Sermon preached at the Sung Eucharist on the Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity 2026

A week ago, I was in Wiltshire. I was there to talk about a friend and the book he wrote, published last year. Sadly, Jon did not live to see the book in print. After a death sentence he had refused to accept for many years, he died in 2023. His wife saw the book through its final stages. So, I talked to her and another friend about Jon and his book. 

Now I am going to tell you something about him because he can help us with our readings this morning. He was a rare and particular man. First impressions were that he was tall … well perhaps not tall. Tall men loom over you, Jon was a long man. He had reach. And he had style. There was a splendid, spreading, corduroy, tweediness on that spare frame. Jon’s suits always looked as though they might go off and have adventures of their own when he wasn’t looking…. He was a scholar, but not the kind who had lots of letters after his name, not a man for the seminar room. He knew about buildings, especially cathedrals, he knew about place and why it matters and his last book told us about the Stones of Britain, the rock beneath our feet and the buildings and landscape it gives us.

To write about place, he visited places, climbed hills, even in the last dreadful illness. He got under the skin of wherever he was, held the stones in his hand, walked the costs even slept by sarsen stones, or in a long barrow. Because he knew about place and the power of place he also knew about the painter Samuel Palmer who, in the nineteenth century, gathered a group of artists at Shoreham-by-Sea to paint landscape in its depth and significance. They called themselves the ‘Brotherhood’ or ‘the Antients’ because they preferred the art of older generations. Locals looked at their strange clothes and odd habits, their midnight rambles and their endless talk, and called them ‘Extollagers’. It wasn’t flattering, it was a sharp judgement on all that extolling of beauty and meaning. Jon took to calling himself an ‘Extollager’. He could talk, O my he could talk, about a place and its significance, about history and geology and myth. He could make the stones speak. I miss him and I miss his constant reminder to pay attention, look for significance. Honestly, significance, can be hard to see walking up Victoria, past endless offers of nine kinds of coffee and exactly the same shops I could find in Barking or Bradford. The philosopher Martin Buber used to worry that we once we knew places could be holy, but now the province of the unholy spreads ever wider. We live surrounded by the unholy and it grows.

And here is the idea we need to latch on to this morning. We heard the prophet Isaiah. He was singing a song for his beloved, a song about a vineyard. He was setting out his stall, telling us what he has to say, why he must say it. He describes God creating a vineyard on a fertile hill. God worked at that vineyard cleared stones, planted vines, tended them, built a watchtower, did all he could possibly do, and then he looked for a harvest. 

Then suddenly the voice changes and we hear God himself speak. God appalled that the certain harvest failed. He declares he will break down its hedge and lay it waste. This little story is what makes Isaiah a prophet. He knows that God creates, this place is his and we are his people. Why then do we not live up to the gift and calling we have been given? Why do we provoke anger and judgement?

The vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, and the people of Judah are his pleasant planting; he expected justice, but saw bloodshed.

It is an abiding belief in the Old Testament that the Land is holy ground. From Eden to Bethel - the very gate of heaven, from Jerusalem as God’s footstool, to Sinai where Moses spoke with the Lord God. Over and again, mountains, plains, and even the wilderness are places of encounter. The biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann writes of places that are, all at once, gift, promise and challenge. We need to know, must know, that the glory of God breaks out not through deep study, nor in lonely contemplation, but on rocky mountain tops, by the ford of the River Jabbok, or at the oak of Mamre. Places shot through with God’s presence, places that might bring us to our knees, places that demand reverence and summon up our responsibility. God abides; God dwells here amongst us.

On holy ground there is a sure confidence that there is a connection between who we are and where we live. You and I are poised between earth and heaven and there are places where those two realities touch – where the sparks fly. All this belief, all this encounter, is gathered up by Isaiah when he speaks of the vineyard on the hill. The idea quickly took hold. You will find in it Psalm 80 – the vine taken out of Egypt and planted - planted so that its roots went deep and its branches spread wide. 

Then we meet the idea again, in Matthew’s gospel. The language in our gospel reading is a direct echo of Isaiah:

There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a watchtower. Matthew 21: 33 

The story in Matthew, however, is not the same story at all. In Isaiah, God’s people fail in their reverence for God and the Land they have been given. That is a story about a nation and its faithfulness. In Matthew, we meet wicked tenants who will not pay their dues and who will be driven out of the vineyard so that others may enter. Suddenly, we are not talking about the Land Israel, but about the Kingdom of God, heaven, and who belongs there.

Two readings about whether we can know God’s presence and respond. Can we know him near? Can we encounter him in familiar places and understand that he is a God of land and nation? Can we know him in Christ and hear him when he speaks to us? The questions matter. Two readings that beg the question urgently and warn of judgement. Are we paying attention? Have we realised how important this is? That is a challenge worth our attention.

But, because I have been thinking about my friend Jon, and thinking about places, I believe there is more to say. There is something to say about places. Listen to this:

I was… standing in a bus queue by the side of a long, mean street. Evening was just closing in and it was raining… always in the rain and always in evening twilight. Time seemed to have paused on that dismal moment when only a few shops have lit up and it is not yet dark enough for their windows to look cheering... However far I went I found only dingy lodging houses, small tobacconists, hoardings from which posters hung in rags, windowless warehouses, goods stations without trains, and bookshops of the sort that sell The Works of Aristotle. I never met anyone… 

That is C S Lewis imagining Hell. It is a place, but a place with no people, and no sense of place. It is all the same, all the time. He goes on to explain that the people there arrive, move in, and within a week they have quarrelled with the neighbours, and moved away. Then they quarrel again and keep moving further away. This city grows and grows as they try to get away from each other. Hell is the ultimate unholy place. Places speak and they can show us good or show us ill.

My friend Jon and his writing and the witness of scripture demand that we keep our sense of place. Keep paying attention, keep half expecting to bump into the truth, deep meaning in the places where we live and work. We have lost our reverence, and we have lost some of our ability to be surprised or moved by place. The climate crisis surely begs the question of whether we still love the land, love our neighbours, and love ourselves. We tear down the places of encounter; we destroy what we have been given as gift.

It is the witness of scripture and faith that God encounters us in life, in history and in the geography of place. Our real God is encountered in reality. God finds a place in in Jesus Christ, in Bethlehem, at the Jordan, in the wilderness, in Galilee and on Calvary. Our salvation depends on the fact that God does come to meet us in bread and wine at this altar and in the lives we live. What we need though and need urgently is not knowledge, but wonder. We should better learn to stand amazed. We should half expect to encounter God and his angels in a vineyard on a hill, or even, perhaps, at Joe and the Juice and All Bar One.

Gerard Manley Hopkins had it right:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil.