Isaiah 5:1-7

Let me sing for my beloved my love-song concerning his vineyard: My beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill. 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. And now, inhabitants of Jerusalem and people of Judah, judge between me and my vineyard. What more was there to do for my vineyard that I have not done in it? When I expected it to yield grapes, why did it yield wild grapes? And now I will tell you what I will do to my vineyard. I will remove its hedge, and it shall be devoured; I will break down its wall, and it shall be trampled down. I will make it a waste; it shall not be pruned or hoed, and it shall be overgrown with briers and thorns; I will also command the clouds that they rain no rain upon it. 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!

Luke 12:49-56

“I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.” He also said to the crowds, “When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, ‘It is going to rain’; and so it happens. And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, ‘There will be scorching heat’; and it happens. You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?”

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I need to begin with a confession. I confess before you and the Lord that I have been terribly wrong about Miss America.

Who? You heard me correctly. Miss America. (1)

Miss America is the young woman who when asked what she would like to do with her life, always responds:
“I want to work for world peace, eliminate hunger and disease and save the children and the whales.”

She says something like that anyway each year. And when she does, I always smirk about her being an airhead and so phony.

But you know. She is right. And young people know she is right. Life is about “big ideas” and “big visions.”

At least a well-lived life is. It is not a life deflated by cynicism. Certainly, a Christian life is such a “big idea” calling. “For God so loved the world…,”not only Texas or just the 1100 block of Austin Avenue in Waco, or the Grand Canyon, India or Switzerland. Or even those on my “A” lists.

No, God’s heart is for the whole world.

That’s why today’s texts from the Luke and Isaiah sound like God got up on the wrong side of bed and is cranky. God’s arms reach out to embrace the world and a believer either because of prejudice or apathy keeps trying to shorten that reach.

These texts roar back in protest!

God is not happy with us when we try to restrain the power of God’s love. “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God and God abides in them.”

Yet, love is not where our culture is abiding. Gaining power is. If not power, then alternative places to abide are forms of escapism like drugs, sex or consumer spending. Too many adults of this culture have reduced life to small ideas that have to do with what a social commentator calls our “North American mania,” which is an addictive drive of the brain’s pleasure centers to live turbocharged lives in pursuit of status and possessions at the expense of the only things that can make us happy: relationships with other people. (2)

We are created for loving relationships. But we seem unable to take this path. We fear loving relationships will not deliver the goods. So we, literally, go after the goods.

What this means is that all across North America we are experiencing weak relationships like the PTA, church, Scouts, the Knights of Columbus or whatever organization you want to choose. People are backpedaling as fast as they can from being a part of a community.

Instead of the church seeing this cultural failing as God’s call to us to teach others the value of commitment, the frightening thing is the church is buying into the same world of little ideas.

How can we preserve ourselves?

How can we avoid dying?

How can we become the biggest?”

These are all institutional questions fit for the marketplace but not the church house. At church we are to remember something about “… the one who loses his or her life for my sake shall find it …”
Paul Tillich, the great Protestant theologian of the 1960s, once said humanity raises questions that humanity cannot answer. I fear we are no longer raising these questions.

To paraphrase what Jesus tells the people in today’s text, “Why can’t you see what’s going on in your souls?”

I know why you are here this morning. You are here because you have a hunch that despite all the goofiness and irrelevance of house like this, there is still a chance something big is being whispered here in a room like this one.

You slog through the possible all week long, hip deep in the ordinary. You slog across the parking lot, making your way though the doors into this space called sanctuary. (3)

You may even be too embarrassed to go public or tell anyone, but you are coming here hoping the impossible will overtake you. You are hoping there’s something to all that we cannot see, hoping there is a real beyond that calls us here and now into question.

The early church father Tertullian said of the resurrection, “I believe because it is impossible.”

We have pretty much mastered all of life except our own hearts. We know what is possible if the only options are human doings. But we come through the doors of this sanctuary wondering if this is still the place where the inconceivable, the incredible, the impossible reigns.

In his poem, “For the Time Being,” William H. Auden speaks for all of us who slog along through the week and enter the doors of the sanctuary on Sunday mornings:

“How could the Eternal do a temporary act,
“The Infinite become a finite fact?
“Nothing can save us that is possible:
“We who must die demand a miracle.” (4)

And that my friends is what this place, this assembly, is all about. We care about the impossibility of the big ideas being possible -- even God’s own existence.

We still believe we are created for God’s own purposes. We are created for miracles. And only a Word based on a Holy Doing rather than human doing can save us.

Somewhere deep inside every one of us, when Miss America says she wants to dedicate her life to world peace, as schmaltzy and rehearsed as her words may be, we know she’s right. We are hearing the big heart of Jesus speaking through her words.

And if we have failed to present one another and the culture around us with the big ideas of God, if we have not presented ourselves and all around us with a compelling vision of a life well lived, it is not the fault of the Gospel of God in Jesus. It’s that we have turned church into trivial pursuits for small answers to even tinier questions.

Isaiah warns of trivial pursuits. God has called Israel to be a vineyard which produced grapes that reflect God’s glory among creation. But Israel trades in her shiny calling for a pitiful, real vision of self-glory. Instead of luscious, sweet tasking fruit, God bites and tastes decayed, stinking fruit.
Is this what you and I have done with our lives? Are we going to let this also be the witness of the church, turning all of life into the puniness of wild grapes? Is decay rather than glory what we in our humanity will choose?

Jesus’ words collected into these verses about disciples who can so easily predict the weather, but who are so unable to see the storm developing all because the atmosphere of their own souls is so empty of God’s call.
Let us be a gathering where the Impossible is hoped for. Let God be in the faces that love you and in the faces of strangers all around you.
Miss America is right. A well-lived life is about big ideas.

What awaits puny souls? Judgment. What do you mean? I mean that in every moment God is reaching out to call us to invest ourselves in God’s work; but time and time again we are disinterested for all we wish to see is how we look, and how we could be entertained and how we might impress. Now there is no more time, and all we have is what we’ve gotten, which in the end is nothing but smallness.

Isaiah and Jesus are having a bad day in the texts, but they love us enough to say, “Wake up. Pay attention to the signs of your life. It’s not too late.”
King Arthur once asked Merlin, “What do you do about a very sad heart?”

Merlin replied, “Perhaps you can only learn from it.”
Live big!

Miss America is right. These texts insist it is not too late.
Live big! Learn from your sadness.

(1) Wonderful insight from Dr. Michael Jinkins in his 2007 lectures entitled “Courage, Faithfulness and the Future of the Church.”

(2) Brooks, David. Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There.” Simon & Schuster: New York. 2000.
(3) Jinkins’ imagery.
(4) Quoted by Jinkins.