Thinking the Texts by John Fairless
Ah, young Jacob just getting his start (a head start running from his brother, by the way) is our text in Genesis. It is interesting to note in this classic vision of “Jacob’s Ladder” that the angels of God are coming and going — much as Jacob himself is on the going side of his journey. He will be coming home in a few years as a changed man. A sermon here might be called, “When God Was In the House!”
Isaiah has God staking out God’s territory, particularly with reference to “other gods” — which Israel seemed to have pretty regular problems with. Baal, Dagon, Asherah, Molech… these are just a few of the lesser names that pop up on the god-radar in Israel’s story. YHWH says, “Any of you boys or girls want to make a claim here; bring it out and let’s be done with it!” Not a peep was heard.
Romans 8 is so full of good theological stuff! Like the coffee brand in Dollar General stores. (I tried it once… it was chock full of something!)
I am captivated by the phrase, “We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now….” With the advent of the James Webb Space Telescope and other super-tech advances, we now know that this is literally true. Did you catch the recent update about the sounds emerging from a black hole? They are 57 octaves below the middle C that our normal human hearing can detect, but have now been sonically raised in pitch so that we can get an idea. Give it a listen below:
And there you have it!
Matthew gives us a parable related to that from last week; we are getting fully educated about agrarian practice in ancient Israel/Palestine. We tend to want to read this story and say, “Hmmm… wheat stalks good; weed stalks bad.” But, as Delmer points out on the podcast for today, even the weed stalks served a purpose in the economy of the time. This one takes some thinking… which is what we try to help you do here at the Lectionary Lab!
One thing for sure — we ought to take our time with this whole “purging” the church rolls kind of thing. When we judge the lives of others, we mostly fail. That’s a job that’s above our pay grade.
And Just for Fun…
Sermon by Delmer Chilton
My Grandpa liked to tell the story of a man who owned a parrot. Every day at 5:00 the man took the parrot and walked down the street to the corner bar where he had a few drinks and talked with his friends. He had taught his parrot to order for him, yelling out, “gimme a beer, gimme a beer."
Each Sunday the man and his wife went to church, locking the bird in its cage before they left the house. One Sunday the door on the cage did not latch well and the bird got out. It left the house by an open window and found its way to the church.
It flew in and lit on its master’s shoulder, crying out at the top of its lungs, “AWWK! AWWK! Gimme a beer, gimme a beer.” The man was embarrassed and told the bird to hush, “Shut up. This ain’t the bar; it’s the church.” The bird looked around and said, “AWWK! AWWK! Same old crowd, same old crowd.”
Today’s Gospel lesson deals with the difficulty in telling the difference between the good seed and the bad seed, the wheat and the weeds, the saints and the sinners. Always and forever, near as I can tell, the saints and sinners look like the same old crowd. Many times in the history of the church, the good people have tried very hard to separate themselves from the bad people.
In Jesus’ story, the master tells the workers to wait, to not even try to “weed out” the good from the bad. This story is not about farming techniques. It is about realizing that only God can judge and that we are called upon to withhold judgment and treat one another with respect. Because, and this is the really important point, there is no such thing as separating the good from the bad in this life. As reformer Martin Luther put it “we are all Saint and Sinner at the same time.”
We know this is true – about ourselves as much as about others. We know that most of us, most of the time, are decent people, but we’re not really saintly, we don’t really live up to the ideals and standards we set for ourselves. We all slip, we all fall, we all sin. In THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO, Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote, “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” Yes, indeed. The line separating good and evil, the wheat and the weeds, the good seed and the bad seed, the saints and the sinners; does not go between us; it goes right through the middle of each o us.
This is why Jesus counseled patience in dealing with others, others in the church, and others in the community and in the world. All of us are, we hope, growing and maturing in our faith.
Yet none of us is a finished product. So, between now, which is today, and then, what our text calls “the harvest,” and the Creed refers to when it says, "He shall come again to judge the living and the dead" - what is it that we, the church, are called to do if we are not called to cull out "the bad" from among us?
Well, we are in fact called to be sowers of good seed. We, the church, as the followers of Christ, are called to announce to the world that God has set up the Kingdom of Heaven, and that it is a kingdom of Grace, not Judgement; it is a kingdom of Mercy, not Law, it is a kingdom of Love, not Hate. We are called to let the world know that God has sent a remedy into this world to deal with our frequent sinfulness, and that remedy is Jesus the Christ. God knew that we, all of us, each of us, were weeds! Sinners! And God knew that we could not fix ourselves, so God sent Jesus to live and die and rise again - so that our sins could be forgiven and; so that we could live each day as forgiven sinners and sometime saints; so that we could, like our prodigal Savior, carelessly spread about the Good News of God's love to others.
And the great sign and seal and symbol of that great Kingdom of Salvation where all are welcome and none are excluded is the meal we are about to receive, the Holy Communion.
I love going to family reunions; mine, my wife’s, anybody’s. I love to see the strange collection of people who gather together to visit, to catch up, to care about one another, to eat together because they are connected by blood or marriage. I love to see the good and the bad, the wheat and the weeds, the good seed and the bad seed: all together, all accepted, all welcome and all at the table. Everybody comes and we’re glad to see them.
It is not by accident that the Bible refers to church as the “bride of Christ,” and the heavenly banquet as the “marriage feast of the lamb.” We, the church, are those who gather together because we are connected to God and each other by blood and marriage – the blood of the cross and the marriage of the church to Christ. When we gather around the church’s table, it is a family reunion, a re-connection, a remembering, bringing together the members of the Body of Christ, as the beloved people of God. Everybody’s welcome – and we are glad to see them. You know; one of these days, we’re going to get to heaven and we’ll look around and we'll start laughing when we see someone there whom we did not expect to make it, “Good Lord, what are you doing here!” And they’ll be laughing when they see us. And they'll say the same.
And somewhere in the distance we’ll hear a loud voice call out, “Awwk! Awwk! Same Old Crowd. Same Old Crowd!
Amen and Amen