A sermon on Exodus 20; Psalm 19; & Matthew 21:33-46 by Nathan Nettleton, 4 October 2026
A video recording of the whole liturgy, including this sermon, is available here.
At the conference I attended this past week, Aboriginal theologians Garry Deverell and Aunty Di Langham pointed to the psalm we sang tonight as the Bible itself calling us to also read Country as sacred text. Psalm 19, which goes on to speak of God’s perfect law and clear commands, begins by saying “the skies tell the glory of God, tell the genius of God’s work … without a word, without a sound, without a voice being heard, yet their message fills the world.”
Garry asked us to recall what sacred texts Jesus mostly drew on in his preaching. Occasionally they were Biblical texts, but most of Jesus’s sermons were grounded in observations of Country: “Consider the lilies …” “Consider the birds …” “Learn from the fig tree …”
But when we read Country now, it speaks of the devastating consequences of 230 years of abuse and exploitation. The land is horribly wounded. The rejected stone turned out to be the rock holding everything together and now, without it, everything is on the verge of collapse. Our prayers of confession tonight were introduced with words from the prophet Isaiah: “The whole world grows weak. The earth is left cursed, and its people are paying for what they have done.” (Isaiah 24:4-6)
The same prophet also told a landcare story that lay behind the parable we heard from Jesus tonight. Isaiah (5:1-7) depicted the people of Israel and Judah as a vineyard that was failing to produce good fruit.
We sometimes see Jesus reworking such stories for different contexts, and in tonight’s version, perhaps aware that the religious powerbrokers to whom he was speaking often used Isaiah’s story to castigate the people for their unfaithfulness, Jesus turns it back on them. Now it is not the vineyard itself that has failed, but the tenant-farmers who had been entrusted with the tending of the vines. Instead of nourishing a good harvest, they have become greedy and violent. They have rejected what turned out to be most important.
Perhaps for us, it is not Isaiah’s version or Jesus’s version, but both. Those who came and occupied this land by force rejected the cornerstone of First Nations care for Country, and now the climate is changing and the harvests are failing. We are not producing the fruit God trusted us to nurture.
The distinction between the culpability of powerful leaders and the culpability of ordinary people is still valid, but on the global stage, Australia is a wealthy and powerful nation. You could be in the bottom half here and probably still be in the top 20% globally. We emit more greenhouse gases per person than most other countries and we are one of the largest exporters of coal and gas which are sent off to produce emissions elsewhere. None of us have clean hands. In Jesus’s story, we are not bystanders, but tenants. Most of us, minor tenants perhaps, but tenants whose greed contributes to the destruction nevertheless. Turning back to our psalm, it asks “who can detect their errors? Clear me from hidden faults” (Psalm 19:12–13). Hidden faults – that’s a good description of the ways we are entangled in sin, in complicity with systems of death and destruction.
We are all in that at different points though. And when I use the story this way to speak of the growing environmental catastrophe, some of the logic breaks down. When Jesus ends the story by asking the religious leaders what they think the owner will do, their answer is that the corrupt tenant-farmers will be made to pay, but in our present context, it is Country itself that is paying the price of the sinful exploitation, Country and the most powerless of its inhabitants, including the most powerless humans. One of the many injustices is that those who have most driven the destruction have profited in ways that enable them to purchase some measure of protection. Some even plot an escape in spaceships.
For the majority without such means of escape, the words from the second of the ten commandments sound all too true, words that the lectionary cut out tonight: our children will pay the price of our sin, to the third and the fourth generation. Part of that First Nations wisdom we rejected was making sure that our every action was informed by responsibility and care for at least seven generations to come. [This principle was invoked by an Australian Aboriginal speaker at the conference I was attending, but is more commonly attributed to the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) of North America.]
So what are we to do now? As we turn to that question, let’s first note the next words from that second commandment, again omitted by the lectionary. The cost is borne to the third and fourth generation, “but God shows steadfast love to the thousandth generation.” I don’t mean to get literal about the maths, but God’s love and mercy will outlast the damage we do, two hundred and fifty times over.
With that in mind, let’s look a bit more at the Ten Commandments, because they are surprisingly relevant to this discussion, not just in terms of their specific content, but even just in their basic concept. In times of catastrophic change and uncertainty, we always tend to look for a set of rules that will enable us to turn things around. Politicians, unable to tackle the causes of unrest, promise hardline law and order campaigns instead.
But such an approach to the commandments is a misreading of both the concept and the context of the Ten we heard tonight. They were never a reform program for the oppressive Egyptian empire. They were given to a people who were already in the wilderness, with a fallen empire behind them and who knows what in front of them. Which starts to sound more like where we are finding ourselves.
The empire we have been living in is beginning to collapse around us. I’ve been talking mostly about ecological collapse, but we haven’t been able to turn that around because our civilisation is beginning to collapse under the weight of its own complexity, tripping over the very stone we rejected. And as we increasingly find ourselves in our own Exodus wilderness, don’t make the mistake of thinking it was pure righteous Israel escaping evil Egypt. The text itself (Exodus 12:38) tells us that as the Israelites set out, “a mixed crowd also went with them.” We too find ourselves in a mixed crowd of refugees from an empire that is collapsing.
Many of us are struggling to let go of the optimistic belief that we can still find a way to turn back climate change and stabilise the global systems. But we have already passed several of the milestones the scientists said we’d have to avoid, and the global cooperation that would be needed is at its lowest ebb in decades.
In her book about social collapse, “I eat the stars”, Sarah Wilson talks about an unexpected feeling of relief that many people feel when they give up clinging to the hope that the collapse is still reversible. They still grow things and tend things and recycle things, but they find themselves able to do so with greater freedom when relieved of the crushing burden of thinking that if they just try even harder there might still be hope.
That sense of relief doesn’t negate the real grief of facing collapse. Many of you have experienced how your grief over the death of a loved one can hold hands with a sense of relief that your own exhausting efforts to keep them alive and cared for are over. Perhaps the Apostle Paul was saying something similar when we heard him say tonight that he was somehow freer to live right when he let go of the law-keeping that had structured his world (Philippians 3:4b-14).
We still reach for some guidance, for a code to live by, but it is held quite differently when we realise that what we need is a code for faithfully navigating our journey into the wilderness, into the unknown, rather than a set of prescriptions for stabilising the empire. The commandment about keeping Sabbath is a clear call to quit the striving that is driven by the illusion that everything depends on us.
Of course, the Sabbath commandment was probably the one that sounded most like liberation to a people who had been slaves, driven 24/7 to keep the grinding industrial wheels of empire turning. And yet, how quickly we forget. When the uncertainties of what lies ahead terrify us, we can soon slide into coveting the certainties of the past, however oppressive they were.
The crowd in the wilderness wept and cried out, “Remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic” (Numbers 11:5). “For nothing”? It cost nothing because they were slaves. Enough food to keep them alive and productive was their only wage. The memory they are coveting is a false memory. But it is easy to slide into that when the path ahead is terrifyingly unknown.
The tenth commandment seems to speak to this. The other nine are things to do or don’t do, but the tenth one is about desire – don’t covet what others have, or even what you imagine they have. It was coveting the inheritance that drove the tenants in Jesus’s parable to turn to violence and theft. Perhaps if we were able to free ourselves of coveting, many of the other commandments would be quite unnecessary.
But as the empire collapses, and we find ourselves in the wilderness with no real idea of what lies ahead, coveting anything that seems certain and dependable is a constant temptation. But coveting keeps us tied to the past. We look back through rose coloured glasses on our life of slavery in the empire, and see only the food that “cost us nothing”, not remembering that it cost us everything.
I totally recognise myself in this. As I progressively adjust to the realisation that the world order I grew up in is collapsing, I find myself flopping back and forth between feelings of liberation and feelings of grief-tinged nostalgia that desperately wants to hold onto that world as though it was a good thing.
It wasn’t. It had good things, for sure. Lots of them. It gave us food and medicine, homes and longer lives. It gave us the technology that lets us gather like this tonight. But the world order we grew up in was also what was killing the planet and crippling its inhabitants, giving out those gifts to some, and depriving others of everything. Our Australian prosperity was built on violent dispossession and burning coal. Grieving that world is like grieving the death of an abusive parent – a painful tangle of love, loss, relief, and tears for what never was but was always yearned for.
As our world collapses, First Nations peoples have seen it before. Uncle Den often reminds us that when we abuse the earth, what goes around comes around. The world as we’ve known it was built on the collapse and destruction of their world. For more than 230 years they’ve been living through what is only now coming around for the rest of us, and they have continued to honour the rejected cornerstone that we have stumbled over. As one of our prayers coming up shortly says, we would do well to learn from their endurance what it means to hold hope in the face of a slow and grinding grief.
So how are we to live in this wilderness as we journey into this unknown future? The ten commandments, originally given in just such a wilderness place, are probably as relevant now as they were then. But I suspect that it has become difficult for us to hear them that way. They have been so often coopted by the empire and made to sound like just another law and order campaign that it is now very difficult to hear them with their original intent. We probably need to hear their essential truths packaged in other ways.
I never thought of it this way before, but I’m realising that that’s kind of what our church covenant is doing. Like the ten commandments, it is calling us to be a particular kind of people who are shaped by a particular set of values, values that can hold us and guide us as we journey on together towards whatever lies ahead. It even specifically says that we are called to non-conformity with the ways of the world we have known, with the ways of empire.
We will close our worship by praying a version of the covenant tonight, as we do through much of the year. We will pray for the strength to resist all greed, violence and desecration. We will pray that our eating and drinking might be filled with generosity and bring joy to the lonely and hungry, of whom there will doubtless be growing numbers as empire collapses.
These are not prayers that somehow imagine that if we just strive hard enough to do these things, we can prop up the empire or save the glaciers and the Barrier Reef. What the prayers might do is help us learn to disentangle our well-placed grief for the glaciers from our ill-placed grief for the empire.
As we continue, week by week, to pray that we might be attuned to the voice of despair but set dancing to the song of hope, we are learning to face the grief and pain without being paralysed by it and duped into coveting the empire’s “free food” that actually cost the earth.
The song of hope. We would do well to remember what Václav Havel said about hope. “Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” Our covenant prayer is calling us to a life that makes sense. It is not making promises that things will turn out comfortably for us.
How could it? The one we have followed into the wilderness is Jesus himself, the one who bears the wounds of a despised and abused earth, as our liturgy says. Here we encounter the murdered son from the end of the parable, who somehow is made one with the abused vineyard itself. Here we encounter the one who has suffered the worst that the empire can do, and who beckons us with nail-scarred hands to follow him now – to follow him into a life that makes sense. Here we encounter the one who reveals to us the God who shows steadfast love to the thousandth generation, and so we set out, trusting that God to feed us with the first fruits of resurrection and nourish us for the journey.