Sermons

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. The earth produces of itself.

Would that that were so with anything I try to grow!

I must admit, I’m no expert in the ways of horticulture, but it’s that time of year where everything seems just to miraculously pop up. Driving around the fields of rural Ohio, I find myself more and more out of my depth with regard to the agricultural imagery in scripture. “Weren’t these parables meant to speak to our own experiences in ways with which we could relate?,” I thought. Well, I have a hard time relating.

We are meant to relate to these stories, and Jesus and his apostles used all sorts of metaphors to appeal to different sorts of audiences. For urban audiences Jesus and the apostles used urban imagery for the Kingdom of God- “the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem” of which the writer of Hebrews speaks and which serves as the dominant metaphor in Revelation as well as in Luke’s Gospel.

On the other hand we findeven more agricultural imagery for the Kingdom of God in the scriptures. This is especially so in Mark. The kingdom of God is like a mustard plant or a fig tree or a vineyard. Anyway, we see both types of imagery, both metaphors, throughout the New Testament, and it was probably because, just as the Church does (or ought to do) today, wherever Jesus or his disciples happened to be they were attempting to make their point in contextually appropriate ways. A farmer in some far-flung corner of first century Palestine probably wouldn’t have any way to conceptualize golden streets and the like, or at least it wouldn’t have meant as much to him as some other metaphor. A merchant in Jerusalem or Rome, or a twenty-first century priest who knows next to nothing about farming, on the other hand, might be lost if he were confronted with metaphors dependent on knowing the particularities of planting and reaping crops.

All that said, I don’t know if a modern farmer would relate to the metaphor or not, whether this experience of apparently automatic growth rings true or if the he must baby his crops along during the growing season. I do know, however, that a great deal is out of his hands in that process, dependent on rain and temperature and other factors he must simply accept. Thanks to modern science, I suspect farmers today probably basically know more about how the crop gets from a little seedling to a plant large enough to harvest than did a first-century farmer, but I wonder if that makes it any less amazing when it happens. Despite knowing the physical processes by which this growth takes place, the phenomenon itself can be breathtaking and even mysterious. The farmer planted the field and it just seemed to grow. Day after day, the crop kept getting bigger and he didn’t know how it happened, or even if he did, it was still pretty amazing.

So it is with the Kingdom of God. There’s little we can do to make it happen. In fact, the best thing to do, in some sense, is to get out of the way and let it happen. Like the seed which the farmer spread the Kingdom of God undergoes a mysterious growth. “The earth produces of itself” Jesus said. The Kingdom of God comes about of its own volition, not ours.

This may seem simple enough, but in fact there was a group in the Church during its early years which held precisely the opposite view. These people were called Pelagians, because their leader was the fourth century British monk Pelagius. The Pelagians believed that humankind was so free that it was ultimately capable of saving itself. The Kingdom of God, for Pelagians, was something which the Church was meant to build.

Lest we think we are a lot smarter than those benighted heretics of the fourth century, this very same idea has been extremely popular in modern times. I know this is one of my hobby horses, so I’ll spare you yet another harangue about the mistakes of nineteenth century liberal protestantism. The point is that the same mistake is made by many contemporary believers, and even theologians, who place more emphasis on what we do than what God does, and this is dangerous territory.

This does not, however, mean that we’re off the hook entirely. While on the one hand the seed sprouted and grew he knew not how and the earth produced of itself, it is important to note that the farmer spread the seed to begin with. While we cannot take responsibility for building the Kingdom of God, while it is sheer hubris to take credit for that which only God can do, we nonetheless have a role to play. The fact that God alone brings about our salvation, that He alone is the efficient cause of the Kingdom, does not get us off the hook and permit sloth or quietism.

Hear what St. Paul says in his first letter to the Corinthians:

I planted, Apol’los watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. He who plants and he who waters are equal, and each shall receive his wages according to his labor. For we are God’s fellow workers; you are God’s field, God’s building.

Paul does not degrade his own efforts or those of his fellow apostle and assumed rival Apollos. Rather, he puts those efforts into the proper context. He does not say that human efforts at building up the Church are in vain, but that those efforts are used by God to His ends. There is a strong sense of cooperation in Paul’s account of human effort: “We are God’s fellow workers”, he says.

It seems that this is the case because even though sin disables us, even though it means we cannot do anything without God, we were in some sense made to cooperate with God. The creation story in Genesis tells us that we was made in the image of God. One way of understanding this is that we were made with the same creative capacity as God. God is the Creator, and we, His creation, are also given the ability to be creative. We may work alongside God in His continual, creative effort to make all things new in Christ Jesus. Whether any given one of us is more suited to planting or watering, to serve God through teaching or leading or evangelizing or any of the other gifts which the HolyoHoly Spirit might give us, our precise role in God’s plan is a matter for discernment. What is sure, though, is that we are simultaneously called to cooperate in some way with God and to recognize that God alone gives the growth.

And whether any of us is terribly good at planting or watering or whatever, we can take comfort in the fact that God’s Providence will give the growth in miraculous ways. Like the farmer who just spread seeds and waited or the mustard seed which became a great plant, what God accomplishes will amaze us when on the last day we behold it. For now, let us be content to do a little, put one seed into the ground or dig one hole for the Kingdom, knowing that nothing good that we do, though it be dwarfed by what God Himself does, will be lost for eternity, but will remain in the life of the world to come. For these good works are not really ours, but they are the effect of God working in us infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son of the and Holy Spirit. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

It occurred to me earlier this week, while thinking about this Gospel reading, how where we find ourselves in biblical stories can change over the course of time. When I was younger–having adventures in less than completely safe parts of the world and making vocational decisions that seemed strange to friends and family, like going into the priesthood–I identified more with Jesus in today’s reading, doing the thing his heavenly Father wanted him to do regardless of popularity. (As an aside, when asked “where do you see yourself in this bible story?” the answer “as Jesus” is probably not the best one, though I’m sure I’ve been forgiven for my adolescent grandiosity.)

These days, though, I can identify more with Jesus’ family who is worried about him. It’s probably natural that one becomes both more protective and more conformist as one ages. As you know, I don’t have children to worry about, but that doesn’t stop me from being concerned about decisions other people I care about make. The most ridiculous example of this for me recently–and this is embarrassing to admit, but that’s kind of the point–is how I’ve been thinking about a YouTube presenter Annie and I like to watch leaving his position at a well established network to start his own business recording music and designing board games. This is not somebody I know that I’m worrying about, and so it’s surpassing silly that I should be concerned that he is making an imprudent professional move. Imagine what I’d be like if I had actual human children making decisions about their lives!

I wonder how many of us have been through a situation similar to Jesus’ in the morning’s Gospel, whether we were the young man making inexplicable decisions or the family member worried about him. Our Lord was, let’s be honest, causing scandal, and his family was afraid he’d gone mad. When Jesus’ family finally approaches, Jesus’ response is not especially polite:

“Who are my mother and my brothers?” And looking around on those who sat about him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and sister, and mother.” 

One wonders how Jesus’ family—the mother and father who raised him and the kinsmen with whom he grew up—felt about this. One suspects they might have felt horribly betrayed!

This is certainly a shocking story, though I think it has something to tell us, and it may be something which some of us are unwilling to hear. I know it makes me uncomfortable, particularly since, as I said, I worry about decisions made by people I’ve never met.

We’ve all heard stories of family expectations seriously impeding a young man or woman’s development into the kind of person they feel God wants them to be. Moving off to college? That’s madness! Choosing to live somewhere besides the family property? Madness! I should hasten to add, that there is plenty of difference between genuine concern and natural protectiveness on the one hand and the makings of codependency on the other, and recognizing that God has given agency and the capacity to make decisions (even bad ones) to those we care about is a good thing to keep in mind.

Anyway, I don’t mean to suggest that we have no responsibility to honor the expectations and hopes of our elders. I do, however, mean to suggest that parents and other family and friends need to respect the potential vocations of their loved ones. When I say “vocation”, I don’t mean profession, but rather calling. Perhaps God is truly calling a son or daughter into a life which takes them far away. Perhaps God is calling a loved one to an endeavor we might think is irregular at best or foolish at worst. The trick is to help that person discern God’s call and support him or her when he or she has made a prayerful decision.

The risk in not doing so is to be either purposefully at odds with God’s will or uncomfortably convicted by Jesus’ assessment of his mother and brothers when it’s too late to say “I don’t understand, but I support you.”

We know that in Jesus’ case, even if his family were caught off guard by his comments in today’s Gospel, reconciliation was effected. Our Lady was present at the cross, keeping her vigil, surely knowing that as horrible as it all seemed her son was following the Will of his Heavenly Father. None of us is as gracious as the Blessed Virgin, though, so we must be all the more reticent when we may be dissuading somebody from following God’s will for them. When we’re conscious of this pitfall and prayerful in our response, we not only avoid a great deal of grief. We are able, at last, to see just how unexpectedly God can work through loved ones and circumstances we never would have imagined.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

A novel which meant a great deal to me as a young man, and whose ideas continue to influence me, is Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers. It follows the lives and conflicts of clergy–both parish priests and diocesan prelates–in a fictional English cathedral city. While there is no single protagonist or antagonist, the most compelling conflict is between an Anglo-Catholic Rector and intellectual, Francis Arabin, and the new bishop’s oleaginous low church chaplain, Obadiah Slope, who rails against things like candles on altars and choral music and so forth. In addition to arguments about churchmanship, Arabin and Slope are also romantically interested in the same woman. So, for me anyway, Arabin is the great hero of the book and Slope the villain.

It is uncomfortable, then, for me to admit that I can identify with Chaplain Slope in one of his evangelical obsessions–namely his Sabbatarianism. Slope condemns the fact that the trains ran, that people played sports, engaged in commerce, and otherwise did anything other than worship and study the bible on Sundays. Amusingly, particularly since this is a hundred-and-fifty-year-old book, Slope constantly engages in what a twenty-first century person might call “virtue signaling” particularly in his pedantic use of language–he insists on using the term “Sabbath Day School” instead of the perfectly appropriate term “Sunday School” to remind everyone of how good he is at following the fourth commandment.

I’d certainly not go as far as Slope. Blue laws are probably inappropriate in a nonsectarian country like ours. What’s more, I can’t see anything wrong with enjoying leisure activities on the Lord’s Day so long as one has also said one’s prayers. (This issue, by the way, has a long history; King James I promulgated an anti-puritan document titled The Declaration of Sports, in which things like archery and dancing and setting up May poles were expressly permitted on Sundays (though you couldn’t engage in bear-baiting or, for some reason, bowling.)

All that said, I have been known to lament the degree to which obligations have crept into our days of rest, and the moralism which often accompanies this, productivity being more valued in our culture than the reasonable allowance for rest and recreation and prayerful contemplation which I think the Lord intended for us in commanding Sabbath observance. I could launch into a litany of complaints here. The lack of any legal provision for opening and closing hours to protect workers against greedy employers–one clear intention of the fourth commandment which even secularizing Europe maintains, much to the occasional irritation of the American tourist accustomed to Wal-Mart style convenience–is a rather inhumane aspect of our society in my opinion. Youth sport encroaching on Sunday mornings has been a perennial complaint, and I’ve been known to whinge about it myself. One could go one, but like everybody who has principles I am a hypocrite in this regard. (You may have heard me say before, that my theory is that the only people who aren’t at least occasionally guilty of hypocrisy are those who don’t have any principles to begin with, which is, needless to say, far worse.) My most recent hypocrisy w/r/t the Sabbath–obviously, I work on Sundays, and so I take Fridays off, which is nice because Annie never works Fridays. The last week for me was busy and stressful and I ended up doing quite a bit of work on Friday. Generally when this happens without their being an honest-to-God emergency, I’m able to take Saturday off instead. Well, this could have happened if I’d been more careful about prioritizing obligations earlier in the week, which I had not done. So yesterday morning, when Annie was on her way to work she asked me “what are you going to do today?” I responded “I’m going to work very hard on this Sabbath day on writing a sermon about how we shouldn’t work on the Sabbath.” I believe this is the definition of irony.

Now, we are reminded in today’s Gospel that legalism about this is unhelpful. The pharisees, you may remember, were famous in Jesus’ time for making the rules of the Old Testament stricter than they actually were in the Bible, often missing the point of why God might have commanded these things in the first place. A thoughtful rabbi could come down on either side of whether or not the disciples should be casually plucking grain on the Sabbath, as they did in the first half of the Gospel, though Jesus gives an elegant argument in their defense. The healing in the second half of the reading, though, should have struck any serious scholar of the Old Testament as an entirely licit exception to the general rule of Sabbath-keeping. Here the Pharisees have left off any reasonable argument, for Chaplain Slope’s Sabbatarian virtue-signaling.

The rubric Jesus gives us bypasses the legalism and pedantry of the Pharisees and Trollope’s villain and (I must confess) the sometimes cranky opinions of John Drymon, priest and hypocrite. He gets to the heart of the matter in one simple concept, making explicit that which the Law of Moses, given by God, surely had at its heart implicitly: the Sabbath is made for man, not man for the Sabbath.

We might then ask, “why did God establish the Sabbath for us?” What are its benefits? I think the reason is two-fold.

The first is perhaps the most obvious. God did not create us simply so that we could toil miserably. He wants us to enjoy him and all he’s given us in this life–not just to work until we die and only then to find any rest. This is not, I would contend, merely so that we might “recharge our batteries” so that we can be more effective in our work six days out of the week, as some may have it. This is certainly a fringe benefit, but it’s not the point. That men and women should find their labor onerous, we learn in Genesis, is an effect of the fall not God’s original intent, and an observance of the Sabbath in which we rest, recreate, and enjoy fellowship with God in prayer and study, is our brief, imperfect, though substantively real weekly return to prelapsarian Eden, which is not primarily a utilitarian compromise, but a graciously given foretaste of the perfect rest to come.

Secondly, and perhaps even more importantly, Sabbath is a reminder that we are not saving the world. God is saving it and will save it, and though all our works done faithfully are accepted and valued by God, our weekly rest does not mean that the Kingdom will come 14% faster.

I have for some time had conversations with a relative (whom I won’t identify) about her inability to cut back on work, much less move toward the goal of retirement. This relative at least theoretically holds a more reformed theology than I, and should be more suspicious than I am of “works righteousness” or what our Articles of Religion call “works of supererogation” (that is, the idea that by being better than strictly morally required we are depositing our own Grace into some sort of treasury of merit to cover the sins of others). When pressed, I think she’d affirm that we must rely on Christ’s Grace rather than our own efforts for salvation. But in practice she has a hard time not acting as if the Kingdom depended on her efforts. Even greater than the irony of my Sabbath-day sermon writing on Sabbatarianism is the irony that the reformed recognition of our reliance on God alone should give birth to the Protestant Work Ethic, whose effect is to so obviously encourage the sort of drudgery and scrupulosity and anxiety which the Reformation began to try to free us from.

The contention that God will work his purposes out one way or another may sound fatalistic, but in the end it should be a great relief. Our efforts are not pointless; everything we do faithfully is a gift from God and may be a means by which he’s working his purposes out, but it’s not all on us, thank God. Sabbath rest gives us a reminder of this, and it helps us practice the most important thing–namely, enjoying God’s grace in this life, preparing us for the same in eternity.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.