This past Thursday, at the Thomas-Davis Lions Club meeting, we heard a presentation by the director of the Aldridge Academy. We heard a bit about what that organization does, about how they work to reconnect and, in many ways, reprogram families in crisis. The director said forthright that many of the kids who come into his program are there because they come from an environment without discipline, without rules, and as a result they find themselves either outright in trouble, with their families or the law or both, or at risk for trouble.

One of the things Sarah has been doing to pass the time these weeks is to watch these Nanny shows on TV, and it’s much the same story there. A family is in crisis, Mom and Dad can’t handle the kids anymore, so they hire one of these nannies who have worked with some of the most powerful families in the world, and they come in and put things right. Consistently, on these programs, the problem is discipline. There are no rules, and much of the work the nanny does is to teach the parents how to behave, to remind them that their job as such is to maintain order and discipline in the household. They’re never happy to discover that they’re the cause of the problems, and are often very reluctant to make the changes necessary.

One of the major reasons for these various family crises, whether we hear about them through a local business dedicated to restoring families or through reality TV programs, is there is a pervasive idea in parenting that freedom is the highest ideal. You give a kid freedom and their best qualities will blossom, their creativity will grow. And if you restrict them with rules, you stifle all that. We’ve all seen the results.

But this philosophy does not restrict itself merely to parenting. It’s pervasive elsewhere too. Freedom is the ultimate ideal; rules and regulations are dangerous and smother the best in us. It shows up a lot in politics, and interestingly enough this idea is not solely the property of one side or the other. Both conservatives and liberals have their variations of it. For instance, on the left, you often hear no censorship. You cannot censor. You cannot create rules to censor, because you stifle art and new ideas and so forth. Freedom of expression is the highest ideal.

On the right, you’ll often hear things about how you can’t put rules on the market. That regulation stifles the economic process. You have to give the market freedom to do what it’s supposed to do. Laissez faire economics. Freedom of the market is the highest ideal.

Much like those freedom-loving parents and their unruly children, this is a flawed idea. No censorship does mean that new ideas are expressed, but it also opens the world up to pornography and all the exploitation that goes along with it. And laissez faire does allow the market to flow unhindered, but many experts are now saying that such openness and lack of regulation is what has gotten us into our present economic mess, that there was nothing stopping these lenders from their predatory practices that are now fueling the fire on Wall Street.

Freedom is the highest ideal. We all want to believe that, because deep down in each of us, we are convinced that we would not abuse that freedom once it is given to us. If set free from rules and regulations, we would still do the right thing, because we’re good people.

But temptation still lurks, and we have once again underestimated ourselves. We have underestimated our own capacity for evil. We talked about that last Sunday, of how we always think evil is outside, in others, but not in us. We’re good and if we had total freedom, we would do the right thing.

I read in a novel once that the greatest evils in history have come from people who were convinced beyond all doubt that what they were doing was good and just. Hitler did not wake up one morning and say “I’m going to murder millions of people because I’m a bad guy and that’s what I do.” No, he was convinced that the reason Germany was suffering after the First World War was because of they had lost the purity of their race, and that the impure were the problem. Convinced of the rightness of this idea, he launched a punitive war against the other nations of Europe and began the nightmare of the Holocaust upon all those he deemed impure and unworthy within his borders. Never once, in all those nightmarish years, did he ever question the rightness of what he was doing, despite the fact that history now remembers it as one of the greatest atrocities of all time.

OBL is the same. He’s convinced that all of his people’s troubles are the cause of the United States, that we’re all evil, and that killing us is a righteous and good act. And also the Pharisees in today’s Gospel lesson. They too are convinced of their own goodness, of the rightness of their cause. They’ve held fast to a belief that the reason God has forsaken them and that their land has been under foreign occupation is that they have become impure. And they hold to their piety and purity, convinced that God will change his mind because of their devotion. And along comes this Jesus who says the impure are loved and embraced by God. You can then imagine why they don’t get along.

Today’s parable is probably Jesus’ strongest attack against their arrogant instance of their own rightness and righteousness. It’s obvious, to them and to us, who those tenants in the vineyards are. Hard-hearted, close-minded, they refuse to listen when God sends his messengers to them about how they’ve done wrong. They know they’re right, and they won’t even listen to God when he tells them otherwise.

But lest we fall into the same trap, let us not think that this parable is directed at them alone. We can also be those tenants. We are Americans and everything we do is right and good. When we walked that road before, it led to slavery, to Jim Crow, to the near extermination of the Native Americans, and a host of other sins of which we are rightly ashamed.

We are Christians and everything we do is right and good. Down that road are the witch-huntings, the Crusades, sword-point conversions, and the Inquisition. Convinced of our own rightness and goodness, we can become guilty of the most heinous of sins. Who then are the tenants of the vineyard?

A harsh lesson. One hard for us, even for me, to hear. To see ourselves at our ugliest, to have laid bare before us our own depravity, our own capacity to do not what is right, but what is evil. We don’t want to believe it. We want to think we would be different. But so did they.

“All have sinned and fall short,” Paul reminds us in the book of Romans. And we too are sinners. We may not be guilty of these historical atrocities, but we are far from perfect either. It was our sin that sent Christ to the cross. In many ways, we were the ones who nailed him up there. And as such, we deserve the most extreme of punishment.

And yet, that is not what we receive. The stone that the builders rejected has become the foundation stone of our salvation. The man we killed died for our sakes. And from the cross where we hung him, he cried out “Father, forgive them.” We belong up there. We deserve the punishment he receives. We deserve it for our blindness, arrogance, for all of our mistakes, our anger, our lusts, and our other vices. But that’s not who’s up there. The Son of God is up there, and in his dying breath he asks for forgiveness for us. Forgiveness for the tenants of the vineyard. Mercy, in spite of what we deserve.

We may fool ourselves into thinking that because of the good deeds of our life, few or many, that we are at heart good, righteous, and somehow deserving of God’s blessing. At the foot of the cross, we see what we really are and we see what goodness really is. There, we see Jesus. There, we hear his words of mercy. And it is there that we find all our flaws and arrogance washed away by a God who so loves us in spite of ourselves that he would die for us. Amen.