"The Oracles of God"

From the time I read the first, holy pages of Scripture, I knew them to be sacred, mysterious, and belonging to God. I resonated when I heard that they were His love letters to mankind. I knew the truth of St. Paul's words that they are "the oracles of God" (Rom 3:2) — His chosen instrument to speak into our individual, personal lives.

Now, as an old man, having twenty-three years of university study and taking five degrees, certainly these earliest boyhood impressions have only deepened and matured. They have not changed at all, not insofar as these basic insights. What can we say about the Scriptures? They are holy. That is the only thing that we certainly know.

The Scriptures are unlike anything else in their spareness and compression: they are clear pools of truth, to be imbibed in reverence and still silence.

I began at college deciding to major in psychology because I mistakenly believed that this was the study of the human soul (psyche) as its name promises, (I ended up devoting most of my studies to Classical Antiquity, medieval studies, math sciences, and theology.) I read the Swiss psychiatrist C.G. Jung, M.D. and meditated on his speculations concerning "coincidence" and his theory on archetypes, primal symbols which point to the essences of human nature: facets in the prism of the human soul.

Nearly a hundred years earlier, the great English poet William Wordsworth used a different phrase. He called these things the "types and symbols of Eternity" (The Prelude). For surely a mystery surrounds us in the Creation and in our own souls, which we all share and into which everyone is called. Eternal forms surface out of the darkness, display their brilliance, and then fade from view. The foolish among us pay it no mind. They knew it to be extraordinary when it happened, but after it fades from view, ignore it.

Arising from all these things, we ponder a simple question: If God were to visit His human creatures, setting aside a three-year period for teaching them, what would He say? We realize that the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God, must certainly point to the essences, the eternal forms of Heaven and Earth: what is important for us to understand, what must we know if we are to rise above the brokenness of the world, and fix our gaze on a world ordered to Heaven.

Simple examples come to mind. We learn of the holiness inherent in the heart and mind of a child:

And then there is marriage, which He holds to be incommensurably sacred. For in marriage a miracle takes place touching even the sinews of human creation:

Jesus reserves a marriage feast as the setting for His first miracle turning water into wine. Effecting the marriage between Heaven and Earth, He will turn this same wine into His Blood, from marriage to marriage.

If death is an archetype, as Jung asserts, then Jesus evinces Himself to be the Master of Death's House, permitting its jaws to swallow Him that He might shatter the Gates of Hell transmuting death into life. Human life itself is made, then remade, in the sovereignty of its Creator. Everything His Divine hands touch are seen to be archetypes by that fact.

In this morning's Gospel, Jesus teaches us about a grave malady, a dangerous disease of the world's brokenness, infecting many, even most, men and women, separating them from God. Surely this must be an archetype. I might add that this disease has become a master problem of our own era.

It is all too easy to dismiss these words as the mutterings of mad men. By what logic exactly would the assassins of a king's son confer upon themselves royal crowns? Or how might highway robbers kill the son of a tycoon and by that fact lay a safe claim to his whole estate and legacy? Madness! But upon careful reflection and as we mature, we come to realize that madness is the constant state of the world .... and fatal, for this broken logic fatally separates us from God, which is the point of the parable. And this, of course, is the point of this morning's parable.

When I was a parish priest in New England, I watched each year as a new class of junior high school students read Arthur Miller's play The Crucible, which was the custom in that area of the U.S. The play would leave a deep impression on the students. One year a young woman approached me at church. She wanted to discuss witches. (Perhaps my black attire recommended me as a subject-matter expert.) In any case, she lived on Witch Trot Road, so-named because witches were trotted down this country lane to the Boston Post Road and thence to Salem in Massachusetts for trial during the seventeenth century.

"How could everyone believe that these women were witches, condemning them to be hung?!" she demanded.

I asked another question: "Do you mean, how could everyone believe the same outlandish lie?"

"Yes," she said. "You know, 'mass hysteria.'"

I replied, "Delusion is the constant state of the world and the state to which the human mind constantly tends. You are young now, but as you mature and if you are wise, you will see this."

"That's ridiculous!" she blurted out. "Give me one example!"

"Oh, that's easy," I said. "Look around you. How many people believe in God and live their lives as if He existed?"

She said nothing. For she too was infected. So I answered for her: "Nearly no one. Is not this the most dangerous lie? That God does not exist?"

Delusion is the constant state of the human mind. Consider the case of global warming. For decades scientists have been reporting that ocean surface temperatures have been rising dramatically. This is not open to debate. Either these temperatures are warmer, or they are not. And it is elementary school science that ocean surface temperatures drive both ocean currents and wind currents. (Surfers in my high school town were always focused on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico whose warm surface waters spawn East Coast hurricanes.) Ocean surface temperatures drive wind currents, which drive weather, which ultimately decide climate. These are not mysteries, nor even deep, nor debatable, science. Yet, perversely, the great mass of humanity ignore this life-and-death threat .... will even deny that the problem exists.

On a more humble and personal scale, I was once the manager of a farm having one striking peculiarity. The old man who once had owned it stipulated in his will that a drinking buddy must live on the farm for the rest of his life. The old man died, and his friend continued living in a small house in one corner of the acreage with his wife. Over time, they came to believe that they owned the farm. They told people in town that the farm had been willed to them. The arrival of a farm manager, hired by the old man's grandson, did not jibe with their delusion. So they put out the word that legal trickery was being used to take their farm away. All around I felt hostility in the community. People drove by my house making indecent gestures. Men came at night and cut down a lemon grove I had planted. Why is all of this happening? I did not know .... until one day a young man made a delivery to the farm from a town two hours away and asked me, "By what legal trickery was I taking the farm away from "Uncle Joe" and "Auntie Tilly"?

A pickup truck screeched up to gas pumps where I was fueling my truck with an elderly nun sitting in the front seat. He leapt out with his fists outstretched dancing about like a boxer taunting me: "Come on! Let's go!"

Everywhere I went, people looked at me and said to themselves, "That's him."

Now mind you, life for the drinking buddy and his wife had not changed at all. But they perceived my my presence as a threat, for it gave the lie to their publicly declared delusion.

Did you know that delusion is commonplace? Over time, I have come to recognize a corollary: what the majority of people believe is likely to be untrue by that fact. For "common sense" (as it is called) arises from the least common denominator, that is, what everyone agrees to be true. Thus, if sound education and mature wisdom are required to recognize truth, then it follows that least-common-denominator belief, the unanimous decision, cannot equate to truth. This perspective helps to open up our parable this morning.

The tenants of the vineyard have come to believe that they are owners. No doubt, they have told everyone in the village that they own the vineyard, the tower, and the wine press. When the landowner's servants arrive, challenging this public delusion, exposing the lie, they are quickly killed, explained away to others as criminal intruders, no doubt.

Finally, the heir appears. In their delusion, the tenants, coming to believe their own lie, extend their "common sense" to include all claims upon his legacy, his inheritance:

Consider how quickly everyone in the neighborhood is apt to accept their expanded claim. Are they not owners of the vineyard? Have they not been here as long as anyone can remember? It is but a small step to believe that they are now heirs to a vast inheritance.

The Parable of the Wicked Tenants is often depicted as God's rejection of the Twelve Tribes of Israel, who have behaved badly and now will kill the Heir, God's Only-begotten Son. I do not dispute this reading of the parable, of course. But I would like to go one step further and say that the parable is an archetype. It is historically true in a setting two thousand years ago and it is an archetype, speaking into every age and situation of human life.

It speaks to our situation today. Are we also not workers in a beautiful and richly-yielding earth? Have we not been benefited from a Great Benefactor, .... trusted? And have we not banished that Landowner from our minds imagining that we are the masters, that we will set the rules, that we will live any way we want? So what! What's wrong with that?!

Have we not seized the Vineyard, and (I might add) polluting it and drawing up a new moral lease: writing our own rules and abridging all former agreements? Perhaps we congratulate ourselves that we, at least, have not murdered the Heir. But that is also a delusion. Perhaps we do not see the tears shed by the Mother of God for the state of our souls and the direction of our thoughts.

How many are willing to dissent from the world's delusion and its new moral order? How many? How many are willing to push back as the words "family," "marriage," and even "identity" are claimed by wicked tenants and redefined? When a brave man comes to his feet and speaks out against it, how many will come to their feet and stand with him? How many? Or will they sit in their chairs and stare at their shoes hoping that nobody notices.

We are trustees, entrusted with the Vineyard. The wall around it and its watchtower are intended for our vigilance — that it not be taken over by deluded men, who envision a different moral order. "When bad men conspire, good men must associate," (to paraphrase Edmund Burke).

Some of us have sunk so low as to put our words in the mouth of God in order to evade our grave responsibilities. They claim to be "compassionate" by affirming evil. They tell me they are "loving their enemies" by accepting those who abridge God's Rule of Life. In this, they have drifted into a most dangerous delusion: that His holy angels do not survey all that is happening.

"Perhaps I can lie and no one will notice!" Delusion upon delusion upon delusion. And we dangerously misinterpret His patience for His permission or forgiveness.

I hear people say that they have not given up on a belief in God. They are trying to make room in their thinking for some kind of God. And here is another, dangerous defect of mind. The Orthodox teacher, Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann, who singled out secularism as the greatest heresy of our time, defined secularism in a way that might surprise many, for it does not focus on rejection of God. The case is more subtle than that. Secularism, he wrote, proposes "a worldview that holds that there is such a thing as a neutral zone, a sphere of life that has nothing necessarily to do with God." We might call this compartmentalizing — the idea that, "Yes, there's a place for God in my life. And my life has many compartments, not all of them to do necessarily with God."

This outlook has become so widespread as to be styled common sense: "Is this not common sense? I'm no religious fanatic! I go to church on Christmas and Easter!"

Let us be clear. Everything is about God. Every detail of a good life is ordered to God. And every detail that is not ordered to God is one that betrays an evil life, an evil mind, and a soul that is being offered up to demons. And here is yet another delusion: "The demons will not notice that I have hung a 'Vacancy' sign outside the house of soul." There is no "neutral zone." The Lord Jesus Himself teaches,

This is the Orthodox Church's official translation of the Bible in English.

We do not own His Vineyard. We are His beloved tenants, to whom He has given all beauty, all blessing, even all dominion .... in a world ordered to Him. Let us then give thanks that we are surrounded by angels who guide us, who show us how to be good tenants, who protect us, and who show us the way to the Kingdom of Heaven. In all of this, grave responsibilities have been entrusted to us.

Let us sure of a truth: when He enters the room, let us leap to our feet.

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