July 20, 2008
The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost (Year A)
Genesis 28:10-19a; Psalm 139:1-11, 22-23; Romans 8:12-25;
Matthew 13:24-30. 36-43
Last week during church I was lying flat on my back, listening to our presiding Bishop Katherine preach at Salisbury Cathedral in
So this morning we have two lessons I really love, the story of Jacob and the beautiful words of the psalm. The wheat and the tares story always makes me a bit nuts, as do most of the agricultural references for the kingdom. I simply don’t think it gardening terms so they do not speak to me as much as some of the other parables. But having these other two lessons to think about and to frame how I read that gospel is really a gift, a gift to the whole communion and, of course, to all the denominations who choose to follow the common lectionary. All of us struggle with these lessons together.
The story of Jacob, Jacob the liar. Jacob the deceiver, Jacob, mommy’s pet/favorite, Jacob the thief, Jacob the coward! It is that Jacob who has stolen his brother’s birthright, lied to his father, deceived his father with a hairy stick, colluded with his mother against his brother. That Jacob! That Jacob sleeps! That Jacob, who knew how to look after his own interests, pulled up a rock and took a nap. And in that nap God, who, if the psalm is to be believed, God searched him out and knew him, that God searched him out and came to him in the dream.
Now that God was not stupid or unknowing; that God knew exactly how deceptive and dishonest Jacob had been and probably was to the core of his being if further stories about him are true. But God in God’s infinite wisdom kept God‘s promise to Abraham through him anyway: his offspring will be as “the dust of the earth,” said God, ever plentiful. And you know, we are.
We and all those others from the World Wide Anglican Communion (WWAC) and the others who use the common lectionary and those others who choose scripture to preach on differently, we are all the children of the dust God promised would follow.
What is interesting to me about Jacob is not so much that he was a liar and a cheat and God used him anyway – it seems to me that is the human condition, to be imperfect – but that Jacob who thought he could make his own destiny by trickery and theft was still astute enough and perceptive enough, even if in a dream, to see the hand of God, to recognize an encounter with God, his first encounter with God. Do we always so perceptively recognize God encountering us?
And somehow that encounter changed him. I wish I could say he was an upright citizen from then on, but that simply would not be the truth. But he did, from that point on, at least consider the role God was playing in all his adventurous, conniving ways. God did indeed know him, even “the words on his lips” and God’s presence could not be escaped.
And God did not send him to the fires of hell as the gospels might indicate. Instead God used the part of him that was good and holy to propagate the world with followers.
So is the moral of this story that we do not need to be honest and forthright? Is the moral of this story that the bad guys who look out after themselves often win? Well, alas, that is true! But that, of course, is not the point of the story at all, and certainly not of this particular combination of stories that we have in the lessons today. I would say the moral of the story is God redeems even those who don’t ask for redemption, that nothing we can do can separate us from the love of God. Nothing! God’s intention is to be in relationship with all people. And God will seek us out and find us, even while we are taking a nap in the desert if necessary, so that we might know God as intimately and as profoundly and frankly, as lovingly as God knows each of us.
The story of the wheat and the weeds speaks to me this morning of the truth of being human, the good and the bad grow together within us. We are all capable of doing good and we are all capable of not following God. And frankly, we are all capable of pointing out the other’s weeds while hiding our own. If we are loud enough about what the other guy is doing wrong, then maybe we will distract God from seeing us when we put the hairy stick in our father’s grasp and claim it is our own skin.
And I sometimes think the conflict in the WWAC is like that. If we can point a finger at the others, then perhaps our own failings will be overlooked. If we can rank the other’s sins as so lethal as to destroy the Communion, then we can diminish the severity of our own. Some say if the gays would stop being gay, then we could live as we always did. They made the Communion split apart. Others say if the conservatives would allow there to be justice, God’s justice, then the Communion would not split apart. Each side is entrenched when, in truth, each side needs to be wrestling with God on their own for their own shortcomings, trusting that indeed God does know them and that no one can flee from the presence of the Spirit, no one.
And that we will flourish, both sides, all of us and everyone in between, we will flourish filled with wheat and filled with weeds, side by side, not because one side is the wheat and one side the weeds, but because all of us contain both, every field, every harvest, every human being.
And the salvation from that very human condition is not in the least teeniest bit dependent upon any of us or anything we do or don’t do, rather it is the gift of the One who knows us, the One who seeks us out, the One meets us in our dreams and in the quiet recesses of our souls.
The good news this week is that we do not need to point fingers at others or worry about our own self righteousness. God loves us, knows us, seeks us, redeems us. The hard news this week is that God knows. God knows all about us. The even harder news is that God knows about those others we have always thought of as weeds and redeems them first; God meets them in their dreams and the recesses of their souls too.
We have two choices then. We can celebrate our common humanity, or we can grow ever more divided trying to do God’s redeeming work of love for God by trying to determine who is in and who is out of the fires of hell at the end of the age.
Truthfully – and this may be heresy – I am banking on there being no fire for I am hoping that the good news really is true, and that I can be redeemed, flawed as I am. And so I will live to delight in the company I get to keep in heaven for there will be folks there I am not expecting and who were not expecting me. Together we will struggle with the words of God and follow where we are lead. Together redeemed. Together loved. Together, fully human, full of wheat, and full of weeds. Together.
Amen.
The Rev. Dr. Gale Davis Morris
Church of the Good Shepherd