Before

  So I thought what I would preach today, contrary to what I have been preaching: something not so practical.  Kind of a wonder.  Sharing something that I have thought about.  We are a religion of stories.  And our faith is mostly the stories we tell ourselves.

In the beginning we are faced with a difficult story for us to understand.  We find Adam and Eve in Eden and this tree they are not supposed to touch.  My first question as a child was why something to not be touched would be created.  We know the story of our fall.  We ate the fruit and found this new awareness.

This story is difficult because we find it difficult to understand why God would think this expanded awareness was bad.  Everything in me told me curiosity was something inspired by God.  Knowing more could be bad?  We are forced to come to some sort of understanding with the first stories of our religion.

In truth we can think more or less about them, but we need some sort of accommodation if that is only to ignore the difficulty.  In my youth I did not see anyway to understand what God was hiding from us in plain site,  I searched for more answers and found I certainly wasn't the only person to wrestle with these questions.  Entire new movements of Christianity developed to wrestle with this difficulty.

The Gnostics as they were called believed in a secret knowledge.  There must be more to the story.  They went as far as to make new Gods.  In their theology there was a better God who had placed that tree there.  They saw the God of genesis as the bad God keeping us from the true reality of the world.  As a scientifically minded person this was unsatisfactory for me.

Occam's razor tells us that if two explanations are competing the simpler one is more likely to be true.  More likely may seem a thin thing to place a journey upon, but this is a faith journey.  Creating more Gods and more stories did not seem to be the answer for my confusion.

Religion gets nervous when we struggle.  Many an alternate theory has been burned over the years, but luckily God doesn't get nervous when we struggle.

 I had reached an impasse.   I had similar difficulties identifying God the Good news with the God of the Old News.  God seemed different.  Destroyed the world more than a few times.  I am counting our exit from Eden as destruction of the world as well.  Could we have been different.  What was God thinking.

Today I can tell you were I have arrived.  I have learned to see the one God of the bible.  That was my first step after years of study and practice.  It is easy to see difference, but when you look close it is easy to see the identifying things of God.  We learn of God.  We can see the story as a love story.  Time after time.  Scheme after scheme.  Failure and redemption.

But this story starts with God keeping something from us or so it would seem.  Today I look at this story through one lens.  God didn't want us to partake of the fruit.  God's motivation is love.  This was loving and in character to our creator.  

No we have some familiar aspects to our creation story.  There is an idea that as we fell into sin we might also be stuck forever.  God also kicked us out for our Good.  No that doesn't mean you can kick out your kids for their good.  Unlike God, you don't know everything that is for their Good.

It is kind of the same logic of not needing another God.  We don't really need another.  Why.  There is more to our God than we could ever comprehend.  But at this point we can rest assured the intentions God has for us are good.

I don't know maybe the Angels were not so different from us.  Perhaps they were in a garden with a tree and they didn't eat.  Again from my scientific mind intelligence seems to be destructive on the whole.  We have all these wonderful and sublime things.  We have the unspeakable all around us.  Having a big crisis in my family I look around and saw crisis is the norm.

Maybe all this awareness and intelligence in the end doesn't serve us well.  I guess I don't really believe in us at this point.  I wonder if intelligent life destroys itself all the time.  In a universe with billions of galaxies perhaps the Angels were the only ones to take the short-cut.  Little speculation but most things with God and Angels is.

There is an answer to this.  We may have failed, but God still believes in us.  Sure many times God has come close to ending this grand experiment, but the destination is not in doubt.  There is something redeeming about us because we have a redeemer.

So right here now lets look through this lens to our scripture today:

Matthew 21:33-46

Amplified Bible

Parable of the Landowner

33 “Listen to another parable. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard and put a wall around it and dug a wine press in it, and built a tower, and rented it out to tenant farmers and went on a journey [to another country]. 34 When the harvest time approached, he sent his servants to the tenants to get his [share of the] fruit. 35 But the tenants took his servants and beat one, and killed another, and stoned a third. 36 Again he sent other servants, more than the first time; and they treated them the same way. 37 Finally he sent his own son to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son and have regard for him.’ 38 But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, ‘This [man] is the heir; come on, let us kill him and seize his inheritance.’ 39 So they took the son and threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him. 40 Now when the owner of the vineyard comes back, what will he do to those tenants?” 41 They said to Him, “He will put those despicable men to a miserable end, and rent out the vineyard to other tenants [of good character] who will pay him the proceeds at the proper seasons.”

42 Jesus asked them, “Have you never read in the Scriptures:

‘The [very] [a]Stone which the builders rejected and threw away,
Has become the chief Cornerstone;
This is the Lord’s doing,
And it is marvelous and wonderful in our eyes’?

43 Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to [another] people who will produce the fruit of it. 44 And he who falls on this Stone will be broken to pieces; but he on whom it falls will be crushed.”

45 When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard His parables, they understood that He was talking about them. 46 And although they were trying to arrest Him, they feared the people, because they regarded Jesus as a prophet.

Traditionally and conventionally we look at this as a prophesy from the psalms specifically verse 42: ‘The [very] [a]Stone which the builders rejected and threw away,

Has become the chief Cornerstone;
This is the Lord’s doing,
And it is marvelous and wonderful in our eyes’?

This familiar parable is comforting in many ways.  We often find rejection in this world.  As painful as rejection can be it can lead to entirely new places that we can't even identify.  In many ways this is like the old and new testament I saw as a child.

These were such different places they didn't seem to be talking about the same thing.  Yet it also can be reassuring for us today in new ways.  We can see God as the builder and humans as thrown away.  Thrown away from Eden to be sure.  Yet we are still in the heart of God's creation story today.  

It is reassuring to know the greater context of this parable.  Something was being taken away, but it was offered then freely to all.  Tore down the tent to build a larger one.

As our psalm today says : 80:14 Turn again, O God of hosts; look down from heaven, and see; have regard for this vine,  80:15 the stock that your right hand planted.

It has been a long road.  It has been one road.  Where we are going is the important thing.  We didn't have to do many things, but this awareness we gained we lost our way.  We see other creations of God's doing different things.  We can talk about angels again, but how about slime mold?

Did you know slime mold remembers.  Even the simplest forms of God's creation:  This is the Lord’s doing,  And it is marvelous and wonderful in our eyes.  I will save you today my slime mold stories, but just to say single cell organisms have robust systems of memory.  They don't however have agendas.

In the end this might be all there is to this long walk.  We took on this awareness and we found these agendas.  I would be ready to say all of human achievement was for nothing if not for one thing: God.

I have spoken to you how science finds no light at the end of the tunnel for now.  They only see the heat death of the universe.  Rather telling that the same people at a loss to describe the beginning are happy to tell you the end.  I hope you understand that I am saying even intelligence and awareness as well may have no light at the end, but God.

Yes God kicked us out of Eden and said some kind of mean things on the way out.  Maybe God knew what we would do or Maybe God gives all creations this test in some way.  For all I know we may be the only failures.  Perhaps the cosmos is riddled with failure more than likely.  But God didn't give up on us.  

As parents we can hope to be the same.  I have a daughter that I am very proud of, but I believe and hope that if she had made all the wrong decisions my feelings would not be different for her.  This I can understand.  I rather wonder.  

Isaiah has something of an answer for us in his fifth chapter verse 7: 

5:7 For the vineyard of the LORD of hosts is the house of Israel, and the people of Judah are his pleasant planting; he expected justice, but saw bloodshed; righteousness, but heard a cry! 

 What could we do to lose the love of God?

The Vineyard of the Lord.  What about our vineyard.  You know we have grapes growing all around us don't you?

Earlier in Chapter five Isaiah says:

5:1 Let me sing for my beloved my love-song concerning his vineyard: My beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill.

5:2 He dug it and cleared it of stones, and planted it with choice vines; he built a watchtower in the midst of it, and hewed out a wine vat in it; he expected it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes.

We have gone a little wild it is true at Nottingham.  We reach our two hundredth anniversary with trepidation.  Did those fist members expect two hundred years.  Well I don't think we expect two hundred years.  But if it is the will of God there will be.

We wonder what  should be our focus.  Well the buildings around us continue to fall.  We find ourselves with new opportunities and new hope.  I walked into the building and gasped as I saw the abandoned house next to our church finally down.  I have done many things and served many roles at church.  I have never gasped.  There is this thing that has stuck with me my whole life: an attraction to the novel.  I've never gasped on my way into the building and I know I haven't by my own reaction to myself.

Remembering that we are created in God's image I think now God too has a love of the novel.  May not have loved everything we have done but there is new things that happen.  Creation creating I would guess something God notices.

The really interesting thing about the buildings being demolished next to us is that we have a real opportunity to open ourselves to the neighborhood.  For too long we have been at the end of the street.  This new green space will actually open up our church to the neighborhood.

When the neighborhood had great strength it wasn't as important that we were at the end.  In the current struggles of the neighborhood we can be that balm in Nottingham.  There is a balm in Nottingham.

I see green space.  I see wide paths.  I see a larger garden with vines planted and tended.  Not to just look pretty but give people a real chance to learn skills in a real Ohio industry.  To work close with Chateau Hough which is a re-entry program at its heart.  If you don't know them I recommend you look them up.

Where we are headed also informs us where we have been.  This is probably the real reason I have grown more comfortable with God and this story of creation.  I see where we are and where we could go.  Intentions are much more powerful than we think.  If we know anything about God it is intention.  People ask why the world is a mess if God is in charge.  Not a hard thing to understand.  People involved.  Always say to those who ask why there is evil is why is there good when that is a lower percentage occurrence.

― John of Damascus offered this view: Had God kept from being made those who through His goodness were to have existence, but who by their own choice were to become evil, then evil would have prevailed over the goodness of God. Thus, all things which God makes He makes good, but each one becomes good or evil by his own choice. So, even if the Lord did say: 'It were better for him if that man had not been born,' He did not say so in deprecation of His own creature, but in deprecation of that creature's choice and rashness.”

― John of Lennon said:

“Everything will be okay in the end. If it's not okay, it's not the end.”

Let us pray

(from the Canticle of the Creatures- Attributed to St. Francis of Assisi)

All praise be yours, My Lord
through all that you have made.

And first my lord Brother Sun, who brings the day...
How beautiful is he, how radiant in all his splendor!
Of you, Most High, he bears the likeness.

All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Moon and Stars;
In the heavens you have made them, bright and precious and fair.

All praise be yours, my Lord, through Brothers Wind and Air...

All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Water,
So useful, lowly, precious and pure.

All praise be yours, my Lord, through Brother Fire,
through whom you brighten up the night...

All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Earth, our mother,
Who feeds us...and produces various fruits
With colored flowers and herbs...

Praise and bless my Lord, and give him thanks,
And serve him with great humility.

We ask our hearts to be as open as our green space.

In Jesus' name

Amen

Nottingham 10-4-2020