Of Shoots and Vineyards (11.17.19)
Of Shoots and Vineyards
Isaiah 5.1-7; 11.1-5
November 17, 2019
St. Charles Ave. Baptist Church
Rev. Elizabeth Mangham Lott
Let me sing for my beloved
my love-song concerning his vineyard:
My beloved had a vineyard
on a very fertile hill.
2 He dug it and cleared it of stones,
and planted it with choice vines;
he built a watchtower in the midst of it,
and hewed out a wine vat in it;
he expected it to yield grapes,
but it yielded wild grapes.
3 And now, inhabitants of Jerusalem
and people of Judah,
judge between me
and my vineyard.
4 What more was there to do for my vineyard
that I have not done in it?
When I expected it to yield grapes,
why did it yield wild grapes?
5 And now I will tell you
what I will do to my vineyard.
I will remove its hedge,
and it shall be devoured;
I will break down its wall,
and it shall be trampled down.
6 I will make it a waste;
it shall not be pruned or hoed,
and it shall be overgrown with briers and thorns;
I will also command the clouds
that they rain no rain upon it.
7 For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts
is the house of Israel,
and the people of Judah
are his pleasant planting;
he expected justice,
but saw bloodshed;
righteousness,
but heard a cry!Isaiah 5:1-7
I’ve spoken before about our love for Monty Don, Britain’s favourite gardener. We’ve watched Monty tour the great gardens of Italy, the romantic landscapes of France, but our very favorite encounters with Monty are on Big Dreams, Small Spaces. Monty visits the homes of ordinary gardeners with small allotments or courtyards or even a rocky rooftop over an old cliff-hewn garage, and he listens to their dreams for what can exist in that space.
To prepare for their limited, one-on-one engagement with Monty, the amateur gardeners have drawn sketches and maps of what they want to plant. The most prepared ones even have lists of plants and flowers and have studied when the sun hits or which areas are shady. Monty will coach them to reconsider parts of their plan and make suggestion based on what he, as a master gardener, knows to be true about simple-yet-impressive planting.
Monty them leaves the gardeners for a time, and their job is to begin preparing the soil (which sometimes means excavating an entire yard and filling it in again with a rich soil and compost blend), tearing out overgrowth, and hauling away anything that stands in the way of their dream garden. Then Monty returns about halfway through the project to offer one day of assistance with whatever their biggest need is at that time.
Without fail, when a gardener has saved an item they love—be it an apple tree, a hedge, or even transplanting dozens of roses from one space to another—Monty ruthlessly does the thing that very few of us ever have the fortitude to do. He prunes, by all appearances, to the point of near death. It almost looks gone. It most definitely looks pitiful. Each and every time I watch him do it, I’m amazed by his confidence and utter lack of hesitation. He lops off branches, tosses what appears to be lovely, leaf-bearing, healthy plant in a brush pile.
But what I see as green and surely soon to bud, Monty can see that it is too leggy, or too leafy, or will never produce fruit if left as it is. It may look like a healthy plant, but it isn’t doing what the plant is designed to do. And each and every time, Monty’s aggressive pruning turns out to be right. He returns to the garden one last time after all of the work is done, and whatever he has almost violently pruned (in the eyes of a timid novice like me) is now healthy, strong, blooming, and even promising the fruit it was meant to bear.
Monty can see the error and the potential in these established plants because he has tended gardens for so long. He has walked the rows, studied the knots of branches, watched the grooves of flowering bushes, and knows the angles and seasons and times for pruning in order to allow the plant to be what the plant was destined to be.
Some of you in this room can walk through a garden with that eye and that confidence. But most of us would be horrified to proudly show Monty Don the apple tree we love and want to save only to have him pull out his favorite pair of clippers and hack saw and begin decimating the poor thing. But he’s right. Every time.
We have to know something about the work of real gardeners and farmers before we can properly read today’s Isaiah poetry.
Let me sing for my beloved my love-song concerning his vineyard: My beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill. He dug it and cleared it of stones, and planted it with choice vines; he built a watchtower in the midst of it, and hewed out a wine vat in it.
Even in the translated English, we hear that poetry. We hear the beauty. We can visualize the hill—not just any hill, but a fertile one, sloping toward the sun. He lovingly, painstakingly prepared this vineyard for planting and producing. He hauled away stones—that slow, good work of digging, lifting, and preparing. The vintner fully anticipated the good, good wine he would make from the grapes in his vineyard and prepared the place for the wine to age. He expected the vineyard to yield healthy, beautiful grapes, but it yielded useless, wild grapes instead.
The vineyard did not do what he anticipated it would do. The vines did not bear the kind of fruit they were supposed to bear. He racked his brain thinking about all the steps he so carefully followed to make sure the soil was right and the angle of the sun was just want the vines needed. He searched himself and asked, “What more could I have done that I have not done already?” And so, he did the thing that only Monty Don seems brave enough to do: he began to cut everything back down to the ground because it wasn’t producing.
Now when the Bible gives us metaphor, which is pretty often, we need to sit and listen for the truth and the lesson in the metaphor. Clearly, the writer isn’t talking about a vineyard. He’s talking about a people. Remember, God is making a people. From the very first poem of Genesis, God is creating an ecosystem for plants and animals and humans to thrive together and live interconnectedly—needing one another, and aware of their mutual need.
Isaiah 5 is telling us that the people of Israel aren’t bearing the fruit they are supposed to bear. What did the gardener expect from his vineyard? Righteousness and justice. And they aren’t pursuing or producing either. The people of Israel are reflecting on their own position, and the prophet Isaiah is making sense of it for them in poetry. “Why are are we suffering,” they ask. “You’re being pruned,” says the prophet, “because you aren’t producing the fruit you were mean to produce. You aren’t being the people of God. You aren’t giving yourselves to the stuff of God’s heart.”
This is scary language for us because we don’t want to believe that God will break down our walls and trample our vines. But this is ancient poetry’s way of saying they were producing what they were pursuing. If you pursue greed and selfishness, don’t be surprised when loneliness and resentment are your closest friends. If you pursue praise and adoration, don’t be surprised when no one can stomach being around you. To be people who are known for the love they have for one another, you must be people who actually love, regularly, routinely, whole-heartedly. Only the practice of loving will grow more love. Only the pursuit of justice will produce a heart for justice.
We end the passage in Isaiah 5 with a lovingly planted vineyard being aggressively pruned back and left to lie fallow as a shocking act of the same creative, imaginative love. Then several chapters later, Isaiah 11 picks up that agrarian theme and notes a shoot coming out from a stump. A place that had been altogether cut down now springs to life again. And this shoot is doing exactly what it was meant to do. The dreams of the gardener are alive in this shoot. A branch is growing from the deep, deep roots beneath the soil.
The metaphors all swirl and blur here as the writer goes straight for the fruit: what will this man produce? What happens when the spirit of the Lord rests on him and wisdom, understanding, counsel, and strength are the conditions in which he grows? He is a man of righteousness. He pursues equity for the meek of the earth. Not charity. Not pity. But equity. Righteousness and justice surround him and clothe him. This branch from the shoot of the stump draws from the good roots in good soil and produces what the gardener first imagined these plants would produce.
None of us likes the image of an angry gardener God burning the vineyard to the ground. It’s terrifying. It’s even triggering for those of us who either grew up in spiritually abusive churches or physically abusive homes. It speaks of violence in a way we don’t want to experience in the holy. But those immersed in an agrarian society knew as quickly as Monty Don when a tree needed to be aggressively cut back. And they knew that cutting the tree back isn’t an act of violence against the tree. It is an act of hope and imagination in next year’s growth, even the next decade’s growth. To look at a plant that is producing something but isn’t producing the right thing in the right way takes deep knowledge of the plant and its possibility. To prune can appear illogical but is actually a deep belief in what that plant will now be capable of producing in the years to come.
This fruit and plant language continues all across scripture because these words were all first written for people who had no choice but to spend a lot of time with their hands in the soil. That’s why we get the fantastic language we use in our baptism liturgy about the fruit produced in your life when you are rooted in Spirit. What grows if we are living a life connected to the very Spirit of God? Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Maybe the gardens of our lives won’t produce all of them at the same time. That might be asking too much. But it’s very much the goal of the garden. Add to it the fruit of equity and justice and righteousness found in Isaiah, and we’re growing quite a lot with our lives.
In her commentary on Isaiah 5 and 11, Professor Margaret Odell invites us to consider not just what the metaphors in these texts are saying about us human people but about God the vintner, God the gardener, God the one who imagines and tends and nurtures. Remember, that is often what sets these scriptures apart from similar ones in other ancient near eastern cultures. It’s not always that the story itself is unique but two stories held side-by-side are saying something different about who God is and who humankind is in relationship to God.
Lest we hear this message as an invitation to anxious perfection: **I WILL PRODUCE GOOD FRUIT! I WILL PRODUCE KINDNESS AND JOY!** Remember that the poem begins with a gardener lovingly tending the soil and imagining what will be. I am all too often the kind of gardener who plants things already full-grown, arranges them just so, and then mostly neglects them until it’s time to plant again. I’m getting better, and Monty Don is largely to thank for that. He reminds me that a garden is never finished, and the gardener’s work is daily tending, pruning, watering, noticing, planning for the next season, delighting in growth and fruit.
Given the role of a gardener in a good garden, what does this metaphor say about God’s investment in our fruit? What is God’s role in what we are growing here? God is working for us to produce equity. God is actively seeking for us to produce generosity. God is adding compost and checking for worms and making sure the soil is just right for justice and kindness and righteousness and love to grow. We do not do this work alone. We do not grow by ourselves. We are in this garden together with a loving master gardener always at work. And maybe when I’m running low on self-control, you’re producing a little bit extra. And when you’re running low on patience, I have some to offer. How is our garden growing? What can you tell about who we are as a people from what we are producing? Where do you sense God the master gardener and vintner tending, fertilizing, pruning, and delighting in our little plot of land right here? Be glad and confident in your growth knowing what you pursue is what you produce. And as we continue in this busy season of life, carry these questions with you. Pay attention to the conditions. Notice what grows. Give yourself to the gardener and to a life that produces good fruit.
Amen.