Rev. Doug Floyd

Lent 5
Rev. Doug Floyd
Isaiah 43, Luke 20:9-19

Last week, Fr. Les exhorted us with the story of the Prodigal Son who wasted his inheritance and the Prodigal Father who pours out his love on both sons without restraint. As it turns out, Christ comes into the far country to pour out His love upon us and present us as blameless before the Father. As Fr. Les said, “We are forever in a state of acceptance.”

This week our parable is a bit more troubling. A man sends his servants to collect fruit from his vineyard. Each time a servant comes, he is beaten and sent away empty handed. Eventually, he sends his son. They kill the son. The owner will go to the vineyard and destroy the tenants.

Our story takes a dark turn this week. The scribes and chief priests know that Jesus is talking about them, and they want to lay hands on him.

We can feel the tension building. The week before Palm Sunday and then Holy Week, we are standing at the edge of the great collision between man and God. When humanity will seize God in Christ and kill him. But that story is still to come.

Let us reflect on today’s parable through the lens of our Isaiah reading. This word from Isaiah is sent to God’s people in captivity.

As the kingdom of Judah ends, Babylon captures a group of the ruling class. They are God’s chosen people and in spite of their failures, they have absolute confidence that their stay in Babylon will be short. The prophet Ezekiel tells them again and again, this is your home now. You are not returning to Jerusalem. It is not until the Temple is destroyed and the rest of Judah is taken captive that the people realize, Ezekiel’s words.

They had held onto the story of the Exodus. God rescued His people from the hand of the Pharoah and lifted them up on His eagle wings to the land of promise. They had heard this story their whole lives. In spite of the failure of God’s people, He would come and restore them again and again.

But now they sit in Babylon. The Temple destroyed. The land ruined. The promise forsaken. It would seem that God had abandoned them. The Lord spoke to His captives through Ezekiel, and the words of Isaiah and Jeremiah. He would comfort, he would restore, he would tell a new story.

¹⁸ “Remember not the former things,
nor consider the things of old.
¹⁹ Behold, I am doing a new thing;
now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?^[1]

The God who rescues His people from Pharoah will tell a new story in and through these captives. He will make a way through the wilderness. They will walk through the valley of the shadow of death but will fear no evil. The Lord will go before and behind and above and below. The wild beasts will not consume them. The fire will not burn them. The water will not drown them.

The I AM will preserve them, will glorify them, will restore them. He will give them a new heart to serve Him. And the nations will stream to Jerusalem.

As Isaiah says earlier in chapter 43,

⁵ Fear not, for I am with you;
I will bring your offspring from the east,
and from the west I will gather you.
⁶ I will say to the north, Give up,
and to the south, Do not withhold;
bring my sons from afar
and my daughters from the end of the earth,
⁷ everyone who is called by my name,
whom I created for my glory,
whom I formed and made.”^[2]

When the Lord restores His people, it will not simply be the captives of Babylon, but the captives of all nations. For the Evil One has held humanity captive to sin. A day of deliverance is coming. A day of restoration is coming. He will call His people home and they will come running.

A group of captives from Babylon return home with this new story burning in their hearts. Over time, it would seem that parts of this story are lost. When we come to our parable today, we find the scribes and the chief priests do not recognize the story.

The leaders are expecting the Messiah to come and vindicate Israel as God’s chosen people, to restore the Temple, to cleanse the land, and to defeat the oppressors like Rome.  They are not looking for a Messiah who embraces the weak, the marginal, the sinner, and even those outside of Israel.

Jesus will make a way to fulfill Isaiah’s words. He will do it through the very conniving of the Pharisees, scribes, and chief priests. Even as they come together with Herod and Pilate to kill Jesus, He will work through their rebellion to fulfill the very promise of God. As Jesus declared in today’s Gospel,

“ ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone’? ^[3]

Israel will be vindicated but not in the way the leaders expect. Jesus, the Israel of God, will be vindicated as God’s chosen One to deliver His people and all peoples. And nations have been streaming to Jesus for over 2,000 years!

As we read these stories, we come to see that they encompass our own stories. We have been taken up into the story of the people of God and through their story we can read our story.

Our story is rooted in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. When we are born, we are born into His unchanging love. We are baptized and adopted into the family of God through Jesus. When we die, we die into His death. He has taken the horror of death upon Himself, so we simply fall into Jesus and His life everlasting.

We tell stories about our life. Some of us will tell a story of adventure and surprise. Others will tell a story of regret and loss. Many tell a story of pain, suffering, and loss. Hopefully, we come to discover that we are not telling our story alone.

God is telling our story alongside us. Let’s say that we tell the story of abandonment. A friend, a lover, a spouse forsakes us. Jesus knows our pain intimately. His friend Judas betrayed Him. His disciples denied Him. And yet, His Father loved Him and raised Him from the dead by the Spirit of Life. He can also raise our broken hearts from the death of love and relationships.

Consider a job loss. I know those well. For most of my ministry, I was bi-vocational. Multiple times, my departments have been cut. The last time, it was so painful, I felt like all my life was a failure. We had a house church that started meeting in a building in 2003.  In 2008, the building caught fire and we lost equipment and some books. Thankfully I recovered many books. Eight months later, my company cut my position along with most of the department. These two losses felt like the end of the world. I struggled to find the joy of Christ during this loss. It was a long, slow loss. Two years later, I was travelling with the Anglicans to England to visit London and look at a possible school for the area.

In the midst of loss, Christ started telling a new and unexpected story in my life. One thing we learn from suffering and loss is not to hold onto our stories too tightly. During anxiety and struggle, the goodness of God is free to surprise us with a new path forward.

This does not mean suffering is easy. It is painful and some suffering can last for the rest of our lives. But Christ is present and He us perfecting us, bringing us to completion, making us lovers.

We may not understand the path we walk, but we can rest knowing that we walk in Christ, through Christ, and by the grace and mercy of Christ. Even in the middle of the valley of the shadow of death, we need not fear. He is with us. He will comfort us. He will make His love known to us.

Whether we prosper or falter, whether we feel His presence or feel the heavens are brass, whether we know the love of friends and family or whether we feel betrayed and forsaken. Whatever we experience, we turn toward Christ, the lover of our souls. He is raising us up with His Saints as a holy Temple of praise to our God.

Let us join with the Psalmist and pray,

“One thing have I desired of the Lord; one thing I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, To behold the fair beauty of the Lord and to seek Him in His Temple” (Psalm 27:4-5).

^[1] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), Is 43:18–19.

^[2] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), Is 43:5–7.

^[3] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), Lk 20:17.