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.

Coming soon...

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?

What kind of origin story is this? We want our founding fathers and mothers to be heroes, don’t we? We want them to be exceptional. We want them to model how we can use our freedom to liberate others and be an example of justice and righteousness to the world – and instead, we get the book of Genesis. Who would write a history like this – with spiritual ancestors who are just as flawed as we are? We have choices; why hold onto this set of stories as our own?

Two weeks ago, we saw Abraham, the one St. Paul calls “the father of us all,” and his wife Sarah treat Hagar shamefully. Today’s reading won’t let us forget that they were, in fact, slaveholders who viewed those enslaved to them as signs of God’s favor and blessing. This is appalling. However long ago the Abraham stories lived as oral history, they were written down centuries later. Given that, I find it fascinating that a people defined by their deliverance from slavery in Egypt would seemingly take pride in their ancestors being slaveholders themselves.

Who knows? Perhaps it’s a sign of moral complexity and humility – a reminder that nothing human is foreign to us, that the roles of oppressed and oppressor aren’t fixed and often have more to do with circumstance than character. That’s more nuance than many of us are prepared for this weekend. I’ll be honest; there are days when I just want my heroes back.

Who better to help me than Marilynne Robinson? In novels like Gilead and Lila, she writes as beautifully about the life of faith as any living writer I’ve encountered – and she published a book in 2024 called Reading Genesis. If anyone can help me hold onto my heroes, she can. And yet, she’s more cynical about Isaac and Rebekah’s “courtship” than I ever thought to be. Yes, arranged marriages based on kinship were common in ancient times. But this relationship seems to be based on love. We’re told that Isaac loved Rebekah, right? Besides, we like having an excuse, outside of weddings, to hear the erotic love poetry of the Song of Solomon out loud in church. It feels a little naughty. Can’t we just gloss over any complicating details and let our romantic notions lie?

Personally, I’ve always drawn strength from Rebekah’s kindness and courage here and, thankfully, Robinson doesn’t burst my bubble on that front. Rebekah passes a test she doesn’t even know she’s taking. It’s one thing to offer a drink to a thirsty man in the desert. It’s quite another to quench the thirst of ten camels. She doesn’t know yet who she’s helping; she simply sees a need and chooses to fill it. Likewise, she then chooses to leave the land of her ancestors to marry a man she’s never met and start a new life. As someone who moved 3000 miles away from my family back East to take this call, I appreciate her choice – and I take comfort in it. She’ll make more questionable, even reprehensible, choices later, but at least they’re her choices. No one else dares to make them for her. I like that about her.

Contrast this with Isaac, the most passive of the patriarchs. There’s nothing wrong with going with the flow, but it doesn’t exactly make him a thrilling suitor. This woman who hauled hundreds of gallons of water for a stranger’s camels is greeted by her prospective husband with not so much as a cup of cold water – at least as we’re given the story here. Our novelist Marilynne Robinson imagines Rebekah reacting as any of us might - who find that the greatest hope of our spouse is that we’ll be just like their mom. She reads Rebekah’s later machinations in the light of this disappointment and sours any simplistic notions of “happily ever after.”

What might this origin story have to do with us as we consider our own origin stories as a nation this weekend? The stories we tell ourselves about the past matter. They shape how we hold ourselves accountable for the present and how we imagine the future. Stories that only allow us to be the good guys are not solid enough to sustain us. They assume that our flaws somehow erase our achievements - when they don’t. They assume that good and evil cannot coexist in the same heart - when we all know that they do. We can still have our heroes, but we don’t need to hold onto them as if they are our hope. Why should their struggle against evil be any easier than ours? Our hope is not in our ancestors’ ability to live up to their highest ideals. It’s in the God who created both them and us for good.

Here is where Marilynne Robinson ended up coming to my aid. She reminded me of what I know on my best days to be true. God’s vast and generous intent for us unfolds over centuries, often written in a hand too big for us to read. God’s love is so strong and loyal and steadfast that it allows space for us to be the complicated creatures we are. God respects the integrity of our choices and lets us live with them - but won’t finally be constrained by them. God will continue working through us and despite us for good. Or in her words, God’s blessing “does not reveal its whole meaning in the course of any life or generation or era. This is the freedom of God in which humankind is free.” That means we can look honestly at what we’ve done and left undone with our freedom these last 250 years. We can claim the grace that sustains all families of the earth, and we can learn to walk in new ways. We can repent and repair what is still broken without it breaking us – and we can celebrate and nurture the good that’s here now and is still possible. In the Name of the One whose freedom sets us free – Amen.

“Oh, my Gawd. Can we talk?” This is a signature phrase from my friend Julie, a native New Yorker, rabbi, and hospital chaplain. She would proclaim this whenever she was confronted with something really challenging. It could be almost anything — misbehavior from our kooky boss, a challenging ethical situation in the hospital, or extreme conflict from a patient or their family. “Can we talk?” was always followed by a deep conversation in my office. Julie would kvetch but was she was not complaining — she was processing. Telling the story, explaining the details, identifying her feelings, listening to my response, and asking tough questions helped her make sense of the senselessness and often led to an insight into a previously impenetrable mystery. “Let me tell you a story,” was another one of her signature lines. She would often interrupt the conversation to tell a story that might seem unrelated at first but would allow us to see things with a fresh perspective, often with deep spiritual insight.

So, this week as I was challenged by the appalling first reading we have from Genesis 22, I called Julie up and said, “Oh my God. Can we talk?” Christians, Jews, and Muslims all struggle with this passage about Abraham being commanded by God to sacrifice his son, Isaac, and we’ve struggled with it for about 4000 years. The command of God seems to conflict with the promise made to Abraham earlier in Genesis. Remember that God promised Abraham and Sarah that they would be the forbears of a great nation, but they were old and childless. Sarah miraculously gave birth to Isaac when she was 100 years old. The command and the promise are in conflict.

I don’t know what’s most disturbing. That God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son or that Abraham seemed willing to do it and Isaac went along with it. It doesn’t make us religious people look very good to the non-believing world. For the atheist zealot Richard Dawkins, it's an example of religion's barbaric cruelty. In his book, The God Delusion, he writes, "this disgraceful story is an example simultaneously of child abuse, bullying in two asymmetrical power relationships, and the first recorded use of the Nuremberg defense: ‘I was only obeying orders' yet the legend is one of the great foundational myths of all three monotheistic religions."ⁱ

So, I asked Julie, “what do you do with Bible passages where God seemingly commands people to kill one another?” She said, “We ignore them. That’s not who God is.” And then she went on, “Whenever God is being obtuse, we make stuff up. We tell stories to get at the true spiritual meaning.” She went on to tell me about midrashim, the stories and commentaries that rabbis throughout the centuries have written to understand, explain, and resolve troublesome texts.

Many midrashists have asked: Where was Sarah when this command was given to Abraham? A variety of stories have emerged to address this lacuna in the text. In one contemporary midrash, Rivkah Lubitch imagines that God comes to Sarah first and says, “Take your son, your only one, whom you love, Isaac, and take him to the land of Moriah and offer him up.” Sarah says to God, “No! A mother does not slaughter her children.” Thus Sarah, passes the so-called “test.”ⁱⁱ

The next morning Sarah discovers that neither Abraham nor Isaac are present. With horror, she recognizes that God said the same thing to Abraham, and he has made a completely different decision. She lifts up her arms to God and says, “I know that one who slaughters his son in the name of God will in the end be left without a son or God. Forgive Abraham, who was mistaken about this.” At this moment, the midrash says, the angel of God calls out, “Abraham, Abraham, do not lay your hand on the boy” (Genesis 22:11–12). And in this way, all three are saved.

I love Sarah’s no in this story. It’s so real and comes out of her own wisdom, out of her own struggle and suffering. It also comes out of her instincts: the God of covenantal love would not ask me for something like this. Sarah’s full engagement — her whole self — contends with God in this moment. Sarah sees the threat that everything could be lost: not only her child, but also her relationship with God, and her faith, which is the foundation of her life. The same is true of Abraham.

There are many places in the Hebrew Bible that teach us that our relationship with God is a conversation. In Genesis 18, Sarah’s laughter about the possibility of Isaac’s birth opens a conversation with God about the meaning and purpose of destiny. Later in the chapter, Abraham himself negotiates with God about the fate of Sodom. Jacob wrestles with God who comes as an angel. Moses is in a decade’s long conversation with God about the fate of the Israelites. While there are many commands in these texts, the God of the Torah seems to require our engagement, our willingness to take up the conversation, to wonder, to question, to challenge, and perhaps even to say no.

But the binding of Isaac has never been one of those stories. We always celebrate Abraham’s blind obedience. Perhaps because of its terrifying nature or because God is asking the impossible, the binding of Isaac has most frequently been taken as a straightforward story about obedience. Why do we want to take this story literally? Maybe it’s not about God or our obedient response but rather about how to relate to the Divine within a covenant of love. A covenantal relationship requires trust and vulnerability by both parties.

This story shockingly reminds us that there are many ways to shirk our responsibility when it comes to the ongoing, life-long, profoundly demanding conversation with God. Maybe we imagine that we already know what God is asking of us, and we follow our sense of duty blindly. Maybe we turn over our inner authority to another human being. Maybe we doubt ourselves and our own perceptions so much that we don’t hold up our end of the conversation. Maybe we think we hear the voice of God and we’re just wrong. Maybe we ignore God’s inquiry into our lives. Maybe we silence our inner protest.

One of the things I learn from Sarah’s refusal is that, without engagement and intimacy, obedience is a mindless and brutal enterprise. True intimacy with God is both a conversation and an evolution that emerges from a willingness to speak from our own integrity. Looked at from this perspective, God’s demand that Abraham kill Isaac is a strange gift, but a gift nonetheless. The absurdity of it shakes my sense of reality. It breaks open my cozy, self-satisfied, pre-packaged notions of God. If God only ever tells me what I want to hear, then no conversation is possible.

Instead, we might notice that to avoid becoming a dictator, God needs us to participate, to hold up our end of the conversation, to struggle with what God asks of us. Maybe it’s in saying “no” that we can make a deeper and more authentic “yes” to God in faith. The command and promise are not in conflict because God always provides.

ⁱ Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006.
ⁱⁱ Lubitch, Rivkah edited by Tamar Biala. Dirshuni: Contemporary Women’s Midrash. Brandeis University Press, 2022.