Texts: Isaiah 5:1-7; Philippians 3:4b-14; Matthew 21:33-46
I don't usually preach on the Sentence of the Day – in fact, I'm not sure I have ever done so. But it's a good place to start today: The earth is the Lord's, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it. [Psalm 24:1]. It ought to sound very familiar to us because we repeat it in our liturgy – the form we're using today. The priest says: To you, Lord, belongs the greatness, and the power, and the glory, and the victory and the majesty; and the people respond, All that is in the heavens and the earth is yours, and of your own we give you. That's what we say regularly, and that's what we say in our Sentence for the Day. But do we ever take time to ponder those clear, simple but oh so radical words?
Our news media today are full of the world financial crisis. That's what they call it – they say it's a "financial" crisis. Credit has dried up; banks have extreme liquidity problems – they no longer trust each other enough to lend to each other. We hear about a mammoth plan to bail out Wall Street; and in slightly more poetic language we have a new term to savour. We no longer have debts, or even bad debts – now we have toxic debts, so-called, I think because they are poisoning the whole financial system. It won't be long, I suspect, before we have pandemic debts, because the toxic debts are spreading their poison around the globe. With due respect to Iceland, I never realised that it had it's own banks and stock exchange until it was mentioned on the news this week as one of those countries that has had to pump vast sums of money into its major bank to keep it afloat.
So the whole world is talking about the financial crisis; but very few of the commentators are calling it what it really is – a spiritual crisis, a crisis brought about in large part through the dark side of our human nature. In a word, the root cause of this so-called financial crisis is greed. It's not very fashionable today – even in the Church – to use the word "sin", but that doesn't mean we have stopped sinning; it just means we can't bring ourselves to talk about it, to recognise it for what it is. In essence, sin is taking the goodness of God too far. Sin is wanting more than enough, more than we are given, more than we need. Sin is refusing to be satisfied with the free gift of the garden's beauty and bounty, and taking the one fruit we are told we can't have.
Sin is forgetting that we are tenants, not owners. Sin is forgetting our Sentence for the Day: sin is forgetting our prayer over the gifts we offer in Communion. Sin is abandoning thanksgiving (Eucharist) and replacing it with a demand for more. Enough is never enough for the sinful heart. And sin is putting me first. Last week's reading from Philippians should still be ringing in our ears: St Paul wrote: Each of you should look, not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others. Is that the teaching we see in the world financial system – will we see it now? Even now, when we have learned the hard way how inter-connected the world has become, will we seek a way out that is fair to everyone, or will we hunker down, as individuals and as separate nations, to protect our own interests first? It is not only the American politicians and the American electorate who are having to make hard decisions in the middle of an election campaign. We're in the same boat, too. Will our politicians have the guts to take the right but hard options, and, if they do, will we the voters support them in that?
The signs are not promising at the moment. I saw on TV this week a reporter doing a survey of people about their voting intentions. One guy summed it up for me: he said he would see what each lot was offering and make his choice accordingly. In other words, his vote was for sale. And he wouldn't be alone in that. Every Budget we see the same, from individuals and pressure groups; there wasn't much in it for me or for us. And I'm not sure that members of the Church are very different in this regard from other people.
And if we want one image to sum up what all this is about before we look more closely at these readings I would suggest an item I found in the ODT recently. Their business editor, Dean McKenzie, had some very helpful articles explaining in layman's terms what was going on in the financial market; and in one of these articles he talked about the different markets that investors will now look to if they have lost all confidence in real estate and the share market. His tips were the commodity markets, and the futures markets. I was curious about these so I read on.
Some of them were pretty obvious; gold, silver, oil, and steel. But then we got to the "pork bellies" futures market. Investors would agree to purchase a certain quantity of pork bellies on a certain date – say, in three months time – at a certain price. If by that date the price has gone down, the investor loses; if it has gone up the investor wins. That's how futures markets work, apparently. Now, that sort of thing may be relatively harmless if we talking jewellery prices, or precious metals that we can well do without if we have to. But some of these markets – including the somewhat unlikely one of pork bellies - are speculating in food. Various cereals also have their own futures market. Has no one thought for a moment about the ethical implications of speculating on food prices in a world of a billion hungry people?
We come to Jesus' powerful parable in St Matthew's gospel passage. As I have said in the notes this morning, this story operates at a number of different levels, but let's just consider it at its surface level for a moment. It seems to be a case of share-cropping, as we would call it in this country. One person owns the land, and a tenant uses it to grow crops. There is an agreement between the parties as to how the harvest is to be divided up between them; but when the time comes the tenants want to keep the lot for themselves and are prepared to resort to murder to achieve their ends.
It seems pretty clear that Jesus has based this story on this morning's passage from Isaiah, where the owner of a vineyard has done everything necessary to ensure a good crop of grapes, but the harvest fails. So, we are told, the owner will cut his losses and walk off the land. That is, of course, a warning of the coming judgment that Israel would suffer in the form of national defeat and exile. Similarly, the parable finishes with a warning of judgment: the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to people who will produce its fruit. The sin of the tenants is to want more than they are given: the sin of the tenants is to deny that the vineyard belongs to someone else.
Already some scientists are predicting the end of the Age of Humankind and are speculating as to which species will become dominant after us. In terms of the parable we could say that the kingdom of God will be taken from us and given to another species that will produce good fruit. And it won't much matter whether we call that the judgment of God or the natural ecological consequences of the way we have misused the earth for so long.
And something very similar applies in respect of the so-called world financial crisis. This is not about a failure of policy in Washington; and it's not about bad decisions by individual executives. It is about human nature – it's about human sin – human greed. It's about trying to turn God's bounty into private and selfish gain. It's about turning everything into saleable commodities out of which excessive profits can be made. And we are all implicated in that to a greater or lesser extent. A recent statistic made the point succinctly: it is estimated that the number of obese people in the developed world is now roughly equal to the number of people who do not have enough to eat in the rest of the world.
As we head for our election, may we take time to meditate on the Sentence for the Day, ponder its implications for the way we live our own lives, and for the way our country is heading at present. To steal a great line from President Kennedy, we should be considering what more we have to offer, not what more we seek to receive. And we should be looking for politicians who will do the right thing, however unpopular that might be.
God has given us a beautiful vineyard. What sort of fruit will we produce for him? And with whom shall we share it? As the psalmist said:
The earth is the Lord's, and everything in it, the world and all who live in it.
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