In the parable in Matthew, God is cast as the absentee landowner. Here the recalcitrant characters are the tenants rather than the grapes. When it was time to pay the rent the tenants took matters into their own hands and beat up the rent collectors rather than giving the owner his share from the harvest of grapes. The tenants were so skewed in their perspective that they imagined that they would come to possess the vineyard if they killed the owner's son. What planet were they living on? How did they so misread the situation?

Both these stories about grapes and God have something to say to us about life, grace, gratitude and responsibility. As I read the passage from Isaiah and the parable in Matthew I was struck by how differently things can look depending upon where one is standing. I have been thinking about perspective and vision a lot this week. Sometimes we are too close to something to see it clearly. Sometimes the bigger vision includes far more than we have allowed inside our frame of reference and so we miss an important part of the picture.

I want to explore further what these two stories about vineyards have to do with us but first I want to take you to a mountaintop. Sometimes the outlines of the vineyard are more clearly seen from the heights than from the valley floor.

On an arid coastal plain some 400 kilometers south of Lima, Peru is a town called Nazca. There are no vineyards on the mountain. It is above the tree line. The buildings are not much to speak of either - no watchtowers or wine vats. But the plains of Nazca are one of the places that the United Nations has designated as a world heritage site. Sometime between 500 BC and 500 AD someone painstakingly removed parts of the soil's upper layer.

Tons of reddish-brown rubble was moved to expose the light-colored sediments left by an old ocean. The more than one thousand lines etched in the soil so long ago cover 450 square kilometers. The longest line is nine kilometers long. But each of the hundreds of lines whatever their length, traces their straight path or their curving contour regardless of the shape of the hills or the furrows they encounter along the way. These lines in the soil were the conscientious creation of a group of people who worked long and hard to lay them out in a precise and particular way. But when one stands in the middle of what appears to be random lines stretching into the distance for miles, the sense of them is a total mystery.

Even from a mountaintop, our vision is not sufficient- the picture is not complete. We must go higher to see the sense scratched into the plain of Nazca. If we rise into the air far above those lofty plains the randomness retreats and lines become shapes. The chalky outlines are geoglyphs- geometric figures, stylized plants, animals and imaginary beings.

There is a 250-foot long hummingbird and a 300-foot long monkey. There is a giant dog, various other birds, and a collection of spirals, triangles and trapezoids. How ancient people were able to create such large and complex figures without being able to see what they were doing remains a mystery. No one really knows why the lines and figures were created. But the fact remains that there is a pattern that can be seen if one stands in the right place. That place is not on the ground. We have to rise above our usual stance in life, our earthly perspective.

As on the mountain so it is in the vineyard. The tenants in the vineyard of Matthew's parable crossed a line because they could not see the shape of things as they actually were. The grapes of Isaiah's vineyard assumed a lack of connection between their fruitfulness and their fate. They missed the larger pattern I which they lived and moved and had their being. They saw no link between their opportunity to grow and the grace that preceded it. They felt no responsibility toward the One who had done so much on their behalf. But when one rises above the vineyards, past the plains on top of the mountain, the lines become shapes and the larger sense begins to appear.

We do not possess that which passes through our hands. Whether it is grapes or coins, hours in the day, or the skills God gave us- all these things belong to the owner of creation. We live on his land but for a little while and while we are here we have a responsibility to care for that with which we have been entrusted. God is not looking for sour grapes or the leftover of our lives. We are not to abuse his servants and we are to honor his son.

Let us draw back and see the bigger picture. Everything belongs to God. God is hoping that we will see the abundant harvest already evidenced by the lines of grace running across the landscape of our lives.

As we move into our stewardship campaign this fall let us rise up past the structures in our vineyard, past the lines on the plains of whatever mountaintop experiences we may have had. Let us rise towards the heavens and take a larger, longer view. We are not just being asked to give our money so the church can pay its bills. This is only one line in the picture. The ways in which we use our time and our talent trace other lines across our common ground. But that's still not the whole picture. As our Senior Warden Annette Fries has said: "it is not just about giving, it is a way of living." We are being asked to supply the needs of the saints in thanksgiving to God because that stance I life in is a way of acknowledging our appropriate relationship to God. The owner of the vineyard deserves the first fruits of our lives, not the leftovers. In biblical times first fruits meant 10 per cent off the top.

We are not the owners of the vineyard in which we labor. We are the tenants of the king of creation. We did not will ourselves into being and we could not throw God out of creation even by killing his son. God decides whether we live or die: whether the vineyard goes on or the walls come down. The good news is that we are not regarded as slaves but are invited to become as beloved sons and daughters.

If we look down from the heights of heaven can we see the watchtowers and the wine vats in our lives God has put into our lives? God has been preparing a place from before we were born so that you and I might have good soil in which to be faithful and fruitful. Can we see the rocks that have been moved from our fields so that we might live, grow and flourish? The size and the shape of some of these obstacles vary. But the stone that was rolled away from the tomb on Easter freed us all. That which was crushed rose again and the wine in the chalice we share is life. Bread which is broken weekly gives us the strength to move toward wholeness- to rise from our knees to our feet, then sends us out to serve.

If we are going to live in full reality we need to see the whole picture, the shapes created by the lines. God is the owner of the vineyard, the king of creation. Without this awareness we will live in the intersection of random lines. Without the larger understanding we will toil in ignorance of our true relationships and we will miss the opportunity to savor the grace that has been showered upon us. Let us commit to growing in our awareness of the big picture and encourage one another to respond in ways that lead to deeper understanding and relationship.

In the weeks ahead it is the hope of your stewardship committee that we will all take the time to trace the contours of our lives and look for the meaning in the lines and shapes we discover. Please listen to the witness of others. Please take the time to use the materials that will be supplied in the bulletins over the next few weeks. If we gaze down from the right vantage point we will see the patterns of angels and archangels and all the company of heaven stretching from the plains on the mountain to the structure in the vineyard, from the day of our birth to the hour of our death. In the light of that vision let us dream about what could happen if we truly offer our life and our labor to the Lord of the harvest, the owner of the vineyard, and the Father of us all. AMEN.