Holy Brit

All children are now registered for school - hurray - the last forms were a lot messier than the first ones.

Kind of like today's reading (Luke 20:9-18) - things got a lot messier as time went along. It seems like this reading has turned up a few times recently - but perhaps that is my imagination. It is not an easy passage but the good news seems to be that whilst there is much in us that rejects Christ and that which is good God's whole purpose is to encourage that is us which embraces Christ. This is a wonderful thing.

The thought that ,despite out own inhibitions and general sinfulness, God is still cheering for us wholeheartedly and wanting us to be in communion with him. Of course the cornerstone is dangerous for those who see it as something which is in the way of their own way of living but it is an equally solid foundation for those who choose to make it such.

There are always too many excuses to abandon faith - always too many reasons to feel sorry for ourselves and blame someone else for our falling away from this walk with Christ - we can look at the scrapes we get from life and see them as evidence of our victim status or we can simply move forward. Perhaps things are unfair, perhaps people are mean and nasty to us, perhaps we should stand up more firmly for ourselves. But in most cases the anger which is required to maintain a selfish stance is more damaging to ourselves, the self which we promote by doing that is not the self who we really want to be and we have to be careful that what we are demanding is really ours in the first place.

The tenants demanded a vineyard which was not theirs and committed a terrible crime to try to obtain ownership of it. The vineyard of our lives belong to our Lord Jesus Christ, not to ourselves, it is His image which we sully by demanding some temporary justice , it is ourselves we belittle with anger and pettiness. Jesus tells us to turn the other cheek - not to make ourselves the kicking board of the world but to allow us the freedom to walk away with our dignity in tact.

These are hard thoughts, contrary to everything we learn in the world we live in, contrary to demands for identity and self. But self is fulfilment in Christ, not demands in the world. Building on the foundation not trying to dig it out and replace it with ego. We must not allow people to be abused and degraded, but we must also distinguish between that, and knowing, that there are times when tending the vineyard, means walking away and fighting the fight is killing the son.