I don’t envision this being a space where I normally will post homilies that I write and deliver as part of my current pastoral charge. Frankly, I tend to think of homilies/sermons as flashes in a pan—they’re predominately meant as the intersection of a place and people stuck in a “timeful” moment (if I can make up a word here) with a “timeless”1 text. That said, we don’t presently have a setup for digital transmission of our services, and normally I would just post a link or something pointing to that so you could also see me in my formal clerical getup. Which is much better than picturing this homily written as a screed in messy fountain pen ink taped to my office wall, or something.
So, I’m going to copy-paste my homily from this past Sunday here. I’m obviously doing so as purely an exercise in the sin of pride. There’s no need for you to read this. You technically aren’t my target audience. But the feedback I received was generally more audible than in times past, along the lines of “I really needed to hear that.” Because I forever live with imposter syndrome, I don’t believe anyone who says that. But y’know what? Maybe you need to hear this mess of a homily too. Again, I think it is better as a speech-act and less so as pixels, but, in the famous words of St. Tautology, it is what it is.
One more thing. My introduction within this homily is an extended allusion of sorts. While the generalities of the circumstances are true, I am not actually referring to any specific congregation. I stake my reputation on the conviction that this is—at times—a feature appropriate to persuasive speech, and not a straight-up lie. As delivered, this introduction was shockingly effective (to the point that a former professor of preaching in attendance verified it as such). But if you think preachers aren’t allowed to also be orators, then that’s a longer, different discussion.
And I do recommend you read this with the texts open before you.
Proper 20 – 10th Sunday after Pentecost
Isaiah 5:1-7; Psalm 80:1-2, 8-19; Luke 12:49-562
St. Paul’s Westdale
17 August 2025
Very joyful and uplifting readings this morning, eh? To be completely transparent and pull back the curtain a bit, these are the sorts of passages you don’t typically look forward to preaching on. Well, at least most modern preachers, I would say. I did grow up in a tradition that was quite fond of it, however.
It wasn’t exactly like the trope of Southern American preaching, which I find tends to lean quite heavily on snake handling, being slain in the Spirit, speaking in tongues, that whole thing. There are plenty of charismatic churches that do that, but mine was a bit more subtle. Despite being formed in the tradition of the Anglican John Wesley, who emphasized the full sanctification of the heart being open to all, it was more so culturally shaped in a time and place where judgment was the major chord being struck over and over again. Judgment at both the small and the large scale.
On the small scale, we judged our neighbours who didn’t look like us, who didn’t believe like us, who didn’t worship like us. Obviously, hanging over us was the weight of knowing they were going to hell if they didn’t hear about the love of Jesus Christ. And if we didn’t tell them that, well…they could get hit by a truck in the next half hour and die, and then the fate of their eternal soul rested on our inability to act.
But the judgment of course ballooned out from there. Whole groups of people needed God’s judgment. Those dirty, capital-L Liberals needed the swift hand of God’s judgment to come down and teach them a lesson. Those queer, baby-killing Communists thought they could control us and take away our freedom of speech, our freedom to bear arms, our freedom to worship. Godless heathen. But they would soon know the truth, because Jesus was coming back, and he was bringing destruction over Sodom and Gomorrah.
After I left that tradition, I was briefly a part of a church that was different. It was welcoming—diversity of race, diversity of sexuality. Judgment-free, they touted on the sign outside. Very well-educated. Folks in high-ranking jobs, driving very nice cars, with garages larger than the house I grew up in. But they were also funding hospitals. They were donating huge sums to local food banks. We knew that hearts and minds could only be changed by sharing the blessings God had given us with others. If we could help meet the material needs of the community, everyone wins. We voted for access to healthcare for all, we voted to try to keep divisive religious language out of public spaces.
But constantly, we were foiled by the idiot Conservatives who were too stupid to find their way out of their poverty. They kept voting against their own interests in the name of Jesus and the Constitution. They were somehow too ignorant to know that a dentist could help their buck teeth grow straighter, too proud to accept the Medicaid and Medicare that we were working so hard to get increased with our huge donations to various Political Action Committees. We sighed, knowing that their Redneck Jesus couldn’t save them because all they cared about was guns and not paying taxes. But soon, they would know the truth, because if the Bible was to be believed, Jesus might be coming back; and if he did come back, they’d see how much Jesus loved us liberals—because we’d all have to get along in whatever heaven was going to look like.
I think one of the reasons preachers don’t like to preach on judgment is because, deep down, we all feel like we’re going to escape it. It’s always someone else. It’s never us. There is self-righteousness on all sides, at every point in the spectrum; and if our Scripture readings this morning are trying to do anything, it is to wake us up to that reality.
Isaiah 5 is part of Isaiah’s prophecy against the wealthy excesses of the southern kingdom of Judah. This was a time in Judah’s history when the rich were getting richer, when the monarchy was consolidating power. Gradually, land was being bought up by the elites, and peasant farmers were converted into a sort of labour class. Grapes were considered a highly specialized crop—needing the land itself to be reshaped, huge amounts of water to be consumed, all for the production of wine. The diverse and self-sustaining farms were being obliterated.
Imagine going to all the trouble to buy up land, to build very specific structures, to hire labourers, to flaunt your wealth, and all of a sudden you’re growing wild grapes. The Prophet Isaiah says, well if you spent all that money and effort and it was not only not yielding, but wildly going to waste, what more is there to do but knock down the walls and let nature take its course? And imagine being angry at God for letting this happen when you yourself have blood on your hands; maybe not literal blood, but the sort of blood spilled when injustice becomes the rule of the land. The people were so busy calling down God’s judgment upon others that they never saw it coming upon themselves.
But perhaps they hadn’t seen the hand of God in action in so long that it’s not that they were maliciously pursuing evil deeds as much as they were just ignorant. The way Luke uses the word “hypocrites” gets at this—despite the fact that Jesus is talking to a vastly different group of people some seven centuries separated from Isaiah’s, I hear the same tone here. Luke very rarely uses the word “hypocrite” to mean something like a malicious phoney; instead, it’s more like someone who is just completely oblivious of the disconnect between their beliefs and actions, or especially their words and actions. Again we hear those agrarian themes: you know when it’s going to rain? You know when it’s going to be hot? And yet you don’t see what’s happening right now, right this very second?
What was happening right this very second, to Luke’s audience, the crowds of people? Probably all of the same exact things happening to Isaiah’s audience. Even despite the judgment that did come, in the form of first the Northern Kingdom of Israel being conquered when Samaria fell, and her people being shipped away to Assyria; and then the Southern Kingdom fell later to the Babylonians when Jerusalem was destroyed—the people are still crying out. We actually hear that witness in Psalm 80, which is telling essentially the story of the result of Isaiah’s prophecy. Here the psalmist cries out to God because God has done exactly what he promised he would; the walls have been torn down, the wild animals are destroying the expensive vines. And essentially the psalmist is saying, “Ok! Enough please! We get the picture!” By way of apology the psalmist says in the words that we read together responsively,
17 Let your hand rest upon the One at your right side,
the Chosen One you raised up for yourself. [that is—us!]
18 Then we’ll never turn from you again; our life renewed,
we will invoke your Name.
19 Adonai, God of Hosts, return to us—let your face
smile on us and we will be saved!
Yet Jesus’ arrivals tells us all we need to know. The people, despite being restored to the land following God’s judgment, did not cease turning from him. And so, in one sense, Jesus is very clear here, echoing nothing new from the thousands of years of history of the Israelites. Sure, Jesus did come to remind the people of the way of peace; but he also came to bring judgment. He came to fulfill God’s promise, and the radicality of that promise of relationship and salvation would be divisive. Importantly, I don’t think Jesus is being prescriptive here as much as he is being descriptive. The good news of the Gospel—that salvation is open to everyone, and it’s not simply an us vs them situation—is going to turn people against each other. Especially at the most essential of societal bonds. People don’t like hearing that salvation is open to all, that his Spirit is available to all, that it can’t be earned by money, or status, or earnestness. When the garden walls are pulled down, when security is shaken, when the status quo is overturned, people react quite poorly.
But wrapped up in the good news of the Gospel is that God is going to put things right, one way or another. Not necessarily the way people think is right. And yet I don’t think God’s judgment is going to look vastly different from every other thing he’s said in Scripture, every way that Jesus has both modelled and enabled within us to live. I think we don’t want to be judged partly because we think God’s judgment is going to be capricious, or politically motivated, or random, when applied to us. As if our judgment of other people isn’t capricious, politically motivated, or random when we apply it to others!
Well; what is God looking for, then, when he judges us? In Isaiah 5:7, we learn what the viticulturist discovered upon visiting his vines: he expected justice, but there was bloodshed; righteousness, but heard a cry of distress. What he expected after giving the vines every good thing they needed to grow was mishpat, justice—but instead he saw mispach, bloodshed or, better yet, oppression. What he looked for was tzedakah, righteousness—but instead only heard tz’acha, a squeal of pain from the downtrodden. A difference of just a couple letters, a couple sounds, in each of the Hebrew words in this verse makes for a poignant wordplay. But this pun makes a deeper point. How easily justice leads to oppression, and how fine the line between righteousness and the causing of pain through self-righteousness! The movement from good to bad is subtler and smoother than you might think. And we, all of us, have heard the cry of Jesus ringing in our ears: you hypocrites! You are oblivious to how sharp God’s eyes are in judging between these things that you think are obvious, polar opposites, but you demonstrate that with lack of care and love and attention that it is easier to slip from one to the other.
And yet—I believe God’s call to us through Christ enables us through the power of the Holy Spirit to, in fact, be agents for God’s justice and righteousness, to stay on the correct side of that dividing line between righteousness and self-righteousness. The 10 Commandments tell us how. The other prophets tell us how. You might like the way Micah phrases it: do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with God. Jesus himself tells us: love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and love your neighbour as yourself.
When we follow this guidance, I think two things happen regarding our sense of judgment. First, we will stop judging others. We will be more intent on loving, more consumed with virtue and honesty and justice, and be carpenters dealing with the planks in our own eyes. And then we turn outward, and rather than judging our neighbours and governments, rather than polarizingly putting them all in buckets we might call conservative or liberal or anything else, we call them to action lovingly, prophetically. We demonstrate the best ways to care for each other and our planet. We do not become zealous crusaders, but rather we more fully live into our calling as God’s people of peace.
And I think the second thing that happens is we stop either wholesale ignoring the truth of God’s coming judgment, on the one hand, or we stop fearing God’s judgment, on the other. In both cases, we live not in a cocky, Pharisaic way, but only with the confidence that God the Gardener has given us, his vine, everything we need to grow in the way he expects. We do not need to toss out God’s sense of justice in order to believe his love for everyone; and neither do we need imagine God as a ruthless lawman ready to bring a hammer down upon our heads for each small mistake we make.
This is the Good News of the Gospel for us here, reading these passages in 2025. May we learn to do the hard work of growing with each other and our neighbours as his vine, tended by his Holy Spirit, embracing his judgment.
Amen.
- That’s a tricky word to use when describing Scripture. I don’t mean that every single word of Scripture applies to every single moment of the future after which it was written. But I do mean that there is an element of Scripture that is infinite insofar as it reflects Godself, though that infinity is both encapsulated in an historical and cultural context and stretches beyond it. I confused myself just writing this footnote. ↩︎
- If these numbers or texts look different than what you read/heard this past Sunday, note that we follow the Anglican Church of Canada Book of Alternative Services lectionary, which sometimes differs from the Revised Common Lectionary—especially on numbering propers, it seems. ↩︎
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