So we could have peace, if we really decided to put into practice what Paul taught and what he had learned from Jesus.  Today’s scriptures, if we listen to them carefully, tell us so powerfully about the love of God, the love that came to be fully realized in Jesus, who allowed himself to be tortured and put to death, but then offered that death on the cross as a sign of the covenant of God’s everlasting love for all of us and, also, as a way to bring God’s love and peace into our world.

     All of the scriptures, today, speak about that unlimited and unconditional love of God. 

     In the first lesson today, Isaiah was speaking to the people of his time and he was telling them about God’s love for them. He explained it in what he calls a song.  He says, “I want to sing for my beloved the love song of my beloved about the vineyard.” God loves this vineyard. And Isaiah composes a song that describes how God took such care to make this vineyard, to bring forth beautiful fruit.  God was constant in care for that vineyard. He dug it up, cleared the stones, planted the choicest vines, built a watch tower, hewed out a wine press, and then looked for a crop of good grapes.  

     But the good grapes did not come, only sour grapes, wild grapes. And Isaiah went on to explain that this vineyard is the people of Israel, the people of Judah.  And God wanted so much for that vineyard to bring forth good fruit. But as Isaiah says, “God looked for justice, but found violence and bloodshed. God looked for righteousness, but heard cries of distress from the poor.” The people of Judah failed to respond to that love of God and so the result was violence, injustice, oppression, killing, death.

     In the Gospel lesson today, Jesus is talking about this same passage from Isaiah when he tells the religious leaders, the priests and the Pharisees, the parable about a vineyard -- it’s the same message that Jesus is talking about. At the end of the parable, you hear Matthew say that they understood that Jesus was talking about them, about the house of Israel at that time. 

     God had poured forth such tremendous love on them and that love goes all the way through history, from the time that God first called the people out of Israel and established the covenant with them. God loved them, poured forth love upon them down through the centuries. And Jesus describes it by using the symbol of a vineyard. Only, this time, God sends the prophets to speak to them and to turn them away from violence and injustice and hatred.  But they reject all the prophets. They won’t listen to the message of God’s love. But God doesn’t stop loving them. 

     Finally, in the parable, the owner sends his own son.  And, of course, we easily understand that this is Jesus, as Jesus puts it himself in the Gospel.  He reminds them of the stone which the builders rejected has become the keystone. That’s a very famous Psalm.  The religious leaders understood that that keystone, the cornerstone, was the messiah.  Jesus was saying, “I am that son that God has sent,” because God’s love is unlimited. 

     It was foolish, you would think, that in the parable, after the owner had sent servants twice and they had been stoned and so on, that the owner would have done anything except send his son. But the owner, symbolizing God, isn’t logical. Symbolizing God, the owner has unlimited love and is willing to give up even his son as he tries to show that God never stops loving.

     Now what if we were to understand, as we should, that now we, who are the church, we are that vineyard, we are the house of Israel, we are the house of Judah, that God through Jesus and through the gospels has sent us the message of unlimited love, of unconditional love, absolute goodness being poured forth upon us who are the church.

     We can’t listen to these passages and just think that they refer to thousands of years ago.  No, God is speaking to us now, giving us the same message that Isaiah proclaimed, the same message that Jesus proclaimed when he was here. It’s the same message -- God is offering love to us, unlimited, unconditional love -- and is asking us to respond to that love by becoming loving people.

     God looks for justice. God looks for righteousness. Will God find it now or will God find violence and bloodshed and killing?

     You see, when we don’t respond to the love of God, when we don’t take it in and let that love of God transform us and make us into fully loving people, when we spurn the love of God, then our humanness unravels. The whole situation keeps getting worse and worse and we turn to violence, we turn to bloodshed.  Just at the people of Israel did. Just as those scribes and Pharisees did when they decided now we will have to kill him. If we don’t respond to God’s love, there will be violence, bloodshed and injustice. 

     When I think about the threat to go to war, I realize that we really are rejecting the way of God. I have to think about what this is going to do to us and also, not to President Hussein, but the people of Iraq who will experience the violence that we will pour forth upon them.  It was proclaimed so well by one of our military hero’s, Senator John McCain, who, during the Vietnam War, bombed the city of Hanoi many times until his plane was shot down.  He was terribly injured and then was tortured and spent 7 years in prison.  He survived and was released and is a hero for us.  But remember what he said about himself.  He said, “I hated the people of Vietnam, even before they took me captive.  I hated them, because it was my hatred that enabled me to be devoted to their complete destruction. I hated them so that I could destroy them.  Otherwise, I could never have continued to do what my human instincts wanted me to do, and turn away in disgust.”  So he had to destroy his humanness by hating them.

     And that’s what we will have to do.  If we’re going to kill, we’re going to have to learn to hate. It won’t just destroy others; it will destroy us as well.  When you hate, you spurn the love of God, you spurn this unconditional, unlimited love that God pours forth upon us and you destroy yourself by rejecting God’s love and turning to hate. 

     What a tragedy that we would do that to ourselves.  

     For the past couple of weeks, an image keeps coming back to me from one of my visits to Iraq.  I know I told you this before, but it keeps coming back to me, so I have to speak about it again.  At the time, I was in Baghdad, and was visiting at a seniors home, where these were poor people who were kept in a home by the government.  During the time of the sanctions, the elderly are very vulnerable, as are the tiny children.  And these people were suffering, but they were getting some care at least.  But after we left that place, we were walking back out in the street and a crowd of people came toward us.  Leading the crowd was a little boy with his grandmother.  They came up to speak to us.  And I looked in the face of the little boy.  He looked to be about 8 years old and I found out later that he was 11, but he was so malnourished that he was only about the size of an 8 year old kid.  But I looked at his face and the whole right side of his faced had been ripped off and it was one big scar and he was blind in the other eye.   He told us what had happened when he was 3 years old.  A bomb had hit near his home where he and a playmate were playing.  The other little youngster was killed immediately, but he was so badly injured.  And his reason for coming to meet us was simply to tell us, “Please go back to the United States and tell your government to stop killing us.”

     But we haven’t stopped killing them and now we’re going to kill them with our bombs again. It will be far worse than the last time, when we bombed for 42 days and 42 nights, 24 hours every day with 88,500 tons of bombs. Now, it will be even worse.  We will be killing, not just the people of Iraq, but, in an abstract way, we will be killing little children like that boy who came and pleaded, “Stop killing us.”

     Isn’t’ it necessary for us to listen deeply to today’s scriptures where God is telling us about God’s unlimited love for us and how God wants us to respond to that love by learning to love others and to reject hatred, to reject violence, to reject killing.  Jesus, by giving himself over to death in that total act of love for us, transforms hatred into love and enemies into friends.  We could do the same thing, if we rejected violence, rejected killing and, instead, reached out to the people of Iraq as brothers and sisters in God’s human family; if we really made an effort to negotiate rather than just give ultimatums that say, “Take or leave it;” if we really respected them as people and we were willing to share the oil that they have, not just to hoard it for ourselves or to make it all for us, but to allow everybody in the world to have access to that oil in a fair and just way.

     If we really reached out in love, we could end this crisis quickly.  That’s what Saint Paul is telling us, “Put into practice what you have learned from me, what I passed on to you, the message of God’s love, the message of Jesus.  Then, the God of peace will be with you and that God of peace through us will bring peace into our world.” 

     In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.