“IN DEFIANCE OF EXPECTATIONS”
Matthew 21:33-46
(10-05-08) Communion

A couple of weeks ago, while driving through the neighbourhood of Ramsey,
actually, I was lost, I had wanted to get onto 25 Ave,
but Spiller Road was closed in that section,
anyway, I stumbled onto the sculpture of the upside down church.
You may have heard about this sculpture,
although it is so hidden away I doubt that any more than a handful of Calgarians
will ever see the sculpture before it moves to its next location.
Early in September the Glenbow Museum brought the upside down church sculpture, created by Dennis Oppenheim, from Vancouver to Calgary
to, in their own words, inspire, challenge, excite and engage Calgarians.
I don’t know if its done any of those things,
but it did make me stop and get out of my car and take a picture of it, with my two kids.
They thought it was just strange, this upside down church.
The official name of the sculpture is, “Device to Root Out Evil.”
And I suppose in some way that makes perfect sense.
The steeple of the church is buried into the ground
and the church building, although it really is no bigger than a large garden shed,
is suspended upside down above the ground.
So I suppose the intent may have been to root out evil
by having the church, perhaps symbolizing God, get to the bottom of things.
I confess, I know nothing about Dennis Oppenheim or his artistic vision,
but I have read that in regards to this sculpture,
he has said that for him it has nothing to do with religion at all,
but is just a very simple gesture about the fusion of sculpture and architecture.

Maybe Mr. Oppenheim has no intent to link his obviously religious installation
to some sort of spirituality, but others certainly have.
The piece has actually been chased out of proposed sites
in New York City, Denver and Stanford University in California.
Imagine that we in Calgary, now host a piece of art
which was considered too controversial for New York City and Stanford, California!
No wonder Maclean’s Magazine recently named Calgary as Canada’s most cultured city! But you know, I think those who have been all bent out of shape about this sculpture, especially the religious folk who have taken this as an insult to their faith,
may be missing a wonderful touch of irony here.
The church, if we are doing our job, if we are faithful to our calling,
is all about turning our world’s expectations upside down.
The sculpture actually does the community of faith a favour,
by reminding us that the message the church is called to share
is all about inspiring, challenging, exciting and engaging people
with the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of the Living God,
whose birth, life, death and resurrection
were anything but ordinary, staid, predictable or common.
His life and his message turned the world of his time
and of all time since, on its head, upside down.
The gospel is all about being in defiance of expectations.

Our text this morning is an example of such subversion.
But before we continue we need to set the context.
Over the past couple of months we have been preaching
mostly from the gospel according to Matthew,
following Jesus and his disciples
from Peter’s confession of Jesus as the Messiah at Caesarea Philippi,
to the Transfiguration of Jesus
and the onset of his journey to Jerusalem, to the cross.
Along the way Jesus has been teaching about, among other things,
forgiveness, the need to forgive, not only 7 times, but 70 times 7 times,
essentially forgiveness without end.
He has been teaching about mercy,
about how God’s mercy is immense, surprising and amazing.
Jesus has been telling parables about vineyards,
about workers getting paid the same amount
although they have worked different hours,
and about how, if God is unfair, it is always to our benefit.
Jesus has said that these parables are glimpses
into what the heavenly kingdom will be like.
Jesus has been challenging the sense of fairness and justice in his listeners,
and in us, as we have also listened.
There’s something going on in these chapters from Matthew’s gospel account
that’s larger than just any one parable or any one teaching.
All these parables and all these teachings
are adding up to a vision of the kingdom of heaven, and of God,
that may seriously and permanently challenge and shake up and turn upside down
what we may have assumed about God and about God’s kingdom.

We find ourselves this week again in the vineyard.
Jesus is continuing his teaching in rebuttal
to the question of the priests and elders who demanded to know
by what authority he was teaching and healing.
Though he won’t answer their question,
the parables make clear that his authority is from God,
Jesus speaks for God, as one with authority.
This morning’s parable deals with a landowner who had some problems with his tenants.
When harvest came, the landowner sent his servants to collect his fruit.
But the tenants beat, stoned and even killed those who were sent to collect the fruit.
So the landowner decided to send his son,
believing that the tenants would respect him.
Instead, the tenants saw an opportunity to inherit the vineyard
and killed the landowner’s son.
Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, asks Jesus,
what will he do to those tenants?

If we were there as Jesus told this parable,
we would probably answer just like those who said
that the landowner will put those wretches to a miserable death
and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time. And why wouldn’t we answer this way?
When people respond to us with violence, with cruelty, with brutality,
we instinctively want to strike back.
It’s the expected response.
We have all heard the phrase, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.
But did you know that this injunction,
first given to the Israelites as part of the Mosaic law,
was actually an attempt to tone down the violence
that people committed against one another?
It wasn’t so easy to respond only an eye for an eye.
Because if someone took your eye, you often were tempted to retaliate
by taking far more than just an eye in return,
if you could, you might take their life.
And so as far back as the time of Moses,
God began introducing the concept of defying expectations.
When everyone expects you to respond a certain way,
the people of God are to respond in defiance of expectations.

And nowhere does this get any clearer than in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Notice that Jesus asks the question,
now what will the owner of the vineyard do,
but he doesn’t answer the question, the people listening do.
They assume the vineyard owner will follow expectations,
their expectations, the expectations of the world.
But remember the vineyard is not the world, it stands for the kingdom of heaven.
And as we have heard over the past few weeks,
the kingdom of heaven is governed by a completely different set of expectations
than the kingdoms of this world.

To be fair, we need to note that this parable is one of only a handful
which are present in all the three synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke.
There are no parables in the gospel according to John.
And in the gospel accounts in Mark and Luke,
it is Jesus who speaks the words
that the owner of the vineyard will come and put the tenants to death.
Traditionally, this parable has been used to describe the judgment of God
against the people of Israel, the Jewish people,
who rejected the prophets God had sent and even killed them,
and who eventually rejected Jesus and had him crucified.
And so God in anger, took away the vineyard
and entrusted its care to the Gentiles, to the church.

But whether Jesus spoke the answer to his own question,
or whether the crowds answered for him,
all three gospels agree that Jesus spoke the words that followed;
“Have you never read in the scriptures,
the stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone,
this was the Lord’s doing and it is amazing in our eyes?”
Clearly Jesus intends to refer to his own impending death and resurrection.
And it is this very obvious connection to what will happen to him shortly in Jerusalem that turns our understanding of this entire parable on its head.

The question is asked, what will the vineyard owner do?
What will he do when his actions are met with violence, with cruelty and brutality?
If the parable is intended to convey to us what the kingdom of heaven is like,
then we need to pay attention.
When people rejected God,
when people abused and rejected and even killed the servants and prophets of God,
what did God do?
God didn’t wipe humanity off the face of the earth,
instead, God defied expectations and sent his Son, his only Son,
Jesus the Christ, the Messiah, to die on the cross instead of us.
And it was his plan all along!
Have you never read in the scriptures,
the stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone,
this was the Lord’s doing and it is amazing in our eyes?
This was the Lord’s doing, that the stone that would be rejected,
that the Jesus who would be rejected,
who came to his own but his own received him not,
who would be brought before the crowds by Pontius Pilate
only to be shouted at, crucify, crucify,
that he would become the cornerstone of our salvation.
It is truly amazing in our eyes!

It is truly amazing that God would respond the way he did,
that God continues to respond the way he does.
Even today, as we continue to reject and deny
and even bring outright hostility to the gift of God’s grace in Jesus,
God still responds with mercy, with patience,
with the promise of his Spirit
and the forgiveness, restoration and reconciliation through that Spirit.
Now, we would be wise to understand that it won’t last forever,
we don’t live forever and Jesus is coming again one day,
but until that day God’s amazing love, patience and mercy,
in defiance of all expectations, is our saving grace.

Anna Carter Florence of Columbia Theological Seminary suggests
that in these final chapters of Matthew’s gospel account,
Jesus spends a lot of time talking about judgment,
backwards and forwards, inside out and upside down.
He is so thorough, in fact, that you have to wonder
if he was afraid that we wouldn’t get it,
unless he preached the mother of all sermon series.
And, she concludes, what if,
rather than the traditional understanding of this parable, which is credible,
what if this outrageous story is simply that:
a wildly outrageous story about a world we have yet to meet?
What if this is a story that contrasts human judgment
with the as yet un-experienced and unimagined divine judgment of a God
who is so far beyond us,
that we cannot even apply the same patterns of justice?
(Anna Carter Florence, Lectionary Homiletics)

We know what the expectations of our world are like,
we know what our expectations are like.
When people harm us, we want to harm them back, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,
and we comfort ourselves in the knowledge that we are only doing what’s fair,
what is expected of us.
When we watch the debates between people who aspire to lead our country
and we see them attacking each other, belittling each other, bullying each other,
it doesn’t shock us anymore.
Its politics, as usual, and that’s exactly the point, isn’t it?
Its to be expected.
As we followed the inevitable bailout of the Wall Street financial mess,
even when the first attempt failed,
we knew it was going to pass eventually,
but first there had to be some deep sense of public outrage and disgust shown
by the politicians responsible for passing the bill,
because it plays better to the constituents back home
when you can at least say that you tried to hold people accountable,
and especially since its only a month before an election.
Never mind that attempts to introduce some regulatory controls
over things such as sub-prime mortgages were routinely defeated
by the same people who are now so outraged and disgusted.
Its to be expected.

But then there are times when people do something in defiance of expectations,
when people do things which are subversive,
when their actions and their words and their love and their grace
turn the expectations of the world upside down.
When the parents of a daughter brutally murdered in cold blood in Edson, Alberta,
can speak about their pain, but not about their desire to get revenge,
to get even, an eye for an eye,
when the love of Jesus moves people to act in defiance of expectations,
that catches our attention, that inspires, challenges, excites and engages people.

When the people of God defy expectations
and turn the common practice of the world on its head,
that’s the most compelling witness to our Lord that we can share.
When the people of God respond to legalism with grace,
when the people of God meet treachery with forgiveness,
when the people of God answer war with peace,
when the people of God reply to judgment with mercy,
that’s when we become most compelling in our witness to our Lord.

When’s the last time we defied expectations?
Are there situations and circumstances where even now
our defiance of expectations would speak compellingly to our faith in Jesus?
What keeps us from living this way?
Even though we might think
that we are locked into the expectations of the world in which we live,
the truth is that we always have an option,
we always have the option to show mercy,
we always have the option to choose grace,
we always have the option to love as Jesus loves us.

And before you get too quick about dismissing all this
as unrealistic and just plain impractical,
remember what we’re doing here this morning.
This table is Jesus’ invitation for us to remember what he did for us.
It is to be reminded that the response of God to sin in the gift of Jesus his son,
in the expectation of the world, is as unrealistic and impractical as it gets.
But in the kingdom of heaven, things are very different from the kingdom of this world.

Where justice demands punishment, God grants mercy.
Where the expectation is of penalty, God shows grace.
Yes, it is unrealistic and impractical, by the world’s expectations,
but it is God’s way, it is the way of his kingdom,
and it must be the way of God’s people as well, it must be our way.
The sacrament we celebrate this morning
is the clearest evidence of God’s defiance of expectations.
The stone the builders have rejected has indeed become the cornerstone,
this is the Lord’s doing and it is truly amazing in our eyes!
Thanks be to God for that!
Amen.