Reflection: Good Tenants in the Vineyard
Once I moved out of my parents’ apartment, I became a teenage tenant. After getting married, my personal boundary extended to a three-member nuclear family: Min-Goo, myself and our first child, and we, as a family, started our immigrant journey while still being tenants. Since our wedding, Min-Goo and I changed our address 11 times in 10 years - until we moved to Winnipeg.
Our first home was on the rooftop of a four-story church building in a makeshift two-bedroom apartment. The church where Min-Goo worked was the landlord; we didn’t pay rent. But I insisted we move out because of the noise from the eight-lane highway right beside us. So, the church purchased a very old brick house in a redeveloping area as an investment, and we moved there. It was so cold in the winter; the wind from the closed window near my desk was strong enough to blow my hair around. Because of the cold, we could barely use any space except for the master bedroom and the kitchen. But I liked the house. It was the first real house I had ever lived in; my family, like most Koreans, lived in apartment complexes. It had grapevines in the front yard! In our first summer there, Korean dark purple grapes were ripe and ready to be picked. We used this amazing chance to make our own wine. At the time, I was pregnant with our first child (who would be born in the spring). We were in full of hope and excitement. Just like we learned from the Bible, we harvested the grapes, put all of them in big basins, and stomped them under our feet to get the juice out. Then we stored our precious, fragrant wine in the basement storage room where many crickets also made their home. We moved out the next winter, but ever since then, every year on Peace’s birthday, I tell my kids that he was born in the grapevine house in Korea. We moved out the next winter.
Fast forward, to when Peace was about three years old, and we lived in a student residence in an affluent and glorious neighbourhood on the UBC campus, until we had to move out because of a sudden outbreak of bedbugs. When Peace was four, we had a big move to Vancouver Island, as Min-Goo got a permanent call from a church there. I was still a student and I was in my second pregnancy. Jah-bi was born in a beautiful blue house with a large backyard in which apple trees grew and French lavender was planted on each little backyard trail. I found my first orange poppy beside the deck. Within a year, we had to move out as the landlord sold the house - a 60-year-old house, cold in the winter, but a beautiful wooden house with a real furnace. I am still thankful that Jah-bi was born in that beloved blue house. Lots of loving memories of tears and joy grew there with our family with two small children. However, every time I made a loving attachment to each home — especially to the nature each residence offered: grapes, apples, lavender, poppies, melon-coloured mosses — , as we were tenants, we had to move when conditions changed. The next rented house - which we called the white house - had a lovely small grapevine over the side door in the backyard. I loved picking up my little Jah-bi and holding him in my left arm while I picked juicy green grapes with my right. I would pick two grapes: one for me and one for Jah-bi. I could peel those grapes open with just two fingers, right from the vine. The very sweet little balls fell on our tongues. In those very lonely days of migration, I gave my full love to every small gift from the earth on my landlord’s property and praised the sweetness of God’s creation. I preserved this memory to create another birth story for my younger child, Jah-bi, to tell him: “You were born in the blue house with lavender. You loved having a fresh grape popped in your mouth with sweetness.”
I am capturing and narrating my personal tenant stories today because my remembrance of how I nurtured joy and connection to the world, especially when those early years were permeated with loneliness and the sorrow of isolation, helps me to see the tenants in today’s Gospel story, The Wicked Tenants in the Vineyard. For me, throughout my 11 years of being a tenant, I lived with the clear awareness that all the properties we leased or rented - no matter whether I enjoyed them or not - legally and personally belonged to the landlord. However, I found a breeze of hope and connection from what the earth produced in those ‘somebody else’s’ properties. I owned the joy as mine. Even though legally speaking, the grapevines, apple trees, lavender, neon-green-coloured, moss-covered rocks were just properties in which I shared no ownership, in the cycle of nature, the legal boundary of ownership and possession was graciously blurred… In spiritual terms, they belonged to me as nature and I all are siblings of the earth. Even though any legal document would call them the human landlord’s property, they were, to me, also the gifts of the earth, the creation of God, which also belonged to me and to which I belonged spiritually. I called them in love one by one. I named them using my creativity. They became my friends when I and my family were like the wandering Armenian. Even though they were not my inheritance, I willingly gave my personal and spiritual respect to them as they belonged to God ultimately, and I praised God’s generosity, beauty and abundance. The illusion that I, we, possess or own something was not a necessary condition to praise God.
While reading today’s Gospel story, the first question that occurred to me was, “What is the tenants’ motivation to kill those servants the landowner sent and even the landowner’s son?” It’s a deliberately shocking story of successful murder. What is the tenants’ motivation? Also, what is the motivation, what is the landowner actually thinking by sending their own son when multiple murders had already been committed prior to that point? The landowner sent their own son without any protection greater than that given to the servants - even though the threat of death was well-known by that point. Today’s reading tells us that what God (the landowner) has in mind is respect: “They will respect my son” (v. 37), my teaching, my own heir, my covenant, my own soul. Radical trust. However, those tenants seized the son, killed him and threw the unburied body outside the vineyard. What was the tenants’ motivation? They sought an inheritance. Greed. Possession. Acquisition of the right of ownership by force and violence. Theft by stealth.
Colonization is another name for theft by stealth. The first settlers who came to this land and those of us who became immigrants (still settlers) were covetous of the land. Those who came later declared it empty, free to take it as if it were our inheritance. The land was endless, the resources were abundant, the beautiful earth was challenging and at the same time brought wealth and power we used for our benefit. Unless we are from Indigenous ancestors, we are all immigrants and tenants. We can still ‘respect’ the covenant, the treaty, the relationship with the Creator to appreciate and use what is available, as a gift, as a tenant. However, like the wicked tenants in the vineyard, those who came later have been busy with erasing, removing, violating and nullifying the laws, the culture, the medicine, the tradition, the identity, the children, the stories and soul of the First Peoples, and therefore, committed cultural and physical genocide.
The vineyard in today’s parable was one that was planted with care, love and intention. It was planted long before the current tenants leased it - - long before they knew it could be their means to provide for life itself. Vines take time to grow and produce fruit. God’s vineyard is an intentional gift passed on to all who come to enjoy what the earth produces and shares. Vineyards do not happen overnight; they are the results of many, many years of cultivation and care. In this story, cultivation by God’s own people, care from God’s own hands. I still vividly remember the joy I embraced even as a tenant to taste the sweetness of a grape, an apple, lavender and a poppy because they connected me and my family to the gifts of the earth. They were not just property. I hope I am still a good tenant who has not forgotten all this and decided any piece of land I legally possess is mine and mine alone.
What the earth produces, offers and shares are gifts to all creation. These gifts are based on sharing, inspired by the understanding of interconnection. Everyone and everything has their own point of interconnection - the foundation of relationship with the circle of life is built by sharing in respect. On September 30th my sons went to school wearing their orange shirts, in deep respect and honour to all the survivors and to those who died in Residential schools. We (using the pronoun with acknowledging that actually we have created a community of both First peoples and Settlers at Immanuel) dispossessed people from their land; we disrespected their customs, we, like the wicked tenants, killed their children and took their inheritance. May we remember all things in our hearts this day. May we remember all the beautiful things, as well as the painful. May we remember as tenants in our life journey on the earth that possession may give us an illusion of power, but sharing allows us to learn the deeper reality that no one is alone. The earth is a gift; it is not just the storage room of God’s wine, but God’s wisdom. It lets us taste the sweetness of God’s pleasure and learn truth through the inevitable pains our lives might bring. The earth is not just material to use up for our convenience, property we leverage to assert our control and power; it is the school where we learn balance, the window which we approach to see the Creator’s heart and God’s ever-evolving consciousness. Let us sing the faithful song of the good tenants in God’s generous vineyard.
Hymn: The Prayer of Jesus (Please click HERE and watch from 38:17.)
Thank you, Golden Ears United Church, for sharing wonderful music!
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