What Is Growing Because I Was Here?

The Fruit of the Vineyard

…the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom.

— Matthew 21

I almost didn't go to a high school football game Friday night. It hadn't been much on my mind during the week, and even that day I went back and forth about attending. But it was Homecoming, so eventually I went. At halftime I wandered toward the band, then continued toward the other end of the stands. In the middle of all those people coming and going, a man approached me and asked, “Are you Gordon Darr?” It was an old friend I hadn't seen since about 1977. He took me over to another old friend, Bill, whom I had known since sixth grade. My family had just moved to town, and Bill was one of the first kids who befriended me. He remembered it, too. In fact, he had kept a journal. Somewhere in it, written by a sixth-grade boy in 1971, are the words: “Met my new friend Gordon today.”

I've been thinking lately about another rather unconventional goal. I would like eventually to meet all of my third cousins and closer. I've done considerable family-history work, but a family tree can easily become a collection of names, dates and relationships. I want those names to become people. I want our family-history project to produce new relationships, recover stories and perhaps reconnect branches of a family that have grown apart. Friday night reminded me why. A relationship begun casually more than fifty years ago was still alive. We didn't merely remember an old chapter. We may have begun its next one.

And then I came to Jesus' parable of the vineyard. We've been surrounded by vineyards in this week's readings. Isaiah described the vineyard from which God expected justice and righteousness. The Psalms asked God to “tend this vine.” Now Jesus tells about a vineyard entrusted to tenants—and eventually says that the kingdom will be given to people who produce its fruits. That's the word that catches me today: produce. The vineyard isn't merely something to possess. Something is supposed to grow there.

That turns the parable back toward me. I have been entrusted with things: family, friendships, memories, music, faith, opportunities, a hometown, and people whose paths have crossed mine. Stewardship cannot mean merely preserving all of it, much less taking pride in possessing it. What am I producing from what I have been given? Can family history produce relationships? Can an old friendship produce a new chapter? Can music produce community? Can faith produce mercy? Can the life I've been given produce something useful to somebody besides me?

This week began with God's expectation of justice and righteousness and has somehow led us back to the vineyard again. Maybe that's the question that has been waiting there all along. Not simply: Do I belong in the vineyard? Not: How much of it belongs to me? Not even: How carefully have I preserved it? Jesus' question is harder and more hopeful than that: Where is the fruit?

Perhaps I saw a little of it Friday night, standing in the bleachers with boys I first knew more than half a century ago. Somewhere, a child once wrote, “Met my new friend Gordon today.” Neither of us could possibly have known what might grow from that sentence. Maybe that's part of life in God's vineyard. We plant, tend, meet, remember, reconnect and sometimes discover years later that something was growing all along. So today I am left with a question I want to carry with me: What is growing because I was here?

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