Thompson's Blog

The Bread of Life

Matthew 20:1-16

1 “For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. 2 After agreeing with the laborers for the usual daily wage, he sent them into his vineyard. 3 When he went out about nine o’clock, he saw others standing idle in the marketplace; 4 and he said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’ So they went. 5 When he went out again about noon and about three o’clock, he did the same. 6 And about five o’clock he went out and found others standing around; and he said to them, ‘Why are you standing here idle all day?’ 7 They said to him, ‘Because no one has hired us.’ He said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard.’ 8 When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, ‘Call the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first.’ 9 When those hired about five o’clock came, each of them received the usual daily wage. 10 Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each of them also received the usual daily wage. 11 And when they received it, they grumbled against the landowner, 12 saying, ‘These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.’ 13 But he replied to one of them, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? 14 Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. 15 Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?’ 16 So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”

I don’t guess we’ll ever figure out how to create the perfect order for our society. Hopefully the political pendulum will continue to swing back and forth in a civil manner. This parable doesn’t resolve the issue of how our economy should operate, but Jesus sure wanted us to wrestle with the issue. I think he wanted us to do some rethinking about the way things operate and to consider how we might better operate. He told this parable to disrupt the economic expectations of his day, and I suspect he wants us to do the same.

Now there are theologians who argue that this parable has nothing to do with money, and everything to do with the conflict between the Israelites and the Christians. Between those who were the original children of God (represented by those who were hired early in the day) and those who were newly invited to feast at the table of God (represented by those who were hired at the end of the day).

Of course whether this parable represents a theological or an economic conflict, the real issue is how we deal with the conflict between grace and justice. And there’s some serious tension between these two pillars of our faith. As people of faith we embrace the importance of fairness and justice, but we also recognize the value of unearned love and acceptance. The bread of heaven comes in a variety of forms, and we need to value all of the ways in which it arrives.

On a theological level, I think we Christians are pretty happy with the idea of newcomers being equally welcomed to the table of the Lord, so I don’t think it’s as helpful for us to think of this parable as being an allegory of the gentile/Jew debate. We gentiles who were invited late in the day aren’t very threatened by that kind of reading of the parable, and if it’s not threatening to our worldview that’s probably not how Jesus wants us to read it. Jesus told parables in order to challenge short-sightedness, and if the story doesn’t cause us some discomfort we probably aren’t reading it right.

If, however, you are currently feeling the full weight of life’s difficulty, I welcome you to identify with those who only worked an hour and were provided full pay for the day. Jesus always had good news for those who were the most troubled. Unlike the scribes and Pharisees of his day who heaped additional burdens on those who were the most troubled, Jesus had the most compassion for those who were having the hardest time.

This work/compensation issue is a sensitive one. It evokes passion in some powerful ways. This is one of those issues that just doesn’t come up in polite conversation. People don’t generally talk about how much they get paid for the work they do. Sometimes people don’t want others to know how little they make. Sometimes people don’t want others to know how much they make. This is a sensitive issue, and there probably aren’t too many people who feel like they are getting exactly what they deserve. I’m guessing this has always been a delicate issue, and Jesus stepped right into the middle of it.

How money is distributed has been the source of a lot of bad behavior over the planet for as long as people can remember. You might say the conflict between Cain and Able was over the distribution of wealth. God valued Abel’s sacrifice more than Cain’s, and the implication of the story is that Cain killed Abel out of envy or jealousy. It’s an abbreviated story and not easy to fully interpret, but clearly there was some conflict over who had what. Jesus knew how reactive we humans are about our financial situations, but that didn’t deter him from bringing it up. Jesus wasn’t interested in promoting propriety – he wanted us to understand the things that get in the way of our communion with God.

Once again, we are presented with some funny math from Jesus. Last week we were told to forgive our offenders an unfathomable number of times. This week we are presented with the story of a really wacky compensation system. We have here the story of a landowner who paid the same wage to people who spent wildly different amounts of time in the field, but the scoundrel in the story is not the landowner. The way Jesus told the story, the scandalous behavior came from the men who worked all day and complained that it wasn’t fair, but their complaints were dismissed by the landowner as having no merit.

It’s not hard for any of us to see how those who had been working all day were coming from, but once again, Jesus was wanting us to see that the Kingdom of God functions with a different set of values.  This story is designed to blurr our understanding of who is most deserving in the eyes of God. I think it serves to challenge our insistence on fairness when we think we are the most deserving, and it highlights God’s desire for all of us to get what we need.

I think this parable sort of parallels the debate we’re currently having over the issue of healthcare in our nation. I’m not claiming I know how to fix our national healthcare system, but I regret the way in which this debate has turned in to a battle between political parties, and in that sense the issues get buried under the amount of debris each party can dump on the other. Of course apart from the political conflict this issue has fostered, I think it highlights the same conflict that we see illustrated in this parable. The issue is, who is going to pay for something that some people need more than others? Should our system operate in a manner that’s fair or gracious?

Of course the miracle would be to find a system that’s both fair and gracious, but that’s an illusive concept right now. Adequate healthcare for all people seems to mean that healthy people pay for more than they need in order for those who can’t afford to cover the costs of their conditions. I think we all generally get that notion, but there are a lot of different ways to carve this problem up, and it’s hard not to get invested in the plan that’s the most fair to where you’re standing.

We don’t live in a world that’s fair. We all know that good fortune is a fickle friend and hard times are distributed in an equally unpredictable manner. We all contribute to our good or bad fortune in some significant ways, but we don’t get to pick our parents, our bodies, our brain-function, our place of origin or many other things that significantly define the course of our lives. We don’t all get a fair shake in life, and that’s unfortunate, but the unfairness that we encounter in life will only prevent us from abiding in the Kingdom of God if we are more focused on fairness than grace.

I believe Jesus told this parable to illustrate the fundamental element of grace that enables any of us to live in relationship with God. None of us have earned God’s favor. The Kingdom of God doesn’t function like a pickup game on the playground. You don’t get picked to be on God’s team because of your extraordinary ability to hurl a fast ball at evil. And I don’t think he wanted us to operate under the illusion that any of us do work that is so much more valuable than the work that others have been called to do.

This is a hard thing for us to get our minds around. We live in a world that sort of worships the work of some people and disregards the work of others. As a person who works in a position that’s relatively well compensated I can testify that we don’t live in a world that’s fair. I can get a little self-righteous about my modest compensation when I compare myself with the Joel Osteens of the world or even some of my United Methodist peers who have larger numbers by their names on the salary sheet, but I’m humbled by my knowledge of the the sacrifice of others I know who are doing God’s work in very private and even uncompensated ways.

Jesus didn’t want us to get confused about who is the most important in the Kingdom of God. This parable points to the fact that there isn’t a place for privilege in the Kingdom of God. None of us are invited into relationship with God because of our gifts, graces, or heroic efforts. Our place in the community of God is rooted in the gracious initiatives of God. The church needs us all to do what we can, but it doesn’t hinge upon any of us.

There is no shortage of jobs available for those of us who choose to follow Jesus, and the rewards are wildly abundant, but we don’t need to mistake our positions in society with our standing in God’s Kingdom. It’s easy to get these things confused, but today’s parable helps me to see pretty clearly how Jesus sorts us out, and it’s nothing like the way the marketplace generally operates.

I’m not entirely comforted by this passage. In some ways I identify more with the worker who went out first thing in the morning. It’s not that I feel like I’ve been at work longer than others, but those of us who’ve been given a fair shake at life are sort of like those men who were hired early. Those who were hired early in the day didn’t spend most of the day wondering where their daily bread was going to come from. A sense of security can create a sense of expectation, and maybe even a sense of entitlement – which is an attitude that quenches an appetite for the unexpected grace of God.

This is a challenging passage of scripture for those of us who have been dealt a fair hand, but I also know it’s the best news any of us will ever get. Because what Jesus wanted us all to know is that the bread of life will never run out. Fairness is going to fail us all at some point. The time will come for all of us when aren’t going to get what we expect or even what we may deserve, and that’s when God’s going to provide what we need. It may not be much in the eyes of the world, but God knows what to deliver when there’s nothing else to count on.

The Kingdom of God is ordered in a far different manner than the society in which we live, and this is a good thing. May we have the eyes to see and the hearts to understand how God chooses to distribute the true bread that comes from heaven. And may we feast on that bread now and forevermore!

Thanks be to God.

Amen

The Mathematics of God

Matthew 18:21-35

 21 Then Peter came and said to him, “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” 22 Jesus said to him, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times. 23 “For this reason the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves. 24 When he began the reckoning, one who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him; 25 and, as he could not pay, his lord ordered him to be sold, together with his wife and children and all his possessions, and payment to be made. 26 So the slave fell on his knees before him, saying, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.’ 27 And out of pity for him, the lord of that slave released him and forgave him the debt. 28 But that same slave, as he went out, came upon one of his fellow slaves who owed him a hundred denarii; and seizing him by the throat, he said, ‘Pay what you owe.’ 29 Then his fellow slave fell down and pleaded with him, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you.’ 30 But he refused; then he went and threw him into prison until he would pay the debt. 31 When his fellow slaves saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their lord all that had taken place. 32 Then his lord summoned him and said to him, ‘You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. 33 Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?’ 34 And in anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt. 35 So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”

If you’ve ever spent a night in a cabin with 8 to 10 middle-school boys you begin to wonder how literally you can take this advice from Jesus about forgiving someone 77 times. I can remember being the chaperone at such a retreat and felt certain my capacity to forgive was approaching that magic number. Can you start pounding on someone if they offend you 78 times? I don’t expect that’s what Jesus had in mind, but if I ever find myself in a confined space with an abundance of unrulely boys I’m going to let them know that I’m not responsible for my behavior if they manage to offend my sensibilities 78 times.

There’s actually some debate among the Greek scholars as to whether Jesus said we should forgive someone 77 times or 70 times 7 times, but the point is pretty clear, and the point is he didn’t intend for us to keep count. I think we all know the importance of not keeping such counts. If you’re counting you’re going to have trouble

I used to watch that sitcom, “Home Improvement” pretty regularly, and I think I’ll always remember what Tim Allen said to one of his friends when he found out his friend was about to get married. Tim Allen didn’t give him any advice, he just said, Let me hear how well you can say “I’m sorry”.

I’ve never shared that line with any of the young people who have asked me to officiate at their wedding, but I’m guessing it’s a familiar phrase within most marriages. There’s that famous line from the movie, “Love Story”, where the woman says to the man she loves, Love means never having to say your sorry. And that’s a great line in a movie where the significant other dies young, but I’m more inclined to think Time Allen is right. Love means you’re always needing to say your sorry. I’m not sure what couples talk about if nobody is ever sorry about anything.

Of course the appeal for forgiveness is the easy side of this equation. Now it’s not always easy to acknowledge fault and seek forgiveness, but I find it to be so much easier to plead for forgiveness than to grant it. I want understanding in response to my failures. I want retribution when others commit offenses against me.

I really like the way this issue of forgiveness is examined in these verses. I think Peter was thinking he was being very generous in his estimation of how many times we should make the effort to forgive. He probably thought he was being wildly generous when he asked if we should forgive someone seven times, but when asked to establish a policy, Jesus stretched the number until it was off the chart.

There is so much truth in the parable Jesus told to illustrate the importance and the difficulty of forgiveness. I think the first scenario in this parable is one that we can all appreciate. The notion of a king forgiving the debt of a servant is like the plot of a Disney movie, but what those of us who live in a world of dollars and cents don’t immediately recognize is the extent of the debt that this king forgave. The amount of money that this servant owed was an unfathomable amount of money. Ten thousand talents was like bazillion dollars. It’s inconceivable that a servant could have built up such debt, but that isn’t the issue. The point is that the servant had no chance of repaying what he owed, but instead of punishing the servant in a crushing way, the king had compassion and gave him another chance.

There’s some hyperbole going on here. The extent of the forgiveness of debt is far beyond anything imaginable, but that’s the mindset Jesus wanted us to have in regard to forgiveness. We aren’t to be calculating when it comes to forgiving. This isn’t an easy thing to incorporate in to our economy. It would be hard for any business to stay afloat if they were to be so generous, but Jesus didn’t want us to have hard and fast rules about the amount of forgiveness we should exercise. He wanted us to be more forgiving than what seems reasonable.

This story of the master granting this unfathomable degree of forgiveness is a nice story, and I like to think it illustrates the way God will treat us all. It reaffirms the concept of our world being in the hands of a benevolent God who understands our capacity to get in over our head, and who chooses to give us a lift when we are unable to help ourselves. It’s a reassuring concept, but the story doesn’t end there. There’s this next episode that sort of shatters my sense of wellbing.

The servant who had been forgiven that unfathomable amount of money refuses to forgive his fellow servant who owes him a couple of bucks. This was some ugly behavior, and when the master hears about this he comes down on the unforgiving servant in a relatively satisfying manner. This feels like some nice justice, and it makes sense that this greedy servant would get what’s coming to him, but there’s something a little unsettling about this.

I think there are times when we all like the idea of there being some sound accounting taking place. We want those people we know who have done ourselves and others wrong to get what’s coming to them. But I’m not sure how to mesh the end of this story with the beginning of the story. Clearly there is this point that gets delivered quite clearly at the end of the story that there are some terrible consequences in store for us if we fail to be as forgiving toward others as God is forgiving of us, but the math doesn’t really add up.

At the beginning of this passage Jesus tells his disciples to be endlessly forgiving, but it ends by portraying this servant getting pounded because he immediately failed to be as forgiving as he should have been. And the final line is that this will be the case for us all if we don’t forgive our brothers and our sisters from our heart.

This is a powerful little parable. On one hand it reinforces the notion that there is no limit to the amount we can be forgiven, it calls for us to exercise unlimited forgiveness, and then it points to God’s willingness to exercise swift, eternal, and painful punishment. This is some funny math. There’s unlimited forgiveness in the kingdom of God, but it’s possible to have an attitude that is virtually unforgivable.

I’m pretty sure Jesus was sort of messing with us in this parable. It seems to me that there are two messages in this parable and each message sort of cancels out the other. It portrays God as being unfathomably forgiving and in doing so to reinforce our need to be have that same attitude toward others, but it also portrays God as being pretty quick to condemn someone who doesn’t live up to the proper standard of forgiveness.

On one hand, I think Jesus wanted to keep us a little off balance. Not unbalanced in a bad way, but I don’t think he ever wanted us to become so sure of ourselves that we become quick to judge other people and to decide who is in for what at the end of time. Clearly the threat of eternal pain can serve to motivate proper behavior, but I don’t think anyone is ever really motivated to love other people in order to avoid endless eternal torture.

I think Jesus wanted us to see the value of operating with boundless forgiveness. I think Jesus wanted us to recognize that this is what will enable our community to flourish. Without forgiveness, we are almost guaranteed to do ourselves in. If we don’t function with an abundance of forgiveness, our trespasses will do nothing but escalate and our community will deteriorate. Learning to forgive from the heart is truly the fuel for lasting and loving relationships.

But there is this other message about the need to not take forgiveness for granted. Forgiveness isn’t just a get-out-of-jail-free card. It’s not a form of divine enabling to do whatever we please. Jesus wanted us to exercise forgiveness in a boundless manner, but he also wanted us to have some fear of those privileges being revoked.

In our passage this morning, Peter was asking how much forgiveness they should be expected to exercise within their own religious community. And the answer was that it requires a heroic level effort to maintain relationships within a caring body of people. We know what Jesus said about the need to be insanely forgiving, but we also know that this hasn’t played out so well within the Christian community. The number of wars, factions, denominations, sects, and different United Methodist Churches is an indication of the difficulty of exercising forgiveness as liberally as Jesus called for it to be practiced. So it’s not hard to see how difficult it is to forgive people who live far away and ascribe to different ways of living and serving God.

It’s pretty hard for me to imagine how world tension is going to deescalate in the years to come, but I think it would be helpful if those of us who ascribe to Christianity would hear what Jesus had to say about the value of forgiveness – which is about the hardest thing we are challenged by Jesus to do. Politically speaking, I think it’s probably easier to call for people to engage in life-threatening operations than it is to try to understand our differences and to exercise forgiveness.

Our parable points to this truth that I think we’ve all experienced on a personal level, which is that forgiveness is a wonderful thing as long as you’re on the receiving end of it, but it is an unfathomably hard thing to exercise when you are on the giving end. We want others to understand why we found it necessary to do what we did, but somebody needs to pay when harm has come our way. It’s a natural instinct, but it’s not what Jesus taught us to do.

Jesus wants us to see the way in which God measures things, and it’s not normal math. What’s most valuable to God is not what we generally think will give us the most satisfaction – but it is the thing that will bring us the greatest sense of peace. What Jesus had to say about the value of forgiveness may well be some of the most challenging words that we hear from him, but the reason he instructed us in this way was because he wanted us to find our way into the good grace of God, and out of the pain of living in service to ourselves.

It’s a hard teaching, it’s a powerful teaching, and it’s the source of true peace.

May God provide us the grace we need to practice the forgiveness that we have already received.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

Holy Diplomacy

Matthew 18:15-20

15 “If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one. 16 But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. 17 If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. 18 Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. 19 Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. 20 For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”

The first thing I want to say about this passage of scripture is what it’s not. It’s not advice on how to get your fellow church member or even your pastor to repent and do what you expect them to do. This is not to say that I or anyone else in the church is incapable of behaving badly, but the intention of this teaching was not to provide a practical strategy on how to get other people to act right. I’ll try to say what I think this passage is about in a moment, but I first want to let you know what I don’t think it’s about. And it’s important for us to think about this because it sort of sounds like a way of getting what you want from other people. This is not to say that it’s fine to behave badly, but I don’t think Jesus was wanting us to understand how we can get our personal offenders to do what we want them to.

In fact the oldest manuscripts don’t include the words: against you in verse 15. The oldest texts just say: If another member of the church sins, go and point out … The original teaching doesn’t seem to have been about addressing personal violations. At some point along the way some scribe decided it would be helpful to turn this in to advice on how to address interpersonal conflicts, but originally this teaching seems to have addressed those situations where someone was behaving in a way that violated everyone’s sensibilities.

In all honesty, it’s not easy to see how that more general sense of misbehavior translates in to our day and age. It takes a lot to distinguish yourself from the average pack of sinners. And if you are compelled to take a step beyond the normal range of bad behavior – it’s probably not going to be a fellow church member who pulls you aside and points out to you that it’s not so good to make a name for yourself as a world-class sinner. If you do some extraordinary sinning its likely that it’s going to appear on youtube – along with lots of comments from people you’ve never met. We live in a far different society than Jesus did, and it affects the way we relate to each other, but there is an important principle here for us to observe.

On one level, this passage does come across as some straight forward advice on how to maintain proper behavior within the church, but on another level it raises the question of what kind of community the church is to be. Certainly we are to be a relatively well-behaved group of people who treat one another well, but Jesus didn’t just want us to understand how to control the behavior of one another, Jesus wanted us to understand how to maintain our relationships with each other. This isn’t an instruction on how to get people to quit behaving badly – it’s advice on how to promote reconciliation and to maintain a Christian community.

What we have here is some instruction on how to exercise holy diplomacy – which is a very satisfying phrase to say. Holy diplomacy – it just sounds like a good thing to do. Whether I am able to define what it is or not I feel good about sharing that phrase with you. Holy diplomacy is something I want to learn to practice, and I’m thinking you can spend a lifetime learning to exercise this ancient wisdom.

It’s worth noting that the lesson from the Old Testament that’s recommended for us to read this week is perhaps the most famous case of holy diplomacy ever revealed to the world — the story of the Passover. The original telling of that story is found in the 12^th chapter of the Book of Exodus. That’s where you find the instructions God gave Moses and Aaron to give to the people of Israel for the final meal they were to have in Egypt before God led them out of slavery.

The people of Israel were instructed to select a lamb of a certain age, to gather in family groups at twilight on a particular night, and to prepare that lamb for dinner. After they slaughtered the lamb they were to smear some of it’s blood on the doorpost of their house, and then they were to cook that lamb in a very specific manner. God provided instructions for how to cook that lamb, what they were to eat along with that lamb, and what they were to wear to this dinner. It was to be a meal to be remembered.

Of course they would remember this meal because of what happened after dinner – which is when God sent the angel of death over Egypt to strike down the first-born males of all the people and the animals in the households that didn’t have the blood of the lamb smeared on the doorpost of their houses. It’s a gruesome story, but it wasn’t an arbitrary act on the part of God.

The events of that evening followed many months of diplomacy. Moses and Aaron had provided the Egyptian Pharoah with some very persuasive reasons to let the people of Israel go, but he wouldn’t do it, so God arranged this final dinner in Egypt. And to this day the people of Israel – wherever they may be living – are to prepare a very similar meal on that particular evening of the year and to recall what God did for them.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a meal that is able to pull all communities of the world together. It functions as a very particularly Jewish celebration, and that’s understandable, but the Passover celebration isn’t something that people outside of the Judeo-Christian community find to be very satisfying. I can understand why the non-Jewish world takes offense at this, but I don’t believe the intent of this meal was to establish Israel as a privileged community. I believe God’s intention was for this meal to remind the people of Israel of their salvation. This meal was to remind them that their deliverance was not earned or deserved, but graciously provided. And they were never to forget that. God didn’t act on behalf of the people of Israel because they already knew how to act – God provided them with a way out of slavery in order for them to experience redemption and to become redeeming people.

I believe God established the people of Israel to be a source of redemption for the world, but I’m not saying this is exactly the way it has worked out. As surely as we followers of Jesus Christ are not always as Christlike as we can possibly be, the people of Israel haven’t always lived up to their calling to be the light of the world.

The nation of Israel has a well documented history of not doing what God expected, but God has a longer history of providing redemption in ugly situations, and certainly the current state of the world isn’t unredeemable. I really don’t know what needs to happen in the Middle East right now, but it’s clearly a place in need of some holy diplomacy.

The story of the Passover is good background for what we have in today’s scripture. The community that Jesus established is to be a community that understands how to deal with unredeemed people. We are to be a community of people who make a great effort to redeem lost people. And even when people seem to be totally out of bounds we aren’t to totally reject them – we are to treat them as Gentiles or tax collectors. And I think we all remember how Jesus treated such people – with grace and hospitality.

The world is a hard place to fix. The difficulty of that undertaking becomes clear when you think about what it takes to retrieve a lost friend, but the starting point of every act of redemption is to remember who it is that calls us all to life.

What Jesus was instructing us to do in this passage is not to ramp up the pressure on people who are somehow living out of bounds, but to be relentless in our efforts to achieve reconciliation. The easy thing is to give up on people, and Jesus wants us all to stay in touch.

I’m not sure how you translate these particular instructions on how we should resolve conflict in to actual church policy. Perhaps one thing Jesus was saying is that whenever two or three have gathered in his name you have achieved the most optimal church size. It seems like things get complicated whenever you get more than four or five people involved in an undertaking.

But the more people you have the more important it becomes to engage in holy diplomacy. And the primary principle of holy diplomacy is to remember that none of us stand in the position of God, but when we gather in the name of Jesus – when we seek to be the body of Christ – Jesus is with us and Jesus is there to help us find our way.

Jesus instructs us to be honest with each other, to be clear with each other, to be relentless in our efforts to be redeeming to each other, and always to be kind to one another. The essence of holy diplomacy is to remember the grace that has been extended to us and to extend that to others. This is the essence of what the Israelites were to remember, and it’s the heart of what Jesus has instructed us to do.

To live as a disciple of Jesus Christ is to live a life of holy diplomacy. It’s not easy, but it sounds like such a good thing to do – and it is a good thing to do. It’s what holds us together. It’s what sends us out.

It’s what God has revealed, and it’s what we are called to practice. It will enable our church to thrive, and it will enable our world to survive.

We’ve been provided the wisdom we need to do more than survive and may God help us to use it!

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

Do What?!!

Matthew 16:21-28

21 From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. 22 And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” 23 But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” 24 Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 25 For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. 26 For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life? 27 “For the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay everyone for what has been done. 28 Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”

One thing I do that I feel pretty good about is giving blood. It’s not on the level of a heroic thing, but I’m pretty committed to it. I go in about as often as I can and give a pint. I’ve got what one of the Red Cross nurses once described as big juicy veins. It’s easy for them to tap into me and I hardly feel it. It doesn’t take much time, but you’re a captive audience for a while, and some of the phlebotomists like to talk while they’re doing their work. I prefer the quiet ones, but I don’t ignore the talkative ones – you don’t want to annoy the person who’s putting a needle in your arm.

I dropped by the Red Cross Blood Center in Jonesboro late one afternoon not too long ago to donate, and after going through all the preliminaries you have to go through I was laying there on the table with the needle in my arm and my blood flowing in to the bag. That’s the quickest part of the process, and it’s sort of like down time for the technicians. This nurse wasn’t particularly talkative, but to pass the time she asked me if I was getting off work for the day. I wasn’t exactly sure how to answer her. Sometimes I know when I’m working or not, but I’m often in sort of a gray area in regard to being at work. I think I said my work day was about over, and then she asked me what I did.

That’s a question that makes me a little nervous to answer in a situation like that because you can’t get away if need be. As we all know, there are some people with powerful religious convictions about one thing or another, and I like to be able to extract myself from conversations that clearly aren’t going to go well. I was stuck, but I told her I was the pastor of the Newport First United Methodist Church and she responded by telling me that I didn’t look like a minister. It sort of surprised me that she shared her opinion so freely, but I assured her it was true. She wasn’t being critical, and I didn’t take any offense, but I thought it was sort of interesting comment.

I’m not exactly sure what she saw that didn’t look very ministerial. It’s not unusual to see a preacher wearing blue jeans these days, but there was something about the way I looked that didn’t fit her preacher profile. And in all honesty – I’m not sure what a preacher is supposed to look like. Or act like for that matter. Sometimes I think I know, but often I’m sure I don’t know. And in my opinion, anybody that thinks following Jesus is an obvious undertaking isn’t really paying attention. I’m not sure how she could tell by looking at me that I’m not perfectly clear about everything, and that I don’t offer easy answers to what I consider to be a complex undertaking, but she could see something about me that wasn’t normal for a preacher.

Unlike me, I think you could probably tell by looking at Peter that he was a preacher. Peter was a rock solid outspoken advocate. Jesus recognized that about Peter, and Jesus knew that Peter had love for God in his heart. Jesus had just announced that Peter was the keeper of the keys of God’s kingdom on earth. Peter was ready and willing to serve in that position, and he immediately blew it.

The first thing Peter did after Jesus endorsed him as the one the church was to follow was to pull Jesus aside and to tell Jesus that he was wrong about what he intended to do. Peter had a powerful presence. He was the kind of person people would look to and follow, and he also had the capacity to go barreling off in the wrong direction. Jesus told him he was a stumbling block and a spokesman for satan. The rock that was to be the foundation of the church immediately became a stumbling block.

And this is a story that makes me feel better about not being immediately recognizable as a preacher. I’m not saying that it’s best not to be an obvious advocate of Jesus Christ, but I am saying that following Jesus isn’t a sprint – it’s a marathon. You don’t get points for winning the first half of a game – it’s the score at the end that counts. This business of following Jesus isn’t as easy or as obvious as we want it to be. It’s the undertaking of a lifetime.

Jesus didn’t soft-peddle the difficulty of living as his disciple. Jesus was painfully clear about the cost of following him. Although I really don’t think Peter was put off by the sacrifice that discipleship would entail. Peter wasn’t a timid man. I don’t think it was the potential for pain that put him off, I just don’t think Peter trusted the strategy. I believe it was unfathomable to Peter that Jesus was going to save the world by walking in to the hands of his enemies. Peter would easily have gone in to battle for Jesus, but he couldn’t bear the thought of Jesus being killed by his enemies.

And I think we all understand this. The power of brute force is so much easier for us to understand than the power of love. We understand a show of force – we aren’t so quick to understand the power of love.

Now I know we’ve been talking and preaching about Jesus for more than 2000 years now. As much as we talk about Jesus and as popular as the Christian faith has become you would think that the power of love would be all we ever look to, but I think it remains as foreign to us as it was to Peter. We’re still looking to those more tangible forms of power to change our world and to establish God’s kingdom on earth. I’m not surprised that I don’t know what a preacher is supposed to look like – following Jesus often requires us to let go of the very things we think we need and of going in directions that make no sense. If I actually looked like a preacher who fully represented what it means to follow Jesus I would probably look a lot more like John the Baptist than a guy who could blend in anywhere on a casual dress Friday. Following Jesus isn’t a normal thing for average citizens. To follow Jesus is to go down an entirely different path than the one we would normally choose.

Jesus came to offer us the greatest opportunity – this opportunity to abide in the company of God – now and forever! And all we have to do to get it is to be willing to let of everything we’ve ever been inclined to think we need. Or as Jesus put it, If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.

This following Jesus business is tough. It’s a delicate balance. We are to love life, and we are to be willing to let it go. It might be easier if we were to live without any regard for family or community ties, but I don’t believe expected us to disregard our family and community responsibilities. I believe Jesus expected us to be fully engaged in this world – to love this world and all the people that we are fortunate enough to have in our lives – and to love God even more.

It’s not easy to live in this world and have our minds set on divine things, but this is our calling. As surely as Jesus needed to go to Jerusalem, there are times in our lives when we discern between the demands of human things and the path of divine things, but I don’t think this is an instruction for us to engage in a blind form of self-sacrifice. I think Jesus was very clear on why he went to Jerusalem. He didn’t go to Jerusalem because he was tired of dealing with the hassles of this world and he was ready to get it over with. He didn’t go because he had been outwitted by his opponents. He didn’t go because he didn’t want anyone else to get hurt. It seems to me that he went to Jerusalem because the opportunity had arisen for him to fully reveal the extent of God’s love for us, and that is what he came to do. He came to reveal the power of the love of God in the most powerful way possible. This is what he did and we’ve been trying to get our minds around this ever since.

Our calling isn’t to live miserable lives, but to find the richest form of happiness. Jesus’ instruction was for us to be more concerned with our souls than our bodies. Our souls are currently attached to our bodies, and while I don’t think Jesus wanted us to despise any part of this arrangement, I think he wanted us to see that there’s not much life in a body without a nourished soul.

It’s interesting to think about the way in which the recent flooding will affect the lives of the people who have lost so much. I’m guessing there are many people who will come to define their lives by the way they lived before the flood and the way they lived after the flood. Clearly this has been a devastating experience for literally millions of people, but I dare say the loss of so much stuff will result in a whole lot of spiritual gain. I’m guessing this will be an experience that will put a lot of people in touch with what’s truly important. I’m not saying that this flood is a good thing, but I am certain that some good things will come from it. There are some people who are going to find true life because their false lives got washed away.

This isn’t the kind of wisdom that we generally value. We don’t generally make our plans around finding opportunities to give ourselves away, but Jesus wanted us to understand the divine wisdom of sacrifice. One of the recent news accounts I saw on television accounts was of a man who was about to launch his new looking ski boat off a flooded road to go search for people who needed were stranded in their homes. I don’t know how it went for him, but it was touching to see someone who was willing to get their nice new boat all dinged up in order to help somebody. I wouldn’t be surprised if that didn’t turn out to be the best day he ever spent in that boat.

Of course Jesus doesn’t just want us to look like we know how to serve him. Jesus wants us to actually know what we need to do to find true life and to have the courage to follow him there. It can be frightening to seek the kind of abundant life that Jesus offers, but it’s good to remember that Jesus didn’t just go to Jerusalem to die – he went there because he knew what it means to truly live.

It doesn’t matter what we look like, but it makes a tremendous difference what we act like when opportunities arise for us to reject the petty demands of godless agendas and to give ourselves to those situations that offer abundant life. We don’t always have the wisdom to step in to those spiritually rich situations, but sometimes fifty inches of rain falls in two days, and we find ourselves waist deep in spiritual opportunity. You never know how the path to true life will present itself, but if we will learn to be suspicious of the wisdom of the world and to seek the wisdom of God we will find our way to the highest ground there is.

Thanks be to God.

Amen

Known By God

Matthew 16:13-20

13 Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” 14 And they said, “Some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” 15 He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” 16 Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” 17 And Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. 18 And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. 19 I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” 20 Then he sternly ordered the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.

It’s an interesting thing to me that Jesus placed so much responsibility on Peter. Peter clearly had leadership qualities. He dared go where others were hesitant to trod, but you can’t really say he had an excellent performance record. He was almost always the first person to jump out with a response to whatever Jesus said or did, but he frequently responded in a clearly appropriate way, and these failures even escalated after this moment in which Jesus declared Peter to be the rock on which he would build the church. The fact that such a flawed character serves as the foundation of the church probably explains a lot about why the church is the less than perfect institution we know it to be. But the church hasn’t expired, and this indicates to me that once again, Jesus knew what he was doing when he appointed Peter as our founding father.

What we have in our scripture reading for today is the dialogue that took place between Jesus and his disciples as Jesus came to see that Peter was the one to whom he would bequeath responsibility. Jesus knew that his days were numbered, and he didn’t want to leave his fledgling community leaderless. What this conversation reveals is what Jesus was primarily looking for in the person that he would entrust his organization. It’s not easy to discern exactly what Jesus was looking for, but clearly there’s something more essential than perfection when it comes to following Jesus.

This is a telling conversation. Jesus wanted to know what people were saying about him, and who they thought he was. Linking him with one of their national heroes was a complimentary thing on some level. By saying that some people saw him as John the Baptist, or Elijah, or Jeremiah the disciples were indicating to Jesus that people thought very highly of him. But Jesus didn’t just want to be revered by people. Jesus wasn’t wanting people to hope for a return to their perceived glory days of the past. Jesus wanted to be seen for who he was, and this is how Peter saw him. By saying he knew him to be the messiah, the Son of the Most High God, Peter was saying that he recognized that they were in new territory. Peter wasn’t looking to return to anything. He could see that through Jesus they had embarked on a new relationship with God.

There is a sense in which Jesus came to discover something when Peter said what he did. Jesus came to understand that God had spoken to Peter in a profound manner, and this was a moment of celebration for Jesus. It’s as if Jesus came to see that God was going to keep this thing going, and I’m sure this was good news to Jesus. I don’t think Jesus was asking a rhetorical question when he asked his disciples who they thought he was. I don’t think Jesus knew what they would say. They might very well have felt like everyone else – that he was just a new and somewhat improved version of someone they had seen before. I don’t think he expected Peter to pronounce him as the One whom God had sent to bring salvation to world in a new and unheard-of manner.

Peter had never had a profound grip on the message of Jesus. In fact Peter would continue to display a very flawed understanding and commitment, but what Jesus seemed to understand is that God was at work in Peter in a way that would exceed Peter’s capacity to do the right thing. Peter wasn’t perfect, but God was going to use him anyway, and Jesus could see this.

I think this is one of the best things I’ve come to discover about the Christian faith. My initial understanding was that our relationship with God depended upon our ability to be lovable and to perform well. This was probably more of a subconscious belief than an actual conviction, but in my early days I thought of Jesus as being more of an intimidating authoritarian figure than someone I actually wanted to know. I’m not exactly sure where I obtained this impression of Jesus, but it was before I actually did much examination of the way Jesus interacted with people. It was also before I met Lewis Chesser.

I’ve spoken of Lewis before. He was the United Methodist campus minister in Fayetteville when I was at the University of Arkansas. And Lewis did a wonderful job of portraying Jesus as someone that was not to be feared but to be embraced. He spoke of Jesus as someone who was much more interested in knowing us than in controlling us. Lewis made me think Jesus loved me for who I was. You might say Lewis helped me get over my fear of not pleasing God, and one way he did that was by not pretending to be a very perfect person.

Lewis was a good person, but he could be pretty salty, and he had attracted a motley crew. The people who hung around the Wesley Foundation weren’t very churchy people, but it was a place where people were able to speak freely about Jesus, and I found the atmosphere to be very stimulating and in a significant way – life changing.

It was my experience at the Wesley Foundation and my relationship with Lewis and other people that I met there that made me want to go to seminary and to learn more about Jesus. Lewis is someone I’ve remained in touch with and I continue to be touched by him and his mistakes. He told me a story a couple of years ago that reveals the lovely way in which God often uses our less than perfect selves to do some godly work.

Lewis left the Wesley Foundation while I was in seminary and served a few different churches in western Arkansas. He was the pastor in Charleston for several years right before he retired and moved to Ft. Smith. There was a couple from Charleston that would drop by and see Lewis and his wife, Mazie, whenever they were in Ft. Smith and Lewis had a hard time remembering the man’s name. His name was Don, but Lewis inevitably called him Bob. Lewis said he always had a little distress when they came by because he knew he always got his name wrong. He got to where he would never say his name until he heard someone else speak his name.

So one day this couple came by and they had gotten some bad news about the man’s health. He had been diagnosed with some kind of cancer and they were really distressed. They visited for a while and as they prepared to leave Lewis offered to say a prayer. He said they actually got on their knees and he began to pray. Unfortunately, no one had mentioned the man’s name, but Lewis felt like he needed to be specific in his prayer, so he took a chance. Among other things, Lewis asked God to provide strength and healing for Bob. As soon as he finished the prayer Mazie said, Lewis, it’s not Bob, it’s Don! Of course this came as no surprise to Lewis, but before he could say anything, Don said, That’s ok, God knows me as Bob.

There are a number of stories about the ways in which Lewis provided opportunities for God’s grace to sweep in and redeem difficult circumstances, but has come to be my favorite one. God doesn’t love us and use us because we know what to do. God uses us in spite of our ability to perform, and I’m telling you, as a preacher count on this. If I didn’t trust that the Holy Spirit is on hand to help you hear something better than what I know to say I wouldn’t have the wherewithal to show up and preach. I count on God’s ability to take whatever we try to do and to turn it in to something greater.

Peter is a great model for us. Peter didn’t understand Jesus perfectly, but he had experienced who he was on a significant level, and he was transformed by Jesus. Peter loved Jesus, and he trusted that God was at work in Jesus in a new way. He didn’t know where they were going, and he failed to be as faithful as he wanted to be, but God’s perfect forgiveness would be revealed through Peter’s most profound failure. Jesus found his perfect leader in the life of this man who didn’t always do what he should have done, but who knew to look to God to make things right. I’m sure Peter learned to be more careful about what he binded and what he loosed because of his various forms of failure and forgiveness.

Peter is the perfect rock for us to continue to build upon. We all have a lot in common with Peter when it comes to being less than perfect, but we are all as capable as Peter of being powerful witnesses to the redeeming love of God and to serve as evidence of God’s ability to use our feeble efforts to produce amazing results.

God knows when we are trying to make ourselves available, and sometimes we actually do muster up the courage to do the right thing, and when that happens it’s a beautiful thing. Peter wasn’t the only person who has ever been inspired to say or do the right thing at the right moment. Sometimes, like Peter, we get it right and we bring glory to God and give Jesus something to celebrate.

We are all known by God in ways that we don’t even know ourselves, and I believe that when we seek to love and serve God we are doing God’s work regardless of what it may look like to others. This is another one of the mysteries of our faith. Sometimes what appears to be failure on earth is a victory for heaven. And just as surely we don’t always judge the events of this world with the eyes of heaven.

But God sees us all very clearly, and this isn’t something to be feared. God knows us well, and loves us perfectly. This isn’t to say that God loves everything we do, but God works in mysterious ways, and there’s always an avenue for redemption. To be faithful isn’t to be perfect, but to want to grow in our relationship with God, and to trust that it can happen.

Thanks be to God for including us all in this holy work of revealing God’s relentless love.

Amen

Onward!

Matthew 14:22-33

22 Immediately he made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds. 23 And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone, 24 but by this time the boat, battered by the waves, was far from the land, for the wind was against them. 25 And early in the morning he came walking toward them on the sea. 26 But when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were terrified, saying, “It is a ghost!” And they cried out in fear. 27 But immediately Jesus spoke to them and said, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.” 28 Peter answered him, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” 29 He said, “Come.” So Peter got out of the boat, started walking on the water, and came toward Jesus. 30 But when he noticed the strong wind, he became frightened, and beginning to sink, he cried out, “Lord, save me!” 31 Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” 32 When they got into the boat, the wind ceased. 33 And those in the boat worshiped him, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.”

It’s interesting the way different things stand out to you at different times. What struck me when I read this passage this week was the fact that Peter didn’t lose his nerve when he realized he was walking on water – it was the strong wind that freaked him out. He had been battling that wind all night – as he had on many other nights, but this was the first time he had ever walked on water, and yet it was the wind that scared him.

I don’t guess fear is ever a rational thing. We don’t get to decide what’s going to frighten us, and we are all frightened by different things. And the thing that frightens us on one day may not touch us on another day. And if you are like me, there are some things that are terrifying when you wake up at 2am and start thinking about them, but they are of no consequence at 2 in the afternoon. Of course there are things that are just as frightening in the light of day as they are in the middle of the night. There are terrifying realities that come our way.

Jesus was dealing with one in his life. One of the reasons Jesus had dismissed the crowd and gone up the mountain to pray was because the most righteous man in all of Israel had just been beheaded by Herod. A bad thing had occurred, and Jesus needed to spend some time in prayer. This wasn’t an unusual event – Jesus is reported to have often gone off to be alone with God. I think this is something we are supposed to notice about Jesus, and the message is that this is something we are to incorporate in to our own lives.

Things go differently when we pray. Things may not go exactly the way we want them to, but when we proceed through life with God our fears are diminished and opportunities for new life appear. Spending time alone with God in prayer isn’t a formula for getting what we want, but it does change the dynamics of our circumstances.

Things certainly things got different after Jesus had spent some time in prayer. Now the disciples had done as Jesus had instructed them to do, and they had headed out across the lake, but the weather had deteriorated and they were not doing well. They were probably wondering why they had done what Jesus had told them to do. The wind and the waves were battering against them, they weren’t near the shore, and it was dark. They were in a very threatening situation, and then they saw a ghost. At least they saw what they thought was a ghost, and it’s probably accurate to say that they had moved from fear to terror.

The people of Jesus’ day didn’t really see large bodies of water the same way we do. While most of Jesus’ disciples were fishermen and people who were familiar with working on water, they didn’t consider the water to be a friendly environment. It provided them with livelihood, but it was also very threatening to them. They didn’t see the water as a playground. They saw it as a form of chaos that God often had to contend with.

Of course we all know how dangerous water can be, but we know how to play in the water. Boating and fishing are recreational activities for us. We often go to the lake when want to spend some time alone with God. Honestly we probably go to the lake in order to do more playing than praying, and that’s ok as long as we don’t confuse playing with praying. Of course sometimes those things run together.

I’ll never forget this story that my wife’s cousin told me about an evening he spent on Greer’s Ferry Lake. He lives in Conway, and there was a period of time when he and his friend would do a lot of night fishing on Greer’s Ferry. He said there had been a lot of flooding one spring. The lake was still really high, and they were out late one night. The lake is usually really calm at night, and you can hear things really well under those circumstances. They were totally wrapped up in the serenity of the moment when all of a sudden this huge thing boiled up from the depths of the lake and broke the calm of the lake and of their minds. They were terrified and mystified until they came to see that it was a big bloated cow.

It unfortunately had drowned during the heavy rains and been washed in to the lake. It apparently had been resting on the bottom of that relatively deep lake until the bacteria started working and generated some buoyancy. Sharla’s cousin said it had generated some pretty good momentum by the time it reached the surface, and I’m thinking the level of their terror might have rivaled that of the disciples who saw Jesus approaching them on foot in a storm in the dark on the lake. The breeching cow event probably wasn’t as life-changing for those unsuspecting fishermen on Greer’s Ferry Lake as it was for the disciples, but I’m guessing it was an experience that moved them to a new place in their relationship with Jesus.

This story of Jesus walking on water is a bizarre tale to say the least, but this isn’t a story that’s supposed to leave us stupefied. Just as those guys figured out what had happened on Greers Ferry Lake, we are to understand what was going on between Jesus and the disciples in the storm on that lake. We are to see that Jesus was so intimately bound with God that he wasn’t bound by the normal constraints of this world. You might say that Jesus was so intimately familiar with God and this world that he could play with it in unusual ways.

I’m reminded of what I’ve seen people do on wakeboards on the lake. A wakeboard is sort of like a skateboard that people ride behind a boat, and I’ve seen people do unfathomable jumps and flips and turns on wakeboards. I can get up on a wakeboard and that sensitizes me to the mind-boggling nature of what other people can do on a wakeboard. Now what they do is not on the level of miraculous behavior, but they are able to do what they do because they have intimate knowledge of how to work with the rope, the wake, the board, and their body to do certain things. Their willingness to spend the time and to take the risks to learn those tricks is somewhat miraculous, but what they do doesn’t defy actual physical laws.

And while I don’t think the lesson we are to extract from this story is that we can defy physical laws if we spend enough time in prayer with God, I do think we are to take comfort in knowing that regardless of what may be occurring in life we can experience profound peace if we will be diligent in developing our relationship with God.

What I see in this story of Jesus walking on the water is affirmation that there isn’t anything more powerful than spiritual depth. And there isn’t anything we can’t face when we look to Jesus for help.

It’s really nice to have this moment in our church when we celebrate the decision these young people have made to look to Jesus for guidance and help. This is a good thing for them to do and for us to witness, but as we all know, they aren’t signing up for an easy life. I think it’s worth noting that it was Jesus who told the disciples to get in that boat and to go to the other side. Jesus might not have known it was going to storm, but he generally knew what was going on. It’s not unreasonable to assume he knew what was going to arise, and he told them to head in that direction.

I don’t think we went over that in any of our confirmation classes. There’s a number of things we didn’t cover – the danger of discipleship, that’s probably a session that I should add to the curriculum, but that’s not what we like to think about. And I don’t believe Jesus arbitrarily sends us in to harm’s way in order to extract new levels of devotion, but I do believe our faith can move us to step in to hard places. Jesus doesn’t just want us to live safe lives. Jesus want us to live rich lives, and such spiritual richness is often cultivated under distressing circumstances. We aren’t to flee from dangerous places and difficult relationships, but we aren’t alone in our work. We are to face whatever comes our way by praying to God and looking to Jesus.

These are mystical things – praying to God and looking to Jesus, and as I mentioned earlier, this isn’t the formula for producing what we need, but scripture and experience leads me to believe that these spiritual exercises enable us to face whatever we encounter with grace and peace. Jesus may not come walking to us on the water, but he may well show up in the presence of a new friend or in a familiar face that we see in a new way. God doesn’t leave us stranded in any situation – God can help us get through anything.

And this is the good news about choosing to follow Jesus. It’s a decision that puts you in good company on earth, and with support from heaven. This world is a difficult place. You never know when a dead, bloated cow might come boiling up from the depths of the lake. The times are always precarious in some new way, and we are all in need of help from ordinary people on earth and our extraordinary savior in heaven. We aren’t going to avoid suffering, but we aren’t going to be overwhelmed by it if we will learn to trust in the source of true life.

It’s easy to think that the most powerful forces on earth are winds and waves, armies and bombs, disease and death – but this passage of scripture tells a different story. This story tells us that there’s nothing more significant for us to do than to give ourselves to God and to trust in Jesus.

This is a nice moment for our church and for those of you who have said you want to follow Jesus. It’s a good reminder for us all to continue to engage life with prayer and hope. We’re in good company on earth and in heaven. Let us proceed with prayer, with trust, and without fear! Onward!

Thanks be to God.

Amen

God’s Eat Place

Matthew 14:13-21

13 Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns. 14 When he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them and cured their sick. 15 When it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, “This is a deserted place, and the hour is now late; send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves.” 16 Jesus said to them, “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.” 17 They replied, “We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish.” 18 And he said, “Bring them here to me.” 19 Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. 20 And all ate and were filled; and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full. 21 And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.

In light of this story of a miraculous feast in the wilderness, it’s worth noting that one of the very first things Matthew reported about Jesus was his refusal to turn stones in to bread when he was alone in the wilderness. If you remember, right after his baptism we are told that Jesus was driven in to the wilderness for 40 days by the Holy Spirit. He was hungry. He needed some bread, and while the devil’s suggestion that he turn stones in to bread doesn’t really sound like a terrible abuse of power – Jesus knew that it was not the Holy Spirit talking.  Those 40 days in the wilderness provided Jesus with great clarity regarding the difference between the promptings of the Holy Spirit and the suggestions of an evil spirit. Jesus knew that there are times when we need to deny ourselves feed on the word of God – he also knew that there are times when someone needs to show up with some actual bread.

The back-story for this morning’s scripture lesson was really sad. Jesus had withdrawn to a deserted place because he had gotten the news that, John the Baptist, his friend and fellow servant of God had been killed by Herod. But this wasn’t just a sad occasion for Jesus, it was a blow to all the people who were longing for the redemption of Israel. John the Baptist was one of their heroes. He was a righteous leader, and he had been killed by their terrible governor. Herod had imprisoned John the Baptist after John the Baptist criticized him for breaking up his brother’s marriage in order to marry his former sister in law. Herod was sort of afraid of John the Baptist because of his spiritual power, but his new wife, Herodias, wasn’t so timid.

Caught up in the revelry of an extravagant party, Herod had announced that he would grant anything to his newly acquired wife’s daughter because she had danced so pleasingly for his guests. Prompted by her mother, the young woman asked for John the Baptist’s head on a platter, and Herod had to comply. John the Baptist’s head was delivered to the party.

The contrast between what went on in Herod’s palace and what was going on with Jesus and the people in the wilderness couldn’t be more extreme. A righteous man was killed for trivial reasons in one place, a crowd was fed by the hand of God in the other place. There was a time in Jesus’ life when he needed to reject the temptation to use his God-given power to feed himself, but on this occasion, he saw that the people needed some food. When Jesus was alone in the wilderness he knew not to use his power to serve his personal needs, but when he was with this hungry and desperate crowd he was moved by compassion to provide them something to eat.

Good food doesn’t eliminate the pain of loss, but providing something good to eat is often our first instinct when we face the pain of death, and that’s not a bad thing to do. Sharing food is about the best way we know to resist the claws of death, and that’s a big part of what was going on when Jesus blessed the fish and the bread and told his disciples to feed the crowd.

No doubt there was an abundance of food at Herod’s palace, but it was a godless environment, and the food in that place served as an appetizer to the death-dealing and soul-sickening main course. There wasn’t much food out in the wilderness, but God was present, and five thousand people were given more than they could have asked for. The bread of life is served when God is welcomed and thanked. The bitterness of death is delivered when people ignore God and assume they are in charge of the world. There are a lot of different places and ways to dine in this world. Where and how you choose to dine will determine what you are served and how well you are nourished.

I don’t know if you’ve ever had the pleasure of eating at Doe’s Eat Place, but if you’ve got a good amount of room on your credit card or a few large bills you can get served an enormous steak. They’re also known for their tamales, but I don’t care for tamales, so it’s the steak that has made an impression on me. And it’s such a memorable name for a restaurant. I’ve never been to the Doe’s Eat Place that’s housed in a barn near Augusta, but I’ve been to the Doe’s Eat Place in Little Rock. I don’t know how Mr. George Eldridge from Augusta got connected to the original Doe’s Eat Place in Greenville, MS, or how he came to establish his restaurant of that name in Little Rock, but Greenville is where the original Doe’s Eat Place began.

I don’t know the full story of how they came up with that name, but it may be that it had to do with which door you went to when you went to Mr. Doe’s place. The front of the place was a honky-tonk, and there was a kitchen in the back. So if you went to the front door you went to the dance place, and if you went to the back door you went to the eat place. I don’t know the whole truth of the situation, but there’s some truth to this, and it sort of stirs the imagination to think of where we go to get what we want.

In my opinion, you can do some fine dining at a Doe’s Eat Place. But as Jesus pointed out when he was tempted by the devil when he was alone in the wilderness, people don’t live by bread alone. There’s not a steak big enough to nourish that hunger that’s in our souls, but we aren’t just floating souls without the need for bread. Our souls and our bodies are intimately bound together, and sometimes our souls are nourished by good food provided by compassionate friends. When food and compassion and companionship come together you might say you are doing some divine dining at God’s Eat Place.

God’s Eat Place can’t be found at a particular address, but it can pop-up anywhere.  And you never really know what’s going to be on the menu at God’s Eat Place, but when you feast at the table of the Lord you know you are going to leave satisfied. God’s Eat Place serves up a wide variety of sustenance, and while it’s not easy to find your way to the spot where God is serving, you don’t have to worry about the bill. God’s Eat Place is quite a place – it’s not easy to get there, you never know what’s going to be served, you don’t have to pay, and you leave with leftovers – abundant leftovers.

It’s interesting to think about the various ways God nourishes our souls. God always provides, but the menu is always different. On the first occasion when Jesus was in the wilderness and in need of food, God provided him with the wisdom he needed to keep the devil at bay. On this second occasion when Jesus was surrounded by hungry people God provided actual food. On both occasions, Jesus pointed to our need to be thankful and dependent upon God, and God served what was needed.

I’m not saying that our God is fickle, but clearly there isn’t just one policy in heaven for dealing with hungry people in the wilderness. This has got to be maddening to people who want God to be represented by clear and consistent rules. We worship a God who is only consistently insistent upon one thing – that we love God and we love our neighbors. You will always find grace on the menu at God’s Eat Place, but it’s served up in many different ways.

God rarely cooks up the same thing twice. And it sort of drives me nuts when people try to define the nature of our faith with a bunch of rules. According to the Bible, God has been revealed in a wide variety of ways throughout time, and every time we become overly dogmatic about what God requires the Christian faith begins to take on a form of idolatry and that isn’t a good place to go. You don’t want to eat at The Dogmatic Eat Place – you fill yourself up with malnourishing food and you leave with a bad attitude.

The importance of living with reverence for God and compassion for our neighbors never subsides, and this was made so clear by this miraculous meal in the wilderness. This is the only miracle story that is recorded in each of the four gospels. The essential requirements for God’s Eat Place to emerge came together on that day. Some people were desperate and hungry and they looked to Jesus – who looked to God, and who then instructed faithful disciples to share the food that was on hand. Need, compassion, trust in God, and willingness to do what Jesus instructed produced a meal that no one could forget.

The contrast between the slaughter at Herod’s Eat Place and the feast at God’s Eat Place couldn’t be greater. The world was diminished by the banquet of Herod – the world was renewed by Jesus’ feast in the wilderness. Those who ate at Herod’s Eat Place were given a sight that they would be desperate to forget — while those who shared food at God’s Eat Place were fortified for a lifetime.

Faithfulness to God can carry us in many different directions, and God can nourish us in many different ways. Sometimes we find ourselves is circumstances of plenty, and when we do we must do as Jesus instructed his disciples to do and share what we have with others. Sometimes we find ourselves in circumstances of scarcity – of not having all that we need to address the demands of life, and God is there for us then as well – reminding us that sometimes we are to feast on nothing but the word of God.

Jesus was very clear about the need for us to live with sensitivity to one another. People don’t dine alone at God’s Eat Place. If we want to be faithful to the God that was revealed by Jesus Christ we are not just to partake of the bread and juice that represent his living presence – we are to be that same bread for the world.

We have gathered today at God’s Eat Place. And it’s good for us to remember that God is a remarkable chef. God knows what we each need, and God knows how to nourish our hearts, minds, and souls. Present your needs, look to God, have compassion, do what you can, and enjoy the divine dining that God will provide.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

The Thing That Changes Everything

Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

31 He put before them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; 32 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.” 33 He told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.” 44 “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. 45 “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; 46 on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it. 47 “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind; 48 when it was full, they drew it ashore, sat down, and put the good into baskets but threw out the bad. 49 So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous 50 and throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. 51 “Have you understood all this?” They answered, “Yes.” 52 And he said to them, “Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.”

It can be argued that the endless little decisions we make on any given day or the small things that happen to us at any given moment can have profound impacts on the courses of our lives. We don’t usually see the large ways in which those small things are going to play out in the future, but by putting off your trip to Walmart for 15 minutes you might have some kind of profound impact on something that will affect someone for a lifetime. I don’t have a good example of this, but it seems plausible. Small things can have large impacts, but we usually aren’t aware of how those small things are going to change everything.

Of course there are also those moments when people know that what they’re doing is going to change everything. How do you think Galileo felt when he figured out that it wasn’t the sun orbiting around the earth but the earth rotating as it orbited around the sun that caused the sun to rise each morning. He might not have been the first person to figure that out, but he generally gets the credit for that earth-shattering idea. His idea wasn’t well welcomed by the authorities of the day. They found his idea to be an inconvenient truth, and I think he was almost executed for corrupting the minds of other people with this unsanctioned idea, but they couldn’t get that genie back in the bottle. This was one of those ideas that changed the course of world history.

Few people do things or reveal things that change the world in short order. But Jesus wanted us to be conscious of the way in which small things can have powerful impacts. Two of the parables we’re looking at this morning are focused on these small things that have huge impacts. He said the Kingdom of God is like a small mustard seed that grows in to a huge plant. And then he compared the Kingdom of God to leavening, and we all know that a single teaspoon of yeast can have a powerful impact on several cups of flour. It’s interesting that he used these two examples because mustard seeds and leavening weren’t considered to be valuable things. In fact, mustard plants were considered to be nuisance weeds in grain fields, and leavening was considered to be more of a contaminant than a useful ingredient.

It wasn’t because of their value or desirability that Jesus compared these things to the kingdom of God – it was because of their amazing capacity to grow and the impact they had on their environment. This reminds me of another small thing that can have a powerful impact. Our Episcopalian neighbors down the street had a terrible experience with fleas. They had a bunch of feral cats living in the crawl space under their sanctuary, and their sanctuary became infested with fleas. And I don’t know of a smaller creature that can be a bigger pest. This scenario is a nightmare to me. I think they had to be out of their sanctuary for about 3 weeks as they bombed the fleas and captured the cats. I haven’t called Father Burton about this. I feel bad for him, but I’m afraid he would sense how grateful I am that it didn’t happen here.

I know that was a terrible experience for them, but it’s a pretty good example of the way in which a small thing can have a powerful impact. I wouldn’t put it past Jesus to remind us that the Kingdom of God is like a flea infestation. These small creatures can fill huge spaces and make people move to new places. Jesus didn’t want us to imitate the bad characteristics of nuisance plants or pests, but he did want us to take note of the remarkable way in which small things can take hold and expand – that’s the characteristic of the kingdom of God that Jesus wants us to notice.

And then Jesus told these parables that compared the Kingdom of God to a treasure hidden in a field and a pearl of great value. What these parables seem to indicate is that we are to be on the lookout for hidden values. He compares this enterprise of serving in the Kingdom of God to being on the watch for material treasures, but he wasn’t telling us to focus our attention on great financial treasures. It’s certainly exciting to come across an undervalued item at a garage sale, and it’s fun to hear stories on the Antiques Roadshow of people buying priceless works of art for virtually nothing at out of the way places. Jesus understood those sentiments that we have, and he wasn’t critical of them, but he wanted us to expand our understanding of what it means to find a treasure. Jesus wanted us to know that there’s nothing more valuable that living in relationship with God – of abiding in God’s Kingdom. And he wanted us to pursue that relationship with the same passion we have for finding buried treasure.

As surely as some people have an eye for great works of art or for financial opportunity, Jesus wants us know that there’s such a thing as having an eye for spiritual treasures, and we need to be on the lookout for opportunities to invest ourselves in those places. I think a good example of this is the way in which Phillip Brown has chosen to get involved with a group of kids in this community that are in need of some attention and opportunity. Phillip has recognized a problem, and he’s responded to it as if it’s an opportunity to do something good. This IMAD program – which stands for: I’m Making A Difference, is rich, and I think this is the kind of treasure Jesus is wanting us to find.

In order to create a little urgency in our hearts to search for spiritual treasure, Jesus told the parable of the fisherman who goes out and hauls in a huge catch of fish and then goes about the business of sorting out the good ones from the bad ones. It reminds me of when I was a kid and I went fishing with my grandfather at this little pond he had built. Whenever I caught what he called a Ricefield Slick he told me to throw it out on the bank not back in the pond. At the time I didn’t fully understand what he had against those colorful little fish, but I came to understand that they weren’t good to eat and they could overpopulate the pond.

I’m not saying that God feels the same way about Ricefield Slicks that my grandfather did, but Jesus knew the practice of sorting good fish from bad ones, and he didn’t want us to live our lives in ways that put us on the level of expendable fish. Jesus wanted us to know that there are ways of living that put us in touch with true life and provide us with true life, but there’s also the possibility of remaining oblivious to the kingdom of God and ignorant of the spiritual treasures around us And when we live like that we’re about as useful to God as a Ricefield Slick was to my grandfather.

Now I tend to think we are rarely one thing or the other. Certainly there are some people who are a lot closer to perfection than others, and some people have chosen paths that seem to resemble perfect evil, but most of us move with fits and spurts toward the Kingdom of God. On most days I think it would be hard for the divine fisherman to quickly throw most of us on that pile of culled fish, but on any given day we might not be immediately recognized as prized catches. In other words, I think we are often made up of mixed agendas. We have an eye out for spiritual treasures, but we can also spend an inordinate amount of time seeking meaningless treasures.

It might be helpful for us to think of ourselves as the fisherman who has a net full of fish. Maybe we each have a pond and we’ve seined the pond to see what kind of fish we’ve got. And it turns out that some of us have ponds that are full of fine fish – catfish and crappie and bass and bream, but some of us discover that we have a good number of trash fish caught up in our nets, and we’ve got some work to do to improve the population of our pond.

Jesus told these parables about activities from everyday life to help us take note of the way in which we can live extraordinary lives. He didn’t give amazing motivational speeches that ramped up everyone’s energy level with the expectation that they were going to go out and change the world tomorrow. Jesus pointed to the small things in life that generate amazing results over time. Jesus didn’t expect us to do anything other than pay attention to our own lives and to the way in which we invested ourselves. Jesus wanted us to be aware of what we’re wanting and what we’re seeking, and he wanted us to know that it’s these small things that make all the difference.

I’ve never really thought about this last illustration that Jesus shares with the crowd. He talks about the scribe that’s been trained for the Kingdom of God, and how he is like the master of the house who brings out his new and old treasures. This is an unusual instruction, and it’s not easy to know exactly what he’s talking about, but it makes me think he’s talking about the work of a preacher. A scribe who’s been trained for the kingdom of God is a pretty good description of someone who’s been trained to be a minister. And you might say the task of preaching is to bring out the old and new treasures. We read the old treasure of scripture and we try to point out the way God’s kingdom continues to be revealed.

Whether Jesus had that in mind or not, this is what it brings to my mind, but I don’t think such work is limited to those of us who work in professional ministry. Those of you who don’t have the credentials of ordination don’t have to think of yourselves as scribes, which is fortunate, because Jesus didn’t generally have much affection for the people who bore that identification, but I think Jesus wanted all of us who have affection for the Kingdom of God to share our treasures of the kingdom.

If you’ve found a great pearl you should let people know about it. If you’ve done all you can to acquire one of God’s hidden treasures you need to bring it out and share it with others. When you’ve seen the way that God has produced some miraculous growth in your own life or in somebody else’s you don’t need to be quiet about that.

On some level, following Jesus Christ is a very practical thing to do. It’s not that mysterious. It’s about living a plain and simple life while keeping an eye out for the opportunities that God provides for us to extend some grace and love for one another. Small things can grow in to large operations. The small thing you do because you think it’s something Jesus would like for you to do may be the very thing that changes everything for somebody else.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

The Aches and Pains of Abundant Life

Romans 8:12-25

12 So then, brothers and sisters, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh — 13 for if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. 14 For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. 15 For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” 16 it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, 17 and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ–if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him. 18 I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. 19 For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; 20 for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. 22 We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; 23 and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. 24 For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? 25 But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

I’m taking a little deviation from my normal course of preaching – which is to wrestle with passages from the gospels, in order to look at something Paul wrote about the Christian faith. I’m not a Pauline scholar, and as my preaching pattern indicates, I prefer to examine those things that are recorded in the gospels of what Jesus said and did, but Paul had some things to say that are important for us to consider. I don’t think Paul had a flawless understanding of what it means and what it takes to follow Jesus, but I consider him to have had a profound understanding of the faith, and there’s no questioning of his commitment to Jesus. What Paul did to promote the message of Jesus is sort beyond comprehension.

Paul was totally immersed in the work of preaching and teaching about Jesus, and he has some gripping instruction to those of us who seek to give ourselves to Christ, but I often find myself wishing that Paul would have written with sixth graders in mind. In my opinion, he puts forth some amazingly complex theological claims. In this text he provides us with some familiar images, illustrations, and actions, but the way he weaves them together sort of leaves me scratching my head. I think it makes sense, but I have the feeling that what he’s saying is above my reading level. So I’m not going to try to unpack everthing Paul has to say in this passage, but I’ll elaborate on some of the familiar images and ideas that he raises and share what I think he might be saying.

The first image I want to address is this idea of the goodness of our debt – which is interesting because I don’t think any of us are normally inclined to think of debt as a good thing. But Paul seems to be celebrating the fact that we are debtors. I know sound financial planners will point out that there’s a difference between good debt and bad debt, but what they are usually talking about is the difference between the kind of debt that gives you some tax advantage and the kind of debt that simply takes your money away. But that isn’t the good kind of debt that Paul was talking about.

Paul is suggesting that there’s a form of debt that puts us in touch with life. Paul suggests that there’s a form of debt that leads to life – which is in contrast to the kind of debt that leads to death. And this is one of those cases where his logic and language isn’t that easy to follow, but he seems to be saying that if we are indebted to the flesh we’re headed toward fear and death, but if we’ll be indebted to the Spirit we’ll become free and alive.

I met a man one time who was a relatively recent convert to Christianity. He saw a very clear distinction between the way he lived before he found Jesus and the new way he was trying to live. But he remembered his old ways and he said he was dealing with a man on a deal of some kind who was being unreasonable and sort of aggressive, and he said, You know, I was about to get in the flesh with him — but I didn’t. And that’s about one of the best working definitions of the flesh that I’ve ever heard. I don’t know exactly what he was tempted to do, but it was going to be aggressive and ugly, and while it might not have lead to death it would have been on that path.

When paul speaks of being indebted to the flesh I think he’s talking about our propensity to being overly concerned with our immediate selves as opposed to our eternal selves. This is a deathly form of indebtedness because there’s nothing we can do to eliminate this debt – in a sense there will always be an immediate demand of some kind to maintain our surface wellbeing. This is the worse kind of debt because it only grows and it never goes away. This indebtedness to the flesh is worse than student loan debt – which doesn’t go away until you pay it off or die, but at least it goes away at that point. If you’re indebted to the flesh it will probably follow you in to the afterlife.

But Paul says it’s a good thing to be indebted to the Spirit, because when we live with a sense of debt to the Spirit we’re motivated to give ourselves to eternal matters. To be indebted to the Spirit is to take a longer view of life and not to be battered by immediate demands. Neither the pleasant windfalls or the horrendous pitfalls that we encounter in this world are as life altering to those who are indebted to the Spirit. Death isn’t as threatening to those who are indebted to the Spirit because death doesn’t disrupt the work of the Spirit. It’s this sense of indebtedness to the Spirit that enables us to experience adoption from God.

To feel adopted by God is to trust that your primary relationship is with God. And when your primary relationship is with God you lose fear of what may happen to your flesh. This is a truth that had become abundantly clear to Paul. His allegiance to Christ had been very costly to him in a physical way. His love and allegiance to Jesus had caused him to be rejected by his Jewish friends and family members and it had put him at odds with Roman rulers. He had been beaten and imprisoned for what he did and believed. And in spite of that he felt blessed and glorified.

I believe that what Paul is saying is true, and I like to think that I’m more indebted to the Spirit than I am to the powers of this world, but frankly speaking I don’t think my allegiance has been very tested. I like to think I’m indebted to the Spirit, but this hasn’t been very costly to me. My faith doesn’t seem to be at odds with my relative good fortune, and I’m grateful for this, but I’m a little unnerved by it as well. It may be that I’m just not paying attention to the way my indedbtedness to the Spirit is at odds with my debt to the flesh. Paul seemed to see very clearly the difference between serving God and protecting his hide, and he was grateful for the abundant life he experienced because of who it was he had chosen to serve.

He considered the sufferings of his time to be a minor nuisance in comparison to the glory that was about to be revealed to him.

Now none of us are immune from the various forms of pain and tragedy that we encounter in this world. Comfort and security are fleeting for all of us, and we’re all familiar with the sound of deep groans.

I find his image of the world groaning in labor pains prior to the arrival of Christ to be really powerful. It’s an image that points to the way in which something new arrived in this world in the life of Jesus Christ, and through Christ we have this opportunity to become the adopted children of God, but he also speaks to the way in which this process of becoming incorporated in to the family of God is not yet complete.

The sound of a groan isn’t a welcome sound, but it’s such an important sound. It’s important to hear the groans of our neighbors, and it’s an important sound to utter when we we come in contact with the pain and tragedy of this world. We aren’t to turn away from the sound of groaning or from awareness of situations that produce the need to groan. We aren’t to live in fear of knowing how bad things can be in this world, and we can face painful truths because we have this assurance that the love of God is going to prevail in this world.

We aren’t to be insensitive to the sound of groaning, but we aren’t to live in fear of it. Paul proposed that we think of the groaning that we experience in life as the groaning that accompanies the pain of birth. Paul didn’t want to belittle the pain that we experience in this life, but he didn’t want us to live in fear of it.

Aches and pains aren’t all bad. I know football practice began last week, and I’m guessing that has been the source of some deep groaning, but that’s some pain that will pay off when the season begins. Paul makes an appeal for us to wait with patience for the new day that will come, but I don’t think he is telling us to sit still and wait. I think it’s a lot easier to have patience when you keep yourself well occupied, and there’s a lot of good work we can be doing. It’s not within our power to fully establish the Kingdom of God on earth, but we can engage in some work to make this world a more hospitable place for others, and we need to extend ourselves in ways that generate those good aches and pains and maybe even some groans.

This world can be a terribly painful place to be, but there’s really only one thing that can keep us from the love of God as it was revealed by Jesus Christ and that is to be more concerned with our mortal flesh than we are with our eternal souls. We are the spiritual children of our loving God and we are called to live in ways that will nourish our spiritual lives. It’s not as easy to feed our souls as it is to nourish the flesh, but I believe we can train our bodies to serve the needs of our souls. This happens when we know the source of true life and we no longer fear for the fate of our flesh.

Paul doesn’t write in a simple form, but I think his point is pretty clear. We are the children of God and we’re invited to live like God’s beloved children. This doesn’t mean that we won’t encounter terrible hardship and suffering, but we are to understand the pain that we experience in this life as the kind of pain that accompanies childbirth. What will be isn’t always obvious, but we can trust that God’s kingdom will prevail. It may not be this simple, but it probably is.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

Our Master Gardener

Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

1 That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea. 2 Such great crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat there, while the whole crowd stood on the beach. 3 And he told them many things in parables, saying: “Listen! A sower went out to sow. 4 And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and ate them up. 5 Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. 6 But when the sun rose, they were scorched; and since they had no root, they withered away. 7 Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. 8 Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. 9 Let anyone with ears listen!” 18 “Hear then the parable of the sower. 19 When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what is sown in the heart; this is what was sown on the path. 20 As for what was sown on rocky ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy; 21 yet such a person has no root, but endures only for a while, and when trouble or persecution arises on account of the word, that person immediately falls away. 22 As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing. 23 But as for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.”

I’m going to add an additional verse to this parable. I’m adding this additional warning: But some of those seeds that produced enormous yields were attacked and plundered by squirrels before the grain could be harvested. Jesus would have included that verse if he had been trying to raise tomatoes in Newport. I’m not exactly sure what the interpretation would have been. Maybe this would have been some kind of warning to not let our defenses down when we think we’ve finally gotten our lives in order.

Jesus utilized stories about everyday matters in order to get us thinking about our spiritual lives. I’ve poured a good amount of time and energy in to the challenge of keeping squirrels away from our tomato plants. I’ve built a little frame that’s draped with some thin netting and so far it’s worked, but I have some fear that a squirrel is going to figure out how to get in and then get panicked when he tries to get out. That isn’t going to be a pretty sight. I think the point of that story will be that I should have paid more attention to the state of my soul than the condition of my tomatoes.

And if that happens I’ll try to accept that lesson. Jesus told parables in order to disrupt our familiar thinking about reality, and this parable provides us with some shocking truths. One thing it portrays is the seemingly unlimited amount of seeds that are available to God. Jesus portrays God as being a planter who has no regard for what most planters would consider to be a precious and limited resource.

I know this has been a tough spring and summer for a number of farmers around here, and I’ve heard stories of farmers having to replant their crops more than once because of the abundance of rain. And having to replant is a costly undertaking for a farmer. God certainly knows the feeling of crop failure, but God isn’t concerned about the high costs of production. In Jesus’ parable, God’s concern isn’t about the cost – God’s concern is focused on the low level of production that comes from the abundant amount of seed scattering that God does in the world.

Now it can be argued that God doesn’t utilize the most productive means of planting. I don’t think there’s a bank that would provide a loan to a farmer who treats their seeds like God does in this parable, but parables aren’t intended to reveal the truth about everything. This is not a lesson on proper planting techniques – this is a parable about the possibilities and the pitfalls of fruitfulness.

We’re told that Jesus spoke this parable from a boat because the shoreline was crowded with people. I’m thinking this image of a sower casting seeds everywhere could have been prompted by Jesus’ view of all the people on the shore. It’s as if Jesus saw all of these people as seeds that had been sown by God. And in this sense the parable points to the way in which all people are valuable and full of potential, but sometimes people land in places with really poor growing conditions, and sometimes it’s due to no fault of their own. Sometimes we contribute to the poor growing conditions that we find ourselves in, but sometimes people just land in bad places.

The truth is that we don’t all get perfectly placed in spiritually fertile conditions. Some people are simply born in to spiritually toxic environments. I suspect that a good portion of the people who are housed in our prisons are people who were conditioned as children to behave badly. I don’t know this, and I don’t really know what to do about it, but I believe there are a lot of children who are born in to this world with a very slim chance of becoming spiritually, mentally, and emotionally healthy adults.

Now this is not to say that some people are simply doomed. I believe there’s always this possibility of abundant life for us all – in fact in many cases people find the avenue to spiritual development after they’ve landed in prison or experienced some other form of profound failure. I’m inclined to believe there’s almost always some form of miracle involved in the process of becoming a spiritually productive person, and some of the least likely people have become God’s most productive individuals. It’s hard to predict such things, and you never know what will come together in a person’s life to generate that fertile environment for the love of God to flourish, but sometimes it happens, and when it does it’s an astonishing thing.

Kind-hearted, gentle and gracious people will sometimes emerge from horrible environments, and the opposite can be true as well.

Of course there isn’t a good way to measure what any of us produce, and we always need to be cautious about how we judge one another. We also need to be careful about how we measure the quality of the soil in which we find ourselves planted. I dare say some of the most spiritually arid places are in what we would call nice neighborhoods, and some of the most spiritually fertile land is in some of the sketchiest places. It’s just not easy to determine what will make for a rich spiritual life, but it never happens apart from the grace of God. We don’t produce our own salvation experiences nor is God unavailable in any situation.

There are a number of ways for us to go with this parable. Jesus may have just wanted us to think of ourselves as the seeds that God tosses into the world to take hold where we can, but it’s not unreasonable for us to think of ourselves as the soil onto which God has chosen to drop these good seeds. And if we choose to think of ourselves as the dirt into which God has chosen to plant it’s good for us to ponder the way in which we have nurtured God’s divine seeds. Are we being as spiritually fertile as possible? And what can we do to guard ourselves from becoming hard packed, rocky, or weed infested?

John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement, held fast to the wonderful theological concept of growing in grace. Wesley considered salvation to be a life-long process, and while he considered it to be a process that was fueled by the grace of God, he believed we have a strong role to play. He thought our task was to learn to cooperate with God, and he had a beautiful way of describing this process. He said we are to learn: how not to resist the promptings of the Holy Spirit.

As the parable indicates, there were more situations that were hostile to the seed than there were fertile situations. It takes a good many things to come together to provide the right environment for God’s seeds to flourish in our lives. John Wesley didn’t want us to think of ourselves as being one kind of soil or the other – as either fertile land or hopelessly rocky ground. Wesley wanted us to think of ourselves as soil that can always use improvement. Some of us need a little compost, some of us need some sand, some of us need some lime, others might need a little Roundup.

John Wesley believed that spiritual development is an ongoing process for all of us. Instead of thinking we are either good soil or rocky ground it’s more helpful for us to think of the ways in which we are being faithful and the ways in which we are neglecting those promptings of the Holy Spirit to serve God and our neighbors. We’re never perfectly aligned with the will of God or too far removed to be touched by God. We all have times of fertility and times of barrenness, and there are ways in which we contribute to both of those conditions.

Wesley described the process of growing in grace as: moving on to perfection, and he believed there was a method to becoming more perfect. He believed we become more fertile by attending worship, by receiving holy communion, by studying scripture and other spiritually oriented materials, and by engaging in the work of helping others. He had an actual list of things to do and not do if you wanted to turn yourself in to more spiritually fertile soil. And he required the early Methodists to participate in weekly meetings where you would be asked how well you are attending to these spiritual practices. It’s a whole lot easier to be a Methodist now than it was in Wesley’s day, but I don’t think it’s gotten easier to be fertile.

I think it’s important for us all to ponder the question of what it is we practice in order to become more perfect. I don’t think God expects perfection from us. In fact God probably expects resistance from us, but God uses us anyway, and I think this is the good news.

God continues to cast seed in a ridiculously abundant manner. Whether we see ourselves as the seeds of God who are provided endless opportunities for magnificent productivity or the ground onto which God casts the seeds of life we are clearly the beneficiaries of a God who wills for us to experience spiritual abundance. And we need to keep in mind that we contribute to our success or failure in this regard. It’s possible for us to live in such ways that we remain lifeless and weed-ridden or fertile and fruitful. And this can change – we can get better or worse.

There are many ways to look at this parable and a number of images to ponder, but regardless of how you look at it you can’t ignore the bountiful opportunity for growth that the sower provides. This God of ours throws seed with reckless abandon. We have a God who knows us well and who has seen all the ways in which we fail to respond to God’s gracious initiatives and powerful promptings, but who continues to grab new handfuls of seed to bestow upon us.

Our God is gracious, but this growth process is hard. God can’t seem to produce in our hearts the will to live in response to these gracious opportunities. There’s something required on our end in order for this relationship to flourish and for God’s garden to grow. We all have abundant opportunities to turn away from arid existence and to experience abundant life, but it isn’t an easy process. We have to be willing to see ourselves clearly and to do the hard work of becoming less self-serving and more life-loving. This isn’t the easy path to take, but it is the most rewarding journey.

None of us serve God perfectly, but we can get better at it. We can practice our faith in ways that make us more fertile soil for God’s good seeds. It doesn’t happen easily or predictably, but we can be those rare seeds that fall on fertile soil and who produce abundant yields. But we can never let up because there are these pesky squirrels out there who are ready to spoil the most perfect tomatoes. Living a spiritually fertile life requires endless vigilance and produces eternal joy.

This parable invites us to see ourselves as being God’s cherished garden. It’s a beautiful image and a powerful invitation.

Thanks be to God.

Amen