By the Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Ph.D. '13
Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in the Faculty of Divinity
Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church
(The following is a transcript of the service audio, Oct. 8, 2023)
May the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, oh God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen. So today is a joyful day in the life of the church, a momentous day really in the life of the church. And I don't just mean this church. I mean the big church because we have three baptisms here today. And just like in a family, when you introduce a new member of the family, the whole family is transformed. We are baptizing three people today, and that means the church, which stretches across time and place, will be transformed today. And it's something to celebrate and we are going to celebrate it. And I have to say, I wish Jesus had some cheerier things to say this morning on this joyous occasion.
Just to be clear, I don't choose these readings. This was not the lesson I would've chosen for a baptism. And it's not just that we're talking, we're hearing about putting to death miserable wretches. It's also that the traditional interpretation of this lesson I think is both dangerous and wrong. I want to talk about ... At risk of saying it again, I want to talk about why the traditional interpretation is both dangerous and wrong as a way to suggest that maybe there is something we might learn about what we will do here today, this joyous thing we will do today, something that we will learn about baptism if we get beyond that dangerous and wrong reading towards a different one.
So what is this reading I'm worried about? So as Isaiah says, in the passage that was read, this idea of the vineyard serving as a stand-in for Israel, that's traditional. And Isaiah names it, the vineyard is Israel. But that analogy of the vineyard as Israel has been used in the Christian tradition to take a uniquely antisemitic, to posit a violently antisemitic reading of this passage that the vineyard would belong to the people of Israel. But now it has been given over to others, namely to us Christians, and we can put those miserable wretches to death.
Now, this is just ... Historically, it doesn't make sense. In the time when Jesus was saying this, there was no distinction between Christians and Jews. Jesus was a Jew talking to other Jews, there would not have been a sense that it was being taken away from the people of Israel and given to anyone else. So it bears asking the question then, I mean it's undeniable that this has been the interpretation in the history of Christianity, but it's the wrong one. So who is Jesus speaking to? Who is Jesus speaking about? Who are these tenants? The ones meant to tend this vineyard? Let's talk about the tenets. What do they do in this passage?
First, they think it belongs to them and only them, and they're willing to kill people to protect that idea. Also, they're not working the field. They're too busy killing everyone who comes to actually work the land and yield any harvest. They say this deliberately, instead of yielding this harvest, instead of working the land, let's kill this guy and take his inheritance so that can belong to us as well. This is what the tenants do wrong, and something about the response of the religious leaders at the time resonates with Jesus or Jesus draws them in line with them somehow. And so there's something going on here about the relationship between religion and power, about the relationship between having religion and having power that is at stake in the way Jesus is talking about the tenants who try to wield all the power and wield it violently, and also these religious leaders. But again, who is Jesus talking about? Who is Jesus talking to?
If you're part of our Faith in Life forum, which meets at 9:30 on Sunday mornings, you know that we are reading the gospels. So here's one gospel principle, one reading principle that I like to use whenever I'm reading scripture. The gospel speaks so much about how we ought to repent over and over again. It says repent, repent, repent. And it also says, "Judge not. Don't judge others." So as a principle, when I'm reading scripture, if I believe the text is talking about somebody else, it's probably talking about me. If we believe the text is accusing someone else, in the spirit of this repentance, in the spirit of not judging others, what we should be listening to is how the text may be accusing us.
And so let's ask that question. Do we look like these tenants? Do I look like the tenant? I'm a religious leader and our Christian Church has been the dominant and most powerful religious tradition in the world for at least 1,500 years. Does this look like us?
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I spoke about how this lesson has been used to justify a centuries long tradition of antisemitism, and I think we Christians don't do enough to take responsibility and to own that vile history of antisemitism. Centuries and centuries, not just in the 20th century, are culminating in the awful genocide of the Holocaust, but centuries and centuries of murderous antisemitism that has been part of our history. It's also Indigenous People's Weekend this weekend. Centuries and centuries of Christianity married to, integrated into a colonial project, a racist colonial project. Does that look like us? Do the tenants look like us? When we think about these histories, our history, who we have been as a church, as the most powerful religious tradition in the world, does that look like us? I am afraid if we're honest, if we read these lines and look at our history with the spirit of repentance that the gospel calls for, we have to acknowledge that it does, that we look a lot like these tenets.
If you're like me, when you woke up yesterday and you saw the news reports, I saw them in the New York Times, but you may have seen them somewhere else. You saw news reports of rockets out of Gaza. You were distraught, you still are distraught, and we pray for peace, we pray fervently for peace and for an end to violence in the Holy Land. You're distraught at the resumption, the continuation of this violence. If you're like me, you're distraught at Palestinian civilians who have been victims of structural violence for decades in Gaza and who are now being targeted, you're distraught by Israeli civilians being targeted, kidnapped.
But if you're like me, you're also especially dismayed because the contours of this conflict in so far as this conflict is built along long traditions of both settler colonialism and antisemitism. Those contours are ours. They come from us. We are implicated in it. This is who we are. These are the wild grapes that we have wrought in the vineyard as the ones meant to tend and build this kingdom. Can you imagine poorer stones upon which to build the Kingdom of Heaven? What will God do with us? When God returns, what will God do with us? This is the question, and it's the question Jesus asks the religious leaders. But importantly, they get the answer wrong. They say God will come, the owner will come and kill those miserable wretches, but we know that is not what God does because the Son did come and we did kill Him.
And instead of putting us to death, God loved us and saved us, and though we were profoundly rejectable, God turns to us and says to us, even today, "You are the ones upon whom I will build this kingdom." The religious leaders think Jesus is corroborating their answer, but he's not. He's correcting them. That's why he says, "Have you never heard? These are the ones. You are the ones." We are the ones called. Despite whatever historical failures we must admit, we carry with us, we are the ones called to build God's Kingdom. And this is why today's lesson is a lesson about baptism, about holy baptism, about what it means when people are called to baptism and are baptized into the church. Because we have this idea of baptism. It comes from early Christian theology that baptism is the moment where God's grace is bestowed upon a person, that before that moment there's some impediment between that person and God. And the baptism is the thing that does it, and that's just not true.
Jason and Casey and Liam have been beloved of God every day of their lives. Love, God's love is not something that's happening today. That is not what this ritual marks. It's not the granting of God's grace to them or the giving of God's love. They're full of it. The people who love them know it. Something else is happening. And listen to the baptismal covenant. As we make those promises with them here today, they are going to stand and Liam's parents are going to stand and they're going to make promises to us and to God to build that kingdom, to take responsibility, to bear the love that God has promised through Jesus Christ in their own lives and out into the world.
What's sacred about baptism is that God and God's mercy turns to us, us, the church here, and asks us to partner with God in building a loving world. What's sacred about baptism is the promises that we make together and that Liam and Casey and Jason will make to do our best, to make God's Word flesh in our lives and in the world in which we live. There is no more sacred promise, and it's one that is difficult and trying, but it's also worth celebrating. And so although we have these hard words from Jesus today, although we have a hard world in which to hear them, we have the glorious promise of God and Christ and the vision of love and justice that God asks us to make real with our lives.