Finding love in a hopeless place
And now that you have that song stuck in your head…
In this week’s sacred story the prophet Isaiah sings a love song about a vineyard - but we all know that it’s not REALLY about a vineyard…plus Isaiah tells us who it’s really about at the end of this ballad.
Today’s text follows suit with the stories we’ve explored over the last several weeks. We witness the exchanges back and forth between God and God’s people as graciousness and mercy and promises are extended to God’s people and God’s people offer praise in return, only to once again find themselves in need of some redirection and certainly grace. I think we can certainly relate to that in our own lives from time to time. That’s one of the gifts of reading and studying scripture in the way that we do here at Kindred - we get to engage in the stories that at one time or another felt completely distant to our lives, and we get to explore together the way that God and God’s people acted in those stories and then make connections to our everyday life and the way that we feel - or don’t feel - God at work in and around us.
Whether we feel like Jacob, wrestling with something unknown yet clearly larger than ourselves, refusing to give up, engaged in the struggle towards a better understanding of ourselves and our lives; or Naomi and Ruth who remain loyal to each other when the world around them would do everything to tear them apart; or Elijah who stands and declares that the LORD is indeed God amidst people who have turned to other god’s because they believed that God had abandoned them and their prayers. God’s people have never been perfect, and yet God never stops showing up and loving them.
Today’s story is kinda like that too.
The Prophet Isaiah uses a metaphor to talk to God’s people - except well he doesn’t really talk - he sings to them. He sings about how God is like a vineyard owner who carefully prepares fertile land to receive the seeds of sweet grapes that would one day become wine. It becomes a love song to the vineyard and the seeds that harken to the level of love and passion found in the works of Aretha Franklin and Whitney Houston.
And then God’s “I will always love you,” is met with equal parts of disbelief and shock and even anger when the seeds don’t turn out as God had expected. The prophet Isaiah tells us that in this metaphor the vineyard is the house of Israel and the seeds are the people of Judah. These people, like all of the other people in the stories we’ve heard before, have a history of turning away from God and needing re-direction, to say the least.
The song continues and the Prophet Isaiah tells us that everything is destroyed by the owner when the vineyard owner sees the wild grapes that have grown in place of what was expected.
That word - expected - can carry a lot of weight. In this story, the Hebrew word used for “expected” can be translated to mean: lived in HOPE for a future outcome. God lived in hope for the future outcome of sweet wine grapes from the seeds - remember, that’s the people of Judah - to seek justice and righteousness and instead saw the opposite.
We are left with images of a vineyard torn apart and a people who have failed to fulfill God’s expectations of justice and righteousness, and then we hear of a branch growing out of an old stump. New life springing out of an object that for all intents and purposes is thought to be dead.
This branch and stump are also a metaphor for the people of Judah who await a new king to lead them into times of justice and righteousness. Jesse, for which the stump is named, is King David’s ancestor, the same King David whose ancestors would become the earthly parents for Jesus Christ.
The Prophet Isaiah praises and lauds over the shoot or branch that springs from the stump of Jesse declaring that the spirit of the LORD shall rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding...the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD. Whatever anger and disappointment there had been with the House of Israel and the People of Judah is forgotten in the hope and promise of the peaceful kingdom that the house of David will bring about.
This story carries in it familiar patterns for us as people of God, familiar cycles of faithfulness and doubt, expectation and disappointment, life and death. And yet, it points too towards the constant presence of God, even as God has to adjust her hopes and expectations for us as God’s people when we yield wild/sour grapes.
Springing from the ruins of disappointment and destruction in the vineyard comes hope for a realized fulfillment of God’s way of justice and peace in the House of Israel and for all people of God. We find love in even the most hopeless of places in God.
This season of Advent is an invitation to journey together as God’s people in the times of faithfulness and doubt, remembering that our true focus is not on what is next, but what waits at the end when the ways of justice and righteousness are fulfilled. As Christians, we know that this happens when Christ comes again when the Mystery of Faith, that: “Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again” is fulfilled.
In the meantime, we accompany one another through this season and our lives together through the times when the vineyard produces exactly what we’d anticipated and the times when it all goes wrong. We hold to truth and promise of God’s love and the call that we have from that love to care for and love one another and all of creation. We look for ways to bring about justice and righteousness for all people, even as we wait for the FULL righteousness and justice that only God can bring. Amen.