Tenth Sunday After Pentecost: August 17, 2025 | The Rev. McKenzi Roberson

Readings: Isaiah 5:1-7 | Psalm 80:1-2, 8-18 | Hebrews 11:29-12:2 | Luke 12:49-56

Once upon a time… no wait… at the beginning of time … or In a time already long past, when it was still of use to cast a spell...no, let me try again…long ago, long ago…or is it there was or there was not—is anything sure or certain but the greatness of Allah?—a king so powerful that man and Djinn bowed before him.

Humans across culture and time have long loved a good story. We hear the magic words and settle in to listen. Maybe you love the coziness of a romance and the comfort of a promised happy ending. Maybe you love a good mystery and the way it ends with questions answered. Maybe you prefer the kind of story grounded in history or the stories told by numbers or physical forces exerted in the world. Or maybe you are the kind of story lover who pretends to hate the story until your partner is halfway through a season of a questionable TV show and you suddenly know more about the story than they do.

Our holy scriptures are full of good stories. We hear tales of kings and war, endless seasons of family drama, cautionary tales, steamy romance (have you read Song of Songs??), and there are the stories found in the bits of law code and genealogy if you are more of a nonfiction reader. 

Our readings from Isaiah and the Psalm feel like reading a story told from two points of view. In Isaiah we hear God's perspective told through the voice of the prophet. In its historical context, the opening phrase “Let me tell you a story for my beloved…” would have been heard by the people listening as the opening of a (probably bawdy) romance song, a familiar construction that sets up the expectation. 

Isaiah builds the expectations of the wealthy and powerful crowd he entertains, perhaps leaning into an innuendo of vines and fertile hills, but then he changes the story. This isn't a story of some steamy romance, this is a story of God's judgement. God is the one planting the vineyard, the people of Israel are the vines producing inedible grapes. The vine has not done what vines are supposed to do, so now it will no longer receive the protection of their planter. The vines should have been producing fruit of justice and righteousness, but they were doing the opposite. The people of Judah were God’s pleasant planting, but they were not growing in the way God intended and there would be consequences for that. 

Our Psalm offers the perspective of the people of Israel. It’s as if we have switched the narrative point of few and skipped ahead a few chapters. God’s promised consequences, proclaimed through Isaiah, have come to pass, and now the psalmist is expressing their grief. They remind God and themselves who God is and what God has done for them, brought them out of slavery and given them a home. Then they ask, why has this terrible thing happened to us? In case you missed it, God, things are bad. In a portion of the psalm we didn’t read this morning, the psalmist claims that God has “fed them with the bread of tears and given them tears to drink in full measure.” 

But the lament and the pain in this psalm are balanced by a trust that God will act. “Restore us, O Lord God of hosts; show the light of your countenance, and we shall be saved.” They know that God has saved them before, and they trust that God can both hear their unfiltered lament and will save them. It is now God’s turn to act in this story.

Now, this isn't a story like some predictable Hallmark movie, the kind where you want to reach through the screen and shake the characters yelling at them, “Just talk to each other!” So often the stories of human relationships boil down to poor communication, often in an attempt to shield an insecurity, but God has communicated quite clearly to the people of Israel the whole time. God loves the people, and God expects them to love each other and to love God in return. There are rules and guidelines about how to make that work, how to show up faithfully in this relationship, but these rules can respond to new contexts so long as the foundation remains in place. 

God expects creation to bring forth justice. God expects the hungry to be fed and the stranger to be welcomed. The people of God throughout the generations have and continue to tell the story of God bringing the people out of slavery and sustaining them in the wilderness, in part to remind ourselves who God is, and in part to remind ourselves that we know what it is to be hungry and lost and met with provision and love. We love our neighbors out of the love that God has already given us, and we tell the stories of our lives, the stories of the saints who have gone before, and the stories of scripture to remind ourselves of how that loved has looked in the past and inspire our imaginations for how the stories of love might look in the future.

The story of scripture, the stories of the saints, these are stories nestled in a story nestled in a story. The story belongs to us, but we belong to the story.

The story of who God is to me, who God is to you, isn’t the Main Story. The main story is God and God’s love for creation, a relationship ruptured early on and repaired through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. But a gift of our faith is the belief that while our individual stories aren’t the Main Story, they are essential components of that bigger narrative. Our stories weave together with the stories of Jesus and all those in the great cloud of witnesses into the grand story of God’s relationship with creation. 

We know how this story will end, we've peaked at the last page of the book and been given images of a place where mourning and weeping will be no more, where there will be healing for the nations, where God will dwell with us and we will be God's people. 

There's a certain comfort in knowing where the story is going, especially when we're still in the thick of it, with plenty of plot and character development yet to be written. Things are hard, but we have stories of hard times before that others have survived, we have stories like mana in the wilderness to remind us that joy and provision can be found in the midst of hard times, and we have stories painting an image of the future towards which we strive while we wait for God’s final redemption. 

God has given us the agency to write any story we wish with our lives, and day by day, God graciously extends an invitation to collaborate in writing God's story of love and justice and flourishing creation.

…And so all God’s creation lived happily ever after. Or, in the Persian construction, “This book has come to end, (but) the story yet remains.”