Sermons

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

“[Some] seeds fell among thorns and the thorns grew up and choked them… As for what was sown among thorns, this is he who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the delight in riches choke the word, and it proves unfruitful.” Today’s gospel lesson is the first of seven parables in St. Matthew’s gospel, and it serves as the paradigm for parables in the gospel. It’s been said that parables serve the paradoxical purpose of both revealing the truth of the matter and concealing it. Indeed, in the passage cut out from the middle of today’s reading (you’ll notice we skipped from verse 9 to verse 18 of the thirteenth chapter of Matthew), Jesus admits this to be the case.

Parables, the parable of the sower included, are often mysterious, difficult to pull apart. And let’s face it: the subject matter with which the parables are meant to deal is itself rather difficult. Any of you who have taught a class will know how important it is to use examples and analogies while attempting to explain a particularly difficult, abstract concept. You will also realize how profound the limitations of such analogies are. The issues with which Jesus is dealing are rather abstract, and so the metaphors presented in parables, though helpful for our understanding, can only approximate the truth of the matter. The fourth verse of the popular Holy Week hymn “O Sacred Head Sore Wounded” begins by asking Jesus “what language shall I borrow to thank thee, dearest friend?” Our language and our all-too-human minds are incapable of fully communicating or comprehending the mysteries of God and his Kingdom. Thus, parables provide a helpful if somewhat limited entry point for contemplating these mysteries.

We have the apparent advantage in this parable of having Jesus’ explanation follow the parable itself. However, if we take a closer look, the explanation doesn’t necessarily simplify the parable. Rather, we are presented a few new questions in the explanation itself, questions which the parable doesn’t answer: who is the sower, what is the word symbolized by the seeds, and what are the “fruits” this word yields?

Let us take the first two of these questions, the identity of the sower and the nature of the word, as one question because, in fact, I believe (along with the Church Fathers) that we are to understand both the sower and the sown to refer to the same thing, namely to Christ himself. “The word scattered the seed,” St. Athanasius writes, and the seed is itself symbolic of the word. This is all to say that our Lord came to disseminate nothing less than his whole self to all who would accept him.

And this word, like a seed teeming with potential but in itself very small, may come to a glorious fruition. But then, perhaps it won’t. The Greek Fathers called this seed logos spermatikos, the generative word, because it holds so much potential for developing a complex, beautiful new spiritual creation, and yet it also requires the right conditions, or else it might come to nought.

As the section of the parable I read a few moments ago mentioned, among the obstacles standing in the way of the word reaching its end in us are the thorny cares of the world and the lure of wealth. It seems entirely appropriate, especially in this day and age, that the two should be uttered in the same breath. For many of us the cares of the world revolve around the lack of money. For others it may be aging and illness, for others it could be the disintegration of a family, and still for others it could be the ravages of addiction.

We need to have some sympathy for those whose faith is tried and even lost to the cares of the world. We cannot, for instance, entirely blame Eli Weisel, the Twentieth Century’s most notable activist for Holocaust remembrance, for losing his faith in the concentration camp at Buchenwald. Sometimes it is a lack of faith which allows the cares of the world to do their damage, but sometimes the cares of the world are simply too intense to suffer, and I believe it is in God’s power (that power being infinite) to give grace even to those who reject him in their distress.

Conversely, it is to those in times of great distress that God is most apparent. We must pray continually for those in great sorrow, need, and distress, praying not only that their troubles may be alleviated, but also that they may find comfort and reassurance and may come to know God more fully in the midst of that distress.

There is plenty to cause us distress in this day and age. War and poverty are an everyday reality for much of the world’s population. This might be an unfair assumption, but I would be willing to bet that most (though probably not all) of us have been spared the pain of being directly effected by something so horrific. The thorny cares that most of us deal with most of the time are of the more garden variety of troubles, which though not driving us to reject the faith or to put ourselves at avowed enmity with God, often make us close ourselves off to the full realization of his grace in our lives. I think we have to start to fight against this by allowing God to cultivate in the soil of our lives a certain mindset of love and openness. We must try to see that the thorns are not only aberrant, external objects; they can also be attitudes that we cultivate in ourselves. Difficulties cannot be avoided, but our approach to them and our willingness to let God’s grace abide in us during times of difficulty are within our power, even in the most difficult of times.

It should be enough that God loves us. God gives grace freely through the living Christ. That should be enough, but it doesn’t seem like it sometimes. That’s normal, and God understands that, too. Yet this does not exempt us from attempting to accept God’s grace and mercy. We must try, as impossibly difficult as it seems during the thorny times of life, to be still and know that God is with us, suffering with us, and sowing in our hearts that with which we are to bear fruits.

And what are these fruits? It seems to me that the yield of the vineyard of the Lord is as diverse as Christ’s Church. There are many of you who give of your time, talents, and treasure to various ministries in this church. That is a fruit. There are many of you who are loving parents and devoted spouses, and bring into those relationships God’s love, and that is yet another fruit. Through the waters of baptism and by the continual outpouring of the Holy Spirit we have been made a new people in Jesus Christ, to show forth God’s glory in all the world. As the prophet Isaiah said:

For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it… Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress; instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle; and it shall be to the Lord for a memorial, for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.

+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.

Back in the 70’s, comedian Flip Wilson popularized the now ubiquitous excuse “the devil made me do it.” The joke, of course, is that it’s a lame excuse. “The devil made me do it” will not hold up in court or in a meeting with your supervisor at work, and I discovered that by the time I was in high school it did not amuse my parents.

A certain way of reading Paul in today’s epistle might, however, strike us as analogous to Wilson’s excuse. “It is no longer I that do it,” Paul says of his own disobedience, “but sin that dwells within me.” Far from being an excuse, however, St. Paul is presenting a rather subtle account of moral and immoral action. The passage is a bit confusing, because of the terms Paul uses: sin, law, flesh, mind. These are all terms with complex, nuanced definitions for Paul, and it will benefits us to spend a bit of time unpacking them.

First, the concept of law is important for Paul, and we can understand why. He was a Pharisee, and it was the job of Pharisees to be well-versed in the Torah, the law of God as presented in the first five books of the bible. That is to say, Paul’s whole business before he became a Christian was to know every obscure regulation from those bits of the Old Testament we hardly ever read in church. There are, in fact, 613 laws in those bits of the bible, and they cover everything from obvious moral imperatives (e.g. not to commit murder) to tax codes and regulations on how to worship in the temple. We know a few of them by common knowledge—like the prohibition against pork and shellfish—but the particulars really get very complex, and Pharisees were concerned with regulating behavior so that all were above reproach. This often meant making rules which might strike us as overly-conscientious to avoid even the possibility of offense.

So this is Paul’s relationship to law. He is not what in fancy theological terms we call an antinomian. That is, he is not content to say that God’s Grace is such that it entirely exempts us from following certain laws. The law, including those 613 obscure regulations, was given by God and is, thus, good. This means we cannot simply reject the law, even the apparently weird laws we don’t follow like not eating shellfish. We cannot say they were simply created by man in a benighted time. The law is from God, but our relationship to it is essentially different under the New Covenant of Jesus Christ. We have, in other words, a transformed relationship to the law.

Because we are human, because we are fallen, this new relationship to the law is in some sense affected by sin. Sin is another of those technical terms Paul uses, and it relates to the other two technical terms: flesh and mind. Sin, here, is actually the Greek word ͑αμαρτια, which literally means “missing the mark”. It is the word that the ancient Greeks would have used of an archer who couldn’t shoot the bullseye. But in today’s reading, Paul personifies sin. It is more than an occurrence of missing the mark; it is something which dwells within us, endowing us with an almost unavoidable tendency to err. It is not that “the devil makes us do it”, it is that our very nature is such that it leads us to sin. It is this nature which Paul calls flesh.

We must be very careful with this term, though. It is flesh not body. For those interested in the Greek, it is σαρκς not σωμα. Our bodies are gifts from God, who made them perfect at Creation and who gave His son a real body not only when he was born but when he was raised from the dead. This is why John makes such a big deal of the resurrected Christ eating and drinking and being physically touched by Thomas. Such will be our state after the resurrection. As we say in the Apostles Creed “we believe in the resurrection of the body” not “in the resurrection of disembodied ghosts”.

Anyway, the biblical view is that bodies are good things. It is flesh, or the tendency to sin which is a bad thing. It is the flesh which Paul explains later in his letter to the Romans that demands the gratification of desires which have no bearing on our livelihood, inordinate desires which go well beyond the normal needs and creature-comforts (which are themselves fine) to demand that which benefits us to the detriment of others: greed and lust and gluttony and pride. The law was given as a means to avoid these fleshly desires. The New Covenant is in a sense more difficult because in place of all these laws, a mere two are given to dissuade us from falling victim to the flesh: love God and love your neighbors. It is more difficult because instead of following a bunch of clear rules, we have to reckon how all the choices in our life meet or fail to meet these two commandments.

And that is where the mind comes in. Again, this is a technical term, and it does not mean reason. I have found in my own life that often reason leads to sin as much as being irrational. This might sound counterintuitive, so let me explain. Reason is a gift from God, just like our bodies, but like our bodies it can be taken over by the flesh. While the legitimate needs of the body can be perverted by the flesh into inordinate desires, so too can human reason be perverted by the flesh to justify just about anything. This is what we call rationalization. Herman Melville, in his novella Billy Budd, wrote of “conscience being but the lawyer to [our] will.” How often do we knowingly do what we ought not to do after convincing ourselves that we are justified in the offense. In Paradise Lost, Milton goes so far as to suggest that Adam and Eve’s transgression may have come after such a rationalization, and takes us through several lines in which Eve convinces herself that God really meant for her to eat the fruit.

So, reason has the potential to lead us astray just as it has the potential to lead us down the right path. So what is the “law of the mind” which Paul says does battle with the “law of the flesh”. We find the answer when we look elsewhere in Paul’s writings. In First Corinthians, Paul explains that discerning God’s will in our lives is possible because “we have the mind of Christ.” In Philippians he urges his followers to “let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.” Later in Romans, Paul says, “do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.” Doing what God demands of us is dependent on us conforming our minds to that of Our Lord. How in heaven’s name are we to do that; this is a tall order. If I knew the answer entirely, I’d be a much less selfish, struggling person than I am. I believe, however, that I know how to start. It seems to me that we begin the process of “conforming our minds” and growing “to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ,” as Paul put it to the Ephesians, through the hard work of authentic prayer. Prayer is nothing less than participating in the work of Christ which began on His sojourn in the wilderness and found its consummation in the prayer He offered on the cross for humanity’s salvation. It matters less how one prays (though the prayer book offers an excellent model). A daily practice of thanksgiving, praise, intercession, and bible study should be central; and our weekly observance of the Holy Communion serves to bind our lives even more closely to that of our Savior. Whatever the method, though, the practice of prayer has an evident impact on how we live and militates against the assault of “the world, the flesh, and the devil.” We will never reach perfection, which Paul knew painfully well. “[We] do not do what [we] want, but [we] do the very thing we hate”, and this will remain a constant struggle. But “thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord” that in spite of the fact that sometimes we err, God’s Grace is infinite and His forgiveness waits only upon our reception of the same.

+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.

The benefits of being in a church which requires use of the lectionary are manifold. It means that, despite some differences between our lectionary and those used by other churches, the similarities are such that we usually hear more-or-less the same lessons that the majority of Christians around the world are hearing on the same day. It saves you from being subjected to my own hobby-horses all the time, which is a danger when the preacher simply gets to choose his or her own text. Most importantly, it makes one deal with difficult texts one wouldn’t choose to. I mentioned to Bishop Jolly last week that I was relieved she had to deal with that Gospel text about the difficulty and division which faithfully following and witnessing to the Gospel can introduce into our lives and relationships.

So, I dodged a bullet and we have nice happy readings this week, right? Well, at first blush it seems that way, but this brings up a problem with lectionaries. Like any document produced by committee, the lectionary emerged from a political process, and that means that sometimes we miss some important things that somebody somewhere was uncomfortable with. Sometimes we’re forced to hear the nasty bits, but other times we get the sanitized version and miss the point which the authors of the various books of the bible intend for us to get. This is absolutely the case with this morning’s Old Testament lesson from the book of the Prophet Jeremiah. In fact, if we read this lesson out of context, we get a message which is precisely opposite that which is intended.

Our reading this morning sounds awfully hopeful. The time for preaching war and famine and pestilence, it seems, was over. “As for the prophet who prophecies peace,” Jeremiah says, “when the word of the prophet comes to pass, then it will be known that the Lord has truly sent the prophet.”

Now to give you some context, Israel was captive to the Babylonian Empire, the greatest force in the near East at the time, the early 6^th Century B.C. Jeremiah, like many of the prophets, engaged in some of what today we would call “street theater”. He had placed a wooden yoke around his neck to symbolize Israel’s bondage to Babylon and its King, Nebuchadnezzar. Hananiah, the prophet to whom Jeremiah addresses his words in this morning’s reading, had just prophesied Israel’s deliverance. Israel’s problems were all over, Hananiah said, and Jeremiah believed Hananiah’s prophecy was from God. In the two verses which immediately follow this morning’s reading, it says:

Then the prophet Hananiah took the yoke-bars from the neck of Jeremiah the prophet, and broke them. And Hananiah spoke in the presence of all the people saying “Thus says the Lord: Even so will I break the yoke of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon from the neck of the nation within two yeas.”

Israel’s problems, it seemed, were at least very nearly over.

But if we read just a few verses further, we find the truth was very different. It continues:

Sometime after the prophet Hanani’ah had broken the yoke-bars from off the neck of Jeremiah the prophet, the word of the LORD came to Jeremiah: “Go, tell Hanani’ah, `Thus says the LORD: You have broken wooden bars, but I will make in their place bars of iron. For thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: I have put upon the neck of all these nations an iron yoke of servitude to Nebuchadnez’zar king of Babylon, and they shall serve him, for I have given to him even the beasts of the field.'” And Jeremiah the prophet said to the prophet Hanani’ah, “Listen, Hanani’ah, the LORD has not sent you, and you have made this people trust in a lie. Therefore thus says the LORD: `Behold, I will remove you from the face of the earth. This very year you shall die, because you have uttered rebellion against the LORD.'” In that same year, in the seventh month, the prophet Hanani’ah died.

So when we read just a little bit further, we find that Jeremiah had been tricked. The prophecy of peace which we find in this morning’s reading was the result of deception and wishful thinking. Hard times were still to lie ahead for the children of Israel.

What does this mean for us, beyond the seemingly obvious, namely, that when the lectionary gives us a text we should pay attention to context? I think it means that we have to be careful about false prophets. If Jeremiah, himself a prophet, could be taken in, how much greater is the danger for us!

Jesus says “he who receives a prophet because he is a prophet receives a prophet’s reward,” but just a few verses earlier (from last week’s Gospel lesson) he says “Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”

A false prophet tells us exactly what we want to hear, namely that all is just peachy. He fools us into believing that the suffering we see around us is just an illusion. He tells us that if we sew our seed by sending in a bunch of money to his cause, we’ll be healthy and wealthy.

To receive a prophet who is truly a prophet is to welcome news we might not want to hear. We don’t want to hear that we might be complicit in sin. None of us wants to hear that he’s selfish or uncaring. None of us wants to hear that he needs a change of heart or a renewed commitment to God or he’s going to be in spiritual danger. We don’t want to receive a prophet because he is a prophet, because the false prophet makes us feel so good about ourselves.

We learn from Jeremiah and from Jesus that the truth can be unpleasant and it can be divisive, but we’re nonetheless called to accept it, and Jesus himself has told us that it will set us free. Let us set aside our fear of the truth, knowing that false hope and false security and a false sense of our own perfection are the quickest way to bonds more uncomfortable than Jeremiah’s yoke. The truth delivered by a true prophet may hit us like a ton of bricks, but when we climb out from under that pile we’ll find the yoke finally removed and we’ll find within us a will we never knew we had to walk in the light, seeing the world for what it is and working to make it what God would have it be.

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