Proper 27a - Who's Vineyard is it anyway?

St. Andrew's Church

2 October, 2005

During the Summers when I was completing High School and between years in University I was one of the ones who seemed to get the really meaningful, but low-paying jobs. I would look out to see the students out there cutting grass and earning twice what I got, and perhaps I really didn't appreciate enough then what I was learning through experience.

My Summer before going to Queen's University was like that. I worked at the Community Psycho-Geriatric Association which was a government sponsored Summer program with offices out of West Park Hospital in Toronto. There were five of us students working under a supervisor who was a psychologist at West Park. Each of us had several older clients in the community who had some kind of difficulty functioning and with whom we would meet several times each week. We would try various psycho-geriatric techniques with them based on their needs. And we would spend a lot of time writing verbatim process-recordings and reports to submit to our boss. We would meet weekly and discuss how things were going and what was working and what was not. It was through this job that I met Sam.

Sam was still very young to be entering the middle phases of Alzheimer's disease. He was in his late 50s, he was Jewish, and he was one of the fortunate ones to have been liberated from a concentration camp at the end of the war.

He was in a very bad way mentally. He was still with it enough to know that he had the disease, and that it was progressing rapidly. It affected his motor ability. He walked with a kind of shuffle and he had difficulty focussing his eyes on you or any other thing for that matter. He appeared to me to be a man who was struggling to keep his head above water, knowing that all too soon he would sink into a kind of mental oblivion - a living death.

He was usually either living in a kind of manic terror or he would be depressed to the point of incapacity.

On nice days I would take him out to a nearby park which would be kind of a distraction for him and would help him get to a better frame of mind. After many weeks of working with him we seemed to narrow down the main source of his extreme distress. He felt that he had wasted his life in many ways. He felt that he did not do what God wanted him to do and that God would punish him. God had given him the gift of living, when so many of his people had perished. And yet, he had spent most of his time in bitterness and in trying get as much as he could for himself. He felt that it was too late and he was too far gone in his illness to make up for wasting what God had given him. "Everything", he said, "is God's gift to us, and we need to use it well." He said that he hadn't done that.

I spent most of my time with him trying to convince him that God was merciful and that even his sense of regret showed that he was caring for God's way. Sometimes he would understand and believe that. Sometimes I would come and visit him and he would have forgotten everything of which we had spoken. I felt a sense of urgency - needing to make sure than when that oblivion finally took him, that he would feel forgiven and loved by God and at peace.

The Summer ended and I moved to Kingston before I knew the answer to all of that and it was about two years later that I saw the notice of his death. "After a long battle with Alzheimer's" the notice said.

Sam's words about everything being God's gift to us have never left me. I knew the truth of them before Sam - I think I always knew it - but there is nothing like having a man who is at the door-step of death-and-what-is-beyond to really home in on what is important.

We have laws to define what belongs to us and laws to protect what is our property. We have a socio-economic structure which rewards some with great riches while the vast majority of the world lives in poverty. And all of that is legal and protected by our justice systems and even by armed force. And all of us have lived in this way for so long that we actually believe that it is true!

In the Gospel story of today, Jesus speaks about a vineyard. It is such a powerful image for the people of Jesus' time, just as it speaks especially powerfully to us in this area bursting with vineyards at every turn. The vineyard was a strong image to the Israelites and to Jesus' hearers of God's chosen land. It is a place prepared by God for his own people. It was for them and is for us an image of abundance and festivity. The vineyard shows God's love for his people through his providence of everything which they need.

Jesus makes clear that the vineyard belongs to the owner and the tenants only have the use of it. They need to be the stewards of the vineyard, working it to produce on behalf of the owner. When they do live as stewards of God's vineyard, then the vineyard is really like a peaceable kingdom: the people are cared for, there is enough for everyone, because the point is: although it all belongs to God, if we are good stewards, God uses it all to bless us and give everyone abundant life.

There are many people who live their lives like that. They are called Stewards. They think of everything which they "have" as really being something for which they have the stewardship. Their wealth, their home, even their time and their natural abilities are to be used to further God's purpose for them and for others.

Stewards give back to God generously, because they know that it all belongs to God anyway. These stewards make their every day decisions based on what God would want them to do. Even their spending on themselves has something to do with others and with God:

"How will this vacation at this time renew me, so that I can better work for God's way when I get home? What will I learn during that time? How will I relate to new people which I meet while I'm there?"

Jesus shows us by example how to follow in God's way, and how to be a steward. He gave up the whole of himself: his abilities and gifts, his time, his passion, even his love of a party! He continued to give of all that he had and was - all the way to death and back again.

It might sound too onerous to us. It might sound too serious, but the truth of it is: it is a life of abundance and joy and love and relationship and peace. It is a life overflowing with meaning, and it is another gift of God to us - to allow us to work with God for God's purpose.

The example of Sam's life and his regrets make me think of my own life. How will I feel when I am on the threshold that Sam was on? I never found out for sure how Sam was as he slipped into the end of his disease, but I believe in my heart that God will have brought Sam into peace. Because that is the generosity with which I have seen God act in the scriptures, and that is my own experience of God in my life.

I invite you to think and pray about your own stewardship. How can you turn your abilities, your time and your wealth into a life of giving back and returning to God?