1) August 18, 2013 [Green]
Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Sermon Text Isaiah 5:1-7
Sermon "A love Song Gone Sour"
Psalm 80:1-2, 8-19 (UMH 801) Hebrews 11:29–12:2 Luke 12:49-56
Many of life’s memorable moments can be brought to mind just by hearing a favorite song. Consider Sam Cooke’s protest song, “A Change Is Gonna Come,” and the ways it evokes the civil rights crisis of the early 1960s, or John Lennon’s song of peace, “Imagine,” which has as a point of reference the Vietnam War. Or even “Fight the Power” by PE that dealt with the Virginia Beach Riots
These and many other songs not only grab moments of the human experience but also give voice to a social critique. When Jimi Hendrix transfixed the crowds of Woodstock with his gripping version of "The Star Spangled Banner," he was building on a foundation reaching back, in part, to the revolutionary guitar playing of Howlin' Wolf and the other great Chicago bluesmen, and to the Delta blues tradition before him. But in its unforgettable introduction, followed by his unaccompanied "talking" guitar passage and inserted calls and responses at key points in the musical narrative, Hendrix's performance of the national anthem also hearkened back to a tradition even older than the blues, a tradition rooted in the rings of dance, drum, and song shared by peoples across Africa. Music has taken us on fascinating journeys from the African ring, through the ring shout's powerful merging of music and dance in the slave culture, to the funeral parade practices of the early new Orleans jazzmen, the bluesmen in the twenties, the beboppers in the forties, and the free jazz, rock, Motown, concert hall composers of the sixties, streets of Bed-Stuy in New York. and beyond.
Song can speak to Social Crisis
Speaking to power through song was a common practice among the prophets of Israel. Just like it has been in our history and is today. I am packing my bags to go to the celebration of the 1963 August 28 March on Washington and one of the questions I want to know as we look at issues like the repel of sections of the voters right bill and the killing of Trayvon Martin what's the song.
In Isaiah 5:1-5, the prophet who writes switches to the role of ballad-singer, introducing his listeners to a song titled “My Dearest Friend’s Vineyard.”
The ballad begins by narrating the story of a dear friend’s vineyard on top of a fertile hill and recounts the labor that went into caring and maintaining this vineyard.
“He dug it and cleared it of stones, and planted it with choice vines; he built a watchtower in the midst of it, and hewed out a wine vat in it; he expected it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes.” (v. 2)
With poetic leaps, this song transports us to the top of a hill, inside of a watchtower, and through a wine vat. We are invited to linger on the long time-lapse of the planting season—from seedling to yielded grapes.
Yet rather than languish in the nostalgia of country life, the ballad-singer moves us to the crisis of a vineyard yielding worthless sour grapes.
Move 1) I don't know about y'all but I have known some sour grapes. Grapes that look like one thing and are truly another; I've met some folks that were sour grapes; I've experience churches that were sour grapes.
It gets bad at times with all the sour grapes people that were suppose to be good who you had worked with and loved and cared for yet in the end they turned out to be sour it makes you wonder is there anybody that feels the same way about The Lord that you feel, anybody that has the same kind of God stuff in them that you have anybody that loves my Jesus. Anybody here that loves my lord?
Following the song, the ballad-singer returns to a prophetic voice and identifies his listeners as the “inhabitants of Jerusalem and people of Judah.” (v.3)
Indeed, the themes expressed in his narrative ballad would have resonated deeply with the cultural life of the prophet’s Judean audience.
This was a song of and for the Judeans.
Speaking on behalf of the God of Israel, the prophet interprets for his listeners the song’s underlying message. The crisis of worthless sour grapes is decoded as acts of oppression and injustice in Judean society (v. 7).
So God turns his back on his people, he stop fooling with them. As a result, God, the vineyard owner, will no longer attend to the upkeep of the vineyard: “I will make it a waste; it shall not be pruned or hoed, and it shall be overgrown with briers and thorns; I will also command the clouds that they rain no rain upon it.” (v.5, NRSV)
Because of Oppression and injustice were not solely issues endemic to the ruling class in Judean society. No Isaiah’s lyrics, his song, emerged in an age of unprecedented cultural, social, and economic conflict.
By the end of the 8th century B.C.E., the Assyrian Empire [10] had conquered the northern kingdom of Israel and coerced the southern kingdom of Judah into becoming a vassal state.
Move 2) Friends of the Neighborhood, God is not minimal.
Isaiah, the ballad-singer, sings of a particular friend and his failed vine crop to speak about broader issues of injustice and oppression.
His prophetic gaze required that his listeners look first to “my dearest friend,” the most vital of all human relationships, in order to understand the wider workings of oppression in elite Judean society.
If, through broader neighborhood markets, schools, churches, and even corner fast-food joints. That we can see the real power of oppression,
Today it is useful to begin not with the unseen oppressive power networks in our society but with their effects on those closest to us.
Just ask the single parent serving ice cream at a favorite fast-food or Wal-mart hangout if he or she would like better hourly wages.
While fast food CEOs average a daily salary of $25,000 a day, workers at fast-food companies in Lake City make only 25 percent of the money they need to survive.
Single parents earning the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour are, as Jillian Berman of the Huffington Post describes, not able to survive even in America’s cheapest towns.
Compound this with the status of single motherhood and the needs of the household intensify exponentially.
Dependent on minimum wages are children, who like any other child in the U.S., deserve access to healthy food, clothing, affordable shelter, and descent education. Within the current reconfigurations taking place in the U.S. economy, the new modes of production continue to privilege those who have wealth or have sold out to the enemy.
Yet, as Isaiah’s ballad reminds us, these wider realities have a local impact on the everyday friend, who routinely rises every morning to try and make ends meet on meager wages.
The current vineyard of the fast-food industry, fast food church, and fast food politics has not stopped producing sour grapes, which is the massive sale of cheap empty calories at the wage of $7.25 an hour.
But let me tell you we can't give up on God while a lot of us are trying to make it on minimal wages we do not serve a minimum God we serve a God with God size vision.
And I need to tell you that, we need to have trust in God, yes we need to have Faith in God. Song two
Move 3) Happy Happy, Happy
Listening to music, spending time with friends, and the fruit of the vine would rightly describe our society’s most familiar hour: Happy Hour.
Happy hour is normally between 5:30 and 6:30. However for many minimum wage workers in the fast-food industry, and the fast food life, these are the hardest time. the hours when they are fussing with children about food, trying to keep lights on, fussing with momma about childcare and if they have a spouse about the bills, the hours of their working lives are far from happy. And a matter of fact I wish I had time to tell you that a lot of them folks in them bars and clubs drinking their vine aren’t Happy either.
Their song has become the ballad of sour grapes, wherein they sing, “he expected it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes.” (v. 2) but I do need to tell you that when you come to the end of your grape vin and you are looking for good grapes even when you seem to be all out of Joy and there seems to be no promise I know a Devine gardener some one that can but touch your plants and it can be whole again as a matter of fact he can just speak a word and no matter how low the plaint of your existence might seem you wan have to pretend any longer because he will pick you up. I said Jesus will Pick you up.
Three things Don't product sour grapes 2 don't limit god to being minimal and Learn to be Happy Happy Happy.
