Forgiveness on 9/11? Really?

Lectionary Link

13 Pentecost, Cycle A proper 19, September 11, 2011

Exodus 14:19-31   Psalm 114

Romans 14:1-12  Matthew 18:21-35

  On this tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, it may be very difficult for us to ponder the notion of endless forgiveness and this is implied when Jesus told his disciples not to set a limit on the numbers of times that one should forgive.    It may be hard for us to ponder the command of Jesus to  “love our enemies and to love those who hate us.”

  Does God forgive endlessly or is there a point when human willfulness can no longer access divine forgiveness?   Recently a Baptist preacher got himself into trouble with some of his base when he published a book entitled Love Wins: A Book about Heaven, Hell and the Fate of Every Person Who Has Lived.  Heaven and Hell has been a prime motivator for Christian religious communities for years.  How could a Baptist preacher, of all people, put such imaginations of heaven and hell into question?  How could he view such imaginations as but temporary states for people to learn ultimately the lesson of God’s unconditional love which in the end becomes convincing to everyone?  It is almost like Heaven and Hell are reduced to imaginations of a purgatory, through which every person works their way in the afterlife, until they learn to accept the love of God. 

  How could he give up the finality of heaven and hell and the incredible motivation that they can be for cleaning up our act in this life?  And how could he give up the finality of heaven and hell as tools of fundraising in the church?  We Episcopalian preachers know that hell, fire and brimstone do not work for fundraising in the Episcopal Church nor does guilt.  So how do we acknowledge the seriousness of evil in our world and ponder the ultimate reconciliation of all people to God’s love?  How do we reconcile the obvious presence of evil, the notion of justice and the final winsomeness of God’s love? Can we really envision Hitler, Stalin, and the 9/11 terrorists reconciled with God’s love?  Do we even want to envision that?

  I think that the controversy of Rob Bell’s books highlights the questions that are raised in the Bible about some great mysteries of life: Innocence and disproportionate suffering, Evil, justice, the limits of love and forgiveness.  The Biblical records provide many images regarding all these great mysteries and the churches at various times have tried to mold the diverse images of the Bible into a single and coherent theology.  And I don’t really think that can be done. The questions and the mysteries are what each of us live each day and we don’t have a silver bullet answer to any mystery.  We look for biblical insights to help us live with the mysteries.

    The Bible is a record of God’s people dealing with the question of the disproportionate dispensing of the suffering of this world amongst the people of the earth.  Many times in the history of the people of Israel as being God’s chosen people, they probably would say, “God if our conditions mean that we are chosen by God, then please do not choose us anymore.”  The whole notion of resurrection came into the Hebrew Scripture as a vision of an afterlife judgment program to rectify the inequities of life.  We may have to suffer now; but in the afterlife there will be justice and our tormentors will get their punishment, and we will get our reward.  This notion of the afterlife is why Marx called religion the opiate of the people.  We can submit to our fate of poverty in this world, because we know that in the afterlife we will get to live on the streets of gold and the tables will be turned on those who had it fortunate in this life at our expense.

  In the biblical record and in the Gospel one can find reflections upon both the global and the local situation of justice, forgiveness and reconciliation.  The events of 9/11 force us to think about both local and global issues of justice and forgiveness.  Those events which were painfully local for the people of our country have been both global and local issues for the last ten years of our lives.  Just think about your most recent trip to any airport.

  The Gospel message about forgiveness includes the words of Jesus that encourage us always to think very locally about people.  We are always to think of people as our brother and as our sister.

  Terrorist attacks occurred because the terrorists reduced people to be impersonal masks of politics and national identity.  In the 9/11 attacks the terrorists reduced individual people to images of someone they thought they hated.  If they had been able to meet John and Mary in their neighborhoods or coffee shops or as someone who gave them a friendly greeting, they could have behaved as local kind people.  But they allowed de-humanization to occur when they reduced real flesh and blood people to an effigy of their hatred.

   I think that the message of Jesus and forgiveness encourages us to live, love and forgive locally.  Do not let anyone become a de-humanized image or effigy of global hatred or group hatred.  We also know that in our warring response to 9/11, soldiers too have to de-humanize others to be able to accomplish their mission of retribution.  De-humanizing global hatred sets off events of revenge and retaliation.

  The message of Jesus is a preventive message; practice forgiveness early and often on the local level.  Do not let anyone become an effigy of global or group hate who can be de-humanized in order to make it easier to harm or injure.

  Today, we are at a very local Eucharistic event, but with global and future aspirations.  We are just a few here at the Lord’s table.  We hope that we are practicing love and forgiveness in our local situation but we also hope that people around the world know that they are invited to be with us at the Lord’s table where we can practice God’s great hospitality to everyone.

  And oh how we pray that forgiveness and love can be known as local and global experience.  And how we pray that God’s love can win us all in this life so that we don’t have to speculate about afterlife outcomes.

  And we pray today, may war and hatred cease in our world, may forgiveness never never end  and may the love of Christ win our world, both locally and globally.  Amen.

What about the Messiah?

Lectionary Link

11 Pentecost, Cycle A  Proper 17, August 28, 2011

Exodus 3:1-15  Psalm 105:1-6, 23-26, 45c

Romans 12:9-21  Matthew 16:21-28

  In today’s appointed Gospel, we find some rather harsh words from Jesus for the man who was to become the premier leader in the Christian Movement after Jesus left this earth.  Jesus said to Peter, “Get behind me Satan.”  Satan is the personification of the lie.  Lying is not just saying things that are not true, it is also choosing to remain in comfortable opinions of things that are only partially true.

  This Gospel highlights an issue amongst the early followers of Jesus and the Judaic community that excommunicated them from the synagogue around the year 80 of the Common Era.  This was an issue:  How is Jesus of Nazareth the Messiah?  And what is the significant definition of the Messiah?  When Jesus told his disciples that he was going to suffer and die, it was hard for Peter to accept this.  How could this be the Messiah?  How could this be God’s anointed one who would be like King David and come to re-establish independence and order for the people of Israel?  Peter was saying to Jesus: “Jesus you are wrong about yourself.  You don’t know how to understand yourself.  The Messiah can’t suffer and die and so you cannot suffer and die.”  It does seem rather comical if not absurd that Peter is trying to correct the Messiah about His misunderstanding of the Messiah.

  The early expositors of the Messiah had a dilemma.  Those who witnessed the suffering and death of Jesus had to look for other Hebrew writings to find other models of the Messiah.  They found such a model in the Prophet Isaiah who wrote about a Suffering Servant Messiah.   But what about a King David triumphant kind of Messiah?   The early expositors wrote that the Suffering Messiah would leave but someday soon return as the triumphant Messiah, and so the two notions of the Messiah were reconciled in a first coming and a seconding coming.  Many members of the  early church and St. Paul believed that they would see this second coming in their own time.  And lots of Christians are all oriented towards this second coming today, even to the point of being apocalyptic fatalists and dismissing the need for taking care of our planet.  After all if Jesus is coming tomorrow, why do we have to conserve and preserve?  We still do have varied opinions about the Messiah today.  Just recently, a preacher was predicting the rapture on May 21st, now delayed until October 21st.  Another TV preacher--who is a self proclaimed spokesperson for the divine meaning of natural disasters-- said the Earthquake that put a crack in the Washington Monument was a sign from God of the approaching coming of the Messiah.

  Get behind me Satan!  Let us not get trapped into a lie about very narrow and limited views of the Messiah.  The record of the Scriptures presents a variety of messianic meanings.  The notion of messiah comes from the Hebrew word that is associated with the ritual anointing with oil.  It meant that people understood the person or the object to represent God’s selected mode of presence or action in this world.  It was used to refer to early Levitical priests in Israel.  The sons of Aaron were God’s chosen and anointed priests.  The notion of anointing and designation referred also to the Temple and the holy objects as well as the unleavened bread.  (In the same sense the Eucharistic bread and wine are also messianic objects in how we regard them to bear the presence of Christ).  Messiahs were not necessarily always good; King Saul was the first “anointed” king of Israel but he and his lineage lost the “messiahship” to the Davidic line.  The investiture of Israel’s Kings involved the pouring of a horn of oil over the head of the new King thus designating God’s anointing and selection.  The Davidic line declined and lost the “messiahship.”  In fact, the Kings of Israel and Judah became so bad that the prophet Isaiah even called the conquering King Cyrus the Great of Persia, a messiah.  This conquering king was designated as one who was doing God’s will and work in carrying the people of Israel off into exile.  So can we admit that the notion of the messiah in the Bible is quite diverse in its application?

  Yes, indeed the hope of people in Israel was for restoration and for someone and some way to make it actual in their lives.  Hope is always looking for a narrative and heroes to bring justice in our world.  Justice is always looking for laws and law givers to make justice actual.  Hope springs eternal and so Hope will always inspire notions of the messiah, notions of how God will be present to us in significant ways.

  We still look for the messiah today in many, many ways.  The problem for Christian messianism is that some still are just like Peter; they want to cling to a very limited notion of the messiah.  Popular messianism today of fundamentalist Christian communities today has more to do with assuming precise correspondence  of catastrophic events with their own  interpretations of the Bible.  Most of these communities and their leaders essentially hope for a messiah who will come in the way they want and they mostly think that God will prove that they were right and to prove it their followers will be whisked away in a rescuing rapture.  I assert their right to have such narratives of hope and such visualizations to bear up with the pain that they think that they are in; but it is a very limited notion of the messiah and like Peter’s notion of the messiah, it is a selfish notion of the messiah that centers on their own exclusive beliefs and communities.

  We do not have to give up hope for our future; we do not have to give up dreams and visualizations of Peace and Justice achieving actual success upon earth.  We can maintain hope and the narratives of hope without falling into very limited notions of the Messiah.

  I would invite us to find the messiah as personal events for us today.  Where has God anointed our lives and our world with the divine presence?  How and where does God get through to us?  How and where does God move us and inspire us in the work to surpass ourselves for better and more excellent outcomes for our lives and the betterment of our families and communities?  The messiah and the messianic come to us in many ways, and even in suffering and apparent failure or in the experience of lack.  It is not that the actual events of suffering, failure or lack are messianic but it is our faith and hope in the future that helps us to redeem such negative experiences in subsequent events of our lives.  Resurrection gives death a new meaning; suffering, failure, and lack can be made to be messianic events with subsequent redemptive events.  Peter could not see anything messianic about the suffering and death of Jesus.  And we can forgive him for that; the notion of a suffering messiah is very counter-logic.  The risen Christ invites us to think outside of the box of logic so that we do not limit the notions of the messiah.

  We like Peter, should always hear the rebuke of Jesus: “Get behind me Satan!”  when we try to limit the work and the presence of the Messiah.  Let us believe that the Messiah touches our lives in many ways and let us be attentive to present ourselves so that we can be the hands, the hearts and feet of the Messiah to bring hope and good news to our world.  Amen.

What does MacDonald's Hamburgers Have to Do with the Feeding of the 5000?

Lectionary Link

7 Pentecost, Cycle A Proper 13, July 31, 2011 

Genesis 32:22-31 Psalm 17: 1-7, 16

Romans 9:1-5 Matthew 14:13-21

  From today’s appointed Gospel: And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.   (And one wonders what the total would have been with women and children, because they count too, and if there were teenage boys there, there would have to be a major food miracle).  Now where in our history and culture have we found posted the number of people who have been fed?

  Do you remember when those golden arches signs grew out of the sides of that hamburger chain in the 1950’s?  McDonald’s Hamburger.  And they had a sign that changed each week.  Over a million hamburgers sold.  I googled the most recent count and some speculate that it must be over 247 billion hamburgers sold.  That’s a lot of beef; though I often wondered about the beef content of those 15 cent wafers.  (I remember when they were 15 cents a piece).

  What if the Christian Church had a sign at each church posting the number of communions served since the Last Supper?  No sign would be big enough for the number of zeroes required.  And MacDonald’s total of 247 billion would not even be a speck of dust in the total number of communion bread served.

  Today’s Gospel looks like a miracle story in the life of Jesus, but more likely it is an early church recounting a teaching in the ancient tradition of the bread of heaven.  If this story were just a miracle story about Jesus feeding the masses, we’d have a moral dilemma on our hands.  Why isn’t Jesus multiplying loaves and fishes to feed all of the people in the world, right now? And why did he selectively decide to do it for one group of people in an event and why does he not choose to do it for all hungry people in the past 2000 years?  One really needs to be careful about how one literalizes the Bible, because then we only encourage the skeptics to demand that we be consistent in how we present God and Jesus Christ.

  The writers of the Gospel who gave liturgical writing or scripts that could be performed within their community worship gatherings, inherited the bread of heaven tradition from the Hebrew Scripture.  And so they told the story of the Eucharist and the story of Jesus using a development upon this motif of the bread of heaven tradition in the Hebrew Scriptures.

  When I hand you the little wafer of bread at Communion, all of you know the routine, otherwise if you were a young child when I hand you the wafer and say, “The body of Christ, the bread of heaven” you might say, “What’s this?”  And how is this the body of Christ?

  That’s exactly what the Hebrew people said when the bread of heaven tradition started.  You remember that one of the greatest heroes of the Hebrew faith was Moses.  And he led the people Israel out of slavery in Egypt.  But it took them 40 years of wandering in the wilderness before they got into the Promised Land.  And Moses as the leader, as a good leader, was supposed to feed this large group of nomadic people in the barren wilderness.  And there were not any MacDonald restaurants in the wilderness.  The environment did not provide subsistence for the people of Israel and with a food shortage, they complained to their leaders.  They even wished for the good old days of slavery in Egypt, At least there they had a supply of leeks and garlic.  And what Gilroyian could blame them? (After all it is the Garlic Festival Weekend).  So Moses prayed to God and God sent from the sky each day, a strange substance on the ground.  And when the people saw, they asked, “What’s this?”  Or if they are like children who are asked to try some new food, they probably said, “ooh, What’s this?”  So “what’s this” became the name of this bread from heaven, Manna means, “What’s this?”  This was God’s intervention in providing heavenly bread for the life of the people of Israel.

  When the Gospel writers preached about Jesus and the Jesus Movement that became the church and were explaining the significance of the practice of the ritual of Holy Eucharist, they used the bread of heaven tradition in their teaching.

  Jesus was the new Moses.  And he like Moses led a large group of people out of slavery to Roman traditions and hypocrisy in the Judaic tradition.  And Jesus provided a new source of sustenance for this new community of people in the wilderness trying to get started and attaining their Promised Land to be the New Israel.

  The Passover Meal, a meal done within one’s natural family, was expanded to be a meal for all within the community of Christ.  And what was one of the early Christian titles for Jesus Christ?  Jesus was called the bread of heaven.  Just as Manna was special bread from heaven for the ancient people of Israel, so too Jesus was the bread of heaven to the new Israel, this new community who came into being because of Jesus Christ.  And when Jesus took bread and sealed his identity with it by saying, “This is my body which is given for you.  Take and eat in remembrance of me” he was expressing a continuity with the bread from heaven tradition.  Ever since, Christ has been identified with the Eucharistic bread, made that way by repeating the words of Jesus.  And we with our thoroughly skeptical sides receive the odd bread in our hands each week, with the even stranger words, “The body of Christ, the bread of heaven.”  And our skeptic side cannot help but say, “Man na?  What’s this?  Body of Christ?  Bread of Heaven?” 

  And yet this “Man na?” has been gathering the church for two thousand years.  The Eucharistic gathering is the most literal, and the most incarnate expression of the continuing life of Jesus Christ in the world today.

  The story of the multitude of the loaves and fish is a crucial story in the bread of heaven tradition that came to be the Eucharistic practice of the church.  And just as those early Gospel writers proudly posted the number of people who were fed by the presence of Christ, the church, even more than MacDonald’s,  has lost track of the number of people who have been fed and sustained by the presence of Risen Christ, in the bread and wine, and in countless other ways in this world.

  The 247 billion burgers sold at MacDonald is laughable when compared with the living bread of heaven, the risen Christ, who is known to us not only in the breaking of bread, but in countless mega-billions of way.  Let us thank God today that we are part of this wonderful bread of heaven tradition.  Amen.

What Is the Wisdom of the Kingdom of Heaven?

Lectionary Link

6 Pentecost, Cycle A Proper 12, July 24, 2011

1 Kings 3:5-12 Psalm 119:129-136
Romans 8:26-39   Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

  In the biblical tradition, who is regarded to be the wisest person in the Hebrew tradition?  It is King David’s son, King Solomon.  We have read the prayer request of Solomon before he ascended the throne to succeed his father David.  What did he ask for?  He asked for wisdom and God answered him by saying to him, “I will give you a wise and discerning mind; no one like you has been before you and no one like you shall arise after you.”  Solomon became the inspiration for the wisdom school in the Hebrew religion and the wisdom teacher was to ancient Israel what the philosopher was to ancient Greece.  Some people have questioned Solomon’s wisdom though, because he is said to have had 700 wives and 300 concubines.  (How’s that for biblical family values?)   What is the wisdom in that?  Well, one woman once said that Solomon had a source for wisdom because he had 1000 counselors who gave him free advice.  How could he not be wise?

  Some Gospel scholars believe that the wisdom teacher was a model for the ministry of Jesus.  The words that seem to be most original to Jesus were teaching stories call parables.  A parable is a story that teaches through the attempt to get the listener to identify with a scenario.  It is an attempt to teach through appreciative participation.  But the parables of Jesus were also riddles; in them he required the listener to confront his counter logic.  How do the parables of Jesus that we’ve read today, represent counter logic?  And how does the counter logic of Jesus trick our literal minds into seeing things in a new way?

  Most people believe that civilizations are great because of the people who are heroes.  Kings and Warriors, philosophers, are normally thought to be the pillars of civilization.  Most of us understand history as the public record of why things have occurred because of the great people who attained fame in their public deeds.  These people are like the great oak trees of the forest.

"Not so", says wisdom teacher Jesus.  The kingdom of God, or the most embracing realm of life itself is known because of the little mustard seed deeds.  Heroes and heroic acts do not make a great society; rather it is the collection of all of the small deeds of kindness and caring that result in the success of any society.  If all of the deeds of kindness and caring ceased; society would come to a halt.  If moms did not care for their babies, and people did not do the millions of menial chores required to sustain communal life, societies would break down and fail.  When great disasters hit, the immediate goal is to return life to it normal sequence of the many rituals of care and mutual accountability.  These are the scaffold and telling reality of the kingdom that Jesus spoke about.  The kings and leaders get to prance on the stage held up by scaffolding of all the tiny mustard seed acts of care and kindness and mutual accountability that makes a society work.  No matter what the president or congress or governors or legislatures or captains of industry do; the people in this network of small acts of kindness and mutual care and accountability will still have to keep on, keeping on.  Parents will still have to do all the things they do for their children; dishes and clothes will have to be washed, traffic laws obeyed, shops opened, groceries sold, produce delivered.  We in the course of all of our little mustard seed deeds don’t have the luxury of worrying about whether we are doing big and important things.  But in the logic of the kingdom of Jesus Christ, it is in these every day micro-events of kindness, care and mutual accountability where the reality of God’s kingdom is found and known, and in fact this reality rules the world because we only survive because this micro-network magnified is the very infrastructure of human community.  We will still be a part of the scaffolding of the kingdom of heaven no matter what they decide or don’t decide in Washington.  How do you like the logic of Jesus?

  The parable of the leaven or yeast is like the parable of the mustard seed.  The kingdom of heaven is like a small portion sourdough culture.  You put it in the dough and this tiny substance infiltrates the dough and gives bread its very “breadiness.”  Jesus was saying, “You hero worshippers think that important people are really making life important and that is wrong.  It is each person exercising the moment by moment small deeds of kindness and mutual care and accountability that gives us abundant life.  Don’t be fooled by all those who tempt you to believe that the spot light of fame, power, and fortune are the key to survival in life.”

  The next parables of Jesus also have the counter logic of this wisdom teacher.  It’s is dishonesty to have discovered the abundance of minerals on a piece of property, and then buy the property without disclosing to its owner that the minerals are there.  What Jesus was indicating by this is that most people do not know the value of their own lives and therefore do not tap the native wealth that is accessible in human experience.  Why is it that two people can look like they are doing the same thing, but one person will express the experience of wonder and the sublime, while the other will be bored?  The kingdom of heaven is the experience of knowing another level of value in this “seemingly” ordinary life.

  The parable about the pearl of great price, is really about another stock market “no-no.”  We call it “insider trading.”  It is about having privileged information that others don’t have.  It’s like going to a rummage sale and offering a couple of dollars for old baseball cards that you know are worth thousands of dollars.  What Jesus is saying is that people can live this life in such a way to understand another level of value.  Within life, Jesus said that we can find abundant life.  And Jesus is inviting us to find that abundant life.  This parable is also about the purpose of human life. We are ever to be re-educating ourselves towards the discovery of higher values.  When we look at our lives, things that once were regarded as important now seem to be trivial.  How is it that our values change?  How is it that we discover new values?  We do so in the event of finding what is great and then we organize our lives around what we regard to be the highest inspiration in life.  The kingdom of heaven is the process of coming to higher values; that’s a problem since values are experienced as being relative to our own moral and spiritual progress.

  How do I tolerate myself for the higher values that I do not yet have nor have discovered?

Well, Jesus said the kingdom heaven is about patience, with ourselves, with each other and with our world.  The net is cast to catch all sorts of values in the mix of our life experience, and we need patience with the mix both in our own life and in our world.  We need to have the patience to wait for a more complete sorting out of the values in our lives and of the values in all human experience.  The kingdom of heaven is about having that kind of patience, but also having that kind of hope that justice amongst all values will someday attain.  The kingdom of heaven is about having patience with hope.

  St. Paul believed that we could have that kind of patience and hope in the midst of the extreme mixture of human experience, because we have God’s Spirit within us and because nothing can separate us from the love of God.

  Let us hear the Gospel today: We live in the kingdom of God’s love, a patient and hopeful love.  And this God of love is educating our values as we grow in wisdom in the art of living.  And may the Gospel also be this:  In the middle of the seeming ordinary, God has for us events of the sublime, events of such wonder that we feel a bit guilty about “having inside” information.  These events guide us upward in the values of our lives.  May God grant to each of us events of the extraordinary within our ordinary lives.  Amen. 

Futility and God's Patience

Lectionary Link

5 Pentecost, Cycle A Proper 11, July 17, 2011

Genesis 28:10-19a ,Psalm 139: 1-11, 22-23

Romans 8:12-25 Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

  What if I were to let you get on your soap box with the following unfinished conditional clause: If I were God, I would  (fill in the blank).  If I were God, I would have eliminated that large pit in the avocado.  Think of how much more guacamole you could get from each avocado without that big pit.  If I were God, I would have finished creating the human foot by making every pinkie toe beautiful.  If I were God, I think I would have left the cockroach on the R & D table.  If I were God I would not have allowed the coming into life experience people such as Hitler or Stalin.  How would you finish this conditional clause if you were given a soap box?

  When we have finished speaking and begin to look at our statements, we might find that we express an intolerance or impatience for many things in this life.  Such intolerance or impatience might be proof that at heart, we are all utopians in wanting a better life and a better world.

  What our intolerance and impatience would also express is that if to truly be God is to allow freedom in the world, then we could not be such a God.  If to be God means to be the most patient of all beings, then we would fail at the task of being God, because as we look at things that are evil or occasions of innocent suffering, we do not think that we can have such patience.  In our temporal pain and suffering we are too willing to sacrifice “freedom” for automatic or robotic good outcomes.  Would good be good, if it were automatic or robotic?

  In the parable of the weeds and the wheat, Jesus presents the message of a tolerant and patient God.  In the biblical writings, God was not always been presented with such patience.  In the story of the great flood, God is presented as seeing the human community to be so depraved that he has to use a great flood to rid the earth of its evil population and save only eight people.  And what does his saved hero Noah do after he comes out of the ark?  He gets drunk and curses his son.

  By the time Jesus comes, God is seen to be much more patient and God’s patience has to do with the fact that good and evil have true meaning because of freedom.  To limit human experience to the sole ascendency of good or evil would be to remove freedom and also the definition of good or evil.

  The parable of wheat and the weed gives us an insight about God’s tolerance and patience.  But it does not suggest that we should just wait until a final day of judgment before we do anything about improving our world.

  What it suggests is that catastrophic intervention would mean destroying the potential good crop of the future because of the presence of some inconvenient inter-mingling pesty weeds.  Some of the legal penalties of the Old Testament law were catastrophic in nature, sometimes called the law of the claw, an eye for an eye, a tooth or a tooth, and a life for a life.  There was a law that said an insolent child should be stoned to death.  What sort of future redemption is present in such catastrophic reactions?

  Catastrophic intervention is the chief mythology of Hollywood.  In action adventures, catastrophic intervention by a hero doing super human martial and military acts wins the day in less than two hours.  This virtual cinematic myth is rotten with the rage of a perfect one who knows that good and evil are so clear cut that good can be forced with the rage of catastrophic intervention.  Such cinematic myths do not have the patience necessary for the way life really is.  Nor do they represent the patience of God.

  How can we come to grow in the patience of God?  How did Jacob come to have patience?  Jacob came to have patience by believing that he had a future and for him to have a future, he had to escape from the wrath of his twin brother Esau, whose birth right he had tricked from him.  Jacob escaped to an unknown future and in his night of sleep he had the dream about the angels ascending and descending upon the ladder from heaven.  In this dream, Jacob was reassured that there was and would be messengers from another realm who could bring messages to his own realm of comprehension to enable him to be patience with the unfolding events of his life.

  St. Paul was aware of the tolerance and patience that he needed to have with himself and he also preached of a cosmic patience that we need to have with this world.  If Paul did not come to have patience with himself, he would have said, eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth.  He participated in the stoning of Stephen; therefore he too deserved to be stoned.  But if Paul had died of a stoning, the entire mission of the Gospel to the Gentile world would not have happened in the way that it did.  Being complicit in murder is perhaps a great weed in one’s life that would challenge one’s right to live and go on.  How could Paul forgive himself and accept the forgiveness of Christ?  The severity of his murdering ways cried out for a great redemptive mission in his life. 

  What did St. Paul call the conditions of weed and wheat of this life?  He called it the condition of futility.  Futility is when we hope for so much more than can become actual.  Futility is when we know that the aspirations of hope cannot be accomplished in the span of an action movie, or even in a span of one’s lifetime.  Futility is when our actual lives seem to tell us that our hope is not valid and we are to be pitied for being so delusional.

  But the Gospel of Jesus and Paul would tell us today that the experience of the Spirit in our flesh is in fact proof that the wheat of hope will someday be ascendant for us.  The experience of God’s Spirit even in our actual weakened conditions of our flesh is the proof itself.

  Let us today accept our limitation as beings who are much less than God.  In our limitations, we do not have the capacity for catastrophic intervention in this world, nor do we have the ability to know that we have the best vision of what is truly good.  What we do have is the presence of the Spirit of God in our lives to inspire us to begin to do a little weeding in our own patches.  O, Spirit of God, what kind of weeding do I need to do to rid my life through personal choices of the things that hinder more excellent human fruitfulness?

  I often worry about apocalyptic fatalism of some people who wish for a catastrophic end of the world as we know it.  They assume a position of God in thinking they truly know from their precise and certain Bible knowledge who is good and who is bad.  Let us not be so certain that we know how the situation of futility in our world, country, community, family or personal lives can be resolved in a final way.

  But let us be certain about the Spirit of God in our futility to be energy and power of hope and patience with us and with each other.  And let us get busy by the Spirit of God to do a little weeding in the patches of our lives.  Amen. 

A Phil-aphorism

Futility is when we hope for so much more than can become actual.  Futility is when we know that the aspirations of hope cannot be accomplished in the span of an action movie, or even in a span of one’s lifetime.  Futility is when our actual lives seem to tell us that our hope is not valid and we are to be pitied for being so delusional.

Is God a Good Farmer with Indiscriminate Planting of Seeds?

Lectionary Link

4 Pentecost, Cycle A Proper10, July 10, 2011

Isaiah 55:10-13Psalm 65: (1-8), 9-14
Romans 8:1-11  Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

Text:

    So here we are living close to some of the most productive farm enterprises in the world.  Agrabusiness is not really a hit and miss kind of business.  This is the age of Monsanto and Archer Daniel Midlands and genetically altered seeds, specially design to produce maximum yield for the conditions of the land.

  So how do we in the age of agribusiness return to the sort hit and miss farming of the parable of the sower as told by Jesus?  Well some us do some hit and miss amateur gardening at our homes and can get real proud of our tomatoes and squash, even while we don’t mention all of the other failures to produce fruit in our gardens.

  We have read the parable of the sower and its explanation.  I really think that the explanation was an effort by a later community to try to specify what the original parable meant.

  What was the purpose of the parable?  I could see Jesus being posed with a question like: Rabbi, why is it that some people are following you but not everyone?  Why are we attracted to become your disciples but why do you seem to be irrelevant to other people?  Why don’t they have the same excitement about your good news?

   And Jesus answered this question with the parable of the sower.  And his parable respects the mystery of why some people come to faith and why some do not.  Why do some people come to understand and accept the Gospel?  Well, the conditions for it to happen are just right.

  That seems to be the meaning of the parable of the sower.  People come to their faith expression because the conditions are right.  Why do fisherman catch fish some days and none on other days?  Well, the conditions have to be right.   How do you like such a vague answer?  Couldn’t one say that about anything that happens, “Well, the conditions have to be right?”

  I think the follow up explanation of the parable was given by people who wanted to make some precise applications as to what conditions are favorable or unfavorable as it pertains to accepting the good news of the Gospel.

  The conditions have to be right.  Is that too vague of an answer to be satisfying?  Certainly in today’s agribusiness, the goal is to make the preparation and the adjustments for the conditions to be right for every crop to be a bumper crop.  Modern science and modern farming is all about having the knowledge to be able to intervene to control the quality of the crop.

  What insights can we gain from this parable even in our age of wanting to have as much scientific control of outcomes?

  The parable of the sower can still give us some insights about God and about having faith.  The unwritten assumption of the parable is that the sower already owns the land on which the seed is planted.  In faith application, this means that God as creator already owns the world, but the world of people do not always know this or acknowledge this in the way in which they live.  Since people are oblivious to God’s kingdom and ownership of the world, and because people live with the presumption of a world without God, there needs to be intervention.  The sowing of the seed of good news, of God’s kingdom, of God’s love and forgiveness, has to be done for people unaware of the possibilities for their lives. 

  The sowing of God’s good news is “indiscriminate.”  What wise farmer would toss seeds onto the path and into rocky places?  The sun shines on the good and evil.  The good news is offered to every situation and circumstance, even when logic would tell us that the seed has no chance to grow.

  Before building a church building at a former parish in Texas, we rented a store-front building in the downtown area.  Outside at the back of the building in a corner to which the parking lot asphalt reached, there was a tree that just seemed to grow out of the side of the building.  I would cut it off, and in a few months, it would be growing again.  I often thought that if I tried to plant that tree in the middle of my yard it would not grow, but for some odd reason, it kept growing out of the side of the building.

  What nature reveals is that the uncanny happens in the mix of nature, nurture and the degree of freedom that each person has.  In the mix of human freedom, the social conditions and the individual nature, the possibility of coming to faith happens.  And with evangelism, we try our best to be “wise” farmers to promote the very best hearing for people to be able to come to faith, even while we must rely on the mystery of conversion to work to see people come to faith.

  I believe that God gives us a task of evangelism; God asks us to be a part of the sowing of the good news of God’s kingdom, God’s love and God’s forgiveness.  We need to learn how to be used by God to be creative lures to draw people to their better selves.  And they know their better selves when they can acknowledge God as the owner of life and when their lives can be motivated by love and forgiveness.  They become their better selves when they realize that the hybrid seed of God’s Spirit is a reality to be discovered within each of us.

  The parable of the sower invites us to ask ourselves the question:  How has the seed of the good news of God’s kingdom done in our lives?  This is a question that St. Paul struggled with in his life.  St. Paul discovered within himself the law of the Spirit of life.  He discovered that God had called creation good because the Spirit of God is the hybrid factor of excellence in our lives.  God’s Spirit within us is the guarantee that we can come to fruition in our lives.

  I believe the parable of the sower invites us to some questions of internal assessment today:  How is the good news of the Gospel doing in our lives?  Are we making the choices to enable  God’s love to be successful in us?  Are we discovering the winsomeness of God’s Spirit within us?  Further, are we making ourselves available to create the conditions that make it attractive and inviting for other people to know God’s love through us?

  Let us remember that our lives need to be witnesses of the success of God’s love.  And so our lives need to part of the right conditions for helping other people know the presence of God’s kingdom and the love and joy and the peace of Christ.  Amen.