In her Pulitzer Prize-winning book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard told of an encounter between a Native Alaskan and a missionary priest who is seeking to share the story of our religious tradition with this man from the hinterlands of northern exposure, albeit with a slant toward saving his soul. After hearing the priest unfurl the good news, and weighing his own response to it, the Native Alaskan asked: “If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell when I die?” The priest answers in all seriousness: “No, not if you did not know.” To which the Native Alaskan responds, “then why did you tell me!”

Sometimes the whimsical story is perfect for stirring the crucible of deep wisdom. Our best authors intuitively know that.

The Acts of the Apostles is one of my favorite books of the Bible—beautifully moving, playfully whimsical at times, and, if we are honest, profoundly problematic. We hear a snippet this morning that holds this full range. A man, lame since birth, is miraculously healed, and immediately goes walking and leaping and praising God. What an image! Who is not moved by such unrestrained joy in the face of long held constraint of suffering!

We see Peter and John leaning into their newly expanded roles as evangelists for Jesus Christ, who has left the post-Pentecost apostles to continue his earthly ministry in their own right.

This Book of Acts is their sequel to the gospels, recounting the deeds of this motley band of upstarts. Their courageous witness emboldens them to be mediators of their first miracles, but they also remain humble that they are not the power behind such events; God is. If they had just stopped there…

When they blame their Jewish siblings for killing Jesus, they deliver a message that has been used by Christians for centuries to bludgeon Jews, proverbially and literally. It should cause us to squirm uncomfortably in our seats. We can do better.

The other disconcerting religious trap playing out here is that the man, lame from birth, was so born as punishment for his or his parents’ sinfulness, a divinely ordained quid pro quo promulgated by God as retributive recompense for their shortcomings. Such a tit-for-tat calculus leaves little room for a compassionate God who comes to dwell with us, or for a Christ willing to be crucified for all, and it surely complicates our understanding of disability. I’m hard-pressed to ever say a newborn baby deserves anything but the warm embrace of love, and we would do well to not use our religious imprimatur to suggest otherwise.

Three decades ago, Nancy Eisland turned this traditional theology on its head in her seminal book, The Disabled God, and in doing so, reframes disability through the lens of liberation precisely because the resurrected Jesus reveals himself as the Christ who makes post-resurrection appearances with all his bodily wounds in full reveal, bringing an impaired, scarred body into his glorified state—affirming non-conventional “physicalities” rather than erasing them. The Body is richer for the diversity of expressions.

In the Eucharist, we are invited to meet and commune with this “disabled God,” crucified and risen, who inspires us to imagine new paths to inclusion, wholeness and justice.

But to do this, we must deconstruct at least three traditionally-held theologies:

• First, the “Sin/Punishment” model (i.e., disability is a direct punishment for sin).
• Secondly, Eisland declares morally bankrupt the “Charity/Pity” model—the notion that disabled folks exist primarily to inspire able-bodied souls to practice charity or compassion.
• And third, she denounces what she calls the Super-crip/Miracle model—namely, that for persons with disabilities to meet societal muster, they must either have a miracle moment which comes as divine reward for their faith, or they must exhibit superhuman feats despite their disabilities, prompting others (you and me) to simply marvel. Our marveling is what creates value. I hope you see the folly in that.

Her use of the term “super-crip” is intentionally disturbing, meant to cajole us from our places of able-bodied comfort. All three models orient to othering and exclusion, a toxin potently at work in our world even today. Again, we can do better.

The antidote to exclusion is embrace, the sort that Jesus Christ offers by outstretching his arms of love on the hard wood of the cross, so that everyone might come within the saving reach of his embrace, and invites us to do the same.^[1]

You should know that a year ago the Vestry adopted a long-range accessibility improvement plan, building on our commitments in recent years to guide us in improving ways we, as a church community, can welcome and embrace, rather than ignore and exclude.^[2] We don’t do it perfectly, and it will take time, but more important than any one structural fix is a mindset that invites us to be evangelists of good news for all.

Today is the launch of our annual stewardship appeal, which bears the theme “Boldly Proclaim” this year. This is the season when everyone who counts Saint Mark’s as a spiritual place of connection is invited to make your commitment of financial support for the mission and ministry of this place in the coming year. I know talk of money may cause some to squirm in their seats. Some like to call it the annual beg-a-thon. I think that misses the point though.

Yes, we set an operating budget informed by the commitments we receive in the annual appeal, but I am not asking you to give to fund a budget. I am asking you something much more profoundly important in life. To share what Annie Dillard called your “unrestrained hallelujah.” Or to join the healed man in walking and leaping and praising God. You could say this is our sequel to the sequel. We have a story to write, here and now, not just read an ancient one. Indeed, we are called to Boldly Proclaim it, and we do so with all that we have and all that we are. A shared story, forged in community which strives to center itself on that holy embrace for all.

Again, Annie Dillard wisdom, at once whimsical and sublimely to the point:

“There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been: A people busy and powerful, knowledgeable, ambivalent, important, fearful, and self-aware; a people who scheme, promote, deceive, and conquer; who pray for their loved ones, and long to flee misery and skip death. It is a weakening and discoloring idea, that rustic people knew God personally once upon a time—or even knew selflessness or courage…—but that it is too late for us. In fact, the absolute is available to everyone in every age. There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less.”

This is our moment, friends. We don’t get a pass due to our foibles or our fears any more than those first disciples did when the post-Pentecost Jesus gave them his charge in their day. Giving is one way of engaging God, with gratitude and joyful, making money a little less a god in our lives.

I choose to give in community, this cathedral community in particular, because I believe the story being written here is one of unrestrained hallelujah, a holy enterprise in which I get to participate. I hope you will, too.

No one here but us chickens.

REPENT and REPAIR. These words are part of a theme for this Sunday at St. Mark’s. I hope you will take a few moments to visit the Affordable Housing Project Visual Storyboards in the Compline corner of our nave today. They recount the story of racially motivated restrictive covenants in our neighborhood that were designed to keep black families out. St. Mark’s parish purchased this land just as these covenants were being written into property deeds. As far as we know, our deeds never contained this language, but our faith community remained silent while this was going on. Furthermore, we are reconciling with the fact that we were a predominantly white church that chose to build in a whites-only neighborhood. We harmed our neighborhood and our black siblings by participating in this systematic process of exclusion. Today, our thirst for justice and accountability has demanded that we repent of the evil we have done as we seek to repair it. Repent and repair. It’s what justice requires and the Gospel demands of folks like us who claim to be followers of Jesus.

Our Gospel today doesn’t address racial justice directly, but it says a lot about fairness. What we learn is that our deep-seated sense of fairness is not God’s fairness. For our sense of fairness is rooted in scarcity while God’s fairness is found in abundance and generosity.

I have one sibling, my brother, Jack, who is three and half years younger than me. When we were kids, we fought like crazy. I remember us both being in the back seat of our family car as we were arguing about the proper distribution of hard candy from a bag that my mom gave to pacify us. As our bickering escalated, my mother intervened from the front seat with a directive. I’m sure that she offered a reasonable and fair solution, but my brother whined, “It’s not FAIR!” My mother had had enough. She pulled the car over, got into the back seat, sitting between us, and said, “Listen you two. Life isn’t fair. You’re being selfish and stingy. I gave you the candy. I’m still waiting to hear ‘thank you!’” She was right. Our sense of fairness was informed by scarcity. We completely ignored her generosity. It took me many more years to learn through the school of hard knocks that life really isn’t fair.

This scarcity-based sense of fairness is what Jesus is confronting in our Gospel today. You heard the story. The vineyard workers who arrived late and worked for one hour got paid the same amount and those who worked from dawn. Doesn’t that offend your sense of fairness? I hope it does. It’s supposed to.

After all, we know what fairness is, and we know how it’s supposed to play out. Equal pay for equal work is fair. Equal pay for unequal work is not fair. Rewarding hard work and ambition is fair. Excusing sloth and sloppiness is not fair.

But God, if the landowner in the parable represents God, is not fair. At least, not according to our deeply held beliefs about fairness. God, it turns out, does not believe that the front of the line is the best place to be. God isn’t interested, in showing favor to the best, the biggest, and the brightest -- the workers with the most elite educations, those with astonishing professional achievements, and the most impressive zip codes.

In fact, the landowner in Jesus’s story doesn’t judge his workers by their hours at all. He doesn't seem to care about why some workers are able to start at dawn and others come later. Perhaps the late starters aren’t as literate, educated, or skilled as their competitors. Perhaps they have learning challenges, or a tough home life, or children to care for at home. Perhaps they’re refugees, or don’t own cars, or don’t speak the language, or can’t get green cards. Perhaps they struggle with chronic depression or anxiety. Perhaps employers refuse to hire them because they’re gay, or trans, or disabled, or black, or female.

Whatever the case may be, the landowner doesn’t ask them to explain or defend themselves. All he cares about is that every last person in the marketplace finds a spot in his vineyard – the early bird and the latecomer, the able-bodied and the infirm, the young and the old, the popular and the forgotten. When the workday is over, what concerns the landowner is not who deserves what. All he cares about is that every worker ends the day with the dignity and security of a living wage. The capacity to go home and feed a family. Sufficient security and peace of mind to sleep well. A reliable sense of accomplishment, belonging, and dignity. It’s an image of the Reign of God.

“Are you envious because I am generous?” asks God.

I must tell you. I really struggle with this. You see, I’m a recovering type-A personality. I’m an Enneagram 3, the Achiever and Performer. My sense of worth and value are wrapped up in being the first in line at dawn and completing the best possible work at the end of the day. AND, I expect to be recognized for it! But Jesus is inviting me to place myself at the end of the line. Things look different from that perspective. Jesus has invited me to join the workers who got more than they expected – the ones who received twelve times the pay they knew they deserved. I’m invited to be ecstatic, stunned, thrilled, and grateful with those at the end of the line. Their experience of payday was one of utter blessing. I was just expecting to get what was owed to me.

If I keep myself at the front of the line I experience a host of difficult emotions – envy, bitterness, anger, and dissatisfaction. I’m too resentful to join in the celebration of those at the end of the line. I miss out. I don’t take satisfaction in my hours of good work. I don’t delight in the fruit of the vineyard. I don’t relax into my time off, enjoying the wages I have been given. Instead, I waste my off-hours harboring resentment and anger.

“Are you envious because I am generous?” God asks.

Maybe, if God’s generosity offends me, it’s because I don’t have eyes to see where I stand in the line of God’s grace and kindness. Where would you rather stand? At the front of the line, where bitterness and judgment consume you? Or at the back, where surprise and joy reign supreme?

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the landowner insists on paying his workers in reverse order, thereby making sure that the first workers see what the last receive. He wants them to experience what radical generosity looks like. He wants them to relinquish their anger and join the party. He wants them to use their plenty to build longer tables, not higher walls.

Could it be any more obvious that we – all of us, every single one of us – are wholly dependent on each other for our survival and well-being? That the future of Creation itself depends on human beings recognizing our fundamental interconnectedness, and acting in concert for the good of all? What’s fair for me isn’t good enough if it leaves you in the darkness to die. The vineyards of this world thrive only when everyone has a place of dignity and purpose within them. The time for selfish and stingy notions of fairness is over.

Are we willing to see this yet? Are we willing to live it?

“Listen. Life isn’t fair. You’re being selfish and stingy. I gave you the candy. I’m still waiting to hear ‘thank you!’” You know, she’s still waiting. Let’s make this right. Thank you, mom, and thank you, God!

Forty years ago, the sage bard Wendell Berry wrote these words:

“It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”^[1]

Integral to life’s most important work is learning our narratives of meaning. Did someone tell you about the day you were born, or the day you were adopted, in such a way that it became your story, not just theirs? Intimately yours, down in the depths of your being?

We encourage godparents of infants preparing for baptism here that it is incumbent on them to tell their godchild the story of the baptism day, so that they will know it in their bones.

We need such narratives to make sense of this existence, this life, this journey, so that when we lose our way, as we inevitably will, we may still have guideposts to help us orient.

Communities need these narratives, too. This story from Exodus is one of our bedrock narratives. At the Easter Vigil, we always hear the Creation story from Genesis and this story from Exodus. The rest of God’s salvation history unfurls from those two foundational stories, and we are invited to make them intimately ours here and now.

The story of the Exodus is not for the faint of heart. Angels going before and behind God’s people, kicking up dust storms and throwing pillars of fire to keep Pharaoh’s bloodthirsty army at bay. But the people knew they were there, on their tail and closing fast, as they came to the seashore. Cutoff, nowhere to escape, you can imagine panic, the sort that awakens you from a nightmare, with heart racing, sweat on the brow.

But this is God’s story, too. The stories that lend most meaning intertwine our story with God’s story.

The Hebrew word for Red Sea is a play on words, a paradox really. It’s the Reed Sea, full of rushy marshes oozing into the deep waters, but with the tweak of a tittle, the word can also mean the Sea of the End. The end of the old—slavery in Egypt, oppression, stifled existence, violence, and the beginning of something new—new, but as yet not fully known, a threshold between what was and what will be, and God figures prominently in it.

Moses channels that divine power and leads the people in admirably pastoral fashion. Fiercely encouraging. Resolutely the leader, smiting the water with his two-by-four, as the old Negro Spiritual tells it.

Moses stood on the Red Sea shore.

Smote that water with a 2x4.

Oh, Mary, don’t you weep.

The waters part but then come crashing back in with tsunami-scale power against their pursuers. The people are delivered into the desert of unknowing, to wander forty years, a straight-line distance of some 200 miles, from here to Portland, but life doesn’t usually follow straight-line narratives, does it?!

“It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.”

At points, the people of the Exodus will wish for a return to the fleshpots of familiar suffering rather than remain in this desert of unknowing, this crucible of mystery and meaning-making. They will be treated to manna and meat falling from the sky, and they will resent even those miracles at times. We may want to scoff or guffaw at their seemingly ridiculous fickleness.

But remember, this is our story, and we should hear it, not as an ancient tale of anachronistic entertainment, but as the story that gets down into our bones and breathes its sinewy life into our mortal coils on the real journey here and now.

Can we see the journey across the sea and into the desert as the long-winding way to meaning and true identity? Can we hold our spiritual ancestors’ foolishness and fears as portals into our own meandered inanity and our newly rediscovered belovedness? Sooner or later, we must make the choice to leave behind the familiar haunts of a shackled existence and step into the mysterious unknown where we find ourselves and God in fresh, liberating and life-giving ways.

Again, Wendell Berry:

“the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our own feet, and learn to be at home.”^[2]

The people who came up off the dry seabed and wandered into the desert were never going to make it “home” without seeing that God was with them every inch of the way. It is a scriptural promise we seem to have to learn over and over again. This is the spiritual journey.

This radical story of ours is dripping with truth presenting as irony and allegory and, most of all, mystery. Mystery leaves a feathered edge to the thresholds of wisdom; mystery holds the space for dark tones to demure full clarity, and in doing so, invites us into those depths of divine possibility, with engaged heart and mind and soul and strength. It is there, in the depths of our being, that we often discover God anew.

Here on this day that we traditionally know as Homecoming Sunday, it is good to be together. Today we are reminded once more that this sacred space and the work we do arising from here are structured on such bedrock narratives that intertwine our meandering stories with God’s story.

This is a place where a community—you and I, and those who have gone before and those not yet known to us—gather so that God might lead us through the parted waters that demarcate what was from what may yet be. That is at once exciting and intrepid, as a story with deep meaning should be.

Will we trust God enough to embrace this journey, together, and newly rediscover our belovedness, stepping inch by inch into a newfound freedom to be who we were truly created to be, and see the hand of God at work in our lives?

This is our story, friends. This is our journey.

As Berry said, it is the real journey, “very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our own feet, and learn to be at home.”

Welcome home.

Mirrors aren’t always flattering. Ask anyone who’s ever been in a fitting room. They capture sides of us we don’t want to see. The good news, though, is that they’re not completely accurate. The lighting, the shape of the glass, the smudges on the surface – all of these can distort the image and make us look either better or worse than we actually are. We’re also typically not the best ones to judge what we see in a mirror; we often find what we expect to find. If we expect to find beauty, we’re likely to find it there somewhere. If we expect ugliness, we’ll likely find it there too. So, here’s my question: Can we train ourselves to look for beauty, and what might happen in ourselves, and in our world, if we succeed?

I’ve been pondering this in light of our Scriptures today. It’s said that the Bible doesn’t just reflect God to us; it reflects us to ourselves. And sometimes, what we see in that mirror is not pretty. Consider today’s psalm. We can put it in context, remind ourselves that it was likely written during the Babylonian exile over 2500 years ago – when the writer and their audience were so thoroughly defeated that they didn’t have swords to wield. Their king, their temple, and their self-respect were gone. The God of the Passover who delivered their ancestors from slavery had long ago left the building, or so they feared. It seemed ridiculous to claim that God “takes pleasure in the people and adorns the poor with victory.” Claiming joy in our Maker under these circumstances, reminding ourselves that we are still made in God’s image, and finding beauty there regardless - these can be deeply faithful acts well worth singing out loud.

From there though, we can admit that the psalm goes off the rails. Boasts from our War Department notwithstanding, how can the praises of God legitimately be in our throat while a sword is in our hand wreaking vengeance? My colleague Adam aptly reminded us last Sunday that vengeance is not and never will be our job. Claiming God’s prerogative as judge does neither God nor us any favors. It so distorts the image of God within us that no one can be seen clearly – certainly not God. So, while the second half of the psalm does not reflect God to us, it does reflect us to ourselves. Our thirst for vengeance when we’ve been injured and our propensity to justify it in God’s name - that is part of who we are. And until we can see this ugliness for what it is, we’re likely to keep doing wrong to our neighbors, near and far. There has to be a better way.

There is. Paul names it in our reading from Romans. “Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.” That feels liberating, at least at first. At last, we’re given a lens, a filter, by which to screen everything else we read in the Bible – a standard we can actually live by. “Owe no one anything, except to love one another, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.”

The law of love - it seems so simple, until we try putting it into practice. I know I don’t always feel love for all my neighbors, whom Jesus clearly describes in the parable of the Good Samaritan as anyone in need (Gentiles and tax collectors included.) And after taking a good, hard look in the mirror, love is not necessarily what I feel for myself either. Thank God, love is not fundamentally a feeling; otherwise, the effort to force our feelings into such a narrow box would consume all our energy and leave us paradoxically self-focused, when the point of love is to cast our vision outward. Love means wanting and working for another’s good, even when we’re not sure what that might be. It means seeking and serving Christ in all people, including ourselves, whether we see the image of God reflected back to us or not.

I wonder how we might put this law of love into practice. I wonder if we could start by looking for beauty. This tracks with how a seminary professor of mine once described love as “taking delight in the concrete particularity of the other.” If every last one of us is created in God’s image, then beauty is part of how we’re made. It gets distorted, of course, by choices we make and by choices made for us; it gets obscured by circumstances we never would have chosen. We might need to look with more patience, more gentleness than we’re used to in our born-to-be-a-critic culture. Our faith tells us that there is still God-given beauty there to be found. Some say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and if that’s true – that no one else gets to define beauty for us and that we can shape what we see – then so be it. That’s good news too.

All this to say, if all we see in our mirrors is ugliness, then we need better mirrors. Maybe we can be better mirrors for each other by letting love color what we see and what we reflect in return. And then maybe we can step back from our mirrors and get back to working for each other’s good. Why else are we here? In the Name of the One who gives us the lens of love and expects us to use it, Amen.

“Vengeance is mine…,” says the Lord.”

Oh.

Ok…

“Vengeance is mine, I will repay,” says the Lord.”

Wowzer.

Is that, is that the gospel? Does that sound like good news to you?

I suppose it comes down to who or what you think might be facing the business end of God’s vengeance  – and whatever God’s vengeance may be.

“I will repay,” says the Lord. “Leave room for the wrath of God.”

Paul is referencing Deuteronomy and God’s promise to vindicate God’s People from all that would seek to destroy Israel. Now in Romans Chapter 12, he’s borrowing this language to address the Church in Rome.

How did the early church hear this? How do we hear it today?

On one level, Paul makes it clear that without exception God wants Christians to keep our noses out of the judgment business. It’s clearly spelled out: this is God’s domain.

If only the church had a better track record with respecting this non-negotiable distinction. Even so, there’s something unsettling about all this talk of wrath and vengeance in the middle of what otherwise sounds like a saintly operator’s manual for Christian living. A mentor of mine would have called this – and please forgive my crassness here – a turd in the punchbowl.

One of these things is not like the other in the refreshment Paul is serving up for us here.

If, as Christians we’re meant to repay our hungry enemies with food and our thirsty enemies with drink, and if we are called to live peaceably and harmoniously, and never act without first giving thought to what is noble in the sight of everyone, what do we do with our resentments, our anger, our natural desire for revenge, our human impulse to repay vengeance with vengeance?

Here’s one problem with Paul’s unfortunate party punch. At a surface level, it looks like we have to practice a pretty robust piety while God acts on instincts we can well understand. Why are Christians denied all the cathartic impulses that scratch our evolutionary itch for survival of the fittest?

Well, because, at a deeper level, of course, this base, animalistic behavior is antithetical to our Christian vocation, and we know that. Sometimes it’s hard, but we know that.

And it gives us another punch problem to reckon with – if wrath and vengeance as payback is inconsistent with following the Way of Jesus, how are we to reconcile with the notion that God gets away with vengeance, cruelty, and violence?

Of course, we must concede that we don’t understand the workings of God – and we don’t. We’re told that what may seem to us like base behavior on God’s part may just be God acting at a higher level of purpose beyond our ken.

And that may be. But there’s still something inadequate about this as an end to the argument. A God who suffers as Jesus did on the cross, is not a God who inflicts suffering. If we can’t trust these fundamental attributes of God’s nature, whose image and likeness all humans bear, we are lost.

And yet the faith into which the gospel invites us is a faith of finding, belonging, and homecoming. The gospel is trustworthy beyond our imagining, especially unto its capacity to transform the meaning of our suffering into newness of life.

I’m struck by spiritual movements within some Christian circles that reject any concept of a retributive God because it smacks of dualism. It fails to transcend the limits by either/or thinking, and it seeks to go beyond notions of vengeance and retribution – surely these are baser instincts in the spiritual evolution of humans.

Perhaps. And where retributive justice can soften and grow into restorative justice in non-dual Christian philosophy, it has much good to teach us.

This doesn’t mean there isn’t a place or a call or a time for God to set things right, to repair what’s broken, to hold to account that which must be held to account.

The oppression we see in the world today – in our own nation – surely, there must be a rebalancing of great injustices – there must be hope for change, even now.

As Christians we join Mary in professing a new day where the mighty are pulled down from their thrones and the lowly are lifted up. There are binaries – healthy binaries – in the gospel, as we can see.

But, there are those in our tradition, too, who would take dualistic certainty too far, to where they seem to build their faith on a sharp justice binary of salvation and damnation. At the end of the day, it’s pearly gates or lake of fire. The giving of God’s mercy, they say, will one day be over.

Perhaps extremes in all directions actually fail to leave room for God’s vengeance, whatever that may be.

The vengeance of God is not the vengeance of humankind. This is where we begin to discern that Paul’s punchbowl and its contents, if I haven’t stretched the analogy too far – is not what it initially seems to be. There is a consistent logic, a patterning, a sanity to the Way of Jesus.

On this we must and can depend. It is in every way and always at cross purposes with the world of empire and domination, but it can be trusted, relied on, and recognized for the real hope that it brings to the oh-so-hurting and broken world as we know it.

“I will repay,” says the Lord. “Leave room for the wrath of God.”

Now it begins to make sense. I don’t know about you, but I see much in this world that only God can repay. What if leaving room for God’s wrath is a kind of surrender of our wrath into the care of God’s wrath? This isn’t to let it go, but to use it, paired with a bigger cause, a larger concern, a community of faith.

This might be part of what it means to carry our cross, to borrow that complicated concept from our gospel reading. I know you’ve heard it preached from this pulpit before, but never, and I mean never, does the phrase “carry your cross” subject anyone to the violence, cruelty, or manipulation of someone else’s idea of what your burden should look and feel like.

In a way, we carry our cross to leave room for God’s just wrath. And we carry our cross to join with other Christians in the call to walk in the way of the cross together. The cross is never carried in isolation – not even Jesus carried his cross alone. And whatever our burdens may be, they are borne by the cross and not on our backs, our insecurities, our fears.

We carry the cross of Christ as members of the Body of Christ to bring good news to the world.

Somehow, some way, part of that good news is our command to leave room for God’s vengeance.

Perhaps the best way to square the circle is to go back and read Romans 12 itself. Paul is contextualizing the hard stuff. He seems to be saying, leave all that, the impossible, to God. Here’s what we’re to do:

Let love be genuine; hate what is evil; hold fast to what is good. Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Do not be overcome by evil but overcome evil with good.

Overcome evil with good.

What can at first glance seem like a moral list — a high code of ethics that you don’t have to be Christian to abide by, becomes our Christian duty when we adopt it as our guide to participate in God’s justice for the world.

When God says, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay,” God is assuring us that we don’t – and we can’t – and we never will, fight for God’s justice alone.

I wonder what St. Paul would say to the women in our first reading. Just verses after the ones we hear today from Romans, Paul infamously tells us: “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore, whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed.” Tell that to our women from Exodus. It’s striking that Pharaoh says to let the girls live; it’s the women in this story who resist him. Their civil disobedience helps to bring about a new birth of freedom. So, who’s calling the right play here?

Let’s start with Exodus. We have Shiphrah and Puah, the midwives who break the law set by Pharaoh, who refuse to kill the Hebrew boys. They fear (or reverence) God more than they fear what their government could do to them, so they break an unjust law to preserve life. But they’re not the only ones who resist authority to keep Moses alive. Moses’ mother and sister are part of the resistance too, as is Pharaoh’s own daughter. All of them partner across “enemy” lines to make sure this child who will one day lead his people out of slavery survives.

What do we conclude from this? Maybe Paul is simply wrong. How dare we equate the voice of the emperor with the voice of God? We know what would have happened if Pharaoh was followed without resistance. Is Paul just sucking up to the empire? Perhaps he is saying what they want to hear, hoping that he and his followers might be left alone to practice their faith in peace. Except… he wasn’t afraid to challenge the powers that be. He skirted the edges of any law that would prevent him from preaching about Jesus. He’s not naïve about the government’s potential to abuse power and, in fact, was beaten and imprisoned repeatedly. The last we hear from him, he’s under house arrest. So then, whose call do we follow here? What might a faithful response to an unjust government look like?

By now, it should be clear that the Bible does not speak with a single voice. We can’t take one passage in isolation and base our actions on that alone. It’s the conversation within and beyond the text that is holy and inspired – the wrestling with what God would have us do across times and cultures, across all forms of government. The truth is – we cannot simply recast the biblical roles with our heroes and villains and assume we’re not being self-serving in the casting. We all like to assume that God is on our side and ours alone. Discerning the next right step is more complicated than that, as Paul points out in today’s reading from Romans.

He begins by telling us to “present (our) bodies as a living sacrifice.” Given the number of vigilantes and insurrectionists who think they’re doing just that, it’s worth unpacking this a bit. Note that it’s a “living” sacrifice. The call is not necessarily to get ourselves killed, although that may happen when we stand with the vulnerable as Jesus did. Perhaps it means that whatever risks we take for justice – they’re meant to be taken wisely and in the interests of preserving life.

Note also that we’re presenting our bodies, as well as renewing our minds. It’s not about lobbing verbal grenades from the safety of our computer screens. Some action is required. It might be protest. It might also be taking our lead from those most affected by the injustice and working more quietly behind the scenes to change things. Both choices can be faithful.

To assume otherwise goes against Paul’s next piece of advice – i.e. not to think of ourselves more highly than we ought. I know, it’s funny hearing that from Paul – a first-class tooter of his own horn. But there are lots of ways to think too highly of ourselves. There’s boastful pride, but there’s also the trap of thinking that we’re the only ones smart enough or committed enough to respond appropriately. Paul counters with the image of a body. By being part of the body of Christ, by definition, we are not all meant to have the same role. We need others to help us see what we can’t – whether that’s opportunities for courage or our own blinding prejudices. We have partners in this work; we’d do well to value them.

Exodus tells us something else though, too. If fear is what’s driving us, then we’re probably headed in the wrong direction. Pharaoh’s fear leads him to actions that are not only evil, but against his own best interest. He ends up trying to kill the very people he’s afraid of losing. The ones who do right here are not controlled by fear. The midwives, Moses’ mother and sister, Pharaoh’s own daughter – they are all moved more by mercy than by fear and so end up being part of God’s salvation – even it if takes another 40 years to see much return on that investment.

That might be the most important thing to remember as we consider our own resistance to unjust authority. Whatever we see now – it is not all there is. God wants so much more for us all. The arc of the moral universe is still bent toward justice. Just because we can’t see past the next bend does not mean we’re on the wrong path. When we stand with the vulnerable and act with courage alongside them, when we let others point out our blind spots and respond with humility, and when we let mercy drive us instead of fear, we are exactly where we need to be to let God guide our next play. In the Name of the One who gives us eyes to see, ears to hear, and the minds and bodies to follow – Amen.

Have you noticed how tribalistic we have become in modernity?

Wanting to move from just being frustrated by endless news cycles offering cascades of despairing reports, I’ve been digging down into the neurobiological and historical roots of our tribal tendencies, trying to better understand our current predicament. I’ve even been dipping into the astrobiological question, what defines “life” (more on that in the footnotes).

It is fascinating reading, prompting reflection that honestly has helped me take a few steps back from my impulse to jump on the “us versus them” wagon without regard for another’s perspective.

In light of today’s gospel, when we get a Jesus who, on engagement with the Canaanite woman, does not seem to be the Jesus we’ve come to know and love, or even really like, I’d like to share some of my gleanings.

Jesus is trekking to the borderlands of familiarity, presumably to teach his disciples some important lessons, we being his disciples, too. He leaves Gennesaret, which is already on the outskirts of social comfort zone, across the Sea of Galilee, where Jews and non-Jews intermingle, far flung from the hallowed halls of Jerusalem.

He moves north into the region of Tyre and Sidon, present-day Lebanon, where few, if any, Jews live. We don’t know why he goes there, but he does, and he is now thoroughly in the land of the Canaanites, Israel’s bitter enemy. It was decided long before that they could not live together. He could not have known the Canaanite woman as anything but the despised and distrusted “other.” His apparent disdain for her would have made political and social sense in his day.

If we go further back in human history, the neurobiology of tribalism runs deep in our veins. We humans are social creatures, ill-equipped to survive on our own. It turns out we have a very effective evolutionary adaptation that orients to tribal instincts: we hang with those aligned with ourselves; we inherently distrust those who don’t. Much of this is subconscious. There is actually a “coefficient of relationship” which guides the notion of kinship—the more genes we share, the more likely we are to orient to them, and draw them closer. Over time, this orbit of kinship led to living together, eating together, and eventually helped establish agriculture, shared goods and services, forged political alliances and what we now call “civilization.”

The term tribe is from the Latin tribus—literally, the ancient Roman administrative precinct in which voting cohorts were held. There was no value judgment invested in the term.

Centuries later, as European countries embraced the expansionist sprint to colonize the globe, the word was applied indiscriminately and pejoratively to any clan or collective of people the colonizers judged to be “barbarians.”

From there, the binaries of moral superiority between “us and them” set us up for the modern zero-sum game we see sweeping all aspects of our social constructs. For me to win, you must lose. And you deserve to lose. The dogs under the table are not worthy to eat my children’s crumbs.

Neurobiology made it easy to do.

But the derivative effects informed by it are disastrous—echo chambers, isolation and loneliness, manufactured fear…these translate fairly readily to justification for racism and xenophobia, mass deportations, indentured slavery, trafficking, pogroms, wars, even genocides. Humans have always had capacity for this range of evil, but we now play the zero-sum game on a global level, with a scale of catastrophic proportion.

Which brings me to the second aspect of neurobiology that factors into this: our brains do not do well with large collections. We naturally create taxonomies, divisions, and boundaries to establish some sense of order.

We don’t know what to do with a global population of 8 billion, but how many people live in your home or in your building or on your block?

We have a hard time conjuring that we have 4 million people living in metropolitan Seattle, but can you rally around a sports team that represents the region and feel some connection with all those others as you do?

We can’t comprehend that more than 100 million people have died in wars in the past century, but do you somehow remember that 49 people died a decade ago in the Pulse nightclub shooting?

Again, neurobiology made it easy to do. We categorize and create boundaries to make sense of our world.

We do it in the natural order of things as well. There are some 8.7 million species of living things on earth, but we can’t really make any sense of that number, so do you remember what we did: we created a taxonomy of living things: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species. Nothing inherently bad in that, but the results have been ruinous. By seeing homo sapiens as distinct from plants and animals, we convinced ourselves that we were separate from the rest of the creatures of this world, and somehow superior.

And if we take this one step further, this is where it really gets interesting…

Political theorist Jane Bennett has written a book entitled Vibrant Matter in which she critiques the traditional ordering of creation into “vibrant life” (comprised of living beings) and dull matter (lifeless things like rocks, rivers, even the vegetable or fruit you might eat at lunch).[1]

But a river isn’t really “lifeless,” is it? Well, it depends on how you define what is living.[2]

Bennett would have us move away from the binary of vibrant life and dull matter and call it instead an “assemblage of vibrant matter” where water and rock create the environment for teeming life. Electrons and electromagnetic fields have bearing on it all as well.

Can we see trees as part of our whole? Can the granite rock in my garden hold the potential energy of its hot lava origin and share that energy with me? Can the fruit on my plate speak its sacrificial beauty into my being, thereby changing me? I want to be part of such assemblages of vibrant matter!

Last week, we heard that Jesus came to the disciples walking on water, and Canon Rich gave a fine sermon in which he proposed for our consideration that Jesus is always coming toward us. God is always coming toward us, even when we can’t see it.
I don’t know what Jesus was thinking when he went to Canaanite territory, but if he was teaching his disciples an important lesson, perhaps even with a bit of unsettling discourse with the Canaanite woman, maybe we can say he went toward her, toward her land of otherness, across the boundary of us versus them, and what came of it was good.

A border crossed, a child healed, an aggrieved mother affirmed, a teacher humbled. Not a bad parable for us to consider today.

FEAR. I want to talk about it today. I grew up in a home where I felt secure, stable, and safe. However, as I got older and I encountered the outside world, I became fearful. I was especially fearful of my peers. I was constantly concerned about what they thought of me. I was sensitive and spiritual, more interested in music and theater than sports. I knew I was gay, but no one else did. This was the 1960’s and I couldn’t imagine ever sharing that with anyone else. I had never met anyone like me, and I was afraid that I would be found out.

This continued until at age 25 I had a profound spiritual experience in prayer. I encountered the complete and unconditional love of God through a mystical experience. This fed my desire to become a priest, and I was no longer afraid. Sure, I would get scared especially if something was threatening. My fear would remove me from the threat and ensure my survival, but I no longer lived with a sense of constant fear and dread. However, something happened this week in my life that re-stoked that irrational fear. I had to grapple with the reality that, as I age, I am afraid of a future that I cannot control. I’m working through it, but I must tell you, this week I was afraid. Really afraid.

Thank God that the church offers us the Gospel that we just heard today. In it the disciples contend with deep, primal fear. Fear like I felt this week. Fear of the unknown. Fear of suffering. Fear of sickness and death. Fear of oblivion. Unfortunately, I have heard many sermons on this passage that suggest that if we have enough faith and trust in God, we will not be afraid. For example, in our Gospel when Peter exercises bold, fearless faith in Jesus, he does the impossible. His faith empowers him to walk on water – just like Jesus! But as soon as Peter gives in to fear, he nearly drowns.

I think simplistic interpretations like this are dangerous. Nowhere in the Gospels are we called to prove our faith by taking pointless risks that threaten our lives. Nowhere in the Gospels does Jesus teach us that bad things happen to us because we’re too frightened to earn God’s protective care. Whether we’re talking about respecting the power of the sea during a vicious storm, or heeding expert medical advice during a global pandemic, the same caution applies. Recklessness is not faith. Stupidity is not courage.

Notice the timeline of events as Matthew relates them. The disciples are frightened because they are in a small boat in a storm. When they see Jesus walking on the water, they’re terrified. They don’t recognize him; they think they’re seeing a ghost. Naturally, they cry out in fear. “Immediately” Jesus offers them comfort and reassurance. He tells them exactly who he is. “Take courage! It is I! Do not be afraid.”

And then Peter tempts Jesus. He gives Jesus an identity test. “Lord, if it’s you...” When else did we hear those words? Remember the beginning of Matthew’s Gospel? Can you hear the echoes of another famous identity test in Peter’s words? The identity test Jesus faced in the wilderness, forty days after his baptism? They came from the devil, “If you are the Son of God…”

This is not about the morality or immorality of human fear. This is about how we respond to God’s presence when we’re afraid. It’s about what we say and think and feel and do when the divine comes to us in guises we don’t recognize.

The disciples are not wrong to be afraid. Of course they’re afraid! They're afraid because they aren't keen on drowning. They’re afraid because gigantic waves in the middle of the night are scary. They’re afraid because they lack the tools with which to process what they’re seeing; human beings don’t have the ability to walk on water.

If we extend the meaning of "drowning" to include all the ways in which we human beings find ourselves in over our heads in this world, then of course we experience fear. Of course, we feel afraid amid political brokenness, rampant social injustice, struggling economies, and escalating international warfare. Of course, we feel afraid when unhealthy marriages, sick children, unfriendly neighbors, grinding jobs, and financial uncertainty threaten our lives. Of course, we feel afraid when our basic biology betrays us into anxiety, panic, and depression.

The issue is not fear; the issue is where fear leads. Notice the first place that Peter’s fear leads him. His fear leads him straight to suspicion and distrust. His fear leads him to test and question Jesus’s identity, instead of taking Jesus’s self-disclosure at face value. “If it’s you, enable me to do the impossible. If it’s you, reorder reality and prove to me that you’re God.”

Interestingly, Peter’s test fails. Despite his initial boldness, he cannot prove who Jesus is by walking on water. He fails within seconds. Why? Because Jesus doesn’t calm the sea for Peter’s convenience. Even though Peter steps out of the boat, his circumstances remain wild and turbulent and dangerous. If Peter thinks he can manipulate Jesus into making faith easy, he learns otherwise fast.

To truly trust Jesus is to hold two pictures of God’s kingdom in productive tension. Yes, sometimes Jesus demonstrates his power in miraculous ways. But most often, we need to trust that his Incarnation – his quiet, abiding presence in our wild, untamed lives – is sufficient for the circumstances we face. Usually, Jesus's power is paradoxical; it comes to us in what looks like vulnerability, like weakness, like strangeness. The image of Jesus’ power is a beaten man on a cross. The wildness of the sea is no proof of God’s absence.

In my mind, the power of this Gospel story doesn’t lie in Peter’s faith, doubt, courage or fear. Peter’s trajectory is not the point of the reading. Jesus’s trajectory is the point, because unlike Peter’s, it never changes. It is constant, focused, relentless, and directed. Did you notice? From the very beginning of the story, Jesus moves towards his disciples. He moves towards them when they’re struggling at sea. He moves towards them when they decide he’s a menacing ghost. He moves towards them when they’re terrified by his approach. He moves towards them when they’re reckless enough to give him a dare. He moves towards them when they begin to drown. He moves towards them when they cry out for help. He moves towards them when they’re shivering and sorry for their rashness. He moves towards them when they realize, for a beautiful, flickering instant, who he is and what he is. He moves towards them when they worship him.

In other words, Jesus never stops moving towards the ones he loves. He never stops crossing the dark water to come to where we are. Neither our fearfulness nor our faithlessness ever alters his steady approach. We are the ones he’s bound for. Our flailing bodies are the ones he pulls out of the water. Ours is the boat he climbs into. It is for us that he calls out across the terrifying waves, again and again and again:

Take courage. It is I. Do not be afraid.

I won’t bury the lead today. Nothing can separate us from the love of God. That is the good news. St. Paul has been building up to this crescendo for months now. Since the beginning of June, we’ve been hearing bits of Romans every Sunday – mostly uncommented on. I can’t speak for my fellow clergy but, given a choice between an argument and a narrative, I prefer story. Today’s no exception. Paul and I will get to the same destination; we’ll just take different routes to get there.

Why? There’s more room to breathe in story – more space for the messiness of our lives. And what better book to mirror back our messiness than Genesis? As someone who follows the God of my mother and grandmother, I find the women of Genesis compelling. I live downstream from them. Rarely does God speak to them directly; like us, they struggle with God’s hiddenness and silence. If they can find God’s love within the limits of their lives, maybe we can too.

When last we visited Genesis together, we were introduced to Rebekah and her how-I-met-Isaac story. Our focus has now shifted to their son Jacob. On the surface, there’s nothing redemptive here. We have a man selling off his daughters, another man saddled with a wife he didn’t ask for, and two unfortunate sisters having neither voice nor vote in being married off to the same man. Reality TV has nothing on the Old Testament. Where is God in this?

Perhaps we see the unspoken hand of God in the love between Jacob and Rachel. There is a kind of grace to falling in love. As former Archbishop Rowan Williams points out in an old article called “The Body’s Grace,” we can experience grace when we are desired and chosen by another human being – beyond any question of deserving. When we’re loved in our vulnerable bodies with all we see in our unforgiving mirrors, when we discover that we are the cause of another’s deep joy, such love can change us. It can create a capacity to give that we never knew we had. At least that’s what happened to me, when I was finally someone’s Rachel after a lifetime of feeling like Leah. Over time, this experience of loving and being loved can help us recognize God’s love for what it is; we discover that the only thing that lasts in this life is already ours, and it can never be taken away.

It doesn’t always work this way, of course. We can love other people without ever making the direct connection to God. We can walk right by mustard seed or yeast and never notice how they have the capacity to shelter or feed us. The treasure hidden in a field can remain hidden. God’s kingdom of love doesn’t always compel our attention. And yes, we can love someone without the grace of being chosen in return. Just ask Leah.

We get more of her story where today’s reading drops off. God shows up again in the text for her. We’re told: “When the Lord saw that Leah was unloved, he opened her womb.” We then hear her story through the names she gives her children. She names her firstborn Reuben, for she says: “Because the Lord has looked on my affliction, surely now my husband will love me.” She names her second son Simeon, which for her means: “Because the LORD has heard that I am hated, he has given me this son too.” She names her third son Levi, thinking: “Now this time my husband will be joined to me, because I have borne him three sons.” It’s heartbreaking. Jacob never chooses her first. While he shows respect for her and seeks her counsel in later stories, her love for him is never fully reciprocated. So, where is God in this?

Apparently, Leah found love and grace in her life regardless. She names her fourth son Judah, which means “praise,” for she says: “This time I will praise the LORD.” Maybe she found love in her role as a mother. Or maybe God’s love found her first, and her status as a wife and mother was beside the point. I could say that she finally found the pearl of great price, but that inverts Jesus’ parable in today’s Gospel. The kingdom here is not like the pearl; it’s like the merchant – the one who searches until he finds. Perhaps Leah finally realized that she too was God’s beloved, that she was God’s pearl of great price, and that gave her the grace to let the rest of it go and praise the Lord.

It turns out, God was able to work through the mess of these sisters’ lives. We don’t even need to build up Leah at Rachel’s expense. In the book of Ruth generations later, Leah and Rachel are specifically named and praised, for they (and I quote) “together built up the house of Israel.” Countless generations have found strength in their stories. Naming God in their messy lives helps us to name God in ours. We spend so much time trying to hold onto whatever love we have, lamenting the loves we’ve lost or never had, building ourselves up at each other’s expense, not realizing that God is in our mess too. Where? Where God has always been – loving us, desiring us, choosing us all. Or as St. Paul puts it, nothing – not even us – “will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

In the week to come, I invite you to consider: Who in your life needs to be shown by your actions that they are God’s beloved? Who might be so battered by bad readings of Scripture that they don’t know the good news is good for them too? How might you let yourself remember that you are also a pearl of great price? In the Name of the One who never stops searching until we are found – Amen.

The Parable of the Wheat and Weeds – what a treat! More traditionally known as the Parable of the Wheat and Tares, the parable is literally sandwiched between several other parables of the kingdom.

Although we didn’t hear them this morning, Jesus follows the parable of the wheat and weeds with two more parables in Matthew Chapter 13: the parable of the mustard seed and the parable of the yeast.

Welcoming branches, nesting birds, warm, leavened bread – these parables offer expansive, inviting kingdom images. But it seems the disciples’ minds couldn’t move past the reaper imagery of bundling and burning in the parable of the wheat and weeds.

I can’t imagine why.

Today’s gospel picks up again as Jesus departs from the crowds, and the disciples follow him into a house where they ask him to explain the wheat and the weeds. His explanation raises the temperature on the parable, as it were, with more graphic and unsettling images. It must’ve been nightmare fodder for at least a few of the disciples: That now well-known fiery furnace, and weeping and gnashing of teeth.

What do you think? How does Jesus’ explanation sit with you?

This parable exists only in Matthew, but it has a familiar resonance. It sounds like a sorting allegory for the final reckoning. This theme appears more than once in Matthew. God will separate the wheat from the weeds, the sheep from the goats – the good from the bad – at least eventually, but when it happens, it will happen with a fiery finality.

It’s not a comfortable parable. It unsettles us, makes us squirm a bit.

That’s what the parable is supposed to do. The heart of any parable isn’t so much about what it means as it’s about what it can do. It works on us. Not once but repeatedly, over time.

Let me be clear – Jesus’ interpretation of the parable includes the decisive assurance that evil and corruption have a shelf life. They will fully and finally expire. The injustices and inequities of this world will be righted once and for all. Make no mistake about it. This is news we need to hear, even as we faithfully seek to combat injustice and inequality in our own time.

But maybe we can set aside the temptation to contain the parable by trying to shoe-horn it into a tidy theological framework—a closed dogma for the final reckoning. That’s just that kind of dualistic thinking that Jesus is trying to disrupt with the parable.

Maybe it’s enough to recognize that the harvest he alludes to is almost certainly not on our immediate horizon. Every single end-of-the-world prophet so far has been dead wrong, including a few of our favorite New Testament saints.

No, leave that to God. We are called to live right here, right now.

Our shared vocation is faithful discipleship, even and especially in a world inextricably embedded with both wheat and weeds. And the instruction is clear: let the weeds grow with the wheat. Don’t try to uproot them before their time is up.

As I’ve said, this doesn’t mean we don’t stand up to evil and injustice. But we are invited to consider a more nuanced view of how we relate to sin and evil in our own time.

We are called to live in a mixed garden, at least for now. It is not for us to worry about who is out and who is in. Because guess what, the mixed garden is within us, too. We are, all of us, both wheat and weeds.

If you feel certain that you are solidly in camp wheat, take a closer look at the weeds growing at your edges. We all have aspects of ourselves that ensnare us, trip us up, and choke out our fruitfulness.

But here’s the good news about having both wheat and weeds within us. God isn’t only involved with our “wheaty” successes. Our weed-choked sufferings and failures are the very patches of our mixed garden where God’s grace flows most freely.

I trust all of you have some sense of what I mean.

I’ve had seasons where I’ve really mucked things up and hurt more than a few people – including myself. This was especially true when I was an active alcoholic.  It was in my lowest low – one of them, anyway – that I was finally given eyes to see God’s grace welling up around me in the midst of my wreckage and desolation. It was my patient, non-reactive Alcoholics Anonymous community who took my hand, and, guided by my Higher Power and theirs, they helped me take those first shaky steps into a journey of transformation that is still underway. Imperfect, of course, but still underway.

I pray I never lose sight of the loving community that knew enough to leave my weeds alone and hold their attention on me. They offered me just enough spiritual water and sunlight to see the sky again. I wasn’t judged, I was helped.

It was the tangle of weeds in my shambles of a garden that, if you’ll permit me to take the analogy just one step further and three gospels over, rattled my wheat enough to knock a grain or two off their stalks. You know the rest.

“Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”^[1]

Even weeds sown in the earth by the so-called evil one have a role to play in our fruitfulness. They contribute to the continuous cycle of death and resurrection that is our life in Christ. The fruitful harvest we bring to the world now is the true harvest we’re called to attend to.

Paul tells us in our reading from Romans that “[T]he whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now.”^[2]

The whole of creation.

All of creation is under God’s control and, by the power of the Spirit, is moving in a Godward direction.

My friends, that includes those pesky weeds.

We may naturally gravitate to the kingdom images in the parable of the mustard seed or the parable of the baker and her leavened bread. But the parable of the wheat and weeds is just as much good news. It is for us, not against us. Both its hopeful assurances and its unsettling challenges serve us in our call to follow Christ.

At the end of the day, as we dwell in our mixed and imperfect garden, it’s good to remember to look up at the sky from time to time. Draw in a deep breath and slowly exhale.

While we’re attending to our lives in a tangle of wheat and weeds, our sunlight, our water, our nourishment, – the very air we breathe – it all comes from above. We can be sure in the knowledge that we don’t – we can’t tend to our patch of mixed garden alone. We have a gardener, too, and our gardener is Jesus Christ.

Amen.

I won’t be with you next Sunday because I have a one-week staycation that begins this Wednesday. I have finally learned, after living in Seattle for seventeen years, not to leave town in the summer. It’s best to take my vacation here to enjoy our beautiful weather and mild temperatures. Our oldest son, Josh, and his family will be with us from Charlottesville, Virginia so all three sons, their spouses, and our six grandchildren will all be in the same place at the same time – mostly at our home. I expect it to be a precious time.

So, when I looked at the readings for today, I was tempted to preach about sibling rivalry and strange family dynamics because of our fascinating reading about Jacob and Esau. But I’ve also spent the last three days working in my yard to get it ready for the convergence of active children and adults. As I trimmed all the plants that I sowed earlier this year, I found myself reflecting upon the familiar Parable of the Sower in today’s Gospel. I’ve also been struggling with my own stinginess as we are contemplating a week of extravagance with so many family members in town. I can’t help it; when it comes to my children and grandchildren, I can be a little too generous. Do I spoil them? Of course not!

The parable seems to be a compelling case for divine extravagance, and its relationship to joy. You heard the story from Jesus. A sower goes out to sow. She throws the seeds upon numerous terrains and there are different outcomes. If your experience is anything like mine, you’ve heard this parable many times and focused exclusively on the four types of terrain Jesus describes. You’ve thought about the people you preach to week after week, and worried about who is hardened, rocky, thorny, or “good.” You’ve agonized over how to find and cultivate more fertile soil in your church or community. You’ve analyzed and quantified, assessed and judged. You’ve evaluated ministry plans and strategies, pruned leadership commissions and committees. You’ve bought special pots, invested in high end fertilizers and weed killers, and counted, sorted, and planted your seeds with exquisite care, placing each bit of God’s good news in its optimal place, to guarantee an impressive harvest. I’ve been the rector of four different parishes. This is what I always thought when I read this parable.

Or else, also like me, you’ve read this parable and walked away, feeling bad about your own faith life. Feeling judged, inadequate, or anxious. You’ve wondered how to make your own spiritual soil less hard, less rocky, or thorny. You’ve designed all sorts of self-improvement projects to fix what’s “wrong” with you. More prayer; less social media. More Bible study; less cynicism. More church; less television. You’ve read the parable as an indictment of your relationship with a Sower who just can’t seem to find an appropriately hospitable environment in your messed up heart.

Now, to be clear, there’s nothing wrong with planning and pruning. There’s nothing wrong with honest and humble self-assessment in our spiritual lives. But I think we miss something crucial when we read this Gospel text as “The Parable of the Four Terrains.” Because that is not what it is. It is “The Parable of the Sower.” It is a parable about the nature and character of God. About God’s kingdom, God’s provision, and God’s extravagant generosity when it comes to us, his beloved creatures.

Consider again the actions of the sower as Jesus describes them: The sower goes out to sow, and as she sows, the seeds fall everywhere. Everywhere. Imagine it – a sower blissfully walking across the fields and meadows, the back alleys and sidewalks, the playgrounds and parking lots of our world, fistfuls of seed in her quick-to-open hands. There is no way to contain that much seed. No way to sort or save it. Of course it will spill over. Of course, it will fall through her fingers and cover the ground. Of course it will scatter in every direction. How can it not?

But here’s the surprising part of the story: the sower doesn’t mind. She doesn’t mind one bit. She has a confident realism, a sense that what needs to flourish will flourish. Maybe not all at once. Maybe not everywhere. But that’s okay. In other words, the sower in Jesus’s parable is wholly unconcerned about where the seed falls or lands or settles - all she chooses to do is keep sowing. Keep flinging. Why? Because there’s enough seed to go around. There’s enough seed to accomplish the sower’s purposes. There’s enough seed to “waste.”

As I imagine this profligate sower walking in and around and through the varied terrains of our lives, I can’t help but wonder about my own contrasting stinginess. The truth is that I don’t tend to believe that there’s enough Good News to go around. I don’t begin with the generous assumption that every kind of soil can benefit from the seed. I don’t have confidence that God’s Word will go out from God’s mouth and accomplish what God purposes for it, no matter where it lands. I don’t trust in God’s endless ability to soften hard ground, clear away rocks, and cut through the most stubborn of thorns to make way for a harvest. I don't care about the birds as much as God does.

In short, I forget that all the terrain is already God’s, under God’s provision and sustained by God’s love. Who am I to tell God, the Creator of the earth and all that is in it, what “good soil” looks like? Who am I to decide who is worthy and who is not of the sower’s generosity? Who am I to hoard what I have been so freely and lavishly given? Who am I to look at God's profligate blessing and call it waste?

How I wish that the Church – the Church across the ages, the Church across all cultures, denominations, and circumstances – were known for its absurd generosity. How I wish we were famous for being like the Sower, going out in joy, scattering seed before and behind us in the widest arcs our arms can make. How I wish the world could laugh at our lavishness instead of weeping in the wake of our stinginess. How I wish the people in our lives could see a quiet, gentle confidence in us when we tend to the hard, rocky, thorny places in our communities, instead of finding us abrasive, judgmental, exacting, and insular. How I wish seeds of love, mercy, humility, and truthfulness would fall through our fingers in such appalling quantities that even the birds, the rocks, the thorns, and the shallow, sun-scorched corners of the world would burst into colorful, riotous, joyous life.

In these crazy political times of scarcity, anxiety, suffering, and loss, what does the world need more than a Sower who is lavish? A Sower who errs on the side of wastefulness? A Sower who'd rather lose a bunch of seeds to inhospitable terrain than withhold a single one?

The thing about this parable is that at some deep, intuitive level, we recognize its wisdom. Whether we want to admit it or not, we know that Jesus is telling us the truth. We know that the most elegant and carefully cultivated gardens can fail, while a profusion of weedy, vibrant flowers pushes through a crack in the pavement and brightens a neighborhood. We've seen how new life can spring from the deadest, most shriveled places in our lives - places we've given up on, places we assumed were hardened beyond hope. We've witnessed inhospitable environments being altered by love. We know that joy follows from selflessness and generosity, not from caution and miserliness.

In the end, the problem is not our ignorance in the face of this Gospel; the problem is our unwillingness to follow in the footsteps of the extravagant Sower. Her carefree generosity worries us. Her seeming wastefulness offends us. Why won’t she discriminate? Why won’t she wait and withhold – at least a little bit? Why won’t she privilege the terrain that’s more deserving?

Because that’s not the kind of Sower she is. Look at her, tossing seeds to the wind with reckless abandon with a daring and delighted smile on her face, inviting us to toss our own handfuls across the earth and share her joy. Shall we do that this summer in Seattle? The invitation is there. Will we take up the challenge?