The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost – August 16, 2025

Let me sing for my beloved, says Isaiah. A love song—for a vineyard. But this is no gentle ballad. It’s a lament. The vineyard, tenderly planted and carefully cultivated, yields only wild grapes. The soil was rich, the hedge secure, the watchtower ready. But the fruit? Sour. Unfit. And so the song turns: the hedge will be torn down, the vineyard trampled. “He expected justice, but saw bloodshed; righteousness, but heard a cry.”

This is heartbreak in divine key. God’s grief is not distant—it’s intimate. The vineyard is Israel. The wild grapes are injustice. And the song is a mirror held up to a people who have forgotten what covenant tastes like.

Then Jesus speaks in Luke, and the tone shifts again. “I came to bring fire to the earth,” he says, “and how I wish it were already kindled!” These are not the soft words of comfort we often expect. Jesus speaks of division—father against son, mother against daughter. Not because he desires conflict, but because truth, when it lands, unsettles. It pierces. It demands response.

Together, these texts ask us: What kind of fruit are we bearing? What kind of fire are we kindling?

Isaiah reminds us that proximity to sacred things—temple, ritual, tradition—does not guarantee holy living. Jesus reminds us that the gospel is not neutral. It provokes. It exposes. It calls us to choose.

And maybe that’s the grace in the fire. It burns away pretense. It clears the vineyard for new planting. It forces us to ask: Are we cultivating justice, or just comfort? Are we bearing fruit that nourishes the world, or simply preserving the vine for our own shade?

This week, may we walk the vineyard with honest eyes. May we welcome the fire—not to destroy, but to refine. And may we remember that God’s love song still plays, even when it aches. Because the gardener has not given up. The fire is not the end—it’s the beginning of something true.