“Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces its fruits.” (Matthew 21:43)
When I was in high school, I was invited to a small handful of parties that were decidedly unsanctioned events.
How this usually worked was that one of my friends would have their parents go away for a weekend or an overnight. Of course, this departure came with a ton of caveats: the house had to be kept clean, and they were strictly forbidden to have any friends over.
No sooner were the parents out of the driveway, however, than the informal telephone tree went out. Before long, all of us were invited over. Predictably, the invite list would careen completely out of control. More and more random people would show up. The stereo would be cranked up. KISS would be blasted (yes, I know that dates me) and the parents’ locked liquor cabinet would have its latch jimmied and the alcohol pilfered.
Inevitably, the house would get trashed.
Sometimes more, sometimes less. During several of these gatherings, grim-looking neighbours would show up on the porch, ordering control “or else we’ll call the police.” On two occasions, the police actually were called, and the party dispersed in an Olympic-level sprint the moment the flashing red lights turned the corner.
Every single time, without fail, the party throwers were ratted out by those vigilant neighbours. They were grounded for weeks, if not months, depending on the severity of the drywall damage or carpet stains. The disappointment and regret of the parents was always palpable. And at least twice, my father received a rather stern phone call detailing my participation, which meant I, too, found myself grounded for several long weeks.
Bear in mind, this all happened forty-five years ago. It was long before texting, group chats, and cell phones. Long before social media existed to capture blurry photos that now last a lifetime. I can’t even imagine how fast things escalate now. The risk of an innocent gathering careening out of control today is huge.
But that is just an aside.
This week, the Lectionary dishes up the parable of the Wicked Tenants. You know the one. A landowner plants a vineyard, equips it with a wine press and a watchtower, leases it to some tenants, and goes away to another country. Later in time, he sends his servants to collect the harvest. Instead of handing over the fruit, the tenants seize the servants, beat them, and kill them. The landowner tries again, sending an even larger group of messengers, but the tenants treat them in the exact same violent manner.
Finally, the owner sends his own son, reasoning that the tenants will surely respect his heir.
Spoiler alert: they don’t. They conspire together, drag the son out of the vineyard, and kill him, calculating that if the heir is dead, they can seize the inheritance entirely for themselves.
Historically, this parable was delivered as a scathing critique of the religious and political hierarchy of Jesus’ day, and the chief priests and Pharisees understood the insult immediately. They knew Jesus was talking about them.
Yet I think we modern believers often miss the enduring truth of this story.
And that truth is simply this: we have trashed God’s house.
And we continue to trash God’s house.
The simplicity of why we have trashed God’s house comes down to one painful reality: we think we are entitled to it. We act like reckless teenagers left alone for the weekend, convincing ourselves that the place belongs to us, that the owner isn’t watching, and that we have the right to break whatever we please to satisfy our own appetites.
This truth lands with particular weight right now, as we mark the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, also known as Orange Shirt Day.
The day is rooted in the experience of Phyllis Webstad, who was just six years old when her grandmother lovingly saved up to buy her a bright, shiny orange shirt for her first day at St. Joseph’s Mission Residential School in British Columbia. When Phyllis arrived at the school, the shirt was harshly stripped from her back, taken away, and never returned. It was a calculated, cruel gesture meant to strip away her language, her family bonds, her culture, and her innate dignity.
We wear orange on September 30 to remember Phyllis and thousands of children like her. But as the Church, we cannot treat this day as merely another well-intentioned theme Sunday where we sing a contemplative hymn and pat ourselves on the back for wearing bright clothes.
We have to tell the truth about who jimmied the locks.
The Indian Residential School system was not some secular accident; it was an atrocity designed by the state and willingly administered by church denominations. In the name of Jesus Christ, churches participated in tearing more than 150,000 Indigenous children away from their families and lands. In those institutions, God’s children endured physical violence, emotional starvation, sexual abuse, and the systematic erasure of their identities. Thousands never made it home. Their unmarked graves across this country stand as a horrific monument to an arrogance that convinced itself cultural destruction was a holy duty.
That was not tending the garden. That was trashing God’s house.
And the party didn’t stop when the schools closed. We continue to trash the place through ongoing systemic discrimination. Indigenous communities across Canada still endure boil-water advisories while multi-million dollar corporations extract resources from their backyards. Indigenous children remain grossly overrepresented in the foster care system, removed not by train tracks this time, but by provincial child-welfare policies that penalize poverty. Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit people go missing or are murdered without the nationwide grief or investigative urgency routinely granted to white Canadians.
We took the vineyard. We treated the original caretakers as an obstacle to be removed. We consumed what was not ours and told ourselves we earned it.
In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus looks squarely at the religious leaders and delivers a devastating verdict: “The kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces its fruits.”
God is not impressed by our stained glass, our polite liturgies, or our claims of holy ownership. God wants a harvest.
And what is God’s harvest? It is not balanced church budgets or well-attended committee meetings. God’s harvest is justice. It is equity, truth-telling, humble restitution, and healed relationship. God cares whether the vulnerable are protected, whether the bruised are bound up, and whether the land and its original peoples are honoured.
This Truth and Reconciliation Day, the Church is facing a holy reckoning. The neighbours have seen the flashing lights; the Owner is asking for an accounting.
We are being summoned to become a people who actually care about God’s harvest. That means moving beyond symbolic apologies into the gritty, humble work of repentance. It means supporting Indigenous-led calls for justice, actively implementing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 94 Calls to Action, returning resources, speaking out against structural racism, and sitting quietly at the feet of Indigenous leaders rather than trying to lead the meeting.
We trashed the house. We cannot undo that truth. But by God’s grace, we can drop the entitlement, pick up the broom, and start tending the soil so that justice can finally bear good fruit.
Blessings today, and remember you are Loved.
~Rev. Lynne Audio File: https://audio.com/lynne-gardiner/audio/office-hours-trashing-god-s-h