Text: Ezekiel 18 1-32 (Matthew 21:28-32)                                              W 19^th Sunday after Pentecost

Sour Grapes

            In the name of him who for our sakes humbled himself and became obedient to death—even death on a cross, dear friends in Christ:  If I were to say that something was “sour grapes”, I expect most of you would understand what I meant by it.  It’s an expression that comes from a well-known Aesop’s fable about a fox who discovers a tempting cluster of juicy grapes hanging in an arbor high over his head. He thinks how wonderfully sweet and delicious they would be and so, with his mouth watering in anticipation, he makes several attempts to reach them, lunging for them with all his strength—but to no avail.  He can’t jump high enough.  The grapes remain always just out of reach.  Finally he gives up the quest consoling himself by saying, “They were probably sour anyway”.  That’s the story the way I heard it anyway.  And with this in mind we apply the expression “sour grapes” to someone who bad-mouths a goal or level of success that they had aspired to attain but for one reason or another found too difficult to reach.  So, the high school girl who doesn’t make the cut for the cheerleading squad, and then bitterly criticizes those who did whenever she sees them perform, or the guy who didn’t get the dream job he wanted, and says, “Well, I wouldn’t have liked making six figures and living in a tropical island paradise anyway”, that’s what we mean when we say it’s just “sour grapes”.

            Well, it turns out that the ancient Hebrews also had an expression about sour grapes; but they had never heard of Aesop or his fable about a fox, so when they used the expression it meant something else entirely.  We heard the source of what they meant when they used the term in the proverb that appears in today’s Old Testament lesson.  It goes like this:  “The fathers eat sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.”  What it’s referring to is that uncomfortable feeling you get in your mouth when you eat a piece of unripe fruit.  It’s kind of dry and tingly and, well, unpleasant, and sometimes it makes your teeth and gums sensitive and ache a bit.  You especially notice it when eating something else later or brushing your teeth.  Hopefully you know what I mean.  In any case, the gist of the proverb then is that sometimes it’s the parents who sin and make mistakes, but it’s their children who have to suffer the consequences.

And there’s no denying that there’s some truth to that.  It’s easiest to see in cases when the effect is direct and the children are actually the victims of their parents’ sins.  Take parents who physically abuse or neglect their children, or parents who are alcoholic or addicted to drugs. Certainly in such cases, children suffer because of their parents’ evil deeds.  Or again, take cases in which the family is broken by the divorce of the parents (or their never having married to begin with).  When this happens, children suffer, often finding themselves caught in the crossfire between angry parents who use their children as pawns in a game of strategy to do maximum emotional damage to their former spouses. It’s so sad.  Then there are other cases that are less direct, say when a parent commits a crime and has to serve a jail sentence, or when through gambling or poor business practice they lose the family’s money, or when through their misdeeds they soil the family name and reputation.  In such instances as these we could legitimately use the term “sour grapes” in the ancient Hebrew sense that it’s the children who pay for their parents’ misdeeds.

The problem, however, is that those who were complaining about sour grapes in today’s Old Testament lesson were using the expression illegitimately.  They were Jews from the city of Jerusalem who had been taken as what you might think of as political prisoners and hostages by the Babylonians and replanted in makeshift refugee camps in the heart of their conquerors’ country.  Understand that at this time in history, the Babylonians had pretty much conquered all the nations in the known world, including the nation of Judah.  The conquered nations were forced to pay heavy annual taxes and tribute to the Babylonian emperor.  That was the whole purpose of building an empire, to make your neighbors pay you for the privilege of having been conquered by you.  It’s a pretty sweet deal if you’re on top, though today we call it extortion.  In any case, it sometimes happened that after paying tribute for several years, a subject nation would start thinking that maybe their conquerors were getting fat and lazy and, well, if we didn’t pay like we’re supposed to, they just might let it pass – too weak to do anything about it. Besides, we could probably whip them this time around if they came back with their army and tried to make us pay. That’s what the nation of Judah had thought; but it turned out that the Babylonians hadn’t become as fat and lazy as they’d gambled.

They came back in force – and they were none too happy about having been so inconvenienced.  But the Babylonians were reasonable business people – in a Marlon Brando Godfather sort of way, that is.  Though they had the power, it didn’t make sense to wipe out subject nations when they rebelled and refused to pay, because dead people can’t go on paying.  So instead, when Judah rebelled and was conquered again, they sort of hamstrung the nation to encourage them to be more cooperative and not make the same mistake again.  The Babylonians took their nobles and military leaders, their scholars, their skilled laborers, the movers and shakers in Jewish society – some eleven thousand of them – and they replanted them close to their capital city in present day Iraq where they could keep a close eye on them and where they couldn’t stir up any more trouble among their countrymen by giving them silly ideas of trying again to throw off the cursed yoke of Babylon.

Now, for the Jews who had been thus taken away and replanted, life was the pits.  They lost pretty much everything they owned, all their possessions and nice homes, and they had to start all over again in the relatively poor land that was assigned to them.  You don’t give hostage-refugees prime real estate.  So whereas they had been well-to-do doctors and lawyers and scribes and skilled craftsmen and so on, now they lived in hastily erected mud huts and scratched out their livings with their bare hands in the soil just to get enough to eat, and rarely did they manage to do that.  And please understand that I’m not knocking farming here.  It’s a good and honorable profession; but even those of you who farm would say life was pretty tough if you had to do it with your hands in bad soil with no animals to pull your plow and no tools more sophisticated than a sharp stick to work with.  No, these people were really suffering.  And they were suffering spiritually as well.  They had been Jews living in Jerusalem:  God’s city on earth, the place of his abiding presence and the center of all Jewish religious life.  It’s hard for us to imagine because of the way we think about such things; but for these people, to be removed from Jerusalem was to be just about totally cut off from the worship of the Lord.  They felt as if God had rejected them, and that really made their hearts ache.

Ah, but they blamed their present situation and their suffering on the sins of their fathers.  You see, the prophets of God had long been warning that a tragedy just like this was going to befall the people of Judah if they didn’t turn around and give up their many sins.  Specifically, the Lord cited their mixing of religions and participation in idol worship, their half-hearted devotion to him, and their taking advantage and trampling of the poor and needy as the offenses that were making him angry.  And it happened that in the generation before this one that was taken away to Babylon, there was a particularly bad king of Judah named Manasseh who had led his all-too-willing people into a literal orgy of the aforementioned sins.  Manasseh had a long reign, and by the time he died the state of national morals was about as messed up as it could be.  Fortunately his grandson, Josiah, who had the next relatively long reign, was a good and faithful king.  In his days a lot of that mess was cleaned up – at least outwardly; maybe not so much in the hearts of the people – but things looked better on the surface.  And it wasn’t long after Josiah died that Judah rebelled against Babylon and the hostages were taken away.  So, thinking about what had happened, the captives figured that the Lord was just real slow on the draw.  It was the rotten generations of their parents and grandparents that the Lord was angry with, but by the time he got around to pulling the trigger, they were the ones standing in the line of fire.  Hence, they were saying sour grapes in the Hebrew sense:  “We are suffering for the sins of our fathers.”  And implied in the expression is the sentiment, “And it’s just not right. The Lord is dealing with us unjustly. We’re the good guys – it’s our parents who were rotten.”

            In this morning’s Old Testament lesson we hear the Lord responding to this charge that he’s unjust through his spokesman, the prophet Ezekiel.  What he says to his accusers is this:  “You’ve been saying, ‘It’s sour grapes’, but you’ve got it all wrong.  I deal with each person individually, and each person is individually responsible for his own sin.  I don’t punish people for the sins of others.  But be sure of this:  the soul that sins will die.  The person who sins will certainly die—unless he or she individually repents.”  You see, by blaming their parents, the captives were avoiding having to look within their own hearts and seeing their own sins.  What the Lord asked them to do was to take a closer look within themselves and repent.

            These are words of the Lord we should all take to heart and apply to ourselves each and every day because each and every day we sin and we sin much.  The problem we have – or at least part of it – is that like the captives we tend to do this in a very shallow and superficial sort of way.  I mean, what do you think about in that quiet time before our worship begins, or in that awkward silence in the divine service when we’re to pause for self-examination prior to the confession of sins, or while you’re kneeling here at the communion rail about to receive the Lord’s body and blood, or when you begin your own morning or evening prayers?  Do you grapple with your soul and the sins inside … do you review your failures to live as God requires and reflect upon the evil attitudes and desires of your heart … and really stir things up and move the furniture so you can get the dirt in the corners?  Or do you find yourself not really thinking about your sin at all and wondering how long this is going to take?  If you do think about your sins, do you have trouble finding any you think bad enough to mention even in your mind, or is it always the same one or two sins you come up with all the time?  Do you go easy on yourself by dismissing some of your sins with excuses and alibis?  Do you find yourself thinking about the sins of other people that you feel they should be repenting of, or do you find yourself comparing your behavior with others and consoling yourself with the thought, “At least I’m not as bad as them”?  “Sour grapes“ was the captives’ smokescreen, the fig leaf, the dodge they used to escape the sort of introspection and soul searching the Lord wanted them to do.  And what I want you to see this morning is that we have whole clusters of such sour grapes that we use to avoid the same thing.

            That having been said – and hopefully taken to heart – there are a few other quick applications of this text I want to mention. The first has to do with a growing movement in some Christian circles that I need to warn you about.  The leaders of this movement are teaching that there is such a thing as a “generational curse”.  The idea is that God does indeed punish people for the sins of a single ancestor, sometimes as far back as ten generations.  The most popular of the advocates of this aberrant doctrine is a fellow named Bob Larson, but there are others, and this Larson has lots of disciples and many imitators.  Larson claims that if you’re having trouble in your life, if you find yourself sinning all the time, it could be because your great-great-great grandfather once committed some act of particularly horrendous blasphemy, and that somehow that sin opened your ancestor to a demon, an evil spirit, that has been passed down the family line ever since.  To overcome your sin problems, you don’t need repentance; you need an exorcism.  Actually, his teaching is a lot more complicated than that; but trust me, you’ve heard enough. If you come across it, I recommend that you mark and avoid it.

            The second application has to do with what might be called the blame game.  I don’t know if it’s still the case, but for a while afternoon television talk shows were infamous for featuring people whose lives were total wrecks, usually people who were wrapped up in all kinds of bizarre behaviors and weird appetites. And audiences were drawn to watch by sheer morbid curiosity what amounted to carnival freak shows – only in a moral or behavioral sense.  Anyway, the common refrain of the featured weirdos and wackos was, “I turned out this way because of the way I was raised.  My parents messed me up.”  It’s a convenient way to pass the buck, but my friends, that’s pure poppycock.  I don’t care how badly you were raised; if you know what you’re doing is bizarre or wrong, then you can stop doing it. You can’t blame it on someone else. But that’s the temptation:  to justify bad behavior by environmental circumstances such as the way we were raised, or peer pressure, or the bad experiences we had.  And we are all susceptible to this temptation – even if our bad behavior is not spectacular enough to get us on the Oprah or Sally Jesse Raphael show.  The Lord holds us individually responsible for what we do.  The excuse that “somebody else made me do it” just doesn’t wash.

            The third way I want to apply this text is by far the most important, and that is to highlight the danger of being “mostly righteous”. What stood in the way of the captive Jews seeing their own sins was the perception that someone else was even more sinful than they were.  That’s what made them think their situation was unjust – that the Lord was shooting at the wrong targets.  The same is true of the people to whom Jesus is talking in today’s Gospel lesson.  He told the good, church going, religious folks that many of the obvious public sinners like the tax collectors and prostitutes were entering the kingdom of God ahead of them.  Why?  Because when these sinners heard the call to repent, they did; but the others, the ones to whom Jesus is speaking, didn’t think they had much to repent of – so they didn’t.  The point is that we are all called by God to repent as individuals.  We are to look at ourselves in the pure and holy mirror of God’s perfect law and never to compare ourselves to those around us. It’s easy to think we are better than some if we look around and see that comparatively we are doing pretty well; but in the mirror of God’s law we all look the same:  filthy, naked, sinners who are rotten to the core.  And seeing what we are and what have done, without any evasion, excuse, or attempt to justify ourselves we ought to be stricken with remorse and repent with contrite tears.

The Lord was angry with his people for accusing him of being unjust with them by their sour grapes complaint that they were being punished for their parents’ sin.  And I suspect that what made their complaint so grievous to him was that exactly the opposite is true.  The Lord does not make any person pay for the sins of another; instead, through his Son Jesus Christ, he paid for he sins of all people.  That’s why he calls us to repent and to examine ourselves with ever increasing zeal:  so that digging deep into our hearts and seeing the enormity of our sins we will increasingly appreciate and hold fast to the forgiveness and salvation he earned for us when our Lord Jesus suffered and died in our place.  In this faith we are saved.  Without it, heaven would be for us a “sour grapes” sort of goal: far, far beyond our reach.  So today and everyday, let us take to heart the word of God that calls to us:  “Repent! Turn away from all your offenses. Rid yourselves all the sins you have committed.  And doing this, receive for yourselves the new heart and new Spirit freely given through Jesus Christ our Lord.”  In his holy name.  Amen.

Soli Deo Gloria!