Just Imagine

Ignatian Prayer and Scripture

Isaiah 5:1-7
Matthew 21:33-46

Over the years I have heard about everything in the liturgy criticized for one reason or another. But this week I have wracked my brain trying to recall if I could remember someone’s suggesting that scripture not be read in church. Perhaps there has been such a time, but I cannot recall it. Some have wondered why we read three lessons, as opposed to one or two. Some devotees of The Great Vigil of Easter want to read as much scripture as possible. But virtually no one suggests that we ought to dispense with reading the Bible. The reason to read it seems obvious. It is the sacred story of the Covenant People. Nearly all Christians, although they may disagree on how to read scripture, assume that the Bible has something to say. And if you ask folks what they most want out of a sermon, they will nearly invariably say that they want the preacher to show how the Bible is relevant to ordinary daily life.

Along comes a pair of passages like the ones from Isaiah and Matthew today on the theme of God’s vineyard. The meaning of them is not particularly obscure. The Isaiah passage, sometimes called “The Song of the Vineyard,” describes the House of Israel as God’s vineyard. As the planter and owner, God sees a vineyard that has not lived up to expectations. Instead of bearing lots of fruit, the vines have grown wild grapes. Thus God will destroy the vineyard. The parable of the wicked tenants in Matthew is even less obscure, since Matthew has taken care to put it in allegorical form. The prophets all come to Israel and one by one are rejected. Finally the Son comes and is thrown out of the vineyard and killed. It certainly conforms to what Matthew knew was the story and fate of Jesus.

Although their meaning may be fairly plain, what are we to do with passages like these? What are we to make of them? In a larger sense, this is the perennial question facing the community of faith in every generation: what are we to make of any scripture? How do we use it? How does it inform our life? One sermon, of course, cannot get into all the nooks and crannies of interpreting scripture. What I’d like to do today is to look at the way this image of the vineyard is used and to see what that has to tell us about hearing the message of scripture in general.

I

Picture a singer standing at the entrance of the Columbia Heights Metro station, singing something that sounds like a ballad. She begins with what sounds like an ancient couplet, “I will sing a song for my friend, a song of love for his vineyard.” We don’t have to know much about vineyards in Washington, DC, for such a singer to get our attention. What we need is for the singer to be good—good enough to get a couple of people per hour to pause and listen. But she is better than good. She is amazing. She halts our rush to Target or to Starbucks just to pause and listen to the sweet strains blending words and melody. By the time she gets to the second verse, we begin to realize that this is a tragic poem that she is singing. She begins to sing of how her friend who owns the vineyard despairs of vines that only produce sour grapes, good for nothing but to be spat out. The intent listener begins to wonder what on earth has gone wrong. Is the story about some disease that has invaded the vineyard? Is the singer an environmentalist making a point about the dangers of pesticides? We listen on. The riddle is solved, but in a way that is alarming. We, say singer and and song, we the people of Washington are the vineyard. And the lover who so sweetly planted us is the Author and Giver of Life. We are the ones who are his darlings. Then, in a plaintive, haunting lament, the singer ends the song, and by now several dozen people have stopped to listen. The vineyard planter looks to us to have produced justice but instead found only injustice. Instead of right relationships, he hears only a cry, only a cry. Only a cry. The singer stops, slips through the crowd and is gone.

Who was that singer? Where did she come from? Is she just another religious nut stirring up guilt? Shouldn’t we know the name of someone who is that good a singer? Her song hangs in the air; and the ending: what can we do about the ending? We walk away, not knowing exactly what, and get it out of our heads by continuing up the street, avoiding a street vender, ducking into Tynan’s for a cup of coffee, eventually being absorbed in the wave of people oblivious to anything but their own lists.

Look at what has happened, just in the last two or three minutes. A text—or even the oblique reference to a text—has caught our attention and in some way begun to work on us. You know what that experience is like because you have had it. You have seen a movie that has done slightly less than change your life, but that has entered your mind like hot steel, cleaving your soul, leaving you wondering, wondering. Or you have read a book that you can’t quite let go. That is what Isaiah intends to do. As he proceeds to show, the Song of the Vineyard was simply to get the attention of Israel so that they could identify with the plight of the vineyard, take responsibility for their own devastation, and know that the One to whom they owed their life was none other than Yahweh Sabaoth, the Lord of Hosts. Isaiah then proceeds to articulate a series of woes—seven in all—that implicitly indict those who have betrayed the covenant by undermining right relationships and by subverting justice. And why does he do all that? Ultimately his aim is to bring his hearers around to changing. It could be said that he is foretelling the future, and that might be true. But equally likely, he is describing a situation that is unmistakably true and present in the community’s life. His short-term goal is to proclaim the absolute trustworthiness and righteousness of God. His long-term goal is to bring the people into a renewed covenant relationship with God.


II

Jesus might or might not have told the parable of the wicked tenants the way we hear it in Matthew’s gospel. An older version appears in Mark. Unlike most of the parables it is an allegory, wherein everything and everybody represents a person or an idea or an event. Whatever else Jesus did, it is quite likely that he used the image of the vineyard straight from Isaiah to make his point. His hearers, the authorities of Israel, knew well enough the Song of the Vineyard. But Jesus introduces the figures of tenants, suggesting that the problem was not the vineyard at all, which unlike Isaiah’s vineyard, produced perhaps bumper crops of good grapes. The problem was rather that those who had tenancy of the vineyard were scoundrels. When slaves come from the owner to collect the produce, the tenants beat them up. Finally the owner sends his son, who he is sure the tenants will perforce respect. Wrong! The tenants, perhaps knowing that as tenants they have rights of possession, proceed to assassinate the one who stands in their way, the heir.

As a good storyteller, Jesus then sets up his hearers for the inevitable response. What will the owner do? The answer is obvious. He will avenge the death of his son! He will put the tenants to death, the hearers answer (Jesus does not comment on that!) and lease the vineyard to other tenants who would give him his produce in due season.
Then Jesus does something that later tradition was to make much of. He quotes from Psalm 118: “The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is amazing in our eyes.” He does not spell out the allegory but tells plainly its meaning. The kingdom of God will be taken away from the religious leaders (the tenants) and given to a people producing the fruits of the kingdom. He then issues a not-so-oblique threat, saying that the “stone” that was “rejected” will cause anyone who falls on it (stumbles upon it) to be broken to pieces and anyone on whom it falls will be crushed.

So here is another way that scripture is used. A metaphor, the rejected stone, referred to in scripture, is mined out of its setting and used to drive home a point, in this case a prophetic warning. The chief priests and the Pharisees get the point all right. They know that he is talking about them. And they react with characteristic and predictable rage, determined to arrest Jesus. It is absolutely fair to say that this was indeed the result that Jesus intended. The entire passage in Matthew’s gospel suggests that Jesus intended to press the point with the chief priests and Pharisees—and by extension the ones whom they led—that their days in charge of God’s community were numbered.

The story does not stop there, of course. Either the Church found in the tradition this nugget of a parable traceable to Jesus that it could confirm as a keeper precisely because sooner or later it came true. Or it doctored up the parable to bring it in line with recent events. Either way, it is a story that demonstrates what happens when those in charge of God’s vineyard are faithless, and a story of what happens in history when the rejected one (Jesus) becomes the keystone or cornerstone.






III


But the most important question perhaps is always, “So what”? That is indeed the question that The New Testament is forever addressing. One typical response to those who read the Bible, and especially to these kinds of things in the Bible, is to jump to a moral meaning, a “moral of the story,” as it were. That is not always bad or inappropriate, especially if one gets from Isaiah the message that we need to reform our ways and get ourselves on the side of justice; or if one gets from Matthew the message that we need to produce the fruits of the Reign of God. An unfortunate response that some make is to use such passages as anti-Jewish propaganda, projecting onto present-day Jews the profiles of ancient Israel ironically drawn from texts out of the heart of Israel’s own sacred tradition. A counter-response that liberals typically make is to silence Matthew and others from saying what they have to say because we are embarrassed at what can be and has been construed to be words and images that put Jews in a bad light. Another reaction can easily be that we treat all this material as far too abstruse to be of much use, all the historical issues having been settled, and the symbols and language too incendiary to risk using.

St. Ignatius Loyola in his Spiritual Exercises uses a method of pondering scripture that could help us here. He takes a passage, like the parable of the wicked tenants, for example, and encourages the listener to move into the content of the passage with one’s senses. What colors, odors, sounds do we hear in the vineyard? And whom do we relate to? The tenants? The slaves? The owner? The son? Typically one uses one’s imagination to move into an experience like that being described, always for the purpose of coming closer to Jesus, clearer in one’s relationship with God. In that way, reading scripture is definitely a form of prayer, a piece of communication with God that is continuous with external life as well as with internal psyche.


IV


If the central question is, “So what?” surely the second question is, “What difference does it make?” What happens when we read scripture imaginatively, opening ourselves up to have the scenes, the words, the ideas make a deep impact upon our consciousness? Little by little—or perhaps on occasion, in a leap—we change, and that is the heart of what the entire gospel is up to. That can probably happen only when we begin to see ourselves in the stories. Are we the poor slaves who are just trying to do the master’s bidding, beaten and abused by the powers we confront? Are we the tenants who have robbed the owner by arrogating to ourselves what does not belong to us? Or are we some of both, depending on which day of the week it is and where we find ourselves in a particular pecking order? What is the Word that God is speaking and that Jesus is embodying right now? And do we rejoice at the rejected stone becoming the cornerstone, or become angry and depressed because in so doing he overthrows our own power? It is marvelous in our eyes or noxious to us, quite honestly?

The gospel, indeed the whole Bible, can be good news or bad news for us, depending upon who we are and where we are in any particular story. But that is part of, maybe the biggest part of, the challenge to which we open ourselves by opening the book in the first place. It is the likelihood that when we read or hear the scriptures, we will come to a moment of recognition. A split second later, we may well find ourselves having to decide exactly what we are going to do with this Jesus who shakes our foundations, how we are going to respond to this God who hounds us demanding justice. Such a moment came to the chief priests and Pharisees when they realized that he was speaking about them.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2011

Shining Light

Ethics and Prayer

Isaiah 58:1-9a
Matthew 5:13-20

When three- and four-year-olds in the day school of a parish where I was priest gathered for daily chapel, they used to compete to light the two candles on the small altar. Our standard ritual was my question, “Who did Jesus say was the light of the world?” For the first several weeks of the term or maybe longer there would be a choral answer: “God!”

“That is a very good answer, but not quite the one I’m looking for,” I’d say.

With a little training, they learned to say, “Jesus.” And I would affirm that Jesus did say that he was the light of the world.

“But who else did Jesus say was the light of the world?”

“We are!” they would shout out.

We do not know what preschoolers will remember, or whether or not down the road it will make much difference that they were taught this or that. I suspect that it is a very uneven thing, some children remembering things that others quickly forget. But it was my prayer that somehow, as those little ones saw the two candles burning on their altar, they would make the connection that Jesus and we were in this together. He who said, “I am the light of the world” also said, “You are the light of the world,” howbeit in two different gospels.

Because this year I set myself the task of looking when I preach at each Sunday’s texts with you through the lens of prayer, I am hearing all of these scriptures today in a different key from how I have heard them before. The passage from Isaiah, for instance, is one we frequently read on Ash Wednesday. Fasting is no good if it is divorced from the ethical behavior that God enjoins. It is easy enough to make the connection between the Lenten fast and the ethical imperative to do right by the poor and the oppressed. And the piece of the Sermon on the Mount that we hear in today’s gospel: it really is about integrity, isn’t it? Tasteless salt or a smothered light are contradictions in terms. If we are salt, we have something to flavor. If we are light, we are the means by which people see. We have to exercise our properties in a way that is congruent with who we are. In other words, we are not worth much if we do not have and act with integrity. The “righteousness,” of which Jesus speaks, the righteousness that his community must have that exceeds the so-called righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees is a sense of right action. It involves the practice of justice. That righteousness is different from moral priggishness or pious fussiness. It is the righteousness of profound integrity.

What happens, however, when we start hearing these things in relation to prayer? We find, first, that prayer itself takes on a fresh meaning. Often we assume prayer to be the words we say in the context of a talk, formal or informal, we have with the Divine. But that is only a fraction of what prayer is. Prayer is a way of living. In the Christian sense, prayer is a way of maintaining our relationship with God. I would put it even more simply and say that prayer is the Life of God in us. But in a larger sense, isn’t it possible that our prayer is our life with our god, whichever god we happen to have? Think about it. Somebody asked me just this week what the commandment on idolatry meant. “What is it to have an idol?” he asked. “Idol” is only a word denoting whatever it is that is the god we bow down to, other than the Author and Giver of Life itself. Those gods can be security or money or education or family or sports or career or one of a couple of thousand other things. But whatever the god is that we are worshiping, the substance of the life we are living with that god is our prayer. That is, by the way, what is so sad about idols, and even sadder about prayers to idols. Idols have no way of doing much for us, except by giving us a temporary fix that meets a need such as self-assurance or the staving off of fear. As the psalmist says in once place, “…eyes have they, but they cannot see; ears but they cannot hear; noses but they cannot smell….” And when we give our lives to what cannot give life back, we are the ultimate losers. So the question is not whether we are going to pray. The question is to whom we are going to pray. And you know already that the biblical deck is loaded. There is only One worth praying to, for there is only One who is living and true.

All of that is well and good, until we start trying to figure out what life with God actually involves. I’ll tell you right now that I have discovered no way to get even all the important pieces of the answer to that question into one sermon. I invariably skip something. Yet there is no question that the Law, the Prophets, and Jesus himself leave little doubt that God’s life involves right relationships. To put it that way brings us squarely into the sphere of ethics. When we start thinking of prayer as a deeply ethical activity, or ethics as prayerful, the whole notion of ethics takes on an interesting meaning. Much of the time, “ethics” seems to mean conformity to a standard of professional conduct, such as medical ethics or congressional ethics (don’t laugh), or the ethics of academe. But the Bible knows nothing about that—which fact doesn’t mean that a code of ethics, for example, is a bad idea. Instead, prophets like Isaiah know a good deal about integrity. The great insight of the old prophets was that spirituality without ethical behavior was vapid, hollow, useless. You can fast while you are oppressing your employees, but it won’t do you any good at all. To put it in human terms, God does not even bat an eye. Fasting while quarreling and plotting schisms and sewing the seeds of division? Don’t waste your time! To put it in human terms, God does not hear as much as a grunt from you. But, true fasting is humility. It is loosing the bonds of injustice, undoing those things that keep people down, coming down on the side of the oppressed, exercising power for the sake of right. To live a life like that is to live the life of God, because those are the ethical things God is interested in. To be absolutely clear, Isaiah does not say that these things go hand in hand with a good fast—and if you aren’t into fasting, read “general spirituality.” These things are fasting or “general spirituality,” if the latter is worth its salt. Feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, being available to those “strangers” who really are our own kin: these things are the fast that God desires.

So, then, is prayer as we usually think of it a waste of time? In the total context of the prophets, even the book of Isaiah itself, it would be wrong to suppose that the prophets condemn all liturgy, all ritual, all prayer as we practice it in the formal sense. No, when the people are wrapped up in religiosity and are all fascinated with how spiritual they are, the prophets remind them that there is a world out there that sweats under the yoke of bondage and groans from pure physical hardship—a world God calls them to care about. But when the people (that is to say the majority) are beaten down, depressed, hopeless, the prophets, like Malachi and Zechariah and Haggai, call for a renewal of the worshiping community.

Interestingly enough, Isaiah winds up his sermon on true fasting by talking about “your light,” and “your healing,” meaning ours. When we have integrated the practice of justice and the practice of worship, we in fact will have arrived at the place of true prayer. Our light will shine, not on us, but on the One whose life we are living, the One whose life is in us. It is the life of the One whom Jesus calls “our Abba in heaven.”


© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2011