Let tares grow,
let tears flow;
there is no
justice without
tearing our
selves apart;
Until life’s ending,
we are left tending
weeds tenderly
as the wheat field.
alternatively
Let tares grow,
let tears flow;
there is no
judgement without
tearing our
selves apart;
Until its ending,
life’s left tending
weeds tenderly
in the wheat field.
Frederick Buechner says that parables are like jokes: if you have to have it explained, it’s just not worth it.* In some ways, this parable says the same thing about itself. The last line of Jesus’ explanation is that those who hear and understand it – the ones who get it – those are the ones in whom the seeds take root and grow and bear fruit. If you get it, you’ve got it.
Perhaps this is a rare opportunity for spiritual self-congratulation. We consider ourselves, after all, part of the inner circle of disciples who understand Jesus, who hear him and who get him, so we are by definition, aren’t we, good soil, that yields a fine harvest. If we look at this church, and its nearly nine decade history, we can see some of the good that has been done.
Eighty-six years ago, in January 1928, the first meeting to form an episcopal congregation in Euclid took place. The first service was attended by 39 adults and 19 young people in March of that year. In December 1928, the Church of the Epiphany was named as a Mission of the Diocese of Ohio, and building began not too long afterwards. This building was first dedicated more than eighty years ago, in 1933, and the extensions completed twenty years later. In the meantime, in 1947, the church was incorporated as a parish and a nonprofit in the State of Ohio.
Since 1959, which is the first year for which I have good records easily at hand in my office, so just in the last 55 of its 86 years, in less than two-thirds of its life in this city, this church has baptized 888 people. It has blessed the beginnings of 481 marriages. It has raised up at least one curate, who came here as a young transitional deacon, to become a bishop. Last year, in one year alone, this parish offered the gifts of God to the people of God 3615 times. In 2006, the number was over 6000. It is impossible to calculate the number of people that this parish has touched, served, prayed with, prayed for;
To borrow a phrase from another parable: “You good and faithful servants!”
Of course, we know that sowing and growing and the harvest are not one-off events. They are a cycle. The farmer cannot sit back after one good harvest and live off it for life. She has to go back out, in the spring, and renew the soil, refresh the earth, reseed the rows, and wait all over again to see what takes, what gives.
So it is with ministry. It is never a once-and-done affair, no matter how successful it may once have been.
In the old country, crop rotation would be a way of making sure that soil didn’t get used up and worn out. A field that grew wheat one year might grow barley the next, and in the third year it would lay fallow, that is, nothing would be sown; the soil would rest and regather its strength, so that it would be healthy and have sufficient nutritional substance the next year to grow a new crop. Soil that was reused over and over, especially for the same crop, farmers found, would become stale and exhausted, and the harvest would gradually weaken and falter. It seems so wasteful in our economy to let a whole field lie fallow for a whole growing season; but the wisdom of the long view says that it is worth it to take care of the soil so that the soil can take care of the harvest for the long haul.
It’s ok if everything doesn’t look the same year by year, season by season. Of course, that doesn’t mean we get to rest on our laurels, but it does mean that we shouldn’t get too anxious if every harvest is not as rich as the ones that we remember. There may be something new trying to grow, that we have yet to recognize.
The landscape around this church has changed in nine decades, as landscapes will. The landscape of the lives of those of us who have been around for a few of those decades has transformed itself from generation to generation, seed time to harvest.
Cycles rise and fall, the seasons in their sequence come and go; nothing stays the same. The landscape has changed; there may be more rocks in a field that used to be loamy; there may be new pathways across old meadows. Some fields that once were well-tended may have become overgrown with weeds. Other plots have opened up where once nothing grew, because someone went out with a hoe and a vision and broke open the earth to give it a fresh outlook on life.
I’ll be honest: I don’t know quite where we find ourselves in this parable today. On an individual level, each of you is quite capable of praying through that dilemma for yourselves, and hearing the call of God on your souls, where your soil needs food, rest, or celebration. As a congregation, as a community, we know that we have some work to do, to align ourselves with the landscape around us; to get to know all over again the soil in which we are planted, so that we can grow most effectively within it; because nothing stays the same.
Here’s the thing that I find most strikingly hopeful about this whole parable, though. Every single time we read it, year after year, that sower goes out and sows the seed this way and that, across pathways and rocky ground and thistle beds and good soil; indiscriminately. This sower is not concerned about who grows the best. The sower doesn’t learn from one outing to the next to restrict the seed to one good area. The sower continues, against conventional wisdom, to seed everyone, everywhere, with the word of the kingdom; because even the cracks in the sidewalk sometimes bear fruit, and even the birds of the air need to be fed by the seed that falls on rocky ground.
God speaks through the prophet: “’My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,’ says the Lord. ‘For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. For as the rain and the snow come down from the heaven, and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.”’
Whether or not we get the parable, or the joke, God’s word does not fall flat; whether or not we get it, whether or not we see it, God’s word is not wasted, but it shall accomplish God’s purpose, and it will succeed in the thing for which God sent it.
Thanks be to God.
Whilst musing over this Sunday’s parable (the sower and the different soils), I hit upon the Dummies.com article, “How to Improve Soil Quality for Healthy Plant Growth,” by Sven Wombwell. Sven suggests that “Worms really are a gardener’s best friends. They feed on organic matter and then disperse it through the soil.” There are many ways to engage in analogical soil/soul improvement preaching on this parable, but the worms, and the organic matter that they eat, stuck with me…
worms eat through the dead
making soil for the living;
some resurrection.
A crossover from today’s Bible Challenge blog, just because Leftovers:
Readings for today were Isaiah 7-9, I Thessalonians 5, Psalm 28, OR Judith 15
The day of my graduation from seminary was supposed to be the Rapture (according to the late Harold Camping). Cue a few juvenile jokes at commencement, and my own attempt to get an ad campaign going for the next day – Sunday – “Still here? All are welcome.”
Anyway, some people say that the closing words of Saturday’s Thessalonian chapter are all about the Rapture – being caught up in the air. Others point out that those who attempt to predict such events, however, have it all wrong; chapter 5 is much more in line with the rest of scripture when it asserts that no one knows the Day of the Lord, which comes suddenly, swiftly and silently, like a thief in the night.
I heard recently that a Tom Perrotta novel, The Leftovers, has been made into a tv series, with the author himself at the helm. I have never read the Left Behind series (I keep thinking I should, for research), but I have read Perrotta’s book, and enjoyed it. Whilst a reviewer of the tv show (who should know) bases the storyline firmly in rapture mythology (http://www.cnn.com/2014/07/06/opinion/parini-rapture-real), the novel itself allows its characters to believe one thing or another at will, and the narrator does not choose or force an explanation of the Sudden Departure upon a reader. It is an exploration of loss, love, and how life lives with them in tension, rather than a theological novel. In fact, reading a few other Perrotta books, I would venture that he tends to “redeem” characters from the extremes of evangelical religion to something more ordinary, to find the wonder in a life lived for the sake of life itself, as, one might think, God intended.
When I was growing up, a trip to the seaside meant (if we were lucky and good) a ride on the beach donkeys.
These little donkeys plied their trade on every tourist beach in England. Usually, there would be about half a dozen of them, wearing colourful straw hats and blankets. They usually looked a bit grumpy. Their attendant traditionally was equally taciturn. For the equivalent of about a quarter, a child would be hoisted across a grumpy grey donkey and bounce across the sand and back for about five or ten minutes while their mother looked on in terror (our mother did not approve of the donkeys, but we loved them.)
This is the image that I have in my mind’s eye whenever I read this prophecy of Zechariah, whether on a summer’s weekend, or in the snow of early spring, on Palm Sunday: the slow, silent, long-suffering beach donkeys and their childish burdens. Not the noble, elegant humility of the silhouetted donkey on the Christmas cards; but a truly humble, humbled and humbling, scraggly, shabby, scruffy little donkey, beast of burden and the patient plaything of children.
According to Jesus scholars Marcus Borg and Dominic Crossan, on the day that we commemorate as Palm Sunday, two processions entered the city of Jerusalem.* Pilate’s people would converge on the city from their Roman garrison on the sea, a show of strength before the festival of the people, the Passover that represented to the people of Israel deliverance from the evil empire of Egypt; a dangerous proposition for the Roman occupiers. Pilate’s procession was a show of strength, of military might, and of the complete dominion of the Caesar, the son of the Roman gods.
On the other side of the city came the royal procession predicted by Zechariah, one in which the Son of the true God arrived at the seat and centre of his kingdom, humble and riding on a donkey. The use of the Zechariah prophecy makes the counterpoint even more clear: this king is not the one in pomp and splendour, nor is he seated on a war horse, because his purpose is not war but peace, and his strength comes from his humility, his closeness to the people, and, seated on a small donkey, his closeness to the ground. He has broken the bows of war, and retired the chariots of the empire. Instead of a Roman fortress on the sea, he sees peace extending from shore to shore; not the Pax Romana enforced by the sword, but the peace of God that passes all understanding.
It is not enough for the people of the Passover. They want a new set of plagues to destroy the Roman destroyers. They want a new Red Sea miracle to divide them from their oppressors. Instead, Jesus comes preaching peace, loving them, laying down his life for them. They don’t get how that is supposed to help them. But his procession is not a challenge to Pilate’s; that, in the circumstances, would be laughable and rather sad. It is, instead, an inversion of it; it makes a mockery of the Caesar’s claims to dominion.
Jesus said, “To what shall I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplace, saying, ‘We played weddings, and you wouldn’t dance; we played funerals, and you wouldn’t wail.’” This generation wants Jesus to dance to its tune, and he will not.
This generation, too; we would like to pull the strings, play the tune, and see Jesus dance to it. We saw it in the courts this week; whatever else you think of the so-called Hobby Lobby decision, the appeal to religious freedom to decide what is or is not contraception, let alone what is or is not healthcare, is surely symptomatic of that tug-of-war, that push and pull over whose god rules, and which tune God dances to.
We saw this week the limits of our recognition of the Passover of others; the Red Sea miracle that delivered a child to its Promised Land looks to another like an unmitigated crime. I can’t imagine bellowing at a busload of children, “No one wants you here,” as we saw on the news from Murrietta; but we are all guilty of blinkered vision, and selective hearing; hearing only the tune that we play, that we think all must dance to.
We still struggle with the idea that loving God, loving Jesus, means loving all of our neighbours, unconditionally. Even after all those Palm Sundays followed by Good Fridays, we struggle with the idea that humility is stronger than oppression. It doesn’t sit comfortably with us. Perhaps we just aren’t ready for it yet.
On this past Friday evening, like many others, like many of you, I went out to watch the fireworks. In the explosions that reverberated in my ribs, that knocked holes in my stomach,
I heard the shells that I had heard falling over Galilee, quarter of a century ago, night after night, from my bed in a kibbutz just south of the Lebanese border. The same gunpowder blast that propelled missiles into the night sky, to explode just far enough from our camp to lull us to sleep. It’s amazing what you can become used to; after a couple of weeks, there was one silent night in which no shells fell, and no one could sleep without them. We had become conditioned to expect the sounds of war; peace undermined our equilibrium and disturbed our sense of normality.
On Friday night, I wondered, watching the red, white and blue afterimages sparkle over the Great Lake, what it would signify if we had invented gunpowder only for this, to create beauty, and not death; to inspire, instead of to exterminate. What if in centuries to come this were to be the only use left for it, to invite the celebration of our liberty together, instead of an unequal freedom; our joy in one another and the lands in which we live; a mutual joy instead of an instinctive mistrust?
What if the only parades left in town were attended by children on bedraggled beach donkeys, laughing and waving palm branches, dancing to merry tune, instead of war horses and worse, and the funereal sound of the gun salute was no longer needed, the bows of war having been long since broken? We can’t even imagine it, can we?
The future into which the prophet invites us is not a brighter, more triumphant version of the way that we live now. It is not a romance, but a real revolution. It is not a future in which we win. It is a future in which we do not even have to fight.
Oh, but it is so hard to give in to humility! It is the wisdom of fools and of children, and we are so wise. Lay down your burdens, receive my rest, says Jesus, but it is so hard to give up the fight to be right.
But when we come to the table, we receive the body and blood of a king who gave his life for his people. And we receive the humble offering of a humble peasant who died a criminal, oppressed by foreign powers, betrayed by his own, beloved only of a few, most of whom thought that he must have got it wrong, somehow, somewhere along the line.
Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.
So rejoice greatly, and shout aloud. Your king comes to you; so triumphant and victorious is he, that he rides humbly on a donkey, and on a colt, on the children’s donkey.
*Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan, The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Final Days in Jerusalem (HarperOne, 2006), chapter 1, “Palm Sunday”
When I was growing up, a trip to the seaside meant buckets and spades, sandcastles in the sand, fishing nets, for catching shrimps in the rockpools, ice cream, and late in the afternoon, before loading up the car for home, if we were very good and our mother was in a particularly relaxed mood after all of the sun and salty goodness, a ride on the beach donkeys.
The little donkeys – some young, some old but small – plied their trade on every tourist beach in England. Usually, there would be about half a dozen of them, wearing colourful straw hats and blankets. They usually looked a bit grumpy – think Eeyore, the chronically depressive donkey from Winnie the Pooh. Their attendant was equally taciturn; he would be a man of indeterminate age and few words, with a look of the Roma Gipsy. For the equivalent of about a quarter, a child would be hoisted across a grumpy grey donkey and bounce across the sand and back for about five or ten minutes while their mother looked on in terror (our mother did not approve of the donkeys, but we loved them.)
This is the image that I have in my mind’s eye whenever I read this prophecy of Zechariah, whether here on a summer’s weekend, or in the snow of early spring, on Palm Sunday: the slow, silent, long-suffering beach donkeys and their childish burdens. Not the noble, elegant humility of the silhouetted donkey on the Christmas cards; but a truly humble, humbled and humbling, scraggly, shabby, scruffy little donkey, beast of burden and the plaything of children.
It feels like a good day to be contemplating Sunday’s sermon.
Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.
He will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war horse from Jerusalem; and the battle bow shall be cut off, and he shall command peace to the nations; his dominion shall be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth. (Zechariah 9:9-12)
We will have no more of kings.
Except, perhaps, for one such as this,
who enters not on a horse dressed for battle
but on a colt, the child of a donkey.
No twenty-one gun salute for him,
since he has broken the bows of war.
Their caterpillar tires he has
morphed into moths; their tridents
he has given to the children
of Neptune as a plaything; he has
loosened the wheels of the barreling chariots;
they shall not pursue him across the sand
as he gazes into the horizon.
The waves bow down in peace.
We will have no more of kings
except for this.
Going out for a beer with a corporation.
Telling a woman that her choice of contraception is against my religion.
Bellowing “no one wants you” to a bus load of children.
Carrying an assault rifle into a department store.
Carrying an assault rifle.
Claiming that my discrimination of choice is enshrined in Christian tradition.
Rewriting the great commandments to read, “Love God, guns, and big business as yourself (never mind the neighbours)”
To what shall I compare this generation?
But to what shall I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the market places and calling to their playmates,
‘We piped to you, and you did not dance;
we wailed, and you did not mourn.’
…Yet wisdom is justified by her deeds.
I stretch my skin across the rocks,
lay out my hair in waves,
torn and tangled by the wind;
I prepare my sweetest siren song,
cast its melody toward you,
yet all unmoved, you sail on.
I fall into your nets, break through
and sink, turning in the waters
churning beneath the dark earth,
but you do not seek me, diving down,
but turn again to the shore,
the safety of solid ground.
You who sang creation into being,
why will you not dance to my tune?
I doubt that there is anyone in this room who has never had pressed into their hand, or encountered on the back of a public convenience door, or otherwise been accosted by a photocopied pamphlet containing, among other words, this verse from Romans:
“For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
In fact, there may be those among us who have distributed such literature, in the name of spreading the Gospel, winning souls for Jesus, saving the world.
But, newsflash: we don’t save the world. God has created the world, God sustains the world, God continually redeems the world from its own sinfulness and mess, consistently, throughout all generations, reaching out to souls in love and calling them back to relationship with the living and loving God. For Christians, the ultimate revelation of that love is the life of Jesus Christ; a life that goes even beyond death. This is the free gift of God: eternal life; life lived in the knowledge and love of God, the eternal One in whom we live and move and have our being.
We talked a couple of weeks ago about that verse in John in which Jesus himself defines, or at least explains, eternal life as the knowledge of God, the only true God, who sent Jesus to bring us to God’s own self.
This is the good news, that we have already been offered, been given: eternal life. It is a gift of God.
The problem I have with the photocopied tracts and such is that they take this verse out of the context of grace, and they make of this free gift a limited offer, free except for the postage and the packaging. We know that gifts with strings attached, gifts that require a deposit, gifts that ask for a credit card up front are not truly free. So the promise of this verse rings untrue when it is coupled with a demand, or a command, or a threat.
Presented by itself, out of context, the verse becomes a cudgel: this free gift of eternal life can be yours, but if you won’t accept it (on the terms laid out in this handy pamphlet), you can have eternal death instead.
It’s as though someone walks in with a loaded gun and says, “Good news! If you do what I say, I will not kill you!” The goodness of the news is somewhat limited and frustrated by the threat that brings it.
The promise of this verse rings untrue when it is coupled with threats of hell or damnation; a gift that threatens is not free.
It makes me sad to see the Gospel of grace transformed into a tool of repression, oppression, fear. That is not what eternal life is supposed to look like, is it?
So if the problem is taking the verse out of context, how about we re-contextualize it a bit?
Paul is writing a letter to believers, to Christians. He is not out to convert them – that work has already been done, by the grace of God – but to talk to them about what the implications are for their lives as Christians of that grace, that forgiveness. He wants to tell them what eternal life looks like.
Previously, he says, you were bound by sin; you were bound to sin. Now that you know grace, you are bound to graciousness; you who are forgiven are bound to forgiveness; you who are redeemed into righteousness are bound to live righteously.
It is an appeal based not on fear but on love, and on the Gospel good news that life is good, and a good life is worth living; that life is of God, and that God lives it with us.
I am feeling the breath of Jeremiah on my neck at this point. He insists that the way forward is not peaceful, that salvation does not come easily to God’s people. Hananiah is a prophet of false peace; Jeremiah will believe his peace when he sees it. Of course, as events unfold, Jeremiah is proved right, and the people of God are not soon delivered from their Babylonian overlords.
But God has not abandoned the people. God’s prophets continue to speak to them the words of God. God will, in time, bring them home.
There are many ways to live a living death instead of an eternal life. Such a life is the result of sin, of deliberate ignorance of God’s love for us, of deliberate unlove for one another, a blithe brushing away of God’s prophetic call on our lives. Such are the wages of sin: a living death, a life unlived.
The work of the prophet, then, is not to say, “Pray these words, and all will be well.” Rather, it is to listen to the God in whom we live and move and have our being. We who know God in Jesus Christ are called to walk in the light, to proclaim good news to the poor, freedom to the captive, health to the hungry; to recognize the call of eternal life within the everyday lives of ourselves and those around us. It is not easy, because eternal life is not an alternative to mortal life, but one is lived within the other.
But Jesus has already made quite plain the righteousness to which we are called, and it is simply this: to love God, and to love our neighbours as ourselves.
It might start quietly. It might start even in silence, with a smile to someone who needs it, a fellow child of God recognized out of context. It might grow into a vocal acknowledgement of the needs of another, or the offering of a free gift of love. It might crescendo into a movement, a momentum that moves towards the recognition, finally, of Christ in all people, of the dignity of every human being.
It may begin with a gentle reminder that the free gift of God’s grace is freely given by God, has already been poured out over the whole world; that it is no one’s to hoard or to hold back or to ration. I was heartened to see how many local churches took part in yesterday’s Cleveland Pride parade and festival. I hope that we can continue to share grace more widely than condemnation as a Christian community, in all contexts, to all comers.
There are many places to begin, and you know best where God is calling you to make a start, to make a stand for the Gospel. Make no mistake: the road of the prophet is not smooth, nor is it paved with gold. But it is a life lived in congruence with eternity; and that is its own reward, and we are promised many more.
This I do believe and hold to be true: that the Gospel is not a threat, but a promise.
