Squatters’ rights have a long and positive history in this country and in Britain, although nowadays all our images seem to be negative. When land was plentiful, when the Wild West was being won and territories were being settled, squatting was a way of laying legal claim to property. Many of our forebears, if you go back far enough, were probably squatters. The remnants of squatters’ rights are encoded in our homestead laws today. The longer you have lived in your house, the more protection you receive against it being taken from you in bankruptcy cases and the like.

Nowadays we are perplexed by what to do in places like Gaza and the West Bank, where Palestinians have lived for centuries on property that is claimed by the Israeli government; or farmland in Zimbabwe, where blacks have lived for generations on white colonialists’ farms; or shanty towns outside of Johannesburg, South Africa, where lean-to hovels do for housing and make for real estate eyesores. In all these cases, we are fairly sympathetic to squatters. People have to live somewhere, and they have lived there a long time. Uprooting them for political or economic reasons seems unfair.

The worst claims of squatters’ rights are tenants in apartments who forget they are tenants at all. They treat their rented space as if it belongs to them and not to the true owners. Ask anyone in that business—and some of them are right here in our church—and they will tell you how exasperating it is when tenants do not pay their rent and then act as if the landlord is the bad guy. Try to collect, and you might be taking your life into your hands. The court costs and the time and effort it takes to root these people out of their apartments are just too much. And when you do, you are likely to find the places trashed and to hear that you are the wicked landlord, not they the wicked tenants.

How does that happen? It happens because people develop a mentality of entitlement, which turns squatters’ rights into squatters’ wrongs.

Jesus tells a parable that claims as much. A man owns a vineyard and puts some tenants in charge of it. They live on the land and work it. He leaves them pretty much on their own. Occasionally he sends servants to check on them and pick up his profits. The tenants think that is outrageous. The profits are theirs. They have worked the fields. They have harvested the grapes. They have done all the work. Never mind that the land does not belong to them. It ought to. They figure all they have to do is act like it does and it will be theirs. Of course, things take a turn for the worse when these agents of the owner keep showing up. But how many of them could there be? They figure if they can intimidate them, the owner will give up and stay away. But the owner doesn’t give up. He even sends his son, who, like the servants before him, is killed by the sinful squatters.

What’s an owner like that to do? Jesus asks. Those who listen to his words, the religious leaders of his day, say that the wicked tenants should be thrown off the land, tarred and feathered, burned at the stake, and the land given to others who will care for it better and be responsible to the owner. But they are indicting themselves in so judging.

The irony is that they don’t catch the irony. And neither do we. We all have this keen sense of judgment about others who take advantage of welfare and what-not, but we don’t see how our own attitudes are not much different. You remember all those reports about the immorality in New Orleans in the wake of Katrina? About the thievery and rape and murder? About rescuers being fired upon by those they were trying to save? Well, now, it turns out that almost all of that was disaster mythology. Urban legend, don’t you know?! Even the media and the mayor of New Orleans were duped. Turns out that there may have been one homicide. Instead of 10,000 dead, the number in New Orleans is in the hundreds, and all along the Gulf Coast maybe a thousand. Only four people died in the convention center and Superdome, one of whom was a suicide. Lots of bad things happened, and some people did bad things, no question. But something in us was as quick to judge the wickedness of others as the Pharisees Jesus asked about the parable. Why is that? Because we are all more easily able to see the sin and evil in others than we are in ourselves.

But the impulse to move from an awareness of being tenants to the claim of being owners is deep in all humanity. It led the great American romantic poet Walt Whitman to declare: I think I could turn and live with animals,/They do not sweat and whine about their condition/…Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things. There it is, in that last phrase—the mania of owning things! Isn’t that true? Are we not consumed with that mania of owning things? As if the bumper sticker is right after all: the one who dies with the most toys wins. No, the one who dies with the most toys dies. Period. And then what? The toys remain. The earth wins. It will one day cover you with a weight you cannot lift yourself.

The Bible is clear: The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof. Now, if that is true, what should we make of our mania for owning things? Even the notion of private property: How can we ever say, It is mine? Mine? Don’t we really mean that we, not some other human beings, are the tenants of this piece of God’s earth for a time? In any ultimate sense, we own nothing? God owns everything, because God made everything and God outlasts everything. So for the time being, you and I are always and only tenants. The issue is not whether we will be tenants or owners but what kind of tenants we will be.

So, now, let’s get more personal. You have money. You think it is yours. You know God asks for you to give back to the service of God in the world a portion of the fruit of your labors. God is not asking you to give anything that is yours. God is actually letting you keep for your own use most of what is God’s. But God demands that you give what God asks for and when God asks for it. That The Form 1040 line “charitable contributions” is deceiving. Charity? Giving a tithe, sharing what you have with the poor, donating money and goods and effort—these are just doing a Christian duty that is right and just. Even if the motivation is love and not duty, it’s not charity; it’s giving God what God expects and deserves because it belongs to God.

If we all understood that around here, we would not have to worry about whether we would have the money for building clinics in Kenya for children orphaned by AIDS, or for upgrading buildings and parking lots, or church staff raises next year (which, by the way, they will not get as of now, because giving has not been up to expectations yet this year). If we gave back to God what God expects of us as tenants, we would have no concern for money; we would only have fun deciding what new transformative mission we would engage in next!

Consider this: if the average household income of this church were only $50,000 per year (and it is higher than that, I assure you), our budget would be $5.5 million. In other words, we would  have more than two million more annually to figure what to do with. Which means, if God came looking for us like the owner of the vineyard in the parable, God would find most of us at best negligent in our duty as the wicked tenants. And here’s the sobering thought to me—some of you are not any happier with me right now than they would have been when the master sent his slaves to collect. Please don’t kill the messenger!

Forget about me, though. We should be more worried about what we do with the Son of God. How are we treating him? He has already come, and what are we doing? Are we receiving him warmly, loving him dearly, presenting him with the fruits of our labors? Or do we say welcome and then prefer to keep what is rightfully his? Are we squatters or stewards?

The same is true about our faith. Jesus told this parable not just about stewardship of resources but about stewardship of the mysteries of salvation. The metaphor of a vineyard was a familiar image for Israel as the people of God. Isaiah used it to describe the relationship between God and his chosen people. The leaders of Israel had lost the sense of grace and privilege that God had given them. They began to view their religion as a right, and their relationship to God as something they could take for granted. Instead of keeping their hands and hearts open to strangers, instead of seeing their chosenness as a responsibility to introduce this God of grace to the world, instead of modeling a new kind of law—the law of love—to humankind, they treated their faith as a possession to be guarded.

Jesus will not allow this. God had sent the prophets to keep hammering home to the people that they could not presume upon God. God has a purpose for us all, and the church as well as Israel must come to grips with it. If we hold our faith too tightly, we start living as if behind a gated community, when God would have us know our neighbors and live openly with them.

I get this feeling every time I hear Christians in America saying things like, “We have to take back our country,” or “We have to make a stand for our faith.” What does that mean? Is our faith so weak that it needs more than the living Christ among us to sustain us? Our faith needs witnessing to, not propping up. We have no need to fear Muslims or Jews or Hindus or whatever. Jesus is Lord of all and died for them, too, whether they put their trust in him or not. But they will come to know that only if they know us as a people who reflect the open hand and heart of God.

Samira Izadi is our Iranian-born sister, a convert from Islam, studying now for the ministry. She e-mailed me this week to say this: I get so hurt by people that use … terms like “standing up for our faith.” … [It] is just so disturbing to me. It implies that God needs us to defend Him and without that His kingdom is going to fall apart and His work is not going to be done.  We get so passionate about that and about things like taking the name of God off this or that and get into hot arguments and I wonder why. It seems like we show more passion in getting into arguments about our faith than sharing our faith.

Arguments stem from a squatters-rights mentality. You treat others as threats, whether to your stuff or your faith. Conflict emerges. People are hurt and sometimes die. God needs a different kind of witness, I tell you. May this church be a place where, when the Son of God comes to call us to account, we will gladly offer to him the fruits of our labors and the friends of our faith.