• Isaiah 5: 1-7

The “gardener’s love song” in Isaiah depicts an attentive, hands-on worker who lovingly plants and nurtures a vineyard in the expectation that one day it would “yield grapes.”  Instead, the vineyard produced “wild grapes.”  In frustration and disappointment, the gardener decided to tear down the hedges that had protected the vineyard and let it return to it’s wild condition; to “go to waste.”  Now the text reveals that the gardener is “the Lord of hosts” and the vineyard is Jerusalem/Judah.  The “wild grapes” are the “bloodshed” and the wailing of pain and suffering from those who bear the brunt of  injustice within her walls.

• Psalm 80: 1-2, 8-18

The psalmist identifies God as the One who took a vine out of Egypt, cultivated the soil and transplanted it.  The vine flourished, providing protective shade.  “Why,” the psalmist asks God, “did You breakdown the walls/so all passersby could pluck it?”  And wild beasts rampage over it?  Now the psalmist pleads to God: “come back/look down from heaven and see/and take notice of this vine/and stock that your right hand planted.”  May God’s benediction return to “the son You took for yourself.”

OR 

• Jeremiah 23: 23-29

Jeremiah draws a sharp contrast between those who claim to speak for the Lord in “dreams” and the prophet who “has my word,” “speaks it faithfully” and lets the chips fall where they will.  One is like straw, the other like wheat.  “Is not my word like fire, says the Lord,” or as devastatingly, “like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces?”

• Psalm 82

God demands answers: “How long will you judge dishonestly/and show favor to the wicked?”  God demands action: “Do justice… vindicate… free…” those who always get the raw deal in life.  This God is obsessed with justice, which makes God unlike any other deities humankind has imagined.  The psalm concludes with a plea: “Arise, O God, judge the earth….”

• Hebrews 11: 29- 12:2

This writer, who has chosen to address himself to “the Hebrews,” cites the ultimate salvation action– “the people passed through the Red Sea as if it were dry land”– followed by the miraculous conquest of Jericho, and then provides a list of those who “lived… by faith” and endured all kinds of humiliations and threats.  Although all these past generations came to be “commended,” they were denied “what was promised,” this writer surmises, because “God provided something better….”  Focusing on Jesus, “the pioneer and perfecter of our faith,” who knew humiliation and suffering himself and is now enthroned, “let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us….”

• Luke 12: 49-56

Given Israel’s disastrous history of conquest, destruction and occupation by the Greeks and then by the Romans, a mood of doomsday runs throughout canonical and non-canonical intertestamentary Jewish writings and in Christian writings, too.  Luke’s Jesus expresses it with particular intensity and declares that his “coming” precipitates its own crisis.  His appearance, because it challenges directly individuals and institutions, does not bring peace, but division between those who respond to him and his message, and those who ignore or reject his presence.  Why, Jesus asks, can you figure out weather patterns, but do not know “how to interpret the present time.”

Andrew Delbanco, humanities professor at Columbia University, chronicled the trivialization of evil in Western Modernity in The Death of Satan: How America Lost the Sense of Evil, (New York, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1995)  He tells how “the story of relentless secularism” deprives believers and any person of conscience of ways to talk about evil responsibly.  He includes an illuminating story (p. 190 ff)  about President Franklin Roosevelt and the rector of his parish in Hyde Park, where the President worshiped regularly and was on the vestry.  The story is taken from the memoir of Frances Perkins, Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor who led the the work to establish Social Security in the USA, (who is remembered on May 13 in the liturgical calendar of The Episcopal Church).  One Sunday after services, the young rector commented to the President that the mystery writer and theologian Dorothy Sayers had been greatly influenced by Kierkegaard.  Roosevelt responded, “Who is Kierkegaard?”  The Episcopal priest replied that it was Kierkegaard who had put “a fresh emphasis on the doctrine of original sin and its implications….”  In the memoir Perkins records that several weeks later the President asked him if he had every read Kierkegaard.  Roosevelt continued, “Kierkegaard explains the Nazis to me as nothing else ever had.”

Kierkegaard’s work, in particular his concern with the real, actual consequences of human injustice, influenced directly many writers now regarded as post-Modern, especially Heidegger, Levinas and Derrida.  For Emmanuel Levinas, philosophy in the West needed to be superseded by ethics.  And, ethics was not abstract or theoretical; it was specific and concrete and immediate.  “The Other” person and the mystery of “the Totally Other” are synonymous,  In the work that is generally regarded as his first major work, Totality and Infinity, Levinas wrote that:

“…the dimension of the divine opens forth from the human face.”  “The proximity of the Other, the proximity of the neighbor, is in being an ineluctable moment of the revelation of an absolute presence….”  The actual presence of the other puts me in a relationship of obligation to the Other; his or her “very epiphany consists in soliciting us by his [or her] destitution in the face of the Stranger, the widow and the orphan.”  Therefore, Levinas concludes, “the work of justice– the uprightness of the face to face– is necessary in order that the breach that leads to God be produced– and ‘vision’ here coincides with this work of justice.”  (p. 78)

In today’s appointed excerpt from Isaiah, God is ready to abandon God’s people, who had been lovingly planted and nurtured, for one specific reason– the cry of those who suffered injustice in their midst!  From Jeremiah, God judges human complacency with  and complicity in injustice.  In Psalm 82, God demands answers and action–“Do justice…!”  Luke’s Jesus, who teaches and practices radical justice for all people, is a threat to the status quo of individuals and society that benefits from callous indifference to the needs of others.  His appearance causes a crisis in the national and religious institutions as well as individual women and men.  For those who want to understand the times in which they live, Jesus says, one question must be paramount: How is justice done or not done in my community/nation right now?  This is a provocative and even risky  question.  This question (and the one who asks it) can divide friendships and families, Jesus warns.  Isaiah, Jeremiah, the psalmists and Jesus all link how a people answer that question to the very viability of that society.  A society that cannot conduct a responsible conversation about real, actual human evil and then “Do justice” makes itself vulnerable to internal and external threats, no matter how noble its history.  Anyone who raises this question and pursues it seriously speaks God’s work “faithfully,” Jeremiah would say.  It is  a”word” that can divide, disrupt and disturb, (like a “hammer that breaks rocks in pieces”), but this word can also sustain, restore and heal.   The difference is between how the “word” is heard and how it is used.