and back, infinitely beyond our own understanding yet closer to us than our own jugular. Thus when all the storms of the devil, the world, and the flesh rage about us, we can close our eyes, breathe in the Spirit, “be still and know that I am God.” The Cross of Christ is the anchor of our faith, the Tree of Life to which we cling.

Sometimes this joy fills us with ecstasy and bliss, with love overflowing, gratitude overwhelming. And sometimes this joy is the only thing we have left, our last best desperate hope, which just barely keeps our heads above water when the whole world seems to be drowning in the Flood.

But the thing about joy—the thing about a vineyard—is that it does not exist solely for itself. The vine is cultivated, in labor and in love, and the wine is vinted, not for those within the walls, but for those outside the winery, for all the world to enjoy. And so Christian joy is not a solitary thing. We do not climb up a mountain and sagely sit contemplating our own inner peace. Christian joy, biblical joy, is inextricably linked to justice, fairness, mercy, truth, love of neighbor and care for strangers.

We bring joy to others by being Christ for them, living as His Body, sharing in His Spirit.

And what this means in practical terms is that we are called in Christian freedom, every day of our lives, to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, house the homeless, cure the sick, visit the imprisoned, educate the ignorant, speak truth to power, rebuke the sinner, absolve the repentant, and love one another as Christ has first loved us.

That is true joy. That is true wine. And nothing else will do.

If you don’t believe me, look to those who refuse to do such things, refuse to love their neighbors as themselves. Look at how grasping, greedy, lost and lonely they truly are, beneath the gilded surface, beneath the desperation and the bluster and the lies. There is no joy in such people, wealthy though they seem. There is no joy in such lives, such an awful living death.

“I am the vine,” sayeth the Lord. “You are the branches. If you remain in Me and I in you, you will bear much fruit.”

You want to know true joy? Stop trying to be joyful. Trust in the promises of the God who never breaks them. Care for the neighbor whom God has set before you. Know that you are a sinner and know that you are loved. Keep your eyes on Christ alone, and you will be joyful regardless of how you feel.

Though of course it doesn’t hurt to drink a little wine now and then.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.