“A Table in the Wilderness”

A sermon by The Rev. Keenan Kelsey
Noe Valley Ministry, Presbyterian Church (USA)
October 2, 2005

Text: Matthew 21:33-43

³³ ‘Listen to another parable. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a watch-tower. Then he leased it to tenants and went to another country. ³⁴ When the harvest time had come, he sent his slaves to the tenants to collect his produce. ³⁵ But the tenants seized his slaves and beat one, killed another, and stoned another. ³⁶ Again he sent other slaves, more than the first; and they treated them in the same way. ³⁷ Finally he sent his son to them, saying, “They will respect my son.” ³⁸ But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, “This is the heir; come, let us kill him and get his inheritance.” ³⁹ So they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him. ⁴⁰ Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?’ ⁴¹ They said to him, ‘He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time.’ ⁴² Jesus said to them, ‘Have you never read in the scriptures:“The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone;*this was the Lord’s doing, and it is amazing in our eyes”? ⁴³ Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom.*

WORLD COMMUNION SUNDAY is a creation of the Presbyterian Church, who began a Sunday to mark the unity of the church and a hope for peace in the world in 1936. It was designed to become an ecumenical service and was picked up by the National Council of Churches in 1940.

Of course you know what happened in the world and to the church in the following 5 years. The Christian nations of the Western Hemisphere fought the most devastating war in history and 6 million Jews were exterminated. So much for the high-minded thoughts on unity and peace by the church.

But it takes more than a world war to wipe out the hopes of the church for unity and peace, so here we are, 67 years after the first World Communion Sunday, undaunted in our hopes. Of course, our world view has changed since then. The first celebrations of this event were really designed to raise money for missionaries and evangelism. Until very recently the Western Church believed that we had the truth, the rest of the world needs it, and evangelism is the most important global task of the church. Indeed, evangelism remains one of the four classic marks of the church. But it is no longer the most important global work of the church for our time. For starters, for the first time since the first generation of Christianity, there are now more Christians in Asia, Latin America and Africa than there are in Europe and North America. We are now the minority. The Christian Church is growing around the globe and the rest of the world needs the American Church less and less for evangelism every passing year. They are doing a fine job on their own. A second factor is the emerging credibility of pluralism – Our world is made up of many religions, and each has a credibility and a cultural reality. Not only is American the American church at the center of the world, Christianity itself shares its faith journey with Islam, Buddhism, , Hinduism, Universalist Unitarian, etc.

Sometimes Western Christianity's blindness can be monumental. Remember when Hurricane Hugo was heading towards the Southeastern United States, and Pat Robertson came on the air and began to pray that it would turn and miss our coastline? Amazingly enough Hugo made a wide turn and missed the continental US and Robertson thanked God. He failed to mention that Puerto Rico was devastated.

World Communion is a chance to celebrate our connections, not our predominance; a chance to claim our call into intimate community with the world. We are connected in ways we barely imagine. Half the planet has already touched you this morning. The wheat for your toast was grown in Kansas and the bread was baked in New Jersey, your coffee may have come from Kenya or Sumatra, your juice was from somewhere between Florida and Argentina. Then you went and got dressed in clothes where the cloth was made in Indonesia and your shoes are from Thailand. You got into your car, a Ford that was perhaps put together in Brazil with components from Ireland, Czechoslovakia and Arkansas and the petroleum was pumped in Saudi Arabia. Throw in the fact that you are sharing air and water with 5 and one half billion other people across the planet and I’d say that you are already in communion with the whole world every day.

I prepare my sermons after conversing over the internet with ministers and lay leaders in, just to name a few countries, Canada, New Zealand, England, Germany and Scotland. I prepare to preach as I watch CNN, with images from Pakistan, England, Iraq and Indonesia, streaming to my television seemingly instantaneously.

This new global world of ours is not always easy, or even helpful. This past Friday, the Moderator of the PC(USA), Rick Ufford-Chase, talked about globalization – not the benefits, but the threats. He told of a village in the mountains of Guatemala where families could not send their children to school because they could not buy them appropriate clothing and supplies. The women got together and created a co-op to plant and then sell potatoes in the area’s central market. This worked well the first year. They drove their crop several hours to the market, sold all the potatoes, and sent their children to school. But the second year the women got to market again, and found a competitor selling the very same potatoes at half the price. Their government had made an arrangement with Canada, where by the Canadian government would subsidize their own potato growers, then ship and distribute potatoes in Guatemala, undercutting the local growers who were simply trying to survive.

In such a complicated world, how are we called to be church? How can we be faithful today, living into the vision of one church promoting peace throughout the world? It’s hard – especially since we Christians can’t even keep peace among ourselves!

Our Gospel reading holds at least part of the answer. It is really an allegory: The story is about a landowner who demonstrates considerable love and care for his farm. He plants the vineyard with his own hands, fences it, digs a winepress and even constructs a watchtower to protect the vineyard from the enemy. He then employs tenants.

Well, God is certainly the landowner, and in the story, the Pharisees, the religious leaders, are the tenants – trusted allies who soon usurp the vineyards and reject God’s messengers – that is, the slaves sent to receive the owner’s share of the crops. The owner’s son who was killed is surely God’s own son.

This is not the time, nor the occasion, to unpack and study this parable as it deserves. For today, it is enough to stretch the allegory to say that this communion table represents the vineyard, that is, the world God has entrusted to our keeping, to our stewardship and care. We are the tenants, recipients of a gift not of our making -- charged to tend it and to make productive. The hardest part of this lesson, yet the most important part for today, is to remember that this table, this vineyard, this world, does not belong to us, or to our narrow or selfish thinking. It belongs to God.

And when we get most discouraged, we get to remember that God does not fail. In the midst of our greatest wilderness, our greatest frustrations and despairs, God sets a table. In the Hebrew scriptures, one of the names for God in the Old Testament is YAHWEH-YIREH. It means, Great God, my Provider. This epithet is used when the prophet Elisha is able to feed 100 men with 20 barley loaves and a few ears of corn. It is used in Psalm 136 when hailing God’s mighty act of providing food to all God’s creatures. It is the form of address that is used in the beautiful Hebrew table prayer: Blessed art thou, Yahweh, our God, sovereign of the universe, who bringest forth bread from the earth. And it is the form in Psalm 78 that Steve read earlier.

The real question is, do we think it is enough? Do we trust that God will spread a table in the wilderness? And do we recognize the provisions that God offers?

World wide communion. What might happen if we joined hearts and hands with Christians in all of the places which celebrate it this morning? What a treasure we would hold in our hands. What a treasure we, indeed, hold in our hands. Let no one take communion lightly today. In our hands, we hold the cornerstone of a whole new realm. We live and work in a common vineyard. We could, as did the workers in Matthew's gospel today, forget what we're doing. We could forget that the vineyard is not our own, that its bounty flows from the one who planted it. We could kill the messengers. We might miss the explosive, dynamic power of the treasure in our hands to transform all of humanity, all of creation.

Rick Ufford-Chase would call us to be church in this global world – not to be political advocates or partisan fighters, but to honor our gospel call to care and serve, to offer water and food and shelter and solace wherever the need arises. Rick would say that we are called to gospel actions – which may well have political consequences. We can change the world, but we need to begin with faithful response to our fellow humans.

Noe Valley Ministry knows how to celebrate this kind of communion. We did it when we made witness at the Interfaith Peace gathering, when we sang at the Homeless Memorial Wall, and when we held a service for Jesse Zele, gentle local hero for this neighborhood. We will do it again when we are walking in the CROP Walk in two weeks, to raise money for hungry people.

We already know how to do this. Let our communion today give us strength and purpose to live into our call.