09 | October | 2023 | Fearfully and Wonderfully Made

Maybe you can tell me what these species have in common: garlic mustard … common carp … zebra mussels … common buckthorn … Asian beetles … poison hemlock … Oriental bittersweet … wild parsnip … emerald ash borer. [PAUSE] They’re all invasive species that have made their home here in Minnesota.
- Definition of an invasive species (from the National Invasive Species Information Center, part of the USDA)[1]: a species that is:
  - Non-native (or alien) to the ecosystem under consideration and,
  - Whose introduction causes or is likely to cause economic or environmental harm or harm to human health
    - Certainly seen the effects of that harm ourselves → multiple ash trees that we recently had to take down because of emerald ash borers
    - My kids can tell you all about the dangers of wild parsnip as they’ve been thoroughly and dutifully warned about it by my in-laws’ before they head out to adventure in the woods around their property in WI. → just brushing against the plant (let alone breaking the stem) releases sap à sap + sunlight = severe burn within 24-48 hrs. → sensitivity to sunlight for exposed/affected skin can last for years
  - If you spend time in any of Minnesota’s state parks, you’ll find information about identifying invasive species and how to let the MN DNR know what particular invasive species you found and where you found it.
Invasive species = one of the major issues propelling the effort of reclaiming prairieland across the U.S. → Through our own human intervention – fueled by greed, apathy, entitlement, and hubris – we have become our own invasive species, damaging and even obliterating lands and waterways and all the species that God created specifically for those particular parts of creation. Only in the past few decades have people really begun to recognize just how crucial reclaiming natural habitats like the prairies of the upper Midwest is and will continue to be to the health of our world and everything that lives on it … ourselves included.
- May sound odd, but I hear the idea of reclaiming natural space in our Scripture reading this morning → So as we dig into it more, I want you to keep that idea of reclaiming space for what God intended in your mind.
First, an admission: This is a daunting When I was doing my sermon planning a few months ago and I read the passages for today, at first, I discounted this one right off the bat.
- Way that I plan sermons: RCL = 6 different passages designated for each Sunday → I read through each passage in turn, maybe take a few notes on each, then decide which passage to choose
  - First Testament passages = always first on the list → So for this Sunday, this Isaiah passage was the first one I read, and my initial thought was, “Now how in the heck would I preach that?” But the more I sat with the passages for the day, the more I felt drawn to this one. That being said, I want to acknowledge straight out of the gate that this is not an easy passage. On the other hand, if God didn’t want us to wrestle with hard things, they wouldn’t be a part of the Bible. So onward we go.
Context reminder: Is = prophet during the Babylonian exile
- Isaiah himself = part of the exiled population → those forcibly removed from their homeland in Judah and taken on a roughly 900-mi. journey across deserts, rivers, and even mountains (Zagros and Elburz Mountains in modern-day Iran) to a land and a culture and a life completely foreign to them
  - So Isaiah is delivering these words to a people who have been utterly devastated. They’ve been through the pain and trauma of being conquered by an invading army. They’ve been marched away from everything sacred and familiar to them. They’ve had to leave not only familiarity but even sometimes family And they’re just trying to make it in a wholly new and overwhelmingly unknown.
And yet into this chaos of uncertainty and undesired circumstances, Isaiah speaks these words from God – words about a vineyard tended and cared for … a vineyard that goes horribly wrong.
- Begins in a way that seems to speak to goodness and care: loved one putting vast amounts of time and effort into creating this vineyard
  - Found not just any parcel of land but a “fertile hillside” = perfect environment for growing grape vines
  - Dug out the land (pre-rototillers, all, so this was no small feat!) and cleared away all the stones → making the already fertile soil even more perfect for nurturing plants
  - Planted “excellent vines” → Heb. indicates the choicest species
  - Also provided for the safety/production of the vineyard
    - Built a tower (watchtower)
    - Dug out a wine vat
    - (Presumably) built a stone wall around the vineyard
  - What Scripture doesn’t indicate = time! – from presentation from the Univ. of California Cooperative Extension “Establishing a Vineyard”[2]:
    - No crop production the first few years, not until Year 4 or 5
    - At least another year is required to produce the first vintage
    - And that’s with modern technology and understandings of how to maximize growth and yields and whatnot! At least 5-6 years before you even begin to see any kind of production from the vineyard. So if our Scripture this morning said the vineyard grew nothing but “rotten grapes,” those plants had to have taken the time to grow and begin producing before the owner even realized just how tragic his situation was.
- Tell-tale line in the middle of today’s text sheds light on what Is is really talking about: So now, you who live in Jerusalem, you people of Judah, judge between me and my vineyard: What more was there to do for my vineyard that I haven’t done for it? When I expected it to grow good grapes, why did it grow rotten grapes?[3] → Remember that these are God’s words conveyed through Isaiah to the people … the exiled people of Jerusalem and Judah. God is speaking to those recently removed from those very places.
  - Now we need to remember what was happening in Judah just before Babylonian exile
    - Kings of Judah had become corrupt and even evil
      - Violent
      - Greedy
      - Most egregious: they had turned not only their own hearts and their own households away from God and to the worship of other gods à they drew the worship of the nation away from God and to those other, pagan gods as well → Through the account of Scripture itself, we know that there is not a single commandment of the 10 that God gave Moses generations earlier that the kings of Judah had not broken.
    - So through Isaiah and through this parable of the carefully, lovingly-attended vineyard gone awry, God is saying to the people, “I cared for you. I worked for you. I tended you and laid down preparations for your best life. And yet despite my best efforts, you have become rotten grapes.
      - Heb. “rotten grapes” = wild, sour, unripe grapes à another transl. = “worthless ones”
And here is where the reclaiming of the natural space comes in: Now let me tell you what I’m doing to my vineyard. I’m removing its hedge, so it will be destroyed. I’m breaking down its walls, so it will be trampled. I’ll turn it into a ruin; it won’t be pruned or hoed, and thorns and thistles will grow up. I will command the clouds not to rain on it.[4] → Now as a girl who grew up on a farm and spent plenty of my summertime walking beans – putting my own blood, sweat, and tears (literally) into eradicating the fields of those horrible, pernicious, insidious weeds – this sounds awful! “It won’t be pruned or hoed, and thorns and thistles will grow up.” Every farmer and gardener’s nightmare! But if we shift our perspective for a moment, we might actually find both admonition and hope in this.
- What God isn’t saying
  - The land will be salted so nothing can grow → no mention of that fertile land being damaged to prevent future cultivation
  - The land will be wiped from the face of the earth
  - The land will be taken over by another vigneron (vineyard owner/farmer) can grow crop there instead
  - Even after all that they have put God through, God is refusing to abandon the people! God isn’t calling them hopeless or a lost cause or a mistake. God isn’t even giving them up to the false gods to which they had been led. True, they may not be a vineyard, but there is natural reclaiming that needs to happen in this space – a dramatic return to the way that God intended for the land to be, a dramatic return to the way that God intended for the people to be.
    - Scholar: The truth is clear: the Holy One who planted the vineyard “looked for justice but saw bloodshed; for righteousness but heard cries of distress” (verse 7). This truth-telling is the fulcrum upon which transformation rests. These truths may be hard to hear, yet set the foundation for the flourishing of all. Naming how things really are, not sugar-coating it or pretending maybe things are ok, is necessary. Glossing over reality does not transform it but simply covers it up, making it unavailable for transformation. The vineyard owner is clear-eyed and unapologetic about speaking the truth. Truth-telling is the first, hard, powerful step toward change. But this truth is really hard to hear! We much prefer to be the ones speaking truth to power, power that is elsewhere. But what happens when we are the power? When God speaks truth to power and that power is us?[5]
You see, in order for that reclaiming to happen, the wall has to come down – the wall that has been built around the vineyard to protect it has to come down. And in the world of the Church, we have built a lot. of. walls. Around ourselves. Within ourselves. Cutting ourselves off from the world around us and from one another. But those walls haven’t kept us safe. They’ve kept us isolated. They’ve kept others out, not to the benefit of the Church but to its utter and undeniable detriment.
- Virtual Synod mtg. this past week → educational piece from Dr. Corey Schlosser-Hall, Deputy Executive Director for Vision, Innovation and Rebuilding at the Presbyterian Mission Agency
  - Corey’s story about going back to Univ. of Oregon campus
    - Hayward Field → MASSIVE change: bigger, more accessible, able to accommodate more events and better serve both the athletes and the public
    - Koinonia Center → MASSIVE change: bigger, more accessible, included housing (filling a deep need within campus community)
    - Local Presbyterian church in Eugene, OR → no change
  - Discussion of change asked 3 difficult but essential questions in the life of the Church (all on a 1-10 scale):
    - When you think about the next 10 years, do you think things will mostly stay the same and go on as normal? Or do you expect that most of us will dramatically rethink and reinvent how we do things?
    - When you think about how the world and your life will change over the next ten years, are you mostly worried or mostly optimistic?
    - How much influence do you feel you personally have in shaping how the world and your life change over the next 10 years?
      - My addition: the church
- Reclaiming the prairie can be (and unfortunately is) looked at by some as a destruction, as a backsliding, as the opposite of innovation. But would it really be so terrible to stop preventing the land from returning to its natural state – the way in which God created it to be? As the Church, are we protecting a legacy that has been handed down to us … or are we in fact preventing the wild, diverse, breathtaking, unbounded flourishing of the Holy Spirit in our midst? Amen.