Proper 11 A Weeds in our Wheat

Darnel is a ryegrass that as it begins to grow looks much like wheat. Roman law prohibited the sowing of darnel in an enemy’s wheat field, so Jesus today is talking to an audience who would have been aware of such an act and its illegality.  An enemy has sowed darnel in a farmer’s wheat and his slaves want to know how to handle it—the farmer says don’t pull it out now, you will only destroy some of the wheat that gets pulled up with the weeds.

Have you ever pulled out something from your garden that later turned out to be a good plant not a weed?  There is a little flower and shrub garden on the office side of the church. My first summer here, I saw something that looked weed-like and began to pick them out of the bed whenever I passed the office door. Later in the summer, however, I found out that these weedy looking things were actually flowers and I felt very dumb and somewhat guilty. 

We might say this about some people as well.  On a first impression some people may seem to be not our kind of people—we don’t like the way they laugh, or their dress, or whatever behavior and maybe they don’t go to church, or go to a church we don’t like.  But if often, after we allow ourselves to get to know them, they turn out to be good friends.  We may forget how we ostracized them. 

Think about the Hebrew Jacob.  Our first impressions of him are of the person who cheated his brother out of his inheritance, and the fact that his mother Rabekah played favorites with him over his brother Esau, which makes us wonder about the integrity of his family.  But in today’s reading we hear of Jacob being chosen by God to an instrument for the blessing of the Israelites. God sees the potential even in broken human beings, goes beyond the sins and uses the talents and gifts for God’s purposes. 

God gives human beings not only second, but third and fourth and multiple chances. We mess up, we act totally dumb, we make bad choices, and the good thing is that God forgives our mistakes and gives us the opportunity to act for the good, to be instruments for God’s purposes.

So you may think of the field of wheat with its weeds today not as different people who are either the goodness of wheat which gives us bread and nourishment or weeds which steal the soil from the wheat and give nothing in return. Instead what if we thought of the field as ourselves, containing both wheat and weeds? People are never either all bad or all good. Humans are a complex mix of patience and impatience, of humility and pride, of kindness and meanness.  In fact, most of our good fiction and movies play on this theme.  Even heroes like Harry Potter carry some seeds of destruction and violence within them.  Saint Peter, the rock of the church, denied knowing Christ.  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had behavioral issues that when they came to light made us know he had human foibles.  There is no human being who is a clean field of wheat without weeds.

Think about what it takes to make a field without weeds—lots of herbicidal chemicals that pollute the water table of our farmland.  To be totally without our darkness is only to deny that it exists. When denying that darkness exists is when the darkness can have the most power over human beings.  In the holocaust, many Germans denied the existence of the concentration camps and refused to believe what was happening there.  When those with addictions refuse to own up to their slavery, then they cannot be healed. If a person cannot see their faults, they cannot begin to tackle them, and the faults grow.

The psalmist knows that God has searched him out and known him.  I believe that this can mean that God knows our faults, knows the weeds that try to choke out our wheat.  Search me out and know my weeds, you might pray to God, for it is acknowledging those weeds before God that you can know the gift of forgiveness, and begin to heal.

To know that there is nowhere we can go that God is not there is to know that God loves our wheat field even as it is infested with weeds. God knows our troubles, the things and people that challenge us, the times when we think and do things not worthy of us, the hurts we harbor, the scars and grief that prevent us from growing into a strong field.  And God gives our field a chance to handle those hurts without judgment. God is alongside to comfort, give us courage in the face of our troubles, to heal our wounds and make us whole.  Our field of wheat and weeds is allowed to grow to fullness, to see which of those things that look like weeds are actually wheat, and to allow the goodness of the nurturing wheat to choke out the weeds along the way.

It’s when I know I am loved and cared for in spite of and because of my wounds, that then I can forgive others their wounds and hurts too.  When we see each other as fields of mixed wheat and weeds, and see people as full human beings, not either fully good or bad, we see that this mixture is for God to judge not us and that God can redeem any situation, any person, for God’s purposes to further the kingdom of peace and justice.

God, search me out, know my weeds and my wheat and help me grow into a nurturing human being you want me to be.

Proper 11A Weeds in our Wheat

Darnel is a ryegrass that as it begins to grow looks much like wheat. Roman law prohibited the sowing of darnel in an enemy’s wheat field, so Jesus today is talking to an audience who would have been aware of such an act and its illegality.  An enemy has sowed darnel in a farmer’s wheat and his slaves want to know how to handle it—the farmer says don’t pull it out now, you will only destroy some of the wheat that gets pulled up with the weeds.

Have you ever pulled out something from your garden that later turned out to be a good plant not a weed?  There is a little flower and shrub garden on the office side of the church. My first summer here, I saw something that looked weed-like and began to pick them out of the bed whenever I passed the office door. Later in the summer, however, I found out that these weedy looking things were actually flowers and I felt very dumb and somewhat guilty. 

We might say this about some people as well.  On a first impression some people may seem to be not our kind of people—we don’t like the way they laugh, or their dress, or whatever behavior and maybe they don’t go to church, or go to a church we don’t like.  But if often, after we allow ourselves to get to know them, they turn out to be good friends.  We may forget how we ostracized them. 

Think about the Hebrew Jacob.  Our first impressions of him are of the person who cheated his brother out of his inheritance, and the fact that his mother Rabekah played favorites with him over his brother Esau, which makes us wonder about the integrity of his family.  But in today’s reading we hear of Jacob being chosen by God to an instrument for the blessing of the Israelites. God sees the potential even in broken human beings, goes beyond the sins and uses the talents and gifts for God’s purposes. 

God gives human beings not only second, but third and fourth and multiple chances. We mess up, we act totally dumb, we make bad choices, and the good thing is that God forgives our mistakes and gives us the opportunity to act for the good, to be instruments for God’s purposes.

So you may think of the field of wheat with its weeds today not as different people who are either the goodness of wheat which gives us bread and nourishment or weeds which steal the soil from the wheat and give nothing in return. Instead what if we thought of the field as ourselves, containing both wheat and weeds? People are never either all bad or all good. Humans are a complex mix of patience and impatience, of humility and pride, of kindness and meanness.  In fact, most of our good fiction and movies play on this theme.  Even heroes like Harry Potter carry some seeds of destruction and violence within them.  Saint Peter, the rock of the church, denied knowing Christ.  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had behavioral issues that when they came to light made us know he had human foibles.  There is no human being who is a clean field of wheat without weeds.

Think about what it takes to make a field without weeds—lots of herbicidal chemicals that pollute the water table of our farmland.  To be totally without our darkness is only to deny that it exists. When denying that darkness exists is when the darkness can have the most power over human beings.  In the holocaust, many Germans denied the existence of the concentration camps and refused to believe what was happening there.  When those with addictions refuse to own up to their slavery, then they cannot be healed. If a person cannot see their faults, they cannot begin to tackle them, and the faults grow.

The psalmist knows that God has searched him out and known him.  I believe that this can mean that God knows our faults, knows the weeds that try to choke out our wheat.  Search me out and know my weeds, you might pray to God, for it is acknowledging those weeds before God that you can know the gift of forgiveness, and begin to heal.

To know that there is nowhere we can go that God is not there is to know that God loves our wheat field even as it is infested with weeds. God knows our troubles, the things and people that challenge us, the times when we think and do things not worthy of us, the hurts we harbor, the scars and grief that prevent us from growing into a strong field.  And God gives our field a chance to handle those hurts without judgment. God is alongside to comfort, give us courage in the face of our troubles, to heal our wounds and make us whole.  Our field of wheat and weeds is allowed to grow to fullness, to see which of those things that look like weeds are actually wheat, and to allow the goodness of the nurturing wheat to choke out the weeds along the way.

It’s when I know I am loved and cared for in spite of and because of my wounds, that then I can forgive others their wounds and hurts too.  When we see each other as fields of mixed wheat and weeds, and see people as full human beings, not either fully good or bad, we see that this mixture is for God to judge not us and that God can redeem any situation, any person, for God’s purposes to further the kingdom of peace and justice.

God, search me out, know my weeds and my wheat and help me grow into a nurturing human being you want me to be.

Proper 10 A Tending the Seeds

Here we have another agricultural parable from Jesus.  A story from a type of life that is not so important to us today in our daily activities, unless we garden like crazy.  At the rectory we barely have enough space to put in a few vegetables, but we are very conscious of the quality of the soil and have added compost and top soil to enhance it.  We have been rewarded this year by a pretty good crop of lettuce and promising tomato plants.  Anyone can go to the University of Illinois extension office to get consultation about their soil and how to improve it.  Agronomists know quite a lot about the types of nutrients soils need to support growth of all kinds of seeds. 

If you have ever travelled in desert country, you also know that some kinds of plants can make a go of it in what farmers in Illinois would consider pretty poor soil; in fact one of the prettiest sights is the spring desert in bloom.  Because it lacks robustness, about twenty acres of my farm has soil that only supports alfalfa and wheat, but those crops do amazingly well on that ground.  We also used to grow watermelons pretty well there, which neighbor boys used to come and steal from us.

So the parable of the sowing of the seeds seems to have some gaps in it.  It presumes only a certain type of seed that needs a rich environment to grow.  A seed that must have sufficient organic matter and not too much rockiness, the depth to keep it from birds and wind, and the nurturing of an attentive farmer.  How many of us can say we have depth in our relationship with God? How many of us would characterize ourselves as good nurturers of our spiritual life or say that we have prepared our lives to live the word of God and make it grow?  And, how many Christians really take their task of spreading the word of God seriously, so that they not only talk about their faith but tend to the faith of those they care about?

Tending to a garden is hard work—preparing good soil, planting by watching which seeds need sun and which need shade; making sure there is sufficient water and the seeds grow without weeds.  Some good gardeners can spend most of every day tending to their plants, and get rewarded by beauty and abundance.

We know how to become a master gardener, but do we know how to become a master gardener with God?  Does our life get filled up with ungodly weeds, with blazing, burning sun, or with lack of attention during dry spells?

The University of Illinois can teach us to become a master gardener, while the church teaches us to become a gardener of our souls.  In this place we learn about the soil we must prepare by prayer, by confession and turning our life around, by taking eucharist with others and being in relationship with not only our friends but with our enemies. We learn about God by loving others, giving our time and talent, becoming a gardener of others’ souls.

Tending God’s garden of souls, like weeding and watering anything that grows, needs constant attention.  So, we carve out time for church and also for quiet time, for rest and reflection.  We make our relationship with God a priority by giving it time—for reading scripture, for prayer and meditation, for giving in time, money or talent to the poor, the sick, the dying.  In whatever way God is calling us, we respond by tending our soul, the seed of God’s love in our life that must have prepared soil, be kept from blowing away in the wind and taken away by the birds that peck at us.

Today I ask you to consider the types of activities that feed your soul and to make sure that this summer you take time to give priority to some of those things at least once a week.  Whenever the thermometer hits a certain temperature, make it a signal for you to tend to your soul needs.  Whenever it rains, see it like a beep on your phone reminding you of God’s message to love yourself and your neighbor by doing what tends those relationships of love.  Whenever you see sunny skies, remind yourself of God’s sun shining in your life, and be comforted by the warmth of that love.  

Tending the seeds of God’s message of good news takes all that Christians have to give.  While how we tend these seeds in the summer may differ from the rest of the church year, we have no less need for tending our spiritual life.  Whether you take in the beauty of the summer outdoors or read something uplifting on a rainy day, or make vacation plans here or at home, remember God’s grace in your life and how to spread it to others. 

At the end of the summer, good gardners expect good outcomes—beautiful flowers and abundant harvest.  So it is with God’s seeds planted by God and nurtured by us with God’s help.  The fruits of love, patience, kindness, and all the other spiritual effects become evident in our behavior toward others and even how we begin to think about ourselves as worthy of God’s love and forgiveness.

May each of us this summer have a great time tending our spiritual garden and may it be bountiful for us and those all around us.

Pentecost Year A A Change of View

The tsunami of 2005 swept a baby hippo away from its mother down the Sabaki River and back onto the Kenyan coast.  Ecologists in Lafarge Park found the hippo, whom they named Owen, bonded with a hundred year old tortoise.  The rangers reported that the two swim, eat and sleep together; the hippo followed the tortoise exactly the way it would follow a mother.

I can imagine this was an odd site—a baby mammal being looked after by an old male reptile.  It may stretch our ideas of motherhood and interspecies cooperation, to see them living together, and the baby hippo receiving the nurturance it needed to survive the tragic tidal wave that killed so many people and animals.  It shows the resiliency of both animals and the creativity inherent in our animal nature for survival and cooperation.  We don’t know how much the tortoise sensed the trauma of the hippo and helped it; we don’t know whether the hippo really knows how different this mother is.  All we know is that they together survived against all odds in being together.

As this story may surprise me, I am also surprised by people as I get to know them.  One older woman of my acquaintance, Anne, I first met when she was in her mid to late 60s and I was in my 30s.  My first look at her saw a ditzy, forgetful widowed lady who had a hard time remembering dates of meetings she kept asking me to attend. She would tell me the night before that a meeting was scheduled the next day, far too late for me to reschedule myself to attend. It was nearly two years before I was able to attend the group she kept inviting me to, and I began to be skeptical about the group itself because of her lack of ability to ask me in a timely manner.

Finally I attended the group of women, and I was blown away by their spiritual maturity and the depth of their faith. Anne surprised me most. In the first meeting she told about many of her activities to improve interfaith relationships, work with girls in poverty, and many other ways she gave so freely of her time to help others.  My first impression of a ditzy woman was replaced with a new-found respect for her faith, her spiritual depth and her commitment to bringing peace and justice to the world.  Not only did my opinion of her turn around, I was so moved by her and the group that she later became my sponsor in joining the group. I might add that it took us nearly two more years for her to get my paperwork and information straight—Anne had not changed, but I learned to look past her lack of organizational skills to the woman of faith underneath, and to treasure her. I now claim her as one of my dearest friends.

The surprises that the Holy Spirit has for us make us take another look at things we can’t understand, people we dismiss, and a world that is mystery.  The Holy spirit descended on a group of people who could not understand each other’s language and suddenly they see what the other is talking about.  The Holy Spirit opens up ears to hear, hearts to listen. 

Have you thought of the Holy spirit as very mysterious?  Its workings are not clear to me. But when I think of the Owen the hippo and my friend Anne, I think of the spirit moving those boundaries and definitions that mark our territory, that break down fences that bind us in tight places, and open doors so that a fresh breeze can bring in new air.

Like me, has the working of the spirit helped you get over yourselves and the list of people, places and things you don’t like and those you do? The spirit’s work can change our minds about ourselves, make us more loving, forgiving and accepting.

When we pay attention to the Holy Spirit, we may find ourselves doing things we never thought we would do, being more than we could ever imagine we could be, and loving with greater depth and care and commitment than we have ever loved.  The spirit opens our ears to hear new language. The spirit breaks down the barriers that separate us—the barriers of gender and age and race and religion—and makes it possible for us to embrace the mystery of God’s grace.

In Tibet, sherpas live in the valleys under the shadow of Mount Everest and lead expeditions up the mountain. They know their mountain very well. But even these sherpas who traipse the sides of Mount Everest only know the mountain from their own valley. When they are shown pictures of the other side of the mountain as seen from other valleys, they do not recognize it as Mount Everest.

Through the Holy Spirit, God shows pictures of the other side of the mountain, the side not seen, the mysterious and wonderful side not experienced before.  Pray that we all may come to know the other side of the mountain, the side not seen, to enter into God’s mystery, that we may be open to the grace God has for us today.

Easter VII A The Community of Faith

Easter VII A  The Sunday after the Ascension

In last week’s gospel we heard Jesus tell his disciples he would not leave them orphaned, and we began to reflect together on what it means to be in a community with each other.  Today, this gospel account continues with Jesus’s prayer that God would protect us so that we may be one as God and Christ are one.

Again we hear this theme of all of us as a community together in Christ.

What does being a community of faith mean?

A community of faith does differ from a regional community.  While Belvidere is a community by virtue of its geographic location, our faith community need not be all in one place. Holy Trinity is prayed for by all the churches of our Diocese in the cycle of prayer, just as we pray for them.  My clergy colleagues keep me in their prayers, as I am sure your friends and relatives pray for you. In this sense, while Holy Trinity is a small church on the corner of Hurlbut and Main, it is also one of thousands of other Episcopal churches throughout the country, and millions of other Christian communities around the world. Our parish members relate to each other here, and yet we relate to this much vaster thing called Christianity.  I have this experience of our larger church whenever I attend deanery meetings with the other clergy of northern Illinois; I had this experience of connection to Episcopalians around the country when I attended the National Episcopal Health Ministries conference two weeks ago.  It made me feel part of something much bigger to know what churches are doing for the health of our congregations.

So, our community of faith is at once this small gathering, and at the same time, connected in prayer and liturgy and faith with a whole world beyond us.

In general, our world seems bigger in the 21^st century.  Some of us are connected with people who live in faraway places and are able to have instant and low cost conversation over email or cell phone with them.  Our news tells us of events around the globe nearly at the moment they are occurring.  We are the most connected in the history of the world, but my question is: how deep is that connection?  How deeply does Facebook and Twitter and email allow us to share the most important things? No one can hug a computer.  And while technology allows us to know more about each other, I find myself wanting more intimate connection than emails can allow.

In comparison to connections in the world, connections among the faith community root us deeply.  In these connections are touched the very heart and soul of our lives. In the faith community, connections are led by the Spirit of God, and in Christ’s name power comes in healing prayer, in intercessing for someone who needs God’s loving arms, in sharing bread and wine, and in passing the peace. 

The community of faith is made up of all who have been adopted into God’s family through baptism.  This family loves each other, as well as fights with each other, makes up, and goes on in love.  Like any family we have our good days and our bad days, but nothing can remove us from the love of God in Christ.  Christ promises that in this family we will never be orphaned.

Supporting each other in the family of faith takes all of us together.  In the baptismal and confirmation vows, all who witness are asked to uphold the new members.  In marriage and the new holy union vows, all who witness are asked to support the couple in their life together.  In the liturgy we say together, the creed, the confession, as we receive the words of absolution and pronouncement of blessing.  There can be no church without all of you.  The priest cannot celebrate Holy Eucharist without a congregation.  Baptism, confirmation, marriage or holy union, and burial are all meant to occur in the context of community.  All participate in these crucial moments of our lives.  And even when visiting the homebound and sick I try to bring parish members with me to remind the person being visited that they continue to be part of this faith community.

Have you ever arrived at church only to find a few people here?  It may feel like you don’t belong to a community when the pews seem more empty.  Attending church bolsters not only one person’s own faith but the faith of the whole congregation.  Each person shows up not only for their own edification and spiritual nurturance, but for every other person’s as well.  When one voice joins with another voice, then a chorus begins to sound—a chorus of voices saying the creed, the Sanctus and Amen of the Eucharistic prayer, the Lord’s prayer, and praying after communion.  One voice can praise God, but together a chorus makes a joyful noise in praise.  Together hearts are lifted higher than a single voice can possibly lift.

But being one in the community of faith does not mean we agree with each other; it means we do not just tolerate but celebrate each other. Without a bass and tenor and alto and soprano, the chorus cannot sing nearly as well. We need each other’s voices together, to make the beautiful music of love that Christ requires of us, and for which Christ’s prays for us.

Claim your place in this community of faith.  Know that your voice counts, your presence bolsters the parish, your prayer makes the congregational prayer stronger, and your talents create what this community should celebrate every day.