Twenty Sixth Sunday of Ordinary Time

Today’s Scripture readings use the imagery of a vineyard to describe God’s love for us.  The prophet Isaiah in the first Scripture reading uses a love ballad to describe his friend’s song concerning his vineyard.  Then Isaiah says the house of Israel is God’s vineyard.
In the Gospel parable the vineyard is the reign of God that is to be found within us.  The vineyard of the Lord is to be found in our own hearts.  God goes to great lengths to prepare wondrous blessings for the vineyard.  We are nurtured by God’s Word, fed at God’s table, helped by the commandment of love.  All we need do is to let God tend us and bring us to produce good fruit.  We are invited in this celebration of the Eucharist to invite Christ into the vineyard of our own heart and to open our hearts and our minds to his loving presence. 
Further, in this mystery of the Eucharistic celebration of inviting Christ into the vineyard of our hearts, the grace of Christ’s presence in the vineyard leads us to celebrate that we are made to love.  We become our best selves when we open ourselves to giving and receiving the love of others.   The vineyard of the Lord is to be found within us but this vineyard is connected to our brothers and sisters with Christ as our cornerstone.  This is the mystery of the Church of Jesus.  We are better together.  The whole Church is the vineyard of the Lord.
What can go wrong with this beautiful imagery of all of us together being the vineyard of the Lord?  From the Gospel parable, the tenants to whom the vineyard is entrusted got greedy and wanted everything for themselves.  Plain and simple, there is rebellion in the vineyard. 
There is rebellion in the vineyard of our own hearts when we get greedy and want everything for ourselves and are unwilling to share.  In the end, the greed of the tenants becomes their undoing for the king will have no part with them.
There is also rebellion in the vineyard of the Lord in our world as well.  Most recently, the ruthlessness and complete disregard for the dignity of life demonstrated by Stephen Paddock in his murderous rampage in Las Vegas.  We see rebellion when one nation is at war with another nation. 
Would that we would have the spiritual sightedness to believe that everything is on loan to us from God.  We are temporay tenants.  We don’t own anything, even though sometimes we act as if we own it all.  Everything ultimately belongs to God.
We must also look within and ask whether we at times are the tenant farmers who abuse the giftedness we have been given?  What is the produce that comes from the vineyard of your own heart, and do we give it back gratefully to God our landowner?  
Our lives are a vineyard that God entrusts to us.  Each of our lives, each of our vineyards, is richly blessed,  The voice of God’s Son calls out to us to share our talents, our riches, our giftedness with those around us and with those who have less.  May we be conscious that like the tenant farmers in the Gospel, we are tempted to be greedy and provide only for ourselves.  When we excuse ourselves from generous sharing and love of others, when we become more interested in security rather than a Gospel commitment to sharing, we fail to respond to the call of God In our lives.  The vineyard of our own heart is ripe for the harvest, and God calls out to each one of us:  “Come, share what you have and discover that the real treasure is not what you possess but in what you are willing to give away.”
Lord, we thank you for the privilege of being tenants of your vineyard.  We are called to be good stewards of all of God’s creation.  In his encyclical ON CARE FOR OUR COMMON HOME, Pope Francis calls us to be good stewards of planet earth having much reverence and care and stewardship of the earthly resources that are given to us.
Bishop Matano is calling to share what we have with those in need throughout our diocese by supporting the CMA.
Our parish is embarking upon a new inititiative CHRISTLIFE in inviting to have a deeper relationship with Jesus.
Being tenants of the vineyard of the Lord, being good stewards of the giftedness that God has entrusted to us is a privilege, not a burden. My ministry as a priest and your ministry in your family and your work life and your ministry within the life of our parish is, please God, a privilege and not just an obligation.
What is the take home message of today’s Scriptures?  We are tenants of this earth,  stewards of what has been entrusted to our care.  We are stewards of the  church, entrusted with the awesome task of ministering to the needs of a broken and hurting world.

And, as the tenants of God’s earthly vineyard, we gather as the faith community of St Joseph’s Sunday after Sunday to celebrate Jesus’ victory over death, and to offer back to the owner of the vineyard a portion of what the land has yielded to us.
We offer up the sweat and the tears and the laughter of our own lives, and as we do that,  we receive back from God the body and blood of His Son who was crucified that we might be redeemed,  You  know what?    That’s a pretty good deal for us.  We are the recipients of God’s unending love for us.