A Truthful Love-Song--October 2, 2020
"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;
he expected it to yield grapes,
but it yielded wild grapes.
And now, inhabitants of Jerusalem,
and people of Judah,
judge between me
and my vineyard.
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?
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.
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.
For the vineyard of the LORD of hosts
is the house of Israel,
and the people of Judah
are his pleasant planting;
T.S. Eliot famously wrote, "Humankind cannot bear very much reality." He was right.
As a species, we seem to want to dodge, ignore, and spin the things that make us squirm--especially the things about ourselves that make us uncomfortable. We have a way of set up blind-spots to miss our weaknesses, and we develop selective memories about our past, all to guard us from having to deal with unpleasant truths. It's the impulse evident when a long-married couple starts arguing over who said what to start the fight (and each has very distinct recollections of how it happened), and it's the same instinct of alcoholics or drug addicts in denial, who convince themselves (and really do believe what they tell themselves) that they don't have a problem... that they can stop any time they want, and that things are fine the way they are. And on a larger scale, it's how nations and people-group willfully forget things from their histories that would make them uncomfortable... and choose to ignore realities that are staring them in the face but which they do not want to see.
What a pitiable species we are: so afraid of being made uncomfortable that we willfully ignore or deny what is in front of us.
How is someone supposed to get through to us when we are in that willful, blissful ignorance? How does any voice of truth ever get through? Or are we doomed forever, we human beings, to live inside the anesthetized insulation of our own creation, like sleepers who cannot wake up from their own dream?
Maybe a difficult truth can be snuck in--like a parent sneaking vegetables into the pasta sauce to get their kids to eat more vitamins--when our guard is down. Maybe, like Emily Dickinson's famous bit of verse puts it, you have to:
"Tell all the truth, but tell it slant
Success in circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm delight
As lightning to the children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind."
In other words, sometimes we need someone to tell us the unpleasant truths we don't want to face, but in a way that gets past our defenses. Then we can deal with it.
That's actually what the prophet Isaiah is doing here. This passage (which, spoiler alert, is also the Old Testament reading for many churches this coming Sunday) is an old dreamer's attempt to get his people to see the truth about themselves and their history in a way that they can bear without running away or sticking their heads in the sand. He tells a story, hoping that his hearers won't realize until they are already hooked that it is a story about them, and their whole nation. He makes it into a song--a love song--with the hope that his people will hear the deep love of God alongside the heartbreaking disappointment of God at how they have turned away from God's good ways.
As stories go, this little scene Isaiah sketched out isn't very complicated. The "beloved" (God) plants a vineyard, and he does what any decent farmer raising grapes would do: he clears a plot of land with good soil, plants good vines, and sets up all the necessary structures on it a watchtower, a wine vat a hedge, and a garden wall. And having done all that, the vine-grower expects good grapes--and gets bad ones!
Well, what's a vintner to do? Isaiah asks his audience--what would you do if this were you? And the moment they start to formulate their answers, the prophet has them hooked. "You would tear down your vineyard, and maybe try and start over somewhere else!" you can hear them mouthing under their breath. "You would give up and try raising cattle--or goats--or zucchini!" Now Isaiah comes to the conclusion of his slanted-telling of the truth: this is a dull story of disappointment from a grape-grower, but rather the history of Israel and Judah. This is the history they don't want to face about themselves. Isaiah pulls off the mask like he's ripping off a band-aid: "This story isn't just about grapes!" he says, "The vineyard is the people of Israel and Judah--you are the ones God was expecting good fruit from, and instead all you've given back to God is sour grapes!" Isaiah wants his people to see that their whole national history is rooted in "bloodshed" instead of "justice," and that where God wanted "righteousness," there were only the cries of victims. He goes on in the verses after this passage calling out the ways the wealthy squeezed out the poor, making their McMansions and estates bigger and bigger so there was no room for low-income housing and small farms (see Isaiah 5:8-10). And then after that, Isaiah forces his audience to come face to face with the ways they cheat and steal and use their wealth to avoid prosecution (Isaiah 5:22-23). It's all an uncomfortable truth that the people don't want to hear, but he's already got them hooked from his love-song; now they will have to bear the truth about themselves and their national history.
I know this doesn't sound like a very cheery passage to read on a Friday morning. But let's be clear: Isaiah is coming from a place of love. And that's because he's convinced that God is coming from a place of love. It is because God loves the people--including the ones who have been repeatedly stepped on for too long in their national history--that God provokes the prophet to say the things no one wants to admit. It is because God is the lover of Israel and Judah that God prompts Isaiah to write his love-song to get the people's attention and help them to face their past and present, so that they can create new systems, new ways of living together, and new patterns for life. It is because God loves us that God insists we come face to face with our own histories--individual, communal, and national--and own the patterns of crookedness, violence, and injustice in those stories, even if we have made a great effort to pretend they are not there. Love doesn't let us off the hook for facing the truth, even when the truth is unpleasant or convicting; to hear the prophets tell it, sometimes the greatest mark of love for their people is when they compel them to face the ghosts of their past and the injustices in their present. It is not because the prophets don't love their own nations of Israel and Judah that they raise their criticisms; it is precisely because they love their people--and because they believe God loves them, too--that they will not let them turn away from their past any longer.
This is a reality we need to be really clear about, because the impulse to turn away from the unresolved messes of our past isn't just an ancient-Israelite thing: it's a human thing. And sometimes we fall for the very tempting lie (let's call it what it is) that if we really love our communities we will only see the positive in our stories, not the broken places. Sometimes we get so afraid of dealing with the ways our past has set up and perpetuated that brokenness in the present that we just get defensive when God raises up a prophet to tell our stories honestly to us. But love never means a selective, happy-and-easy-things-only view of those we love, the same way you expect a doctor to tell you the whole truth about what your diagnosis is.
In these days, it seems we are being invited once again to engage in an honest retelling of our own histories--the histories of our families, our churches and denominational bodies, and our nation as well. It is tempting to cover our ears any time someone raises a part of our history that makes us uncomfortable. It is tempting to just shout and interrupt any time someone calls us out on something we did not want to have to face. And it is just as tempting to imagine that the failures and hurts of past are all dealt with and done, rather than lingering and languishing in the present still. Part of what Isaiah did in his time was to compel his listeners to see that their patterns of greed and violence in the past had ongoing consequences that over time didn't go away, but just became socially acceptable. Maybe we need to have some uncomfortable truth-telling as well where we are, and then have the important second half of the conversation by addressing the question, "What do we do about it now?" as well.
Whether it's an individual finally coming face to face with their addiction, a congregation dealing with the decades of dysfunction that have turned it into an exclusive social club, or a nation dealing with the undead threat of racism and white supremacy, it's always scary to face the truths we had spent a long time burying. But as much as Isaiah's incisive story here forces us to see that we'll have to work up the nerve to face our own past and present, Isaiah also reminds us that we don't face them alone. God insists we face the realities we didn't want to bear, but the same God promises to face them with us and to give us the courage to deal with them. That's what real love does: it empowers us to face the truth rather than helping us to hide from it.
And in that sense, even having to wrestle with the things we are not proud of (or should not be proud of) is a way, not of punishing us, but of bringing us more fully to life. Like Baldwin says, "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced." Today, may we be given the courage to face what we have been afraid to see, and may we be given the prophetic voices like Isaiah's to point us in the right direction.
Lord God, give us the courage we need to own our past and our present honestly, as individuals, in our communities, in our country, and in our church.
No comments:
Post a Comment