by the Rev. Dr. Rochelle A. Stackhouse
Preached October 2, 2011, at Church of the Redeemer UCC, New Haven, CT
Isaiah 5:1-7, Matthew 21:33-46
Listen to the words of this song. (Play The Band Perry’s “If I Die Young”)
“If I die young, bury me in satin/lay me down in a bed of roses/sink me in the river at dawn/send me away with the words of a love song.”
When I first heard this song, I did a quick check of my radio station to see if somehow I had mistakenly hit a country station. But no, it was KC101, and for those of you who don’t listen to pop radio, that’s one of the basic pop/rock stations geared to listeners between ages 12 and 35. Their usual artists are Beyonce, Lady Gaga, Kanye West, and others like them. The Band Perry (that sings this song) is a country band and this is decidedly in style and lyrics a country song. But it’s getting widespread play on pop radio, a song about a girl dying young and wanting to be buried in pearls and talking about going to heaven in evangelical terms, and saying “I’ve had just enough time.” Enough time? Why isn’t she shouting about the unfairness of it all and not “going gently into that good night?” She seems so calm about dying young, as though it’s what she expected.
Now I know this is just one song, but what’s going on here? A few days after I first heard that song, I spoke with a local therapist who talked about how hard it was to work with young black teens in New Haven who are very sure they will probably be dead by their mid-twenties and so cannot envision why they should plan for a future. (Check out the front page of today’s New Haven Register where the homicide victims of 2011 are pictured). And I keep seeing all the chatter on the web about 2012 being the end of the world, and not just from fringe sites. So I began to wonder if this song isn’t symptomatic of a cloud of feeling, oddly reminiscent in some ways of parts of the 50’s and 60’s when we were waiting for someone to set off a nuclear bomb. Duck and cover.
It’s really no surprise that this sense of foreboding is so widespread. I was reminded at a Conference I attended on Monday that in the past ten years, we have lived through the breakdown of so many of the institutions we have counted on as the bedrock of our societal security. In 2000, our political system seemed broke as we waited for the Supreme Court to tell us who was our new President, and now both parties in Congress seem utterly paralyzed. In 2001 our sense of living in this bubble of security in the U.S. evaporated along with the World Trade Center towers. Whether the cause is human or natural, the past few years have made it clear that the global climate is decidedly changing. In 2008 bank failures and housing foreclosures and unemployment exploded on the scene so that our economic system seems deeply broken, such that young people caught in low wage dead end jobs are flocking to Wall Street to engage in protests against those perceived to be taking all the profits and killing those seeking to claim their share (as in Jesus’ parable).
In the imagery used by the prophet Isaiah, our vineyard seems to be producing wild, inedible grapes! And in the imagery used by Jesus, there seems to be little hope that the vineyard can be reclaimed as a just place. Death and imagery of varying kinds of death seem to be a natural response to what so many perceive as humanity gone off course in some serious ways, and not only in this country. In countries as diverse as Greece, Mexico, Afghanistan, Somalia, Israel, Yemen, China and Columbia, so much seems so wrong and there seems so little hope that it can be put right.
In the midst of all this, where is the church? In the song, God’s purpose seems to be receiving this girl at her death with loving arms. God is outside the picture of life and only involved in death. Did I neglect to say that the institution of the church is another one that seems to have fallen apart for so many? From sex and money scandals and internal bickering across many traditions, for lots of people in the world, the church seems irrelevant at best and destructive at worst. Wild and inedible grapes in the vineyard.
But that is not who we are at our best, and it is not who we want to be here, today, I firmly believe. Greater New Haven and the world need a church that is not a safe, nostalgia trip to cocoon us from a scary world, a time machine that takes us back to an imaginary era when “things were different.”
We don’t need a church that only exists to bury our young, a church that reflects a God out of touch and uninterested in the affairs of humanity gone off track.
We don’t need a church so busy arguing about who is fit to be inside it that we drive away those who need it most.
In Jesus’ story, the vineyard owner sent the son to the vineyard that was no longer a place of prosperity and sharing but of death and greed. The son came to talk to those caught up in their own destruction, to offer them another way of living. As Jesus said elsewhere, “I came that all may have life, and life abundant.” We are the descendents of that son! We carry the same message, even if sometimes we have trouble believing it ourselves.
World Communion Sunday must be more than just all Christians in the world singing Kum Bay Ya around the Communion Table. It is a day that, empowered, encouraged, and embodied by Jesus, we make a new commitment with each other across traditions and continents for the church to be a place of life, a place where we connect people to the living God, a place where we nurture a lively, hopeful community of transformation which actually believes the world can be a just and loving place and then acts to join with God’s Spirit in making that world be real.
I feel like I say this a lot here, and maybe you are tired of it, but we need to be reminding ourselves all the time that the work we do here, the prayers we pray here, the way we form the faith of our children here, the way we choose to use the resources of buildings, money, time and skills here are not just luxuries, extras in busy lives. All of this is critical if we believe that the vineyard of this world has any chance of being the fertile, productive, nurturing, beautiful vineyard we and our children need it to be, if we really have a sense of the future. The stakes are higher now than in the past; the technology for destruction that is available in the world makes the bombs that so utterly destroyed two Japanese cities seem tame. Technology has made it easier to spread hate and fear and lies than at any other time in human history.
But that same technology also has the possibility of being used to spread hope and love and cries for justice and peace, like the recent “It Gets Better” campaign on YouTube seeking to help gay and lesbian youth seize life when they are tempted to commit suicide in the face of bullying. We have been planted by God here, and the task of this church is to nurture us as fertile vines to spread far and wide with acts and words of love and hope, to be sweet grapes in a world of wild vines. If you will, we as a church, as Christians, exist as fertilizer, as rich soil, and everything we do here needs to be in service of strengthening each other for the task of serving God in the world. That’s what God needs us to be.
That’s what this table is all about. It is good food, God food, vital, nutritious grapes, just a little bit, which is all we need. Though we talk about body broken and blood poured, this table is not about death, but about life rising up out of what seems to be the power of death, against all odds. It is the center of what Christians believe, the basis of our irrational, exuberant hope.
The radio may be playing songs of death, but the pop song that comes to me today about who we are as the church in these times is a song Bruce Springsteen wrote in response to the destruction of 9/11. He sang this:
Come on up for the rising
Come on up, lay your hands in mine
Come on up for the rising
Come on up for the rising tonight
Left the house this morning
Bells ringing filled the air
Wearing the cross of my calling
On wheels of fire I come rollin’ down here
Come on up for the rising
Come on up, lay your hands in mine
Come on up for the rising
Come on up for the rising, [for life!]Amen.
Bruce Springsteen, "The Rising"
