So, several years ago I read Alan Weisman's book, The World Without Us. The book’s title is fairly explanatory – it is a book about the world after humankind – how long it would take for the asphalt and concrete to crack; how well all those animals we’ve bred to live with us would fare after we are gone. It was fascinating to hear Weisman describe the changes that would come to a place like Manhattan–how the weeds, and trees, and cats would take over (dogs it turns out have tied their fate too closely to ours).
We see a lot of it around here, in our own part of the world with the landscape peppered with falling down barns and silos with vines growing up the sides. We've all heard coyote howls at night just a little closer than they were back when.
While I'm a boy of the country, I'm also a boy of the city, and I don't much like the idea of old neighborhoods overgrown with weeds, of abandoned factories being taken over by tumbleweeds and shrubs, but maybe I need to look at it differently. Maybe it's not destruction. Perhaps it's just a reset.
The way we’re living on this earth isn’t sustainable, much less flourishing and it maybe it would be good to start fresh with our cities and our countryside alike. There are certainly times when we can repair what has been let go, but then there are those times when what is in place has become so corrupted and rusted and rotten that it needs to be let go, to lie fallow for a while until something fruitful and flourishing can be made of it again.
This seems to me to be what Isaiah is driving at this week. In this strange love poem the prophet talks about the people of Israel and Judah as a vineyard, a garden that God did all that God could to make flourishing. But as any gardener knows, its not all up to the grower. Sometimes the crop fails due to no fault of our own–some bad seed, a disease, the uncontrollable weather patterns. The only solution is to plow it under or pull it up. If there is a disease in the soil then we have to let the ground go uncultivated for a time. God has seen the vineyard he planted that should have become fruitful with a bounty of love and righteous justice bear the diseased fruit of greed, violence and oppression. The only answer is a reset. The only answer is a fire
During my ten year tour of universities east of the Mississippi, I took some time off since I wasn't getting anything accomplished in school. I decided to just mosey out west and see what was up. One of my favorite states is South Dakota, so I decided to head that way. As I was going west, there was a huge fire in the Black Hills. You could see the smoke all day from miles and miles away. And at night you could see the red glow of the wide, vast burn. I worked my way around it and continued west and eventually wound up with no further to go as I'd gotten to the Pacific Ocean and cars don't swim all that much.
I spent a few months kicking up and down the coast. But the call of the South beckoned, and I started working my way back east. I went back through South Dakota. The fires had long since died out, and it looked like a lunar landscape. But if you looked hard enough, you could see grass and saplings already poking up. And birds and small critters were scampering here and there. The big animals, like buffalo, weren't back yet, but there was time. They'd return soon.
The forest had gotten to full of deadwood, and it needed to be reset. And God's wonderful creation would return, just like those buffalo.
I sometimes wonder about this gospel reading today. It's not the peaceful Jesus, the prince of peace, abundant with the peace of the Lord and all that. This is a different Jesus. Violent and angry. Bringer of fire and destruction. And most of us, when we read it, we think we kinda know what's going on, and we sorta know that he's talking about the strife that will be caused by other people turning against the followers of Jesus. And we know whose side we're on, so we can almost feel smug in our upcoming martyrdom.
But what if we're the deadwood? What if we are Isaiah's wild grapes? Is it possible that it is us who have allowed the weeds in, that our complacency in being on the right side has allowed the weeds to take over our own lives, our own communities, our own world?
Does that complacency encourage the rapid growth of the wild grapes of violence rather than the good vintage of love? So often we just assume that we can just rest easy and allow ourselves to be cultivated into flourishing places, to work in our communities to create the possibilities of love. But if the wild grapes have already fruited, as they certainly have done in so many places, then we must also learn to welcome those resets and fallow times that come to our own lives and the life of our communities.
Or maybe it is ourselves, our churches, that need to be spreading that righteous flame, setting fire to a world of injustice and poverty, malice and neglect. Maybe we should set the world aflame with the love of God. Maybe we should set the world to burning with the commandment of Jesus to love that God and love our neighbor. Maybe we should set the world afire with the flame of the Holy Spirit. And when the fire burns down, and the gentle life-giving rains fall, only then will we begin to see the shoots of new life. The new vines of righteousness and justice, of love and mercy, poking up everywhere. Spreading throughout all the earth, bringing joy to all of God's creation.
Whatever the case've got a lot of work to do. Let's get to it.
Amen.