Tuesday, July 26, 2011
July 24, 2011 - Pentecost + 6
This past week, I heard a story on the radio that greatly disturbed me. It was about the drought in the Horn of Africa, which is on the eastern coast. It's where Ethiopia is. Where Somalia is. Somalia – where the UN has recently declared a famine to be taking place. The radio host and his guests were talking about how bad the situation is there, about the vast numbers of people who are struggling to leave their country & make it to a refugee camp on the border with Kenya, walking for miles on foot, with no food, no water, carrying their starving children on their backs.
That same day, I read a story in the NY Times about parents who pay extravagant amounts of money to have playhouses built for their children. And by extravagant, I mean between $50 & $200 thousand dollars. In some parts of the US, you could buy a complete, grown-up sized home for that amount of money. It was an interesting story, but to read about that and then to be starkly reminded that there are places in the world where there is not enough food or water was startling. I was angry at the injustice of it. I was discouraged, thinking of how much good 50 or 100 or 200 thousand dollars could do in the world.
Then Friday, we heard of the tragedy in Norway – people killed in when a building exploded, and then so many youth and young adults shot down at a summer camp for political and religious reasons that don't really make sense. And again, I was disturbed in spirit by the pain and tragedy that exists in the world.
Yesterday, I read a follow-up story of a teenager in Florida who killed his parents and then had a party that same day in his home for his friends. The article talked about how it had shocked his community, how people were stunned and confused, trying to figure out what had happened, what had led this young man to such unspeakable acts of violence. And I shake my head, and I weep for all of these people, all of these situations, and so many more – and I know that God does too, because this is not what God intended when God created the world, created humankind in God's image and called us good. These are NOT signs of the kingdom of heaven coming near. And I don't know about you, but it seems to me that often much easier to see the places where God's kingdom – where God is in charge, where God rules, where God's will is being done – so much easier to see the places where God's kingdom has not yet come than it is to see the places where the kingdom of God has come near, where it is breaking into the world. Some days those places where God's kingdom isn't come into such sharp focus that I long for a deeper vision, to see those signs that the kingdom of heaven is coming with a much sharper ache.
I imagine Jesus' audience in the gospel longed for such a vision too. They too wanted to know when the world would be set right. They wanted to know what God was doing about all the bad things in their world and in their personal situations, wanted to catch some glimpse of what God was up to in the world and the signs they should be looking for. And so Jesus has been teaching them just that, all through this chapter in Matthew's gospel, as the crowds hung on his every word. We've heard Jesus trying to describe what the kingdom of God is like the past few weeks in the parable of the sower and the parable of the weeds among the wheat, and again today in these 5 different parables – all of them starting with, “The kingdom of heaven is like...” (Matthew always used the words “kingdom of heaven” instead of kingdom of God, in an attempt, we think, to make sure he didn't use God's name wrongly or disrespectfully, but he was talking about the same thing.)
And I want to focus us today on just one of those five parables, the first one we heard, the one about the mustard seed. Jesus says to his listeners, “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.”
Now on the face of it, this parable sounds like “great things come in small packages” or “out of insignificant things, important things come.” But while that's certainly part of it, that's not all of what's going on here. Because part of what Jesus is trying to get across here is that the Kingdom of God comes in ways that we don't expect. I've never grown a mustard plant, but sermon prep gives me a reason to go look up random things on the internet, and what I've learned is that mustard is considered almost a kind of weed. Those little seeds Jesus is talking about, well, the mustard plant puts out a lot of those. And if the seeds get loose in your garden or field, watch out, because they germinate in something like 3 to 10 days – and then they reseed themselves, and grow and spread. It's not something you'd deliberately plant. This is the last kind of plant the people of Jesus' day would have expected him to compare God's rule to. They would have expected something tall and majestic, like a mighty oak tree, or the towering redwoods of California – something mighty and strong – not a humble mustard plant.
And yet, Jesus says, the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone sowed. It has great staying power. It has the ability to spread itself around & come up in places where you never would have expected it. The kingdom of heaven, Jesus says, is like that. It may not look like what you were looking for, but there it is, popping up again, in the far reaches of your yard, spreading past your property onto your neighbor's lawn, and then down the block...
And with this parable comes the reminder from Jesus to keep your eyes open. The places where God's kingdom is not are plain to see. But look around you – the kingdom of heaven is coming, in small, unexpected ways, when people reach out to each other with love and patience and compassion – as the ELCA and other Lutheran churches throughout the world are already doing in Somalia, providing food and water to those desperately in need. See those mustard seeds growing in upstate New York, where a secular community has reached out to the grieving Amish in their community after 5 of their members died in a car accident. See those plants springing up in our local community as people and churches reach out to those who are suffering in so many ways – from hunger, or homelessness or hopelessness. It may be harder to see where God's kingdom has come near – but it is coming, Jesus promises us that, and it will spread itself with God's grace and mercy... So be on the lookout. See what seeds have been sown in you, and then go sow some of those seeds yourself.
Amen.
July 17, 2011 - Pentecost + 5
It's no wonder to me that when the disciples get Jesus alone, they pull him aside and say, “Explain that parable to us please.” Because it doesn't make a whole lot of sense on the surface of it. Jesus tells the crowds this story about the kingdom of heaven, and it's yet another farming parable – this one about weeds among the wheat. In this story, he says, a man goes out to his field, and sows good seed, but then, in the dead of night, while everyone is sleeping, an enemy comes along with weed seeds and plants them right alongside the good wheat seed, sneaking away before anyone can realize what he has done. Now when the slaves of the householder realize what has happened, when the wheat begins to grow and they see that it's not just wheat sprouting up, they go and ask the man if he wants them to do what any good farmer or gardener would do - “Do you want us to go and gather the weeds?” Because everyone knows that you don't want weeds to get a toehold in your garden. Give a weed an inch, and it'll take a mile, right? Weeds will take over the garden given half a chance, or at the very least, they'll make it harder for the plants you want to grow to grow. So at the 1st sign of weeds, you want to get out there and get rid of them, right? Give your other plants a chance to get established and not have to compete with weeds for sun and water and nutrients.
But that's where this parable gets a little strange. Because the landowner tells them the exact opposite of what we would think... He says to his workers, “No. Leave the weeds alone. Let them grow together until the harvest time, and we'll deal with them then.”
The disciples are understandably confused about this. Let the weeds grow? Even knowing as they do that this is clearly not just a story about wheat and weeds, it doesn't make sense.
Now my guess is that they were probably all too willing to get out there and start weeding up the bad seeds among them. Many scholars think that that was the case in the community that the author of Matthew was writing to. They think that there were different factions in his church, people who saw themselves as good and righteous wheat and some others among them as bad, evil weed that needed to be uprooted and gotten rid of, and they were just the ones to do the job!
We see this all mentality all around us. We experience it in ourselves. To hear Jesus say through the parable that we should just let the wheat and the weeds grow up together and take their course and trust that it'll all be sorted out in the end doesn't sit well with us. It's often not enough for us to trust Jesus' words that at the end of time, the weeds will be gathered up and burned, that the angels will collect all causes of sin and evildoers – we want that to happen right now, especially as we hear stories of awful things happening in the world around us, tales of violence and tragedy, of people who take advantage of the weak and vulnerable of our world and our society. And when we see these things happening, when we witness sin and evil taking place in the world, we want to uproot those things. We want them not to get a toehold in the field around us and in our lives, and it is confusing and frustrating to hear Jesus say, Never you mind, just leave 'em alone for now.
But as confusing as those words may be, when we step back, we see that there is wisdom in them – because our vision is masked. We may think, like the servants in the parable, that we can tell the difference between the weeds and the wheat, but that reality is that it is not always so easy to recognize what is wheat and what is weed, to be positive about who is evil and who is good. The weed Jesus is talking about in his parable looks remarkably like wheat. It's not until they are both fully grown that you can really be sure which is which.
That's true of us and our ability to see into the hearts of people too. It can seem so easy on the surface to label someone else as a bad seed and want to eradicate them. But we cannot know in our limited perspective what another person may come to be. I think of someone I reconnected with at my class reunion last weekend, a man who in our younger days was awfully “weedy” - and I kind of mean that literally. He was a drug user and a drug dealer and for a lot of years, people just kind of assumed that that's the way he would always be. But there he was at our reunion, proclaiming the goodness of God and how God was at work in his life and had brought him out of that life – and how God is now using him in the lives of young people at his church, using those weedy experiences to help others avoid them. And still, I think there are probably some who would see him, covered in tattoos and listening to heavy metal music, and would just assume he's the same old weed he always was.
But God sees something different in him. I imagine that God always saw the wheat that was possible to grow in his life, the part of him that would produce a bountiful harvest in God's field. Jesus gives us this cautionary tale about being patient, about not judging others too quickly because he knows, so much better than we ever can, that God can transform weeds into wheat.
And thanks be to God for that, because the truth is, we're all some interesting hybrid of wheat and weeds growing together, not just in the same field, but in the same person! And on any given day, from just looking at us, we're just as likely to be taken for weeds as for wheat. The good news is that Jesus, the sower, is patient. He can wait it out until the end, working in us and even in the ones we think are destined to remain weeds forever to bring forth a harvest of grain.
In the meantime, our job is not to judge others. In this parable, we are not the servants who want to do the weeding. We're not the angels who will be responsible for the reaping. We are called to be wheat – and except maybe in some strange sci-fi movie, I'm pretty sure you've never seen wheat get up and start attacking the weeds around it. Wheat grows. Wheat produces grain that feeds and nourishes others.
So go, grow. Be wheat in a weedy world. Let God take care of the weeding.
Amen.
July 3, 2011 - Pentecost + 3
I want to look this morning at the reading from Romans. Because of all of the apostle Paul's writings (and he wrote a great majority of the New Testament), this is one section that makes sense to me. His writing is full of deep ideas, rich images, great theological explanations, but sometimes, don't you feel like you need to read his letters with a dictionary right next to you? Or take only one sentence at a time? His writing is dense – hard to pick up in one hearing or reading. But we come to this passage from the 7th chapter of Romans, and for once, I feel like, “Yes! I get what Paul is talking about!” Even though it's kind of circular, I feel like he is describing my own experience.
Here the reading is again, but this time from The Message paraphrase of the Bible:
"What I don't understand about myself is that I decide one way, but then I act another, doing things I absolutely despise. So if I can't be trusted to figure out what is best for myself and then do it, it becomes obvious that God's command is necessary.
But I need something more! For if I know the law but still can't keep it, and if the power of sin within me keeps sabotaging my best intentions, I obviously need help! I realize that I don't have what it takes. I can will it, but I can't do it. I decide to do good, but I don't really do it; I decide not to do bad, but then I do it anyway. My decisions, such as they are, don't result in actions. Something has gone wrong deep within me and gets the better of me every time.
It happens so regularly that it's predictable. The moment I decide to do good, sin is there to trip me up. I truly delight in God's commands, but it's pretty obvious that not all of me joins in that delight. Parts of me covertly rebel, and just when I least expect it, they take charge.
I've tried everything and nothing helps. I'm at the end of my rope. Is there no one who can do anything for me? Isn't that the real question?
The answer, thank God, is that Jesus Christ can and does. He acted to set things right in this life of contradictions where I want to serve God with all my heart and mind, but am pulled by the influence of sin to do something totally different. "
Sound familiar? My husband used to work with a woman who said to him, “Andy, if people knew better, they'd do better.” And that sounds so good, but it's not really true, at least not all of the time. Paul experienced this, and we do too, that there are times when we do know better, but we still don't do better. Paul wants to do the right thing, but somehow, someway, despite his best intentions, he finds himself doing exactly the thing he doesn't want to do; and the thing he does want to do, he doesn't actually do. Something inside him sabotages him every time, and that something is the power of sin.
Now sin for Paul is not just about the individual actions – it's not just about the things that he does or doesn't do. Those are “sins” with a small “s”, but what Paul's talking about here is Sin with a capital “S”. Sin with a capital “S” is the underlying condition, sins are just the symptoms. It's like how when you get a cold, the sneezing and runny or stuff nose, the coughing – those are just symptoms; it's the virus underneath it that's causing the problem. And no matter how hard Paul tries to kick this cold, his immune system can't kick that virus out. He's tried everything, and he keeps finding himself back in the same place.
We all know how this feels – to know what we should do, and not be able to do it. Or to know that we shouldn't do something, and find ourselves doing it anyway. I always think of times when I know I shouldn't say something, times when I actually say to myself, “Don't say that. It won't help. It's mean. It will hurt the other person. Just keep your mouth shut.” I might even literally bite my tongue. And yet, so often, I just go ahead and blurt out whatever I just told myself not to say anyway. I know better, but I don't do better. It's not that I don't have any responsibility for my actions – but sometimes, it's just overwhelming; it's as though I really can't help myself. The power of sin is so strong within us that sometimes it doesn't matter if we have the best, strongest willpower in the world , sometimes it just overpowers us, and we find ourselves doing things our best selves don't want to do, things we know that will hurt us, hurt other people, hurt God.
The power of sin is like a riptide, a rip current. I never really knew much about that until I lived in Rhode Island – but you all know what a rip tide is, right? It's that strong, strong current that you don't really notice until it's got you in its power and it's dragging you out to sea. And try as you may to swim back to shore, the harder you try, the more you realize that you're never gonna make it back on your own. You exhaust yourself trying to save yourself by swimming against the current, until you finally realize you can't do it. You can't hold out against the power of sin through sheer willpower alone. As Paul says, “I obviously need help! I realize that I don't have what it takes. I can will it, but I can't do it.”
Our lives as Christians can be like that. Our best selves, the part that delights in God and God's command, wants to do what God wants us to do, and yet so often, we find ourselves doing the exact opposite. We find ourselves pulled further and further away from God's shore by the power of sin, and we can just tire ourselves out, trying to swim back on our own, until finally we realize that we're doomed on our own. We need something or someone stronger than us, stronger than the power of sin within us to come and rescue us.
And Paul reminds us, that Jesus Christ can and does do just that. He can and does rescue us from ourselves. He comes and sets things right. He comes into our lives and triumphs over the power of sin. Like a lifeguard, Jesus enters the riptide of sin, and pulls us aside – not by swimming against the current, but across it, until we are brought out of the current and carried back to the shore of God's love, grace, and forgiveness. He swims alongside us, ready always to pull us out of the current that threatens to pull us under, giving us hope to keep swimming. Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)