I think it's because it was an early day -- with lots to do before I left for church. Whatever it was -- except for the headlines -- I never did get around to reading the daily newspaper until I returned home that night. That's when I read an article a few years ago about Delores. She was the assistant manager of a Goodwill store, who found more than $12,500 in a shoebox. Instead of discretely pocketing the loot, she tracked down the rightful owner -- the only daughter of a recently deceased life-long schoolteacher. Dolores gave her the money. The young woman, in turn, gave 20% of it back to Dolores, and Delores gave half of that back to God through her church. I put the paper down, turned to Sandra, and said, "Now, that's the way it's supposed to be -- the way God wants it to play out."

Well, that's not at all what happened in Jesus' story from our Gospel. Today’s story is a parable, from the Greek parabollh, which literally meant 'to compare by laying two things side by side and '. It refers to Jesus' practice -- familiar back in biblical times -- of taking a natural situation from ordinary life and using it to teach a spiritual truth or an object lesson for living.

This parable was less about agriculture, though that was certainly the setting, than it was about economics -- about an economically based relationship. Some tenant farmers had a relationship with the owner of the vineyard they rented. They lived on the land. They worked the land. They knew the land. They harvested the fruit of the land, made wine, and traded it for other commodities. But the land wasn't theirs. The grapevines weren't theirs. The winepress and other facilities weren't theirs. It all belonged to someone else -- an absentee landlord. They were obligated to a relationship in which they respected the rights of the actual owner and were to pay him his portion of the proceeds from the land and their labors.

It's a great parable not only because it was part of the real lives of the people that heard it, but also because, as you think about it, you can relate to the parties involved in the story. If you own a piece of rental property that you rarely have occasion to visit, and someone rents it from you, you know that it belongs to you. You know that you have a right to receive the agreed upon payments for its rental at the agreed upon times. After all it belongs to you. Then again, if you rent a house -- especially for a long period of time -- you can get to feeling that it's your place. You live there. You cut the grass. You plant and water the flowers. You do the decorating and all the cleaning. If you never see the landlord, you might just get to feeling that it belongs to you. After a while you even might just start to resent that absentee so-and-so. That's about as far as your sympathy for those tenants in Jesus' story is apt go, because they cross the line. The landlord requests his rent. He sends a collection agency to extract and deliver proper payment. The tenants hide. They ignore the calls. They set the dog on them when they show up at the front door. They beat up and run off any collection agent or repo man that shows up. Perplexed by their behavior, the landlord supposes that either his tenants have taken offense at his tactics or that they're just careful not to give their rent to pretenders. So he sends his son, but horror of horrors, they kill him.

Jesus draws the audience into his parable -- asking them what the owner should do. It was the same strategy that the prophet Nathan used on King David when he told him the fabricated story about the prosperous farmer, who, even though he had a large flock of sheep, stole the only pet lamb of his poor neighbor to eat it. According to Matthew's version of this same parable, the crowd's ire was raised by the injustice of the characters in Jesus' story (as King David's had been) and so they reacted much as David had. What should be done? Matthew had the crowd answer the question, and Luke has Jesus answer it himself. It'll be curtains for those wretched tenants, and what's more they deserve it. The vineyard will be rented to others, who will give the owner his due.

According to Luke's version of the parable the listening crowd responded curiously. They say, "Heaven forbid!" That's because Luke has Jesus' audience understanding the parable allegorically. The landlord represents God. The vineyard represents the Covenant and all its benefits -- a relationship with God, a Promised Land to live in, all of God’s favor and provisions, and the Torah to live by. The tenants represented the people of Israel. The servants sent to collect the owner's rightful share represented the prophets. The share to which the owner was entitled represented true devotion to God, proper stewardship, and obedience to His ways. And the son, well, certainly to the Gospel writers, the son in the story represented Jesus, Himself. The reason the crowd didn't want to hear the punch line of the parable, the reason the religious leaders wanted to take Jesus into custody, was that they understood that they were the tenants. The last thing any of them wanted to hear was that God was prepared to dispossess them of the benefits of their relationship with Him, let alone that it would be given to others.

The point of the parable was clear. God gave all that He did to the Jewish people -- to accomplish His own purposes, because everything belongs to God. But His people lost sight of God's purposes and imagined that it was all for them – that it belonged to them, to satisfy their needs, and to fulfill them. When God sent the prophets to call their attention back to God and His purposes, they rejected each and every one of them -- killing many. Ultimately God decided to send His Son -- to call His people back to God, but they’d reject and kill Him as they did the prophets, and in the process, the Covenant would go to others.

What does all this have to do with us? Well we’re people too – just like those ancient Jews or those contemporaries of Jesus – prone to some of the same foibles. So this parable might just cause us to be grateful to God, grateful and humbled, that we might be included in the privilege of a covenant relationship with God ourselves. It might cause us not to take our relationship with God for granted. We're no different from the people who first heard this parable. We're just as likely to assume that we're entitled to any of the benefits of relationship with God -- just because we call our selves Christians, because we've been baptized, because we belong to a church, or because we're humans created in God's image and are, therefore God's children. But frankly, with every privilege come certain responsibilities. As St. Paul suggests in today's epistle -- it ill-behooves us to assume that we’re entitled or that we've arrived. This parable also might cause us to redouble our efforts to reach out to others in Christ’s name to proclaim His love in word and deed -- to snatch them into the vineyard as well.

It might also, of course, be taken literally instead of allegorically. It might just teach us about the urgency of stewardship -- about the desperate need we all have to grow in our stewardship – in how we use what we’ve been provided to serve our Creator’s purposes and how we care for His Creation. This world and all its creatures and resources belong to God alone, and not to those who have the drive or craftiness to make it theirs or to use it only for their own purposes. We humans now virtually infest the world by our numbers, often have the audacity to think that anything we want can belong to us to use and use up, as we see fit -- always with incredible short-sightedness. The moral of this parable, especially in our time, may well also be that when we think and act that way we sin against the One who really owns it all and us too. I’m one, who sees the story of the Fall not as a sin of sex, as many have taken it, but as a sin against stewardship – misusing gifts. It may just be if we continue on the craven path of unbridled develop-ment and consumption, that the God who made us will, as Jesus says in this parable, visit upon us the natural consequences of our behavior, and it will be gone. Disciples of Jesus Christ need to have ears to hear and hearts to live each of the morals of this parable – as Delores from that Goodwill shop did -- humble gratitude to God, sincere discipleship to Jesus Christ, and faithful stewardship of all that God has entrusted to us – using and caring for it all as our Creator wants.