KGL+
Sermon
Trinity Church Boston
Year A Proper 22
October 4, 2026
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts together be always acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and redeemer. Amen.
I am deeply aware that I made many of my elementary parenting mistakes on my nieces and nephews prior to my husband and I having our own children. There is very little as satisfying as working out major adulting errors on someone else’s children first, then heading back to a clean and full-of-breakable-items, toddler-free house afterwards.
I didn’t realize how little I knew about smaller and younger humans until we visited my not-yet husband’s family in Ohio. Our nephew was somewhere between 18 months and two years old, and it was a blast hanging out with a small, excitable creature, who, right now, is currently driving a car and a foot taller than I am.
We ran around together, we exhausted one another at the playground, we watched him see and follow a wild rabbit in the backyard of his house—bunn-nnee, he kept calling out to it. BUNN-NEEE. And as a joke, and because I didn’t know any better, I looked at that small child thinking I was being cute, and said, “Oh, that’s not your bunny! That bunny is mine!”
Who here instinctively knows which word was going to haunt me for the rest of my life?
Suddenly, that sweet child, playing in the grass with me and yelling ‘BUNN-NEEE!’ in the most adorable way, looked me squarely in the face and said, ‘Mine? Mine! MIIIINE!’
Juice? MINE. Chair? MINE. Cookie? MINE. Car? MINE.
Having clearly broken my not-yet-nephew and fearing that this would be the end of a quite good relationship, Chris and I spent the rest of the weekend trying to undo the sins we had unknowingly committed—we had not realized that the most attractive word and concept, even to someone fairly new to the human condition, was, in fact, “mine”. The next forty-eight hours were dedicated to emphasizing ‘share’; ‘ours’; ‘theirs’, on repeat. The results of that effort were middling—the appeal of claiming something as one’s own was as powerful a magnet as I have ever experienced. Gone was the cuteness of the bunnn-eee. Here was the advent of incarnate ownership.1So, research into child development tells me that it was only time before he learned the word ‘mine’: https://eac-network.org/4-strategies-toddler-enters-mine-stage/
And yet, I’m not sure why that surprised me so completely. I claim things as mine all the time, almost none of which I have any right to claim. That idea? Mine. This space? Mine. The good leftovers in the fridge which I had mentally prepared to bring to work with me, but didn’t actually verbalize that plan to my husband, and who took them anyway? MINE.
I recall placing tape down the middle of the childhood bedroom I shared with my sister, pronouncing one side of it was hers, and the other side mine, as my parents looked on holding back from querying me if I was prepared to pony up for my fair share if it was, in fact, my own, as I claimed. Not only was I wonderfully comfortable naming something someone else owned as my own, but I also then delighting in directing who, in fact, could access it.
Those listening to Jesus would have had this vineyard imagery he uses in this morning’s parable known as the ‘Parable of the Wicked Tenants’ at ready hand. Not only were vineyards a well-worn image in scripture, but simply incorporating the details of a watchtower in the midst of it would have recalled the portions of Isaiah 5 and Psalm 80, both of which accompany this gospel passage. A landowner plants a vineyard, sets it up for success. But for a variety of reasons, it does not fare well—the intended fruit production fails; the care for it ceases; passersby pluck the fruits off the vine. Isaiah laments this response to the graciousness of God, writing:
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!2Isaiah 5:7
In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus paints a not unfamiliar portrait—an absentee landlord sending his servants to claim and collect from the tenants what he is owed from the fruits of his vineyard. However, the response from the tenants to that request (or even stated expectation) is profound violence. Jesus says that first the tenants kill the servants, then they do the same to the next group sent; then they decide that if they kill the heir to the landowner, they will inherit the vineyard themselves.
All of which is a puzzling rationale for those listening: what would make the tenants believe that they would be on the receiving end of the inheritance? Aside from the violence and bloodshed, the basic logic upon which the actions of the tenants are predicated don’t make sense. It is not their vineyard, though they may tend it and live on it. No community steeped in the framework of that time and location would have expected otherwise.
A note for us all: our history of who owns what land and the American system of tenancy may color some of our engagement with this parable—you can’t live in American Revolution Boston or read The Grapes of Wrath and not see the world of land ownership differently. We bristle at the thought of power and agency being in the hands of another—there is a vulnerability which comes from considering that what we do, what we care for, what we work for, is not wholly ours to claim as our own. Our very culture promises that in individual ownership we might find freedom, but that premise stems from the notion that any landowner is inherently inclined towards injustice and greed; that the fruits of the vineyard’s labor and stewardship will not be shared equitably and generously.
The tenants of the parable react similarly— they mistake their role as stewards of the vineyard for ownership, and claim that the vineyard is indeed their own. MINE, they say. But Jesus, who has cleared the temple of the moneychangers only verses before this passage, has had no issue with naming injustice where injustice is due and warranted. And he does not in this parable. In fact, the parable is uncomfortably open in terms of assuming good intent on the part of the landowner—how many visits will he extend when the refusals mean death for the bearer?3The ones receiving the most criticism are the religious leaders—‘scribes and elders’ turned to ‘scribes and Pharisees’ by the end of the passage, and even they acknowledge the sovereignty of the landowner to retaliate.
We villainize the wicked tenants who behave so poorly, but they are simply us– we who forget that we, WE, are not the owners of the vineyard ourselves—WE are the tenants even though we forget, almost immediately, that all we have has been given from another. We, who look at our life, our gifts, our things, our passions, our church, as something which we own, rather than something we are entrusted with to care for. The palpable draw of the ‘MINE’ we repeat once we have a taste of the power which comes with ownership. I can tell you about the pew I still claim, thirty years later, as ‘my own’, at the church I attended growing up, and have gone to almost not at all since I was ordained—but the impulse to hold it as my own has neither faded with time nor acknowledged what I hope are the many, many people who have sat and prayed there since.4CHR Location Kit’s Favorite Pew since 1993.docx I loved this pew. There was no pew cushion on it, and the end was blocked by a pillar, so few people would choose to sit there. When I returned in the early 2000s, they had added back a pew cushion, so the availability and comfort for other chronic introverts was dangerously impactful to my preferred, and yet rarely utilized, seating.
The fruits of the vineyard are not bespoke, by the way—they are not created for one people or one family, or even reserved for the landowner themselves. The products of a vineyard were meant for a whole people and community, shared and traded and used for celebration and delight in the context of our scripture. Not only do the tenants fight back, refusing to let go of what was not theirs in the first place, but in holding on so tightly, they deprive the wider community of the grace available therein.
I often think of the damage control (there is no other phrase for it) which we attempted to do with our sweet nephew that weekend fifteen years ago—trying in vain to stem the tide of the inevitability of human fallibility in two days of singing Daniel Tiger songs and avoiding saying the words ‘m-y’ or ‘m-i-n-e’. And I think of what we do here, every time we come together to worship—sharing bread and wine, every person receiving the same grace as the next; sharing our pew benches with those who were also drawn to this place at this time today; sharing the prayers we offer in unison, and in the privacy of our own hearts. And I think, maybe doing this is not the antidote for our inclination to deem every- and any- thing our own: pocketing and hoarding it for fear that we won’t feel powerful enough, safe enough, loved enough, when we leave this place and go back into the world outside.
The Holy One who has given us the gifts in the first place keeps giving them to us. Even if we err. Even if we mistake what we have as our own, rather than that of God. And that is the Good News, friends. That the vineyard is NOT our own; not susceptible to the grumps and grouses of humans, but are filled with abundance grace (and even perhaps bunnies) which are meant to be shared in order to be understood. We have been invited to join the work of God, whose promises are good, and true, and unabashedly full of love.
Amen.