Living in the Spirit
August 8, 2016

Scripture Reading: Isaiah 5:1-7

Let me sing for my beloved
   my love-song concerning his vineyard:
My beloved had a vineyard
   on a very fertile hill.
He dug it and cleared it of stones,
   and planted it with choice vines;
he built a watch-tower in the midst of it,
   and hewed out a wine vat in it;
he expected it to yield grapes,
   but it yielded wild grapes.  

And now, inhabitants of Jerusalem
   and people of Judah,
judge between me
   and my vineyard.
What more was there to do for my vineyard
   that I have not done in it?
When I expected it to yield grapes,
   why did it yield wild grapes? –Isaiah 5:1-4

An old saying, “You never know a good thing until it is gone” was true for Judah and I fear true for us today. Do we comprehend what it means to live in covenant with God? We who choose to recognize God as our sovereign live in a special relationship of trust and responsibility. This covenant relationship has a long and tested history with God from Noah to Abraham to Christ. We flirt at its edges like dipping our toes into a pool of water trying to determine if it is too hot or too cold for us to immerse ourselves. We seem to be willing to swim when the water is warm, the sea is still, and there are no sharks in the water not recognizing when it is our pollution of greed tainting the pool and attracting sharks.

Another old saying describes us: “I want to have my cake and eat it too.” It describes Isaiah’s Judah also. Why do we never learn from our mistakes? In Oklahoma, following the oil bust of the 1980’s we worked hard to diversify our economy and established a solid tax base for necessary services to meet the common good. Even in the depths of that recession we were able to give the oil companies a break on taxes just to help them survive the downturn. In recent years we eroded that tax base with reckless cuts to line our own pockets and now in another cycle of oil and gas decline, we cannot appropriately fund the most basic services like education much less offer any help to an industry in trouble. We need to fill our public offices with many Josephs* who planned for the future and did not just live for today.

Prayer: God, help us to examine ourselves and recognize when our desires are shallow and short term. Guide us in be responsible citizens for today and tomorrow. Amen.

*See story of Joseph storing grain for Egypt in Genesis 41

All scriptures are quoted from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicized 
Edition, copyright 1989, 1995, Division of Christian Education of the National Council 
of Churches of Christ in the United States of American. Used by permission. All rights 
reserved.