After four years and some at STM [the School of Theology and Ministry], I've learned a couple of things about this place; and one of them is that you can never go too far wrong by talking about "context." So let me open with that.

The context from which I am speaking to you today is that of a liberal theologian, and I am presuming that I am talking to a room of — mostly — other liberal theologians and ministers. If that doesn't describe you, I'm sorry to leave you out; perhaps you can consider this an opportunity to eavesdrop on what we liberals worry about amongst ourselves.

For the rest of us, then, or maybe just the rest of me if I'm wrong in my presumption about whom I'm speaking to, we like to think that from our particular viewpoint there are certain aspects of the truth that stand out more clearly from than they do from some of those, shall we say, other viewpoints. We like to think we have a better view of, for instance, the universality of God's love, or the radical inclusiveness with which God embraces God's creation.

Well, as I said, I am a liberal theologian, so I'm inclined to agree with that. But if you're getting the sense that there's a "But—" coming, and I'm setting us up for a fall, you're right. So let me get to it.

In the gospel that was read for today, Jesus is speaking to a crowd that includes several of the chief priests and elders of the Temple. After some preliminary verbal sparring, Jesus tells them an allegory about a man who owns a vineyard, and rents it to some tenants before going on a long journey. When he sends his servants to collect the portion of the harvest that is legally his, the tenants beat them; when he sends his son, the tenants murder him. What, asks Jesus, will the landowner do now? The crowd answers: of course, he will put the wicked tenants to death and give the vineyard to others.

Let's be clear here: in its setting in Matthew's gospel, this passage is not hard to understand. Jesus is saying to the chief priests and elders: you are the wicked tenants, and because you have been faithless and because of your crimes, God is going to kill you and give the Kingdom of Heaven to someone else. Certainly the chief priests themselves had no difficulty reaching this conclusion; because a few verses on from where the lectionary reading ends, they're already planning how they're going to have him executed.

But it is at this point that every instinct of liberal exegesis rises up and goes, "Eugggh." This is not the God we think we know, this God who punishes murder with more murder, this God who — as in the Isaiah reading [Isaiah 5:1-7] — tears down the walls of the vineyard and gives it over to brambles and weeds simply because it gave him the wrong grapes. This is terrible! So what can we make of this passage?

Fortunately, we have some trusty maneuvers we can turn to in order to save matters. We can try the classic, "Did Jesus really say...?"; so, for instance, we can speculate that the evangelist or one of his sources invented this story to dramatize Jesus' conflict with the Temple authorities and so Jesus himself never actually said any of this and we don't have to worry about it. Alternatively we can look for a spin or a way of looking at the story that makes it more palatable; so in this case we might we say that Jesus doesn't mean the vineyard to be Israel and the wicked tenants to be the priests and elders, rather the vineyard is ourselves, and the wicked tenants are our own evil desires, but in the end God will come and cast out those evil desires and give the vineyard — that is, ourselves — over to our better natures. That sounds much more pleasant. Or, if all else fails, we can pull the rhetorical equivalent of shouting, "Look! Over there!" and quickly moving on to something else.

In short, our instinct pushes us to tame the text. To neuter it. To make it safe. We like things that are safe.

So let's talk about "safety" for a moment. A couple of years ago, I got curious so I went through my house looking to see how many things I could find that said CAUTION or WARNING or DANGER on them. I don't remember the exact count any more, but it ended up an impressive list, and I wasn't even looking that hard. Apparently my home is a maze of lethal hazards, assuming that I'm boneheaded enough to lick an electrical socket or jam a fork in the microwave. Even toothpicks sometimes come with warning labels these days, just in case you were idly wondering whether it was a good idea to poke a small pointy stick into your eye.

OK, so sometimes the warnings get out of hand, but when you get down to it, they're there to point out to us that despite all our efforts to surround ourselves with safety, the world remains a dangerous place. Fire can burn you. Electricity can shock you. Pointed sticks can stab you.

Passages like this one in Matthew's gospel are the Bible's way of saying, "WARNING: Serious injury or death may occur." Passages like this one remind us that this thing we do, where we get up in the pulpit and invoke God's name, or get down on our knees and invoke God's name, or recite our baptismal covenant and invoke God's name, or sit down with a wounded person and invoke God's name — that this thing we do is dangerous, and that if we do it wrong then someone can get hurt.

Maybe that thought makes you uncomfortable. I hope it does, because I can tell you that it scares the crap out of me.

But — and here's the main point I'm getting at — that danger is a good thing, because it means that what we're touching is something real. Maybe we'd like a God who was nothing but love and kittens, all comfort and no wrath — I know I would — but that wouldn't be God, it would be a security blanket.

Think about it. If it weren't fire that we were playing with, we'd have nothing to keep us warm in the cold night. If it weren't lightning that we had pulled from the sky and chained in copper wire, we wouldn't have our electric lights and computers and pacemakers. And if the name that we invoked were not the name that tore open space and time to make the universe and that hung a ball of thermonuclear fire in the sky just so we could see where to put our feet, then it would not be a name with any power or wisdom to help us.

So where does that leave us? Maybe at a place where we remember that just as our own viewpoint gives is a better view of some truths, it also hides other truths from us that some of those other viewpoints see more clearly than we do. Yes, we know that God is not a wrathful deity casting people into a lake of fire, the way that some churches have liked to portray; and I'm still quite certain that we're right to combat that image of God. But the churches that preach that fire-and-brimstone message also have a sense of the majesty of God, the awe of God, the sheer, wild, exhilarating terror of being in the presence of something utterly greater than oneself, and this sense is something that I think we over here on the liberal side could stand to remember now and again.

God is not safe. God is not tame. Invoking that name will always bring with it a certain peril, and that is as it should be when we invite the One who made the stars and the heavens to come into our little lives. It was not a security-blanket God of whom the psalmist wrote:

The voice of the Lord is powerful; the voice of the Lord is full of majesty.
The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars; the Lord breaks the cedars of Lebanon.
He makes Lebanon skip like a calf, and Sirion like a young wild ox.
The voice of the Lord flashes forth flames of fire.
The voice of the Lord shakes the wilderness; the Lord shakes the wilderness of Kadesh.
The voice of the Lord causes the oaks to whirl, and strips the forest bare; and in his temple all say, "Glory!"
[Psalm 29:4-9]

Remember that scripture says also that one of the gifts of the Spirit is fear of the Lord [Isaiah 11:2]. The wonder and the terror are a package deal; if you get rid of one, you lose the other.

And so, perhaps, at the end of the day when we put on our liberal-exegesis hats and sit down to read Scripture, and we come across those passages that stress us — perhaps we should be just a little less quick on the draw to find ways to "redeem" the text. Maybe before we look for that spin, or that twist, that will transform the text into a story about a God of love, we should pause just for a moment and ask what some of those other viewpoints are seeing in this passage that our own viewpoint blinds us to.

I'm not saying we should stop being critical readers of scripture, but I am saying that sometimes we are too hasty to interpret away the parts we don't like. And when we do, we not only run the risk of ignoring the warning labels and sticking our spiritual forks into toasters, but we are in danger of impoverishing ourselves of some of the great gifts of scripture... like that God whose voice shatters the cedars and makes the very land to dance, and in his temple all say, "Glory!"