Homily, Enough Humility to Change Your Mind
The Nineteenth Sunday after the Pentecost, Proper 22A (2026)
St. Peter’s Episcopal Church
Plant City, FL
The Rev. Derek M Larson, TSSF
Today’s Lectionary Readings:
Isaiah 5:1-7
Psalm 80:7-14
Philippians 3:4b-14
Matthew 21:33-46
In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
If you could return to your childhood dinner table and taste one thing again, what would it be?
Perhaps your grandmother’s biscuits. A soup that simmered all afternoon. Something picked from the garden and carried straight into the kitchen. Perhaps a warm apple pie.
You take one bite, and suddenly you are back. You can feel the chair beneath you. You hear a familiar voice calling from the kitchen. Somehow as it touches your lips and its scent enters your nose, you are transported back to a place that means something to you. A place where you belonged. Where you were loved. Where you were at home.
I’d like to carry that image with us as we listen to today’s gospel reading.
Jesus tells the parable of someone who plants a vineyard. A place protected by a fence and watched over by a tower. A place where its fruit can be changed into the sweetness of wine. But the planter of the vineyard goes away to a foreign land—we don’t know why—and leaves the vineyard in the care of some tenants who will send him its fruit and wine. But instead the tenants withhold that fruit and wine and refuse to share it. They are not the ones who planted the vineyard, but they claim it for themselves and kill anyone who says otherwise, including those the planter sends to them.
Finally, the planter of the vineyard sends his son. We might wonder whether the son had ever walked among those vines that his father planted. Whether his father had told the story of his planting them. Whether he had hoped they would one day taste their fruit together. But alas, the son, too, is killed and the fruit withheld. The story is a tragedy. What is it’s meaning?
One way of reading the parable is as a warning. It is about an economic transaction and a breech of contract. A landowner pays employees to work the land and grow a crop but the employees attempt to steal the business and withhold profit from the owner. In this reading, if God is the owner and CEO of Vineyard Inc. then the tenants are those corrupt employees who refuse to give God God’s rightful property and God will come and punish. It is a warning—don’t hold back what God is owed—and a legitimate reading of the passage, but one that lacks something crucial to truly understand this passage.
This is a love story. Not primarily a business story. Not a story of law and order. A love story.
We may not see it at first. Jesus tells it so matter of factly. But his hearers would have noticed it. Because this is a retelling of a famous love story.
We hear it in our first reading today from Isaiah.
“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.”
It’s a song about unrequited love. The planter of the vineyard, the beloved, formed and shaped it with their own two hands. Dug in the dirt. Cleared it of stones. Picked out choice vines. Built a tower to watch over it.
This is a place that means something. That holds sentimental value. That has been grown out of the planter’s love and care. Alas, something went wrong, and it did not grow good fruit. The love the planter has for his vineyard, grows up fruitless.
Jesus adapts this story, but it’s basically the same. It begins the same exact way, “There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a watchtower.” The landowner is not a distant CEO or an impartial business owner seeking to maximize profit. The landowner is the planter of the vineyard. The one whose two hands shaped the dirt of the earth. Whose blood and sweat was poured into the land. The one who cared enough to build a tower to watch over it all.
And when he goes away, whatever the circumstances, he looks back and remembers. And when he can’t return himself he sends others to collect the produce that he may taste the sweetness of the wine from the fruit which he himself planted. That he may be transported back to another time in his life when he watched over these very vines. It is more than profit that is withheld from the planter of the vineyard, it is his beloved home. In a foreign land it is the one connection he has to the place where he began. And when it is taken from him, along with his very son, someone has stolen his very heart.
The parable is a tragic love story about homesickness and the loss of connection to the places and people that are so important to us. Like Isaiah, it is a story in which the planter of the beloved vineyard is not able to taste the fruit of his own work.
But if this is a love story, then who is it about?
When Jesus tells it, the focus is placed on the bad tenants. But the story is not about them. They are the antagonists. The bad guys. The ones in the story that must be overcome. Who then is the story about?
The story is about the vineyard. And about the Father’s love for the vineyard. About how the Father shaped the vineyard with his own two hands and longs for it when away. And how the Father will stop at nothing until its captors are overcome. That he might be reunited with this beloved place. The place of his heart and hands.
And who is the vineyard?
The vineyard is the people of God. You. You, the people of God are the vineyard. This story is about God’s love for you. And God’s longing for the fruit of your heart. And how when others take that fruit captive, God continues to reach out to you, even sending his own son to bring you to him. You are the fruit of God’s own hands. You are the desire of God’s own heart. You are God’s beloved vineyard.
Jesus didn’t tell the end of the story. Instead, he asked his hearers, the chief priests and Pharisees to write the end. And their story ended in punishment and damnation. “The landowner will put those wretches to a miserable death.” It’s perhaps the end we root for.
But Jesus goes on to tell another ending. Not in words, but in life. For he is the Son that the Father sent into the vineyard—into the world—to save. And it is his blood that was planted in the earth. And when the fruit of the vineyard was held captive, the fruit of his blood was given, and overcame those captors and restored the vineyard to the Father.
Today we are living the end of this story. And when we come forward with our offering of bread and wine and the fruit of our labor, the Father receives them and finally tastes the beloved work of his hands. And when we sip from the chalice, we taste the fruit of the blood that was planted in the ground to free us. At this table the Father and the beloved vineyard are reunited and enjoy the fruit of one another.
And so as you come forward for communion today, consider this. The taste of wine on our lips, is the taste of home. The taste of the Father’s love for us. It is the taste that transports us back to where we belong. So eat fully. Drink deeply. The Father’s love is for you. You are the beloved vineyard. And God longs for you. Amen.
