Too long, O LORD, too long! Too long have we covered our ears and hidden our eyes and turned our backs on the world’s hunger for a harvest rich with love & universal kinship. Too long have we preferred the slim pickings of “I got mine,” the weeds and walls built against difference, the bitter taste of wars waged in the false name of security. Too long have we fed big mouths that make a spectacle of themselves for profit. Too long have we starved and silenced mouths that would speak truth or disrupt our practiced piety of “keep your head down.” Too long have we willfully believed in “isolated incidents” and shunned those who would make us see otherwise. Too long, O LORD, and now the vultures no longer bother to hide their delight in death as they stroll through marbled halls and circle over the lines we have imagined in the sand. Too long, and now our pretense of shock belies our habitual complicity and our easy tears betray our chosen ignorance. Too long, and those grotesque featherless heads begin to sound reasonable as they proclaim that death’s entrails are good for nutrition, that toxic water will cleanse the body, that the banquet table of greed has room enough for all. Too long, and our lips have forgotten how delightfully sweet your harvest can be when we are kind, how abundantly fruitful your vineyards become when we share without fear, when we plant against evil, when we shovel away all the rot that has fed the vultures and till it as manure into the ground where it belongs for the sake of the harvest. But it has been too long, O LORD, too long, and now the vineyard must be razed before new life can grow. My God, let new life grow.

on Luke 13:8-9