The World Is Changed

By The Rev. Bernard W. Poppe, Rector

Once upon a time, in a Kingdom far away there lived a princess. She was very beautiful and wherever she walked the birds would sing and bright flowers would open up. She liked to go for walks in the forest around the castle and call to the deer and rabbits to walk along with her. Then one day she strayed farther than usual into the woods and realized that no one was around. She replaced her princess dress with her party clothes and tore out of the woods in her royal Ferrari leaving the deer and rabbits in a cloud of dust on her way to the disco.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

I’d get this far before my very young nieces and nephews would scream in a chorus of "No!!!’s" That’s not how to tell a fairy tale, they’d complain through their giggles. I’d try again, but they didn’t want to hear about Cinderella in the Industrial Waste Dump either. (I didn’t get many invitations to baby sit. My sister had no sense of humor.)

Well, I’d ask, how do you tell a fairy tale? And I’d get the same old conventional Grimm Brother’s garden variety story. The real message was, "Don’t mess with our fairy tales. Either tell them right or don’t tell them at all."

That’s not unlike the message Jesus got when he told the parable or the Vineyard. He took a perfectly good old favorite story and put it on it’s head. The story of the Vineyard was an old favorite first told by the Prophet Isaiah centuries before. Everyone knew it and when Jesus began his version of it, like my nieces and nephews they no doubt began to relax with the familiar cadences until he changed it. In the fifth chapter of Isaiah the story starts, "Let me sing for my beloved a love song concerning his Vineyard." Now that’s how you start a story! It’s the Old Testament version of "Once upon a time." It continues, "My beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill, He digged it and cleared it of stones, and planted it with choice vines; he built a watchtower in the mist of it, and hewed out a wine vat in it... and he looked to it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes." It too was a parable of Israel’s disobedience and unfaithfulness to God, but Jesus turned it on it’s head and gave it a Martin Scorsese ending with a lot of violence. In Jesus’ version the tenants in the Vineyard got greedy and wanted all the income for themselves and thought to kill the landlord’s son in order to get it.

The scribes and Pharisees listening to the story may not yet have understood the flow of it, but the generation later that read the Gospel certainly made the connections with the Christ figure of the son being killed and the greedy tenants being the religious leaders. The rejection of evil people and replacement of a new people in the vineyard must have given the average listener hope.

The addition of the verse about the rejected stone becoming the cornerstone added another dimension to the lesson. Though Jesus was rejected and crucified, he became the cornerstone after all for their beliefs and lives. Jesus really knew how to take a story and run with it.

But people still don’t like their stories being tampered with. The financial crisis that hit the world has tampered with an American story begun in the post world war II era. A story about an America strong and independent who could lead and not need any other country. This latest crisis has in fact shown that America is not isolated and invulnerable, but linked to a world economy that must be considered partners not servants or unequals.

There are important lessons to be learned about how to conduct business that include responsibility and accountability. Greed and fear have threatened the strength of our systems. The bedrock of integrity seems to have been rejected by too many in leadership roles leading up to the crisis. That same integrity and moral sense of responsibility for people in this country and around the world has got to become the chief cornerstone. The first lesson from Exodus recounts the giving of the ten commandments and connected with this Gospel lesson serve as a wonderful reminder of exactly what that cornerstone is made up of. The very decency of humanity as encapsulated in the ten commandments and lived in the life of Jesus and given through the commandments of his teaching provide us with the compass to lead us.

One of the comments I heard about this crisis was that it might have changed the world as we know it. There is no "might" about it. The world is changed. It is not how we’ve known it. Some look back in nostalgia to the 1950's as the glory days of America and wouldn’t it be wonderful to go back to that time. For some yes, but for others, no. That decade was a tale of two cities (or two countries) in which we hear one story at the exclusion of the other.

Regardless, we cannot look back at stories trying to recapture an illusion. We have to look toward the uncertainty of the future, not in fear, but in faith. We’re programmed to fear the unknown rather than embrace the opportunities that the future has to offer. If integrity replaces greed and faith replaces fear we’ll be on our way.

We have a lot of four legged guests today to remind us of a man we commemorate today. St. Francis certainly gave a model to the world of faithful compassion. His love of God and the created world is the subject of much spiritual writing and song. His personal story inspired countless others to live simpler lives and find their joy in God’s creation. It touches us six hundred years later because deep down, and maybe not so deep down we still hope and believe that a simpler love can restore the chaotic consequences of materialistic greed and even beyond that, ambitious power to dominate people, lands and markets.

The unconditional love experienced by pet owners from their beloved pets is further witness of the possibility of a perfect world. We need to slow down and take seriously the spiritual laws handed down to us by people we honor. Moses, Jesus, Francis, and many others are honored for what they have to share and teach us. These teachings can and have to be the cornerstone of our lives if we are to make it to another generation. The world has become too small to think only of ourselves and lives too precious to be thrown away or ground down by inhuman labor practices and abusive expectation.

Our story as a people has yet to be written. Old stories can keep us grounded and it’s important to know where we’ve come from but it’s a mistake to think we can ever go back again. Like the stories of the Israelites in the desert we’ve been reading these past weeks, there is no going back and even the uncertainties of the future cannot scare us into trying. We have to go forward and rather than fear it, we have to go bravely and lovingly into it.

It’s a beautiful vineyard that God has given us, full of life and possibility. We are tenants on this fragile earth and we can be good ones. We’ve seen what the bad tenants can do, let’s show them what the good tenants can do. Amen.

© 2008 St. George's Episcopal Church, Maplewood, NJ