Hey, Church Fans! Boy are we having fun in the parish this week. Below is the text for this weekend. As always you can get video of the homily in a day or two at our YouTube channel by clicking here. Just fast forward to the homily.
Have you ever had this happen to you? I was walking through the break room and stepped on a grape. What happened? It let out a little wine. On a more practical note, I was telling my sister about how you could take left over wine and put it in the ice cube trays to use later to chill your white wine. She looked at me kind of puzzled and said, “What the heck is ‘left over wine?’”
Wine has been around for millennia. Vineyards are special places. They always have been. But it takes a lot of work and a lot of patience to make. Did you know it takes three years for a newly planted vine to produce its first grape? In the meantime, you had to keep the birds and other varmints from eating the fruit. Then there is the harvest, then the crush. Once you bottle it, it has to ferment for weeks and then age from 6 months to five years depending on what kind of wine you are making. Vineyards and other types of agricultural images would have been something very familiar to the people of Jesus’ day.
We get two different parables about vineyards this week, one from Isaiah and one from Our Lord. The vineyard is the People of God, the stewards are those who were given care of it. The message is a rather harsh one. Those to whom God entrusted his vineyard were not doing their job.
It’s a rather sobering lesson and no small challenge for us who have been entrusted with this little part of the vineyard of South Anchorage we call St. Elizabeth Parish, especially when we remember that there will be an accounting of our stewardship at the end of this life.
It is at once an honor and a challenge. On the other hand, it’s pretty humbling. In the Catholic understanding of parish life, you and I, the St. Elizabeth Parish Family, are given the care of souls of every man, woman and child who live in South Anchorage, all the way down to Whittier.
God has given us this part of the vineyard. Our job as a parish is to become so much a part of the scene around here that they cannot imagine life without us. The call from the Lord is challenging. The grace to carry it out is eternal.