Sermons

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

There are few things as potentially amusing and as potentially instructive as listening to a small child pray. It is typically a mix of both the amusingly selfish and the inspiringly selfless, expressing those two truths about all Christians (namely, our transformation into new people in Baptism and our constant struggle with our old, creaturely obsession with self) which we adults are usually too clever to make so obvious.

If you have a child in your life and you’ve not listened in on his or her prayers before bedtime (which I hope children still do) I would encourage you to do so. You’ll likely hear some rather selfish stuff—prayers for a new bicycle or a less irritating sibling—but you’ll likely also hear some rather moving examples of Christian charity: prayers for sick friends, for mom and dad, for that sibling (despite how irritating he or she might be), and so forth.

As I said, we adults are clever enough to monitor the prayers we give around others. But how often in our private conversations with God do we forget to ask ourselves if we’re really praying aright? There are two prayers from our Book of Common Prayer which are directed for use as concluding collects for the Prayers of the People which I think we are wise to think about. One asks God to “Accept and fulfill our petitions, we pray, not as we ask in our ignorance, nor as we deserve in our sinfulness, but as [God] know[s] and love[s] us in [His] Son,” and the other asks God to “Help us to ask only what accords with [His] will; and those good things which we dare not, or in our blindness cannot ask, [to] grant us for the sake of [His] Son Jesus Christ our Lord.”

How often do we fail to consider the fact that God may know what’s best for His people? How often do we pray without reflection for personal benefits and even for the benefit of self at the expense of others?

A little over twenty years ago a very popular book called The Prayer of Jabez came out. It was written by a fellow named Bruce Wilkinson, and he based the book on a rather obscure passage from 1 Chronicles. So popular was this volume that three versions for children of different ages were released in the years following its publication. And what did this book instruct its readers to do? To pray very specifically for personal benefits in the areas of finances, social influence, and the like. Throughout the volume is an unstated assumption that God ought to respond to our desires rather than the other way round. Sadly, whether we want to acknowledge it or not, the popularity of this book and of the “prosperity Gospel” more broadly suggests that it is very easy to pray for oneself unreflectively, to forget to consider others in our intercessions.

In this morning’s Old Testament lesson we are introduced to a figure better than most in regards to being reflective in prayer. At Gibeon the Lord seems to give Solomon a blank check, as it were: “Ask what I shall give you,” he says. God forbid that He should say the same thing to me. I’d probably ask for a trust fund and a vacation home. But Solomon responds, “Give thy servant therefore an understanding mind to govern thy people, that I may discern between good and evil; for who is able to govern this thy great people?” Solomon prays that he may have the gifts to serve God’s people, rather than for “long life, or riches, or the lives of [his] enemies,” and for this God grants Solomon’s request.

Of course, not all prayers for ourselves are selfish, and we don’t have to pray only for God to give us gifts to do His work (though, this is one thing we should always pray for). It is perfectly appropriate to cry out to God in our distress and ask for relief. When we are ill or sad or frightened, God is ready to hear us. The danger is when we cannot see past ourselves, past our own needs and desires, to see how God might be needed in the lives of others, and how we might, through prayer, be given strength to reach out to those in need of His Grace.

The difficult truth is that we’ll never be so adept at discerning the complex motivations that do battle in our souls to become perfect in prayer. Unless you’re a lot more self-aware than I, prayer will always include at least a hint of self-interest. Does this mean it’s a losing battle, that we may as well not pray? By no means! We hear in St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans the good news that we who have been redeemed, who have been regenerated in Baptism, have a prayer-partner who prays for us and in us and who finally perfects the complex, tortuous words we offer up to the Almighty:

[W]e do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words. And he who searches the hearts of men knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.

Remain steadfast in prayer, then, with confidence that God will hear and answer us “not as we ask in our ignorance, nor as we deserve in our sinfulness, but as [He] know[s] and love[s] us in [His] Son, Jesus Christ our Lord” and that the Spirit which gives us the words we need has given us the strength to say those blessed words against which even the Gates of Hell cannot triumph: God the Father has made us His sons and daughters through Jesus Christ and loves us and listens to us as any father should: with compassion and understanding and an overwhelming desire that we should live in peace and felicity all the days of our lives and in eternity with the Triune God.

+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.

I’ve discovered over the years that it is to my benefit (and I hope to some extent the benefit of those subjected to my sermons) to read theologians and biblical scholars for who I have a great deal of respect and with whom I find some common ground but who at the same time challenge my own ideas. This is like threading a needle. I mustn’t stick exclusively to those with whom I am in nearly perfect agreement (probably the closest would be the so-called “radical orthodoxy” of theologians like John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock), as they’ll serve largely to reïnforce what I already take to be the case. On the other hand, it does me little good intellectually–and perhaps it is positively harmful spiritually–to spend too much time poring over texts whose basic assumptions are so beyond the pale that it becomes questionable whether the authors are even making good faith arguments. Here I class things like the Jesus Seminar and Process Theology.

So the “sweet spot” as it were is where intellectual honesty and rigor meet the challenging of my own assumptions, and there are plenty of good examples of this. I love much of what Karl Rahner wrote, particularly regarding “unthematic revelation” as the precursor to Christian inquiry, but I can’t fully embrace his definition of the Trinity. I think N.T. Wright is a tremendously careful, faithful reader of the bible, but (as I mentioned during our Christian education series on Romans) I’m not sure I can fully embrace his reading of Paul’s use of the word faith (πιστις) in that letter, and I think in some ways he’s over-corrected when it comes to his view of the afterlife. There is a great deal I find compelling in the work of Karl Barth, but sometimes I can identify with one critic who wrote “the first time I read a volume of [Church Dogmatics]… I felt like a ferret swimming in a bucket of Thorazine.”

Probably the best example of this “Goldilocks zone” of theology for me, though, is the work of Orthodox Theologian David Bentley Hart. His first monograph on aesthetics and theological truth was a game-changer and his work metaphysics (insofar as I understand it, anyway) seems similarly on point. But his 2019 book That All Shall Be Saved strayed too far, I believe, from the biblical witness and teaching of the church in its argument for universalism (that is, to put it simply, the idea that it is impossible for anybody to choose perdition rather than salvation). I could maybe go so far as the Orthodox Church in America’s Archbishop, in echoing the great Kallistos Ware (himself, like Hart, an Anglican convert to Orthodoxy) “we can’t teach universal salvation as doctrine, but we can hope for it.”

That said, what we mustn’t ever do, is presume to claim who makes the cut and who doesn’t, whose faith is genuine and whose isn’t, who’s elect and who’s reprobate. Some sadly do so presume. The Westboro Baptist Church, that cult from Kansas, that homophobic Kansas cult that protests soldiers’ funerals, famously have done. I’ve done a fair amount of driving the last couple of weeks, and I’m always struck by the billboard on I-75 that just says “Heaven or Hell” and gives a toll-free phone number. I’ve not tried calling, but I wonder what verdict they’d give me.

This morning’s gospel should serve as a warning to avoid this kind of speculation. The slaves approach their master and ask if they should pull the weeds out of the garden, a rather obvious thing to do, one should think. The master, however, is afraid that some of the wheat would be thrown out with the weeds, and instructs the slave to let them grow, leaving the separation for the reaper.

I had always thought it rather strange, not having a background in agriculture, that the weeds could not be distinguished from the wheat. I had always assumed a farmer could tell the difference. Having done a bit of research, though, I discovered that the weeds in question were likely lolium temulentum, or darnel, which indeed cannot be easily distinguished from wheat until very late in both plants’ maturation. So Jesus’ audience would have known the dangers of trying to pull up these weeds from a wheat field prematurely. Some of the crop would invariably be lost.

And notice whom Jesus identifies as the reapers: they are the angels. They’re not us. They are not the clergy or the matriarchs and patriarchs of a parish church or the vestry or the General Convention of the Episcopal Church or any other human agent. The angels make the separation, not us.

It goes without saying that this should lead us to a degree of tolerance. I think it’s easy enough for most of us to avoid speculating out loud about a person’s ultimate destination, but I think our hearts have more trouble in this regard than we might expect. I have thought to say and very occasionally actually said to somebody those three horrible words that lie in wait, ready to pop out of our mouths when we’re angry: go to hell. Rarely do I really mean it literally, but sometimes, maybe deep down, I do. That’s my problem; that’s sin.

In a sermon on this very text, St. Augustine had this to say:

O you Christians, whose lives are good, you sigh and groan as being few among many, few among very many. The winter will pass away, the summer will come; lo! The harvest will soon be here. The angels will come who can make the separation, and who cannot make mistakes. … I tell you of a truth, my Beloved, even in these high seats there is both wheat, and tares, and among the laity there is wheat, and tares. Let the good tolerate the bad; let the bad change themselves, and imitate the good. Let us all, if it may be so, attain to God; let us all through His mercy escape the evil of this world. Let us seek after good days, for we are now in evil days; but in the evil days let us not blaspheme, that so we may be able to arrive at the good days.

Here that great father of the church not only tells us to withhold judgment—not knowing as well as the angels who might be a weed and who might be wheat—but he also warns us not to blaspheme. Blasphemy is irreverence, and it may take the form of us presuming to carry out the divine task of judgment ourselves. To presume to say somebody is going or has gone to hell, to take upon ourselves the authority to proclaim damnation, is perhaps the greatest blasphemy of all.

Let’s make a go, then, of withholding judgment, knowing that judgment is not our prerogative when it comes to eternal matters. In fact, let’s go one step further, by really trusting that God knows what he’s doing. We might be surprised on our own heavenly birthday, when we go to join the saints in light, when we see who’s there. They will have been changed, perfected, made into what God meant them to be, as will we. If we hadn’t got it be then, we will finally realize how wrong we were to condemn so quickly, but, thanks be to God, that that realization will not inhibit us, but will free us to live in that land where our sinful arrogance has been purged and we can live in perfect peace and unity.

+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.

“[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.