Yesterday, I had a funeral for a long time parishioner, Lenny Giuliani. Lenny was a winemaker. Making wine wasn’t his profession, but it wasn’t simply a hobby either. His family called him the “Einstein of Wines” because he was extremely scientific in perfecting his wines. His daughters brought me a few bottles of their father’s wine and suggested that I try them before the funeral. Their father loved constructive criticism, and they said they’d love to hear my honest opinion.
And so I opened his bottle of red, a blend of several different grapes noted on the label, and I’m no connoisseur, but I could tell that I was drinking something special, the culmination of a life’s work, a work of art. It made me think of Pope St. John Paul II. You might be a Catholic nerd if a glass of wine makes you think of a Pope! For, back in 1999, Pope St. John Paul wrote a letter to artists, to all who passionately dedicate themselves to beauty and creativity. The Pope reflected upon how the creative work of artists, often comes painstakingly, but their beauty is a gift to the world. Maybe it’s because I’m half Italian, but I believe good food and good wine are works of art. And Lenny’s wine was certainly artfully made. He developed these wines, painstakingly, and shared the fruits of his labors with the family and friends, and for that, the world was blessed.
I thought I’d share that with you not simply because wine, vineyards, grapes, and winepresses, flow throughout our readings this weekend, but I think Lenny’s dedication to his art also speaks to the lessons of these readings.
For our readings focus on how we use our time, how we spend our life. Self-absorption or self-donation.
In today’s First Reading Isaiah explains how the Lord had prepared Israel like a fine vineyard. God had given Israel the Law, the Torah, he had taken them out of the slavery of Egypt, and sent them prophets to help them be his holy people. And yet, what did they do with that freedom, what did they do to the prophets?
Rather than yielding the lush, juicy grapes of faithfulness, justice and peace, Israel had produced the wild sour grapes of infidelity, false worship, ignorance of the scriptures, injustice toward the poor.
Isaiah’s prophetic warning urges us to examine the vineyard of our own souls. When we examine our life, do we find the good fruit of peace, justice, faithfulness, and joy or do we find the sour fruit of turbulence, selfishness, ignorance, and crankiness? Are you yielding lush spiritual fruit or sour worldly fruit?
The crankiness, bitterness, selfishness, are typically signs of self-absorption rather than self-donation. They are signs of the need to hand our souls over to God in a fuller way, by devoting more time to prayer, fasting, spiritual reading, meditation on the scriptures, and engaging in the works of mercy. They are signs of our need to turn away from the things that do not give us life: the works of selfishness and slothfulness.
The Gospel Parable of the Tenants also highlights the twisted logic of sin by which we reject God’s plan for his vineyard, God’s plan for our souls.
In the parable, who is the vineyard owner, who is his servant, who is his son, who are the tenants? Well, of course the vineyard owner is God, who has set us upon the earth to love and serve him. The vineyard owner’s servants are the prophets God has sent to call us to be faithful to God. The vineyard owner’s son, killed by the wicked tenants, is Jesus, who is rejected by sinful man, and dies on the cross.
Sadly, we are the wicked tenants in that story. The one’s who do the rejecting. We are placed in the vineyard of the Lord, and instead of using our time to serve the Lord alone, we hijack the vineyard, and use it to pursue our own selfish ends.
But the stone rejected by the builders has become the cornerstone. God is greater than our sins. He has given us another chance through Jesus Christ. The sinful tenant can repent and enter into a restored relationship with God, and bear the fruit we were supposed to bear from the beginning.
So the parable is ultimately one of Good News, it is an invitation to repent and believe in and follow the Son who is greater than our sins.
Living in a fallen world, we often get used to sin. I know, I was shocked by the mass shooting this week in Las Vegas. I was shocked, but sadly, not surprised. Not surprised because as a nation, we seem to be falling farther and farther from God. And the farther and farther we fall, the more common these tragedies become.
The lesson from Scripture is clear, Isaiah warns Israel because it had become infested with sin and was bearing rotten, sour fruit. Our nation, any nation, will also bear similar rotten, ghastly horrors, as long as faithlessness, godlessness, perversion, and disrespect for human life persist.
Our duty and our salvation as Catholic Christians is to continue to gather as God’s people as we are doing now, at the altar, at the foot of the cross, to plead God’s mercy for our national and personal sinfulness, and to receive the strength we need to spread the Gospel, to convert hearts, to purify perversions, and to enlighten darkened minds and hearts.
Catholic Christianity is the remedy because it is the way of Jesus Christ, the way of self-donation in fidelity to the will of the Father.
“Keep on doing what you have learned and received and heard and seen in me,” Paul tells the Philippians. “Then the God of peace will be with you.” St. Paul of course was pointing to his own tireless labors in the vineyard of the Lord for the spread of the Gospel. The saints are always our teachers, they show us how ordinary people can become extraordinary blessings for the world. In just a few weeks, we'll be celebrating the great Solemnity of All Saints. I encourage you to choose a saint and learn everything you can about them, that they can inspire you in the Christian life. The saints are the true geniuses, the true artists of history.
Ordinary things, small acts of love, truly can transform the world. So become artists, in the words of Pope St. John Paul, “become passionately dedicated to the search for new “epiphanies” of beauty” and make your art a gift to the world. Your art might be music, or winemaking, or teaching or healing or writing or works of mercy. Become artists of prayer, hospitality, scripture. Become artists of self-donation, become artists of Catholicism, lights in the darkness, and make the world beautiful for the glory of God and salvation of souls.
