24 July 2011 Discovering Joy Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52
Six times in these readings Jesus tells us what the kingdom of heaven is like. Yet, even after six examples, I’m not sure I really know what I am supposed to know.
I know what a mustard seed is and what yeast is. I can imagine a treasure hidden in a field. A merchant in search of fine pearls sounds reasonable, and I know what a fishing net is.
To say that God’s kingdom is like these things confuses me. Each is so very different. They seem to have nothing in common. How can they all be like the kingdom of heaven?
If I take this claim literally, then God’s kingdom may be these everyday things. Seeds, yeast, treasure, pearls and fishing nets. God’s kingdom, if normal stuff, must be a here and now place and not something we would call heaven or someplace ‘out there’ in another world.
If on the other hand I remember these are parables and that parables have a deeper meaning, then the kingdom could just as well be here or in heaven or “out there” in another world.
Theologians, folk who study about God, seem to think the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven as Matthew calls it, may be a sort of ideal utopian place very different from this world. They say this worldly existence has too much pain and suffering sadness and sorrow to be God’s kingdom of love and happiness. If this is the case the kingdom surely must be a kingdom to come in the future. Others, as we might imagine, disagree as they point to Jesus’ own claim that the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God has come near.
I don’t know, this world or another world, the future or now. Do we hear our deafening confusion or is it just me?
Perhaps knowing the truth about a location or time for the kingdom of heaven is illusive for a reason. Perhaps this ideal utopian kingdom is, like many other wonderful truths about God, a mysterious reality. A reality true enough, but a mysterious one.
Actually a mysterious reality may make the most sense. We are after all talking about the kingdom of The Sovereign Monarch, God. There really is no other kingdom on earth to compare to God’s and we’ll have to wait to know about heaven. At best we dream up an analogy of a kingdom and try and apply it. It is common for us to create our own prescripted kingdom world isn’t it. We’ve been known to do that once or twice a day. But the truth is an analogy will never be like the real thing.
Or might we study a parable and consider the only one who really would know its meaning is God. That is what we should do. Let God teach us.
In Matthew’s gospel reading this morning, Jesus gives us several examples of what the kingdom ‘is like.’ I think I missed that. Jesus says this is what the kingdom ‘is like’, not what it actually is. Close, but not exactly. The mystery stays in play.
The first two parables, the ones about the mustard seed and the yeast, are different from the others. In these parables something of surprising size or substance is found to produce unexpected results. The mustard seed, the smallest seed, becomes the greatest of shrubs and then even becomes a tree. The yeast, a catalyst for leavening, is mixed with a lot of flour until it all becomes leavened. In these examples the kingdom of heaven is like a known quantity with unpredictable or unexplainable results.
We begin life thinking we know who we are, with a clearly perceived purpose, no different than everyone else and then we find ourselves in love with Jesus and our life is flipped on its head with unpredictable or unexplainable results.
Kingdom living begins with our intention to discover what God is about. Like the parent proud of their adventurous child, God smiles at our efforts. God smiles and God actually encourages our seeking, our quest for discovery. All along the way God is filling our world, each of our lives, with grace, for we too become sought after.
Rick Warren, author of the popular book, “The Purpose Driven Life”, reminds us, “the purpose of your life is far greater than your own personal fulfillment, your peace of mind or even you happiness.” The truth is God seeks after us solely for God’s purposes and so often we find ourselves living a life we never expected.
The next two parables, the ones about the treasure hidden and the pearl merchant, are also different. In these parables something of surprising value is found. Having found, our been found in this way may bring us to new places of beauty. Surprising us with treasures hidden, pieces of life that, once found, produce great joy.
So, the kingdom of heaven is now like a surprising discover, expected or unexpected, that brings great joy. We may be on to something now. Joy is a good thing. Joy brings smiles, relieves worry, and produces a good night’s sleep.
The discovery of joy is so powerful though we are often moved to desire it at all costs, to even sell all that we have. Sounds unlikely doesn’t it? To sell it all for a life of joy and hope for what at times seems like at best an elusive kingdom. Surprising what we will do when searching for kingdom living.
It has been said many times, our Christian faith depends on our believing in the impossible. Otherwise our human imagination, our human expectations may limit the possibilities of the kingdom at hand. To overcome these limitations requires nothing less than unyielding faith in the impossible. Perhaps, a miracle.
Don’t be fooled, life is not really about treasure or pearls. But we know that’s not the point. We have our own weaknesses, our own treasure or pearl we would give everything for. We know what it is. We work extra hard for it, we give up things to have it, we cannot stop ourselves. We will even go into debt for it!
Scripture is right about these things though, it is not the object of our affection that drives us as much as it is the result of having it, the surprising joy it gives. You have all heard the story, the two happiest days for a boat owner, the day the boat is bought and the day it is sold. Joy to have it, joy to not have it. Joy is the constant feeling we search for. All else is changing. Discovering the one joy that never changes jut may be what Jesus is teaching in these parables. Discovering the one joy that will always bring joy sounds very much like kingdom language to me.
There is a story in the gospel of John of a wedding in Cana of Galilee. “And when they wanted wine, the mother of Jesus said to him, ‘They have no wine.’” We know Jesus’ response. He performs his first miracle turning water into wine. Here during a wedding, during a time of joy and celebration and gladness Jesus’ first act of kingdom building. It was not our grief, but our joy that Jesus first visited with a miracle. Surprised? Isn’t that how Jesus helps us find the purpose in our life? By surprising us in our discoveries about his kingdom.
The final parable, the one about the net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind, is also different. In this parable we hear a story that predicts for us how faithfulness works for God. The fish are drawn to shore and separated. The good fish are placed in a basket and the bad are thrown out.
There is a strong ethic in the kingdom of heaven about what is good and what is bad and judgment will separate the two. The good go in the basket, the bad are thrown out. The good are kept for a future meal, not so the bad. They are not invited to the feast.
The deeper meaning becomes personal when we consider how we are living our lives. How do we know what we do is right or wrong? Knowledge of the good will allow us to be kept, to be placed in the basket, to join in the surprising feast of the kingdom. Knowledge of the bad is equally important. It allows us to avoid being thrown out of the kingdom. Knowing the rules profoundly affects how we live our lives, what we do with our lives, who we worship in the process, and who we become. The faithful, in God’s eyes, live the good life. Choosing the righteous life, they reject evil and become a child of God.
Jesus teaches these things and much more. In addition to the here and now truth about God’s kingdom Jesus also predicts our future. At the end of the age angels will come and separate the righteous from the evil. The end of the age will catch us in its net and the angels will separate, they will judge. Will we be in the basket or not?
To help us Jesus asks, “Have you understood all this?” Why, no, not of our own wits have we. We need a whole lot more than just our own discernment. God offers us knowledge of the ultimate, absolute source of wisdom about the kingdom. God offers deeper meanings of God’s truth that can only come with the help from one true source. That help, that source is our Lord, our Savior, Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ, through whom or what else might we understand what is good and what is evil. Jesus Christ, through whom or what else might we be surprised by great joy. Jesus Christ, with whom or what else might we discover the kingdom of heaven?
Tom Currie, pastor at our home church in Brenham before he left to pastor in Kerrville, says, the joy of discovery of the Kingdom of Heaven in our midst “sustains those who undertake the risk of… (Living)…the gospel of Jesus Christ.”
Undertaking the risk of living the gospel of Jesus Christ we discover the Kingdom comes from the master of the household, our God, alive in our life through the power of the Holy Spirit. Our kingdom joy is the discovery that leads us to our God, who is the source of the only wisdom that matters at the end of the age. For it is then that the master of the household brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.
To undertake the risk of living the gospel of Jesus Christ will do this to us. When we reach into the Bible and pull out a text so old that “ancient” doesn’t begin to cover it. The text of scripture rises and unfolds into the air something ancient no more. The ancient treasure of joy lies in its uncanny ability to be resurrected in us to new life. To a new life where we undertake the risk of living a gospel which will become written on our human heart.
The gospel of Jesus Christ, written on our hearts, where through Jesus we understand surprising results, where through Jesus we are surprised by our faith in the impossible, where through Jesus we discover unchanging joy.
That sounds a lot like Kingdom language to me.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen
072411.gpc
Monday, July 25, 2011
Sunday, July 17, 2011
17 July 2011 “What Do You Expect?” Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
When we lived in the country in Washington County we lived near a small farming community called Greenvine. You have to love that name, Greenvine. Just hearing it gives you a sense that this broad area of farmers and ranchers produces an abundant crop. Green must be the vine and everything else that grows their.
I particularly enjoyed two times in our growing season there on the farm. First was when it was time to prepare the soil and plant the seed and second was the time for the harvest.
In between there was the usual need for watering and weeding and waiting. I anticipated with great expectation as I watched for the new growth I hoped would come. But I really enjoyed the bounty, the harvest.
Actually the whole family enjoyed our little time for harvest heaven. Small though it was in comparison to some, we loved that time in our garden there at the farm. Harvest time for us was a full on family affair.
I remember we grew corn, black eyed peas, potatoes, tomatoes, squash, melons and even okra a few times. With the call for help with the picking there came a rush and scurry and a great slam from the back porch screen door. You remember those don’t you, screen doors?
Everyone had their job and we would gather pails and bags and grubbing hoes and whatever the crop of the moment required. Potatoes were probably the most fun to dig for. It was as if every turning of the fork brought up candy or something sweet. The kids thought it was the best. I can still see their bright faces as I turned up the next potato plant for them to dig under. Sometimes there were 4 or 5 potatoes, sometimes many more. We always had a contest to see who would find the biggest one. The digging was ferocious! I often could not keep up!
Corn was fun too. The trouble with corn was the surprise of a worm or two when you pulled the shuck away! We could always count on worm inspired squeals when we shucked the corn!
The parable of the weeds growing with the wheat we read this morning follows last Sundays parable of the Sower and his seeming waste at slinging seed everywhere at once. These parables are in a greater section of Matthew detailing the conflict between Jesus and his opponents among the leaders of Israel. To our first century brethren there is special meaning in these stories for at the time they felt their future was being threatened by hostile opponents. Evil lurked in their midst.
It is not difficult for us to connect to these same stories known so long ago. We find comfort in them for they are the stories of everyday life. We too have lived them.
Our first century brethren had planted good seed before and they knew about growing crops. They also knew, no matter how careful they were with their soil preparation and planting, weeds would come. Through these recognized and common experiences Jesus was adept at teaching special deeper meanings. He teaches that if we will open our eyes to the obvious, to the familiar everyday life that is around us, we will experience an amazing truth. We will have a glimpse of the kingdom of God.
Opening our eyes to this morning’s parable we learn many things.
First, we learn there are two plantings. Both the wheat and the weeds are the result of an intentional activity that brings them to stand together in the field.
Second, we learn it is only when the disciples are alone with Jesus that they ask what the parable means. And he teaches them. The one who sows the good seed is the Son of Man, the field is the world, and the good seed are the children of the kingdom; the weeds are the children of the evil one, and the enemy who sowed them is the devil; the harvest will come at the end of the age, and the reapers, the harvesters, will be angels.
Third, we are reminded first to not judge fellow members of our community, those we presume to be weeds. Then we are commanded to leave them alone. The separation of authentic members of the covenant community from false members is God’s business. Jesus almost seems to view the world as a field for conflict with competing claims by two kingdoms, one good and of God, the other evil and of Satan.
Finally, we learn the harvest time is critical to the bounty.
In the parable the servants want to begin immediately pulling the weeds. Their master forbids it. They may do more harm than good, he tells them. Wait, he commands. Wait until the harvest and at that time another group, the reapers, the angels, will gather the grain and separate the weeds for burning.
A good lesson, taught by the garden, is to learn when the potatoes are ready to harvest. You cannot know just by looking at the surface, you have to dig deeper. It is at the deeper level we find sustaining and lasting nutrition from the harvesting.
What then might we be missing about this morning’s parable? There is, after all, an enemy in our garden. It is as if Jesus is presenting us with the haunting question, “Why does evil exist?”
Jesus tells us that the enemy has come and gone. The enemy need not hang around. But it is clear, evil exists. Why evil exists is a tricky question. When life is rocking along and things are going well we seldom give evil a passing thought. But, up close, shaken by the evil in our world, immediate and sustainable answers elude us.
Ever our patient teacher, Jesus may help us see God’s deeper meaning.
…Perhaps there is evil because it is difficult to decide what is wheat and what is weed and our response should be to allow weeds every chance to change and become wheat.
…Or perhaps evil exists because weed and evil occasionally serve a purpose? I know how impossible this seems. But it is true; many of us have learned valuable lessons when bad things have happened.
…Perhaps it is simply that the weeds remind the wheat what it is and what it is not. Can you think of a really good “bad example”, a person who has done something bad and through their evil decision you were motivated to make a good decision.
Martin Luther, the great leader of the protestant movement, said that we are “at the same time saint and sinner.” We are wheat, indeed, but sometimes we act just like weeds.”
One of the ways we do that is in our persistence to point out the weeds, the evil or bad behavior in other people. We are quick to judge when, in our view, someone is good and when someone is bad or evil.
One of my favorite stories about judgment was told by H. A. Ironside in his book “Illustrations of Bible Truth.” It is the story of a man called Bishop Potter, who was headed for Europe on a great ocean liner. When he boarded the ship he discovered that he was to share his cabin with another passenger. After meeting his new roommate, the bishop went to a crew member to ask is he could place his valuables in the ships safe. He shared, in confidence of course, that judging from the appearance of his roommate he was suspicious of the man’s trustworthiness. The crew member accepted the bishop’s valuables and said, “It’s all right Bishop, I’ll be very glad to take care of them for you. The other man has been up here too, and left his for the same reason!”
The moral of the story is that we are all weeds to someone else! Don’t you know we all have a severe reputation in the eyes of another?
Jesus’ deep rooted parable message to us this morning is that it is not the church’s task to uproot weeds and equally it is not our task to judge one another.
After all, Jesus did not bring justice upon the evil one. All he needed to do was sow the weeds – and pretty soon the wheat gets confused about what it is to be wheat and starts acting like a weed. Luther’s words ring true, we are “at the same time saint and sinner.”
If this were not enough, Jesus reminds us our duty is to do nothing when the weeds grow higher and higher in our lives. We are not to pull them. What we are to do is much harder. Perhaps it’s the most difficult thing a Christian is to do.
We are called by God to forgive, to forgive, and forgive yet again. While the deeper message of this parable tells us to do nothing in RESPONSE to evil we are clearly to do something to PREPARE ourselves for it. We must never relent in our efforts to do good things. Our good seed will keep growing if we tend them until the time of glory, the harvest.
We tend them as we receive the life giving water from our baptism. We tend them as we nourish them with the bread and the cup that feeds our souls with the presence of God during the Lord’s Supper. We take these preventative actions all with an eye to making it more difficult for the enemy to sow the seed that looks like wheat among the good wheat of our lives, our families, our congregation, and our world.
Let us not forget, it is up to God to harvest the good and burn the evil, not us.
Dear ones, we are called to reach out, to love, to be patient with, and to show tolerance toward our enemies. We are called to bring justice and right living in the face of evil as best we can. But we cannot nor will we ever absolutely overcome injustice and violence and pain and suffering. But God can. And God will, in God’s time of course.
The poet, Theodore Roethke, says this about weeds;
“Long live the weeds that overwhelm
My narrow vegetable realm!
The bitter rock, the barren soil
That force the son of man to toil;
All things unholy, marked by curse,
The ugly of the universe.
The rough, the wicked, and the wild
That keep the spirit undefiled.
With these I match my little wit
And earn the right to stand or sit.
Hope, look, create, or drink and die:
These shape the creature that is I.”
The deeply rooted message in today’s parable is a message to forgive the weeds and go about the business of being wheat and bearing fruit and listening to God. For God has complete control. God controls wheat and weed alike and God is in control even when bad things happen. The ultimate victory in this tug of wills belongs to God, and just like the victory of the resurrection following the crucifixion, the ultimate victor is God.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen
071711.gpc
Additional resources:
“Pulpit Resource”, Volume 36, Number 3, 2008, pages 13-16.
I particularly enjoyed two times in our growing season there on the farm. First was when it was time to prepare the soil and plant the seed and second was the time for the harvest.
In between there was the usual need for watering and weeding and waiting. I anticipated with great expectation as I watched for the new growth I hoped would come. But I really enjoyed the bounty, the harvest.
Actually the whole family enjoyed our little time for harvest heaven. Small though it was in comparison to some, we loved that time in our garden there at the farm. Harvest time for us was a full on family affair.
I remember we grew corn, black eyed peas, potatoes, tomatoes, squash, melons and even okra a few times. With the call for help with the picking there came a rush and scurry and a great slam from the back porch screen door. You remember those don’t you, screen doors?
Everyone had their job and we would gather pails and bags and grubbing hoes and whatever the crop of the moment required. Potatoes were probably the most fun to dig for. It was as if every turning of the fork brought up candy or something sweet. The kids thought it was the best. I can still see their bright faces as I turned up the next potato plant for them to dig under. Sometimes there were 4 or 5 potatoes, sometimes many more. We always had a contest to see who would find the biggest one. The digging was ferocious! I often could not keep up!
Corn was fun too. The trouble with corn was the surprise of a worm or two when you pulled the shuck away! We could always count on worm inspired squeals when we shucked the corn!
The parable of the weeds growing with the wheat we read this morning follows last Sundays parable of the Sower and his seeming waste at slinging seed everywhere at once. These parables are in a greater section of Matthew detailing the conflict between Jesus and his opponents among the leaders of Israel. To our first century brethren there is special meaning in these stories for at the time they felt their future was being threatened by hostile opponents. Evil lurked in their midst.
It is not difficult for us to connect to these same stories known so long ago. We find comfort in them for they are the stories of everyday life. We too have lived them.
Our first century brethren had planted good seed before and they knew about growing crops. They also knew, no matter how careful they were with their soil preparation and planting, weeds would come. Through these recognized and common experiences Jesus was adept at teaching special deeper meanings. He teaches that if we will open our eyes to the obvious, to the familiar everyday life that is around us, we will experience an amazing truth. We will have a glimpse of the kingdom of God.
Opening our eyes to this morning’s parable we learn many things.
First, we learn there are two plantings. Both the wheat and the weeds are the result of an intentional activity that brings them to stand together in the field.
Second, we learn it is only when the disciples are alone with Jesus that they ask what the parable means. And he teaches them. The one who sows the good seed is the Son of Man, the field is the world, and the good seed are the children of the kingdom; the weeds are the children of the evil one, and the enemy who sowed them is the devil; the harvest will come at the end of the age, and the reapers, the harvesters, will be angels.
Third, we are reminded first to not judge fellow members of our community, those we presume to be weeds. Then we are commanded to leave them alone. The separation of authentic members of the covenant community from false members is God’s business. Jesus almost seems to view the world as a field for conflict with competing claims by two kingdoms, one good and of God, the other evil and of Satan.
Finally, we learn the harvest time is critical to the bounty.
In the parable the servants want to begin immediately pulling the weeds. Their master forbids it. They may do more harm than good, he tells them. Wait, he commands. Wait until the harvest and at that time another group, the reapers, the angels, will gather the grain and separate the weeds for burning.
A good lesson, taught by the garden, is to learn when the potatoes are ready to harvest. You cannot know just by looking at the surface, you have to dig deeper. It is at the deeper level we find sustaining and lasting nutrition from the harvesting.
What then might we be missing about this morning’s parable? There is, after all, an enemy in our garden. It is as if Jesus is presenting us with the haunting question, “Why does evil exist?”
Jesus tells us that the enemy has come and gone. The enemy need not hang around. But it is clear, evil exists. Why evil exists is a tricky question. When life is rocking along and things are going well we seldom give evil a passing thought. But, up close, shaken by the evil in our world, immediate and sustainable answers elude us.
Ever our patient teacher, Jesus may help us see God’s deeper meaning.
…Perhaps there is evil because it is difficult to decide what is wheat and what is weed and our response should be to allow weeds every chance to change and become wheat.
…Or perhaps evil exists because weed and evil occasionally serve a purpose? I know how impossible this seems. But it is true; many of us have learned valuable lessons when bad things have happened.
…Perhaps it is simply that the weeds remind the wheat what it is and what it is not. Can you think of a really good “bad example”, a person who has done something bad and through their evil decision you were motivated to make a good decision.
Martin Luther, the great leader of the protestant movement, said that we are “at the same time saint and sinner.” We are wheat, indeed, but sometimes we act just like weeds.”
One of the ways we do that is in our persistence to point out the weeds, the evil or bad behavior in other people. We are quick to judge when, in our view, someone is good and when someone is bad or evil.
One of my favorite stories about judgment was told by H. A. Ironside in his book “Illustrations of Bible Truth.” It is the story of a man called Bishop Potter, who was headed for Europe on a great ocean liner. When he boarded the ship he discovered that he was to share his cabin with another passenger. After meeting his new roommate, the bishop went to a crew member to ask is he could place his valuables in the ships safe. He shared, in confidence of course, that judging from the appearance of his roommate he was suspicious of the man’s trustworthiness. The crew member accepted the bishop’s valuables and said, “It’s all right Bishop, I’ll be very glad to take care of them for you. The other man has been up here too, and left his for the same reason!”
The moral of the story is that we are all weeds to someone else! Don’t you know we all have a severe reputation in the eyes of another?
Jesus’ deep rooted parable message to us this morning is that it is not the church’s task to uproot weeds and equally it is not our task to judge one another.
After all, Jesus did not bring justice upon the evil one. All he needed to do was sow the weeds – and pretty soon the wheat gets confused about what it is to be wheat and starts acting like a weed. Luther’s words ring true, we are “at the same time saint and sinner.”
If this were not enough, Jesus reminds us our duty is to do nothing when the weeds grow higher and higher in our lives. We are not to pull them. What we are to do is much harder. Perhaps it’s the most difficult thing a Christian is to do.
We are called by God to forgive, to forgive, and forgive yet again. While the deeper message of this parable tells us to do nothing in RESPONSE to evil we are clearly to do something to PREPARE ourselves for it. We must never relent in our efforts to do good things. Our good seed will keep growing if we tend them until the time of glory, the harvest.
We tend them as we receive the life giving water from our baptism. We tend them as we nourish them with the bread and the cup that feeds our souls with the presence of God during the Lord’s Supper. We take these preventative actions all with an eye to making it more difficult for the enemy to sow the seed that looks like wheat among the good wheat of our lives, our families, our congregation, and our world.
Let us not forget, it is up to God to harvest the good and burn the evil, not us.
Dear ones, we are called to reach out, to love, to be patient with, and to show tolerance toward our enemies. We are called to bring justice and right living in the face of evil as best we can. But we cannot nor will we ever absolutely overcome injustice and violence and pain and suffering. But God can. And God will, in God’s time of course.
The poet, Theodore Roethke, says this about weeds;
“Long live the weeds that overwhelm
My narrow vegetable realm!
The bitter rock, the barren soil
That force the son of man to toil;
All things unholy, marked by curse,
The ugly of the universe.
The rough, the wicked, and the wild
That keep the spirit undefiled.
With these I match my little wit
And earn the right to stand or sit.
Hope, look, create, or drink and die:
These shape the creature that is I.”
The deeply rooted message in today’s parable is a message to forgive the weeds and go about the business of being wheat and bearing fruit and listening to God. For God has complete control. God controls wheat and weed alike and God is in control even when bad things happen. The ultimate victory in this tug of wills belongs to God, and just like the victory of the resurrection following the crucifixion, the ultimate victor is God.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen
071711.gpc
Additional resources:
“Pulpit Resource”, Volume 36, Number 3, 2008, pages 13-16.
Sunday, July 10, 2011
10 July 2011 The Sower and the Seed Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
10 July 2011 The Sower and the Seed Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
It was my grandfather who showed me how to use and reuse wire, old inner tubes, various nuts and bolts, clips and pins, used boards, old car parts, discarded bits of carpet and any other used but useful piece of refuse that with a bit of luck and good old fashioned ingenuity might fix just about anything. He would not buy something new or even reconditioned until he tried to fix it or repair it or get around it or do without it.
My brother Jim and I helped on more than one occasion re-roof the house my grandfather built. We spent a fair amount of time out in the garage rooting around in a bucket or a box looking for the right thing to fix something.
Granddaddy hated waste. Like lots of people of his generation who grew up during the Great Depression, long before we became environmentally sensitive, he loved to recycle things. He lived the motto of not wanting, not wasting.
I am reminded of a poster from that time, an advertisement that was put out by the Green Giant Food Company. The poster showed a well-cleaned plate, just after someone had eaten the food on the plate and licked it clean. Over the plate were the words, “The plate of a patriotic American.” Some of you may remember it. We had a war on. There were shortages. Eat you peas. Clean your plate for the good of the war effort was the message.
My grandmother lived by that philosophy too. I moved in to live with them when I was fourteen or fifteen. We always had plenty of food, but we were expected to eat our plates clean. A clean ‘happy’ plate was a patriotic plate!
Most of us have this nature about us. We don’t like to be wasteful. When we are properly motivated we will take the time and make the effort to take care of our physical, mental, and spiritual resources. It is the faithful thing to do, to respect and use with reverence all that God has given us. Wasting just may be a sin.
Certainly, there is no eleventh commandment about being wasteful. But, how often do we find, in scripture or in life, expectations of a disciple that seem to run counter intuitive to our very sensibility? At times, we are not so naturally inclined to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. Many aspects of our personality make discipleship somewhat of a reach for many of us. And this parable in Matthew’s gospel this morning of the sower speaks to one of them. We are by nature efficient. We don’t like to waste anything.
But then there is Jesus. In today’s scripture he tells the story about a man who went forth to sow. A farmer went forth to sow seed as farmers have done for centuries. But this farmer had to be one of the most inept farmers who have ever sown seed.
Jesus says the farmer goes out to his field. We know what should come next. The farmer carefully removes all the rocks and weeds. He plows the soil into neat, straight furrows. And then he puts the seed in the furrows, carefully covering up the seed with about a quarter of an inch of soil, each seed about eight inches from every other seed. Like us, the farmer deftly follows the directions on the Burpee Seed package!
Well, no, he did no such thing. Jesus says the farmer simply goes out and with no preparation or care starts slinging seed!
Once the seed germinates, and it is time for harvest, the harvest is rather disappointing. Most of the seed has been wasted. Of course, you would expect this with this kind of farmer!
Some of the seed has been thrown onto the roadside. What on earth did the farmer expect by that? Much of the seed has been eaten by birds where it was not sufficiently covered by the soil. Other seed thrown into clumps of weeds has been choked out by the weeds.
The amazing thing about this is that Jesus says there was a miraculous harvest. About ten percent of the seed actually germinated. Jesus enthusiastically calls this an amazingly rich harvest, one that brought the farmer great joy.
Don’t you find it interesting that the sort of farming we would call a failure Jesus calls a success? He sure looks at things differently than the way we look at things.
In the name of efficiency and the greatest good for the greatest number, the modern world has stacked people on top of each other, piled human beings together, forced us into large groups – the herd. Jesus appears to point to another way in which, though a minority of the seed actually germinated and bore fruit, it is considered to be a wonderful, miraculous event.
Certainly with this formula there is a great deal of waste in the kingdom of God. Our way of figuring things would surely say so. A great deal of seed is being put at risk with this sort of sowing. A lot of otherwise good seed is going to be wasted.
But then we think about how God created the world. Why didn’t God create just one species of flower, for example? That ought to be miracle enough. But God didn’t stop there. God created a lot of flowers, all different colors and sizes and shapes. Few of the world’s flowers are actually seen by many people. Why did God continue and waste so much beauty? There does seem to be a sort of extravagance built right into the grain of the universe. A great deal of waste. God is effusive, or we might say, wasteful. Jesus calls it something different; he calls it a divine wonder.
Much of the great good that this God does is unseen by the world, unacknowledged, and unnoticed. Few of us will ever read through the entire Bible; much less comprehend all of it. God has just said too much to us, on too many different subjects, on too diverse occasions. So we hire preachers, to plow through the Bible, and then reduce what we have read to four spiritual laws, or three basic principles, or six fundamentals. We human beings acts as if it is our job to comprehend all of God, but in order to do that we have to considerably reduce God, bring everything down to the lowest common denominator, something that you can put on a bumper sticker. “Jesus saves” or “My boss is a Jewish Carpenter”, or one I saw yesterday, “Real men love Jesus.”
But then we are reminded that God is bigger than all of our reductions and generalizations. There is a great deal more to be said and thought about God than we can say or think.
Sometimes people emerge from church mumbling, “I didn’t really get anything out of that service today.” It’s true, let’s be honest here.
Am I supposed to take that as a criticism? Well, usually I don’t. Perhaps the sermon was focused on people who are going through times of difficulty and trial. Maybe that person is experiencing smooth sailing right now, no problems. So naturally they “didn’t get anything out of it.”
The point is that church is not simply the efficient, individual and personal answer to “what do I get out of it?” Maybe the point of church is more often, “what does my neighbor get out of it?” In church, a great deal is wasted. More is said than we really need to hear. Many times we sing a hymn that does nothing to uplift our heart. But maybe that hymn uplifts the heart of our neighbor. And Jesus has made our neighbor, and our neighbor’s needs our problem too.
So maybe we should say that to be a good disciple we have to have training in how to sit through a lot of church, a great many worship services that are wasted.
Waste isn’t reserved just for a few. Some folks actually complain that their pastor is disorganized and the he/she doesn’t use church time well. Sometimes it is true. We are working not just for the church, but also for Jesus. When a pastor wastes an entire afternoon with a troubled person this may not be the most efficient use of the pastor’s talent, training, and time, but are these the only measures for what is at the heart of the reign of God?
In fact, I have had folk say to me, “I don’t get about 90 percent of what’s said in your sermons.”
I might be concerned about this low percentage of comprehension. But then I hear, with a twinkle in the eye, “But the 10 percent I do understand keeps me coming back, Sunday after Sunday, and gives me quite enough to chew on the rest of the week.” Sometimes only about ten percent of the seed actually germinates.
The Methodist Bishop, William Willimon tells the story of a woman, a graduate of John Hopkins University, who went on to Duke University where she earned a graduate degree in nursing. She did so well academically that the faculty asked her to stay on and be a professor of nursing.
Bishop Willimon did not meet her until she was in her 60’s. By that time she had left the nursing faculty and she was working in an inner-city health center, a volunteer, for those who had AIDS. One afternoon, talking to her and her friend, the Bishop was saying that he had so much respect for the work she was doing, for the way she was using her gifts.
Her friend said, “Do you? Frankly, I consider it a waste. When I think of all the good she could be doing and I consider the brilliant career that she simply tossed away, I consider her story to be sad, rather than inspiring.”
What a waste? That Jesus came to us reaching out to us in love. He told us the truth about ourselves and our world and the truth about God. And we responded by rejecting him, abandoning him, nailing him to a cross, where his life blood drained out of him. What a waste.
Even there, he kept reaching out to us, embracing us, forgiving us. And then when God raised him from his death, he came back to us again, back to the very people with whom he had failed so miserably. He came back to the very ones who betrayed him and promised us, “I will never leave you.” No, no matter what. No matter how you waste your life. I will never leave you.
What a waste.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen
Additional resource:
“Pulpit Resource”, Volume 36, Number 3, 2008, pages 9-12.
071011.gpc
It was my grandfather who showed me how to use and reuse wire, old inner tubes, various nuts and bolts, clips and pins, used boards, old car parts, discarded bits of carpet and any other used but useful piece of refuse that with a bit of luck and good old fashioned ingenuity might fix just about anything. He would not buy something new or even reconditioned until he tried to fix it or repair it or get around it or do without it.
My brother Jim and I helped on more than one occasion re-roof the house my grandfather built. We spent a fair amount of time out in the garage rooting around in a bucket or a box looking for the right thing to fix something.
Granddaddy hated waste. Like lots of people of his generation who grew up during the Great Depression, long before we became environmentally sensitive, he loved to recycle things. He lived the motto of not wanting, not wasting.
I am reminded of a poster from that time, an advertisement that was put out by the Green Giant Food Company. The poster showed a well-cleaned plate, just after someone had eaten the food on the plate and licked it clean. Over the plate were the words, “The plate of a patriotic American.” Some of you may remember it. We had a war on. There were shortages. Eat you peas. Clean your plate for the good of the war effort was the message.
My grandmother lived by that philosophy too. I moved in to live with them when I was fourteen or fifteen. We always had plenty of food, but we were expected to eat our plates clean. A clean ‘happy’ plate was a patriotic plate!
Most of us have this nature about us. We don’t like to be wasteful. When we are properly motivated we will take the time and make the effort to take care of our physical, mental, and spiritual resources. It is the faithful thing to do, to respect and use with reverence all that God has given us. Wasting just may be a sin.
Certainly, there is no eleventh commandment about being wasteful. But, how often do we find, in scripture or in life, expectations of a disciple that seem to run counter intuitive to our very sensibility? At times, we are not so naturally inclined to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. Many aspects of our personality make discipleship somewhat of a reach for many of us. And this parable in Matthew’s gospel this morning of the sower speaks to one of them. We are by nature efficient. We don’t like to waste anything.
But then there is Jesus. In today’s scripture he tells the story about a man who went forth to sow. A farmer went forth to sow seed as farmers have done for centuries. But this farmer had to be one of the most inept farmers who have ever sown seed.
Jesus says the farmer goes out to his field. We know what should come next. The farmer carefully removes all the rocks and weeds. He plows the soil into neat, straight furrows. And then he puts the seed in the furrows, carefully covering up the seed with about a quarter of an inch of soil, each seed about eight inches from every other seed. Like us, the farmer deftly follows the directions on the Burpee Seed package!
Well, no, he did no such thing. Jesus says the farmer simply goes out and with no preparation or care starts slinging seed!
Once the seed germinates, and it is time for harvest, the harvest is rather disappointing. Most of the seed has been wasted. Of course, you would expect this with this kind of farmer!
Some of the seed has been thrown onto the roadside. What on earth did the farmer expect by that? Much of the seed has been eaten by birds where it was not sufficiently covered by the soil. Other seed thrown into clumps of weeds has been choked out by the weeds.
The amazing thing about this is that Jesus says there was a miraculous harvest. About ten percent of the seed actually germinated. Jesus enthusiastically calls this an amazingly rich harvest, one that brought the farmer great joy.
Don’t you find it interesting that the sort of farming we would call a failure Jesus calls a success? He sure looks at things differently than the way we look at things.
In the name of efficiency and the greatest good for the greatest number, the modern world has stacked people on top of each other, piled human beings together, forced us into large groups – the herd. Jesus appears to point to another way in which, though a minority of the seed actually germinated and bore fruit, it is considered to be a wonderful, miraculous event.
Certainly with this formula there is a great deal of waste in the kingdom of God. Our way of figuring things would surely say so. A great deal of seed is being put at risk with this sort of sowing. A lot of otherwise good seed is going to be wasted.
But then we think about how God created the world. Why didn’t God create just one species of flower, for example? That ought to be miracle enough. But God didn’t stop there. God created a lot of flowers, all different colors and sizes and shapes. Few of the world’s flowers are actually seen by many people. Why did God continue and waste so much beauty? There does seem to be a sort of extravagance built right into the grain of the universe. A great deal of waste. God is effusive, or we might say, wasteful. Jesus calls it something different; he calls it a divine wonder.
Much of the great good that this God does is unseen by the world, unacknowledged, and unnoticed. Few of us will ever read through the entire Bible; much less comprehend all of it. God has just said too much to us, on too many different subjects, on too diverse occasions. So we hire preachers, to plow through the Bible, and then reduce what we have read to four spiritual laws, or three basic principles, or six fundamentals. We human beings acts as if it is our job to comprehend all of God, but in order to do that we have to considerably reduce God, bring everything down to the lowest common denominator, something that you can put on a bumper sticker. “Jesus saves” or “My boss is a Jewish Carpenter”, or one I saw yesterday, “Real men love Jesus.”
But then we are reminded that God is bigger than all of our reductions and generalizations. There is a great deal more to be said and thought about God than we can say or think.
Sometimes people emerge from church mumbling, “I didn’t really get anything out of that service today.” It’s true, let’s be honest here.
Am I supposed to take that as a criticism? Well, usually I don’t. Perhaps the sermon was focused on people who are going through times of difficulty and trial. Maybe that person is experiencing smooth sailing right now, no problems. So naturally they “didn’t get anything out of it.”
The point is that church is not simply the efficient, individual and personal answer to “what do I get out of it?” Maybe the point of church is more often, “what does my neighbor get out of it?” In church, a great deal is wasted. More is said than we really need to hear. Many times we sing a hymn that does nothing to uplift our heart. But maybe that hymn uplifts the heart of our neighbor. And Jesus has made our neighbor, and our neighbor’s needs our problem too.
So maybe we should say that to be a good disciple we have to have training in how to sit through a lot of church, a great many worship services that are wasted.
Waste isn’t reserved just for a few. Some folks actually complain that their pastor is disorganized and the he/she doesn’t use church time well. Sometimes it is true. We are working not just for the church, but also for Jesus. When a pastor wastes an entire afternoon with a troubled person this may not be the most efficient use of the pastor’s talent, training, and time, but are these the only measures for what is at the heart of the reign of God?
In fact, I have had folk say to me, “I don’t get about 90 percent of what’s said in your sermons.”
I might be concerned about this low percentage of comprehension. But then I hear, with a twinkle in the eye, “But the 10 percent I do understand keeps me coming back, Sunday after Sunday, and gives me quite enough to chew on the rest of the week.” Sometimes only about ten percent of the seed actually germinates.
The Methodist Bishop, William Willimon tells the story of a woman, a graduate of John Hopkins University, who went on to Duke University where she earned a graduate degree in nursing. She did so well academically that the faculty asked her to stay on and be a professor of nursing.
Bishop Willimon did not meet her until she was in her 60’s. By that time she had left the nursing faculty and she was working in an inner-city health center, a volunteer, for those who had AIDS. One afternoon, talking to her and her friend, the Bishop was saying that he had so much respect for the work she was doing, for the way she was using her gifts.
Her friend said, “Do you? Frankly, I consider it a waste. When I think of all the good she could be doing and I consider the brilliant career that she simply tossed away, I consider her story to be sad, rather than inspiring.”
What a waste? That Jesus came to us reaching out to us in love. He told us the truth about ourselves and our world and the truth about God. And we responded by rejecting him, abandoning him, nailing him to a cross, where his life blood drained out of him. What a waste.
Even there, he kept reaching out to us, embracing us, forgiving us. And then when God raised him from his death, he came back to us again, back to the very people with whom he had failed so miserably. He came back to the very ones who betrayed him and promised us, “I will never leave you.” No, no matter what. No matter how you waste your life. I will never leave you.
What a waste.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen
Additional resource:
“Pulpit Resource”, Volume 36, Number 3, 2008, pages 9-12.
071011.gpc
10 July 2011 The Sower and the Seed Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
10 July 2011 The Sower and the Seed Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
It was my grandfather who showed me how to use and reuse wire, old inner tubes, various nuts and bolts, clips and pins, used boards, old car parts, discarded bits of carpet and any other used but useful piece of refuse that with a bit of luck and good old fashioned ingenuity might fix just about anything. He would not buy something new or even reconditioned until he tried to fix it or repair it or get around it or do without it.
My brother Jim and I helped on more than one occasion re-roof the house my grandfather built. We spent a fair amount of time out in the garage rooting around in a bucket or a box looking for the right thing to fix something.
Granddaddy hated waste. Like lots of people of his generation who grew up during the Great Depression, long before we became environmentally sensitive, he loved to recycle things. He lived the motto of not wanting, not wasting.
I am reminded of a poster from that time, an advertisement that was put out by the Green Giant Food Company. The poster showed a well-cleaned plate, just after someone had eaten the food on the place and licked it clean. Over the plate were the words, “The plate of a patriotic American.” Some of you may remember it. We had a war on. There were shortages. Eat you peas. Clean you plate for the good of the war effort was the message.
My grandmother lived by that philosophy too. I moved in to live with them when I was fourteen or fifteen. We always had plenty of food, but we were expected to eat our plates clean. A clean ‘happy’ plate was a patriotic plate!
Most of us have this nature about us. We don’t like to be wasteful. When we are properly motivated we will take the time and make the effort to take care of our physical, mental, and spiritual resources. It is the faithful thing to do, to respect and use with reverence all that God has given us. Wasting just may be a sin.
Certainly, there is no eleventh commandment about being wasteful. But, how often do we find, in scripture or in life, expectations of a disciple than seem to run counter intuitive to our very sensibility? At times, we are not so naturally inclined to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. Many aspects of our personality make discipleship somewhat of a reach for many of us. And this parable in Matthew’s gospel this morning of the sower speaks to one of them. We are by nature efficient. We don’t like to waste anything.
But then there is Jesus. In today’s scripture he tells the story about a man who went forth to sow. A farmer went forth to sow seed as farmers have done for centuries. But this farmer had to be one of the most inept farmers who has ever sown seed.
Jesus says, the farmer goes out to his field. We know what should come next. The farmer carefully removes all the rocks and weeds. He plows the soil into neat, straight furrows. And then he puts the seed in the furrows, carefully covering up the seed with about a quarter of an inch of soil, each seed about eight inches from every other seed. Like us, the farmer deftly follows the directions on the Burpee Seed package!
Well, no, he did no such thing. Jesus says the farmer simply goes out and with no preparation or care starts slinging seed!
Once the seed germinates, and it is time for harvest, the harvest is rather disappointing. Most of the seed has been wasted. Of course, you would expect this with this kind of farmer!
Some of the seed has been thrown onto the roadside. What on earth did the farmer expect by that? Much of the seed has been eaten by birds where it was not sufficiently covered by the soil. Other seed thrown into clumps of weeds has been choked out by the weeds.
The amazing thing about this is that Jesus says there was a miraculous harvest. About ten percent of the seed actually germinated. Jesus enthusiastically calls this an amazingly rich harvest, one that brought the farmer great joy.
Don’t you find it interesting that the sort of farming we would call a failure Jesus calls a success? He sure looks at things differently than the way we look at things.
In the name of efficiency and the greatest good for the greatest number, the modern world has stacked people on top of each other, piled human beings together, forced us into large groups – the herd. Jesus appears to point to another way in which, though a minority of the seed actually germinated and bore fruit, it is considered to be a wonderful, miraculous event.
Certainly with this formula there is a great deal of waste in the kingdom of God. Our way of figuring things would surely say so. A great deal of seed is being put at risk with this sort of sowing. A lot of otherwise good seed is going to be wasted.
But then we think about how God created the world. Why didn’t God create just one species of flower, for example? That ought to be miracle enough. But God didn’t stop there. God created a lot of flowers, all different colors and sizes and shapes. Few of the world’s flowers are actually seen by many people. Why did God continue and waste so much beauty? There does seem to be a sort of
extravagance built right into the grain of the universe. A great deal of waste. God is effusive, or we might say, wasteful. Jesus calls something different, he calls it a divine wonder.
Much of the great good that this God does is unseen by the world, unacknowledged, and unnoticed. Few of us will ever read through the entire Bible, much less comprehend all of it. God has just said too much to us, on too many different subjects, on too diverse occasions. So we hire preachers, to plow through the Bible, then reduce what we have read to four spiritual laws, or three basic principles, or six fundamentals. We human beings acts as if it is our job to comprehend all of God, but in order to do that we have to considerably reduce God, bring everything down to the lowest common denominator, something that you can put on a bumper sticker. “Jesus saves” or “My boss is a Jewish Carpenter”, or one I saw yesterday, “Real men love Jesus.”
But then we are reminded that God is bigger than all of our reductions and generalizations. There is a great deal more to be said and thought about God than we can say or think.
Sometimes people emerge from church mumbling, “I didn’t really get anything out of that service today.” It’s true, let’s be honest here.
Am I supposed to take that as a criticism? Well, usually I don’t. Perhaps the sermon was focused on people who are going through times of difficulty and trial. Maybe that person is experiencing smooth sailing right now, no problems. So naturally they “didn’t get anything out of it.”
The point is that church is not simply the efficient, individual and personal answer to “what do I get out of it?” Maybe the point of church is more often, “what does my neighbor get out of it?” In church, a great deal is wasted. More is said than we really need to hear. Many times we sing a hymn that does nothing to uplift our heart. But maybe that hymn uplifts the heart of our neighbor. And Jesus has made our neighbor, and our neighbor’s needs our problem too.
So maybe we should say that to be a good disciple we have to have training in how to sit through a lot of church, a great many worship services that are wasted.
Waste isn’t reserved just for a few. Some folks actually complain that their pastor is disorganized and the he/she doesn’t use church time well. Sometimes it is true. We are working not just for the church, but also for Jesus. When a pastor wastes an entire afternoon with a troubled person this may not be the most efficient use of the pastor’s talent, training, and time, but are these the only measures for what is at the heart of the reign of God?
In fact, I have had folk say to me, “I don’t get about 90 percent of what’s said in your sermons.”
I might be concerned about this low percentage of comprehension. But then I hear, with a twinkle in the eye, “But the 10 percent I do understand keeps me coming back, Sunday after Sunday, and gives me quite enough to chew on the rest of the week.” Sometimes only about ten percent of the seed actually germinates.
The Methodist Bishop, William Willimon tells the story of a woman, a graduate of John Hopkins University, who went on to Duke University where she earned a graduate degree in nursing. She did so well academically that the faculty asked her to stay on and be a professor of nursing.
Bishop Willimon did not meet her until she was in her 60’s. By that time she had left the nursing faculty and she was working in an inner-city health center, a volunteer, for those who had AIDS. One afternoon, talking to her and her friend, the Bishop was saying that he had so much respect for the work she was doing, for the way she was using her gifts.
Her friend said, “Do you? Frankly, I consider it a waste. When I think of all the good she could be doing and I consider the brilliant career that she simply tossed away, I consider her story to be sad, rather than inspiring.”
What a waste? That Jesus came to us reaching out to us in love. He told us the truth about ourselves and our world and the truth about God. And we responded by rejecting him, abandoning him, nailing him to a cross, where his life blood drained out of him. What a waste.
Even there, he kept reaching out to us, embracing us, forgiving us. And then when God raised him from his death, he came back to us again, back to the very people with whom he had failed so miserably. He came back to the very ones who betrayed him and promised us, “I will never leave you.” No, no matter what. No matter how you waste your life. I will never leave you.
What a waste.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen
Additional resource:
“Pulpit Resource”, Volume 36, Number 3, 2008, pages 9-12.
071011.gpc
It was my grandfather who showed me how to use and reuse wire, old inner tubes, various nuts and bolts, clips and pins, used boards, old car parts, discarded bits of carpet and any other used but useful piece of refuse that with a bit of luck and good old fashioned ingenuity might fix just about anything. He would not buy something new or even reconditioned until he tried to fix it or repair it or get around it or do without it.
My brother Jim and I helped on more than one occasion re-roof the house my grandfather built. We spent a fair amount of time out in the garage rooting around in a bucket or a box looking for the right thing to fix something.
Granddaddy hated waste. Like lots of people of his generation who grew up during the Great Depression, long before we became environmentally sensitive, he loved to recycle things. He lived the motto of not wanting, not wasting.
I am reminded of a poster from that time, an advertisement that was put out by the Green Giant Food Company. The poster showed a well-cleaned plate, just after someone had eaten the food on the place and licked it clean. Over the plate were the words, “The plate of a patriotic American.” Some of you may remember it. We had a war on. There were shortages. Eat you peas. Clean you plate for the good of the war effort was the message.
My grandmother lived by that philosophy too. I moved in to live with them when I was fourteen or fifteen. We always had plenty of food, but we were expected to eat our plates clean. A clean ‘happy’ plate was a patriotic plate!
Most of us have this nature about us. We don’t like to be wasteful. When we are properly motivated we will take the time and make the effort to take care of our physical, mental, and spiritual resources. It is the faithful thing to do, to respect and use with reverence all that God has given us. Wasting just may be a sin.
Certainly, there is no eleventh commandment about being wasteful. But, how often do we find, in scripture or in life, expectations of a disciple than seem to run counter intuitive to our very sensibility? At times, we are not so naturally inclined to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. Many aspects of our personality make discipleship somewhat of a reach for many of us. And this parable in Matthew’s gospel this morning of the sower speaks to one of them. We are by nature efficient. We don’t like to waste anything.
But then there is Jesus. In today’s scripture he tells the story about a man who went forth to sow. A farmer went forth to sow seed as farmers have done for centuries. But this farmer had to be one of the most inept farmers who has ever sown seed.
Jesus says, the farmer goes out to his field. We know what should come next. The farmer carefully removes all the rocks and weeds. He plows the soil into neat, straight furrows. And then he puts the seed in the furrows, carefully covering up the seed with about a quarter of an inch of soil, each seed about eight inches from every other seed. Like us, the farmer deftly follows the directions on the Burpee Seed package!
Well, no, he did no such thing. Jesus says the farmer simply goes out and with no preparation or care starts slinging seed!
Once the seed germinates, and it is time for harvest, the harvest is rather disappointing. Most of the seed has been wasted. Of course, you would expect this with this kind of farmer!
Some of the seed has been thrown onto the roadside. What on earth did the farmer expect by that? Much of the seed has been eaten by birds where it was not sufficiently covered by the soil. Other seed thrown into clumps of weeds has been choked out by the weeds.
The amazing thing about this is that Jesus says there was a miraculous harvest. About ten percent of the seed actually germinated. Jesus enthusiastically calls this an amazingly rich harvest, one that brought the farmer great joy.
Don’t you find it interesting that the sort of farming we would call a failure Jesus calls a success? He sure looks at things differently than the way we look at things.
In the name of efficiency and the greatest good for the greatest number, the modern world has stacked people on top of each other, piled human beings together, forced us into large groups – the herd. Jesus appears to point to another way in which, though a minority of the seed actually germinated and bore fruit, it is considered to be a wonderful, miraculous event.
Certainly with this formula there is a great deal of waste in the kingdom of God. Our way of figuring things would surely say so. A great deal of seed is being put at risk with this sort of sowing. A lot of otherwise good seed is going to be wasted.
But then we think about how God created the world. Why didn’t God create just one species of flower, for example? That ought to be miracle enough. But God didn’t stop there. God created a lot of flowers, all different colors and sizes and shapes. Few of the world’s flowers are actually seen by many people. Why did God continue and waste so much beauty? There does seem to be a sort of
extravagance built right into the grain of the universe. A great deal of waste. God is effusive, or we might say, wasteful. Jesus calls something different, he calls it a divine wonder.
Much of the great good that this God does is unseen by the world, unacknowledged, and unnoticed. Few of us will ever read through the entire Bible, much less comprehend all of it. God has just said too much to us, on too many different subjects, on too diverse occasions. So we hire preachers, to plow through the Bible, then reduce what we have read to four spiritual laws, or three basic principles, or six fundamentals. We human beings acts as if it is our job to comprehend all of God, but in order to do that we have to considerably reduce God, bring everything down to the lowest common denominator, something that you can put on a bumper sticker. “Jesus saves” or “My boss is a Jewish Carpenter”, or one I saw yesterday, “Real men love Jesus.”
But then we are reminded that God is bigger than all of our reductions and generalizations. There is a great deal more to be said and thought about God than we can say or think.
Sometimes people emerge from church mumbling, “I didn’t really get anything out of that service today.” It’s true, let’s be honest here.
Am I supposed to take that as a criticism? Well, usually I don’t. Perhaps the sermon was focused on people who are going through times of difficulty and trial. Maybe that person is experiencing smooth sailing right now, no problems. So naturally they “didn’t get anything out of it.”
The point is that church is not simply the efficient, individual and personal answer to “what do I get out of it?” Maybe the point of church is more often, “what does my neighbor get out of it?” In church, a great deal is wasted. More is said than we really need to hear. Many times we sing a hymn that does nothing to uplift our heart. But maybe that hymn uplifts the heart of our neighbor. And Jesus has made our neighbor, and our neighbor’s needs our problem too.
So maybe we should say that to be a good disciple we have to have training in how to sit through a lot of church, a great many worship services that are wasted.
Waste isn’t reserved just for a few. Some folks actually complain that their pastor is disorganized and the he/she doesn’t use church time well. Sometimes it is true. We are working not just for the church, but also for Jesus. When a pastor wastes an entire afternoon with a troubled person this may not be the most efficient use of the pastor’s talent, training, and time, but are these the only measures for what is at the heart of the reign of God?
In fact, I have had folk say to me, “I don’t get about 90 percent of what’s said in your sermons.”
I might be concerned about this low percentage of comprehension. But then I hear, with a twinkle in the eye, “But the 10 percent I do understand keeps me coming back, Sunday after Sunday, and gives me quite enough to chew on the rest of the week.” Sometimes only about ten percent of the seed actually germinates.
The Methodist Bishop, William Willimon tells the story of a woman, a graduate of John Hopkins University, who went on to Duke University where she earned a graduate degree in nursing. She did so well academically that the faculty asked her to stay on and be a professor of nursing.
Bishop Willimon did not meet her until she was in her 60’s. By that time she had left the nursing faculty and she was working in an inner-city health center, a volunteer, for those who had AIDS. One afternoon, talking to her and her friend, the Bishop was saying that he had so much respect for the work she was doing, for the way she was using her gifts.
Her friend said, “Do you? Frankly, I consider it a waste. When I think of all the good she could be doing and I consider the brilliant career that she simply tossed away, I consider her story to be sad, rather than inspiring.”
What a waste? That Jesus came to us reaching out to us in love. He told us the truth about ourselves and our world and the truth about God. And we responded by rejecting him, abandoning him, nailing him to a cross, where his life blood drained out of him. What a waste.
Even there, he kept reaching out to us, embracing us, forgiving us. And then when God raised him from his death, he came back to us again, back to the very people with whom he had failed so miserably. He came back to the very ones who betrayed him and promised us, “I will never leave you.” No, no matter what. No matter how you waste your life. I will never leave you.
What a waste.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen
Additional resource:
“Pulpit Resource”, Volume 36, Number 3, 2008, pages 9-12.
071011.gpc
Monday, June 27, 2011
26 June 2011 “A Disciples Reward” Matthew 10:40-42
26 June 2011 “A Disciples Reward” Matthew 10:40-42
Today is an exciting day for me personally. Today I celebrate the anniversary of my ordination to the Ministry of Word and Sacrament. It was June 26, 2005. In the history of our church there have been installation services as new pastors have been called, and I expect we have ordained a few. We certainly have held many such services for elders and deacons. All who are ordained have a right to be proud.
I labored faithfully through seminary and those of you who are ordained, which includes many of you, have labored faithfully learning the faith, worshiping and being God’s ministry to one another and to the world. The remembrance of our dedication of service to our God is of great importance for the faith, the life and witness of this church, and we can be mighty proud of our work thus far.
Ordination is the act by which the church sets apart persons who have been called, through election by the church, to service. In our Presbyterian tradition and according to scripture, we call them presbyters.
The worship service for ordination is actually rooted in our baptism, which “is the basic Christian ‘ordination’. In baptism, we are individually claimed as God’s own beloved sons and daughters and grafted into the body of Christ – the community of faith – the church. It was in our baptism that we were made disciples of Jesus Christ and called to serve others as if we were serving Christ himself.
All worship takes this stance, we are made disciples for service and it is right and fitting that from time to time we remind ourselves of our personal call to be servant discipleship in Jesus Christ.
It is to this reminder that today’s scripture turns us. We hear it in Matthew’s gospel at the end of chapter 10 in the form of a call to welcome those doing God’s work and to hear about their reward.
Listen to it again:
“Whoever welcomes you welcomes me and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.
“Whoever welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward; and whoever welcomes a righteous person in the name of a righteous person will receive the reward of the righteous;
And whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple – truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward.”
There is a powerful affirmation in this scripture. We have been doing God’s work, you and I, and it is now time to hear of our reward!
Welcoming the Word of God connects us to God, and being connected to God connects us to the reward of God’s salvation. That is what the reward of the righteous is. Our reward is found in being in a right relationship with God. God grants salvation through Christ’s cross, this is God’s atoning act of righteousness.
So, welcoming the Word of God connects us to God and connects us to the reward of God’s salvation. This is a beautiful truth to remember. It is the sort of good news we want to hear. This is our day to celebrate who we have been as a church and as the faithful, who we are now and who we will become. We will celebrate this day being ordained, all of us, being set apart, and knowing God’s truth for each of us. This day we receive the reward for our faithfulness.
Yet, something doesn’t seem right. Perhaps we have gone too far if we become the center of attention in today’s call for celebration and reward.
Ernie Hinojosa began a new congregation in San Antonio. The place was doing so well, far better than Pastor Ernie had dreamed, one day he found sanctuary in his office and prayed a lament to God: “ I’m too young, I’m not strong enough to do this!” to which God very clearly replied, “Ernie, what made you think it was about you? It’s not about you; it’s about me. This is my work.”
I am so struck by that line, “What made you think it was about you?” I have written that phrase in my journal and wish I could burn it in my psyche because I need to be reminded of that truth every day.
In the midst of an American culture that seems at every turn to tell us what we deserve, it is truly difficult to believe we are not the center of the universe. We deserve the best car, the biggest house, we owe it to ourselves and our families, why, just ask your doctor, Celebrex is right for you… there is no question, it is about us!
Is it possible we are surrounded by false prophets who tell us what we want to hear?
Jeremiah thought so. We heard this morning of Jeremiah’s response to the prophet Hananiah. Hananiah was preaching and prophesying what the people wanted to hear. The people of Israel were in exile in Babylon. They wanted to go home, to their land, their temple and their old way of life. Hananiah was telling them what they wanted to hear. He assured them, all the temple vessels would be returned to Jerusalem. He assured them they were about to be set free from their exile. Jeremiah hoped so. He truly did. He wanted to go home too. But, that was not happening. The words Hananiah was saying had not come true. He preached exactly what the people wanted to hear, rather than taking the route of God’s truth, which was what Jeremiah was all about.
There is another prophet, Jesus of Nazareth, who also decided to not preach what the people wanted to hear. Instead he preaches the Way of God’s truth. Jesus says exactly what God wants him to say, even when it is not what we want to hear.
In Matthew’s tenth chapter, Jesus has called his disciples and he sends us with them to do God’s work.
Today we hear about our real rewards for now we know the real truth. The cost and reward of being a disciple is that we must surrender to the fact that it is not about us. Ouch. Good by celebration!
About this passage, Barbara Brown Taylor has said, “What the Bible tells us over and over again – what our lives tell us – is that the only reward for doing God’s work is doing God’s work. Period.”
Susan Langhauser, another great preacher, says, “Let’s face it; our question, ‘What’s in it for me?’ is not a biblical question!”
Brother Lawrence, a humble 17th-century monk, having no possessions in this world, found himself quite well off, which he attributed to the fact that he sought only God, and not Gods gifts. He was not interested in Langhauser’s question, “What’s in it for me?” He believed that God is much greater than any of the simple gifts God gives us. Rather, he chose to look beyond the gift, hoping to learn more about God alone. It actually became his desire to avoid receiving any reward, so that he would have the pleasure of doing everything solely for God.
Barbara Brown Taylor is right, the only reward for doing God’s work is doing God’s work. Period.
God has placed within our hearts a desire to be in relationships. And when in a genuine relationship we do not ask, what is in it for me. A true relationship should not be about us. We know we are in a true relationship when we cannot distinguish the individual. Two in a relationship become one as they become friends, as they fall in love, as they become parents, or as they become the right thing they have done. It is not about us as an individual. We die to self, remember, and are born anew.
There is a wonderful story of a women’s Bible study group who had chosen to study Malachi 3:3, which says that God “will sit as a refiner, a purifier of silver.” Not really understanding that concept, one of the women volunteered to go discover the process of refining silver. She made an appointment and on arriving at the silversmith’s shop, was escorted to the place of refining. The smith held the piece of silver right in the center of the flame. The woman thought about what that might say about how God deals with us, and she asked the smith, “Do you have to hold the silver in the hottest part of the fire?” “Oh yes, “he replied. “If I look away for a moment it could get too hot and be destroyed. If I don’t let it get hot enough, it will not become pure and therefore workable for my purposes.” “But how do you know when it is refined?” asked the woman. The silversmith replied, “When I can see my own image in the silver, I know it is pure.”
This is Gods’ truth; God sits as a refiner, a purifier of each of us. Our baptism, our individual refinement as God’s own beloved sets us apart for service to God. The reward of doing God’s work is simply and powerfully doing God’s work.
Our celebration this morning is not about you or about me; it is about God, and it is about our relationships. Yours and mine and ours with God and all that God has created.
Today is a day for celebration. Today we remember our ordination, our baptism, our calling by God to join together along the route of God’s truth. Our calling to a journey of true faith in Jesus Christ for those being sent to do Gods’ work.
We will know we are on the right path to that work when our Creator’s image can be seen in us and all we say and do. When we love widely and care deeply for those around us Christ’s image can be seen in us and we will then know for certain, this life of ordained service to our God is most definitely not about us.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen
062611
Today is an exciting day for me personally. Today I celebrate the anniversary of my ordination to the Ministry of Word and Sacrament. It was June 26, 2005. In the history of our church there have been installation services as new pastors have been called, and I expect we have ordained a few. We certainly have held many such services for elders and deacons. All who are ordained have a right to be proud.
I labored faithfully through seminary and those of you who are ordained, which includes many of you, have labored faithfully learning the faith, worshiping and being God’s ministry to one another and to the world. The remembrance of our dedication of service to our God is of great importance for the faith, the life and witness of this church, and we can be mighty proud of our work thus far.
Ordination is the act by which the church sets apart persons who have been called, through election by the church, to service. In our Presbyterian tradition and according to scripture, we call them presbyters.
The worship service for ordination is actually rooted in our baptism, which “is the basic Christian ‘ordination’. In baptism, we are individually claimed as God’s own beloved sons and daughters and grafted into the body of Christ – the community of faith – the church. It was in our baptism that we were made disciples of Jesus Christ and called to serve others as if we were serving Christ himself.
All worship takes this stance, we are made disciples for service and it is right and fitting that from time to time we remind ourselves of our personal call to be servant discipleship in Jesus Christ.
It is to this reminder that today’s scripture turns us. We hear it in Matthew’s gospel at the end of chapter 10 in the form of a call to welcome those doing God’s work and to hear about their reward.
Listen to it again:
“Whoever welcomes you welcomes me and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.
“Whoever welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward; and whoever welcomes a righteous person in the name of a righteous person will receive the reward of the righteous;
And whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple – truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward.”
There is a powerful affirmation in this scripture. We have been doing God’s work, you and I, and it is now time to hear of our reward!
Welcoming the Word of God connects us to God, and being connected to God connects us to the reward of God’s salvation. That is what the reward of the righteous is. Our reward is found in being in a right relationship with God. God grants salvation through Christ’s cross, this is God’s atoning act of righteousness.
So, welcoming the Word of God connects us to God and connects us to the reward of God’s salvation. This is a beautiful truth to remember. It is the sort of good news we want to hear. This is our day to celebrate who we have been as a church and as the faithful, who we are now and who we will become. We will celebrate this day being ordained, all of us, being set apart, and knowing God’s truth for each of us. This day we receive the reward for our faithfulness.
Yet, something doesn’t seem right. Perhaps we have gone too far if we become the center of attention in today’s call for celebration and reward.
Ernie Hinojosa began a new congregation in San Antonio. The place was doing so well, far better than Pastor Ernie had dreamed, one day he found sanctuary in his office and prayed a lament to God: “ I’m too young, I’m not strong enough to do this!” to which God very clearly replied, “Ernie, what made you think it was about you? It’s not about you; it’s about me. This is my work.”
I am so struck by that line, “What made you think it was about you?” I have written that phrase in my journal and wish I could burn it in my psyche because I need to be reminded of that truth every day.
In the midst of an American culture that seems at every turn to tell us what we deserve, it is truly difficult to believe we are not the center of the universe. We deserve the best car, the biggest house, we owe it to ourselves and our families, why, just ask your doctor, Celebrex is right for you… there is no question, it is about us!
Is it possible we are surrounded by false prophets who tell us what we want to hear?
Jeremiah thought so. We heard this morning of Jeremiah’s response to the prophet Hananiah. Hananiah was preaching and prophesying what the people wanted to hear. The people of Israel were in exile in Babylon. They wanted to go home, to their land, their temple and their old way of life. Hananiah was telling them what they wanted to hear. He assured them, all the temple vessels would be returned to Jerusalem. He assured them they were about to be set free from their exile. Jeremiah hoped so. He truly did. He wanted to go home too. But, that was not happening. The words Hananiah was saying had not come true. He preached exactly what the people wanted to hear, rather than taking the route of God’s truth, which was what Jeremiah was all about.
There is another prophet, Jesus of Nazareth, who also decided to not preach what the people wanted to hear. Instead he preaches the Way of God’s truth. Jesus says exactly what God wants him to say, even when it is not what we want to hear.
In Matthew’s tenth chapter, Jesus has called his disciples and he sends us with them to do God’s work.
Today we hear about our real rewards for now we know the real truth. The cost and reward of being a disciple is that we must surrender to the fact that it is not about us. Ouch. Good by celebration!
About this passage, Barbara Brown Taylor has said, “What the Bible tells us over and over again – what our lives tell us – is that the only reward for doing God’s work is doing God’s work. Period.”
Susan Langhauser, another great preacher, says, “Let’s face it; our question, ‘What’s in it for me?’ is not a biblical question!”
Brother Lawrence, a humble 17th-century monk, having no possessions in this world, found himself quite well off, which he attributed to the fact that he sought only God, and not Gods gifts. He was not interested in Langhauser’s question, “What’s in it for me?” He believed that God is much greater than any of the simple gifts God gives us. Rather, he chose to look beyond the gift, hoping to learn more about God alone. It actually became his desire to avoid receiving any reward, so that he would have the pleasure of doing everything solely for God.
Barbara Brown Taylor is right, the only reward for doing God’s work is doing God’s work. Period.
God has placed within our hearts a desire to be in relationships. And when in a genuine relationship we do not ask, what is in it for me. A true relationship should not be about us. We know we are in a true relationship when we cannot distinguish the individual. Two in a relationship become one as they become friends, as they fall in love, as they become parents, or as they become the right thing they have done. It is not about us as an individual. We die to self, remember, and are born anew.
There is a wonderful story of a women’s Bible study group who had chosen to study Malachi 3:3, which says that God “will sit as a refiner, a purifier of silver.” Not really understanding that concept, one of the women volunteered to go discover the process of refining silver. She made an appointment and on arriving at the silversmith’s shop, was escorted to the place of refining. The smith held the piece of silver right in the center of the flame. The woman thought about what that might say about how God deals with us, and she asked the smith, “Do you have to hold the silver in the hottest part of the fire?” “Oh yes, “he replied. “If I look away for a moment it could get too hot and be destroyed. If I don’t let it get hot enough, it will not become pure and therefore workable for my purposes.” “But how do you know when it is refined?” asked the woman. The silversmith replied, “When I can see my own image in the silver, I know it is pure.”
This is Gods’ truth; God sits as a refiner, a purifier of each of us. Our baptism, our individual refinement as God’s own beloved sets us apart for service to God. The reward of doing God’s work is simply and powerfully doing God’s work.
Our celebration this morning is not about you or about me; it is about God, and it is about our relationships. Yours and mine and ours with God and all that God has created.
Today is a day for celebration. Today we remember our ordination, our baptism, our calling by God to join together along the route of God’s truth. Our calling to a journey of true faith in Jesus Christ for those being sent to do Gods’ work.
We will know we are on the right path to that work when our Creator’s image can be seen in us and all we say and do. When we love widely and care deeply for those around us Christ’s image can be seen in us and we will then know for certain, this life of ordained service to our God is most definitely not about us.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen
062611
19 June 2011 Trinity Sunday “He is With Us”
19 June 2011 Trinity Sunday “He is With Us”
It happens every year about this time. There is a frenzy of activity associated with it. Everyone closely associated with it feels its pressures. The community holds its collective breath until it is finally done. Families, I suspect, are affected by it most.
It may have all the high drama of a crime scene investigation show on television. There are elements of frenzied and panic filled climactic activities followed by finality, a sudden abrupt end to it all, and it may take the experts some time to sort out what really happened there.
It is that time honored, much anticipated end of the school year. Teachers and administrators and students long for it with every breath left in their worn out bodies. Parents, on the other hand, are panic stricken. What will we do now that the kids will not be in school? Summer is here, it’s going to get mighty hot. How long till school starts again? What about their grandparents? They will be around to help keep the kids, won’t they???
While school has ended, we here in the church are marking a transitional time too. It began with the extended Easter season where we walked with Jesus following his death and resurrection, next was the Day of Pentecost with our celebration of the gift of the Holy Spirit to the Church. Today is Trinity Sunday and then we move into Ordinary time.
The Church, you see, follows a rhythm of seasons which orders life and influences our worship. Pentecost is typically seen as the end of the liturgical year. The first Sunday of Advent being the beginning.
We find a fair amount of calendar time between Pentecost and Advent. During that time we take summer vacations, find a cool place to go in Colorado, or enjoy the beach or our favorite swimming or tubing place in our own river region. Summer can become a perfect time for rest and renewal.
It is in this spirit, this time of rest and renewal, that the church brings us Trinity Sunday. It seems strange we would begin to slow things down with a story about the Trinity. The Trinity is a complex, thick doctrine. Can we imagine such a difficult concept as Trinity, God in three persons. Our rich experience of the diversity of the one true God is a hard concept to communicate.
In Matthew’s words to us this morning Jesus helps our understanding in a very practical way. Previously in the gospel, an angel of the Lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled back the stone covering the tomb where Jesus was buried and sat on it. The angel said to Mary Magdalene, and the other Mary, who were at the tomb, “Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said. Come, see the place were he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples, He has been raised from the dead.”
There is nothing in literature to compare to the dramatic meaning of this story. Jesus, the Messiah, has risen from the dead. Jesus, the savior of humankind, has appeared to his disciples. Jesus, God’s own son, has brought them and us to a great commission. A commission to go into the entire world and preach the gospel making disciples of all nations.
We hear in this passage the echo of the Genesis reading for this morning. In the creation story God said, ‘let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness.” This is not a command to make us into the physical image of God. It is rather that we are created in God’s image to live together in love and freedom – with God, with one another, and with the world. We are created to be loving companions of others so that something of God’s goodness may be reflected in our lives.
We are reminded in this morning’s scripture that we have been given this specific command from Jesus. We have been charged with a particular function, to go and make disciples, to baptize them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, there’s the Trinity again, and to teach obedience to everything Jesus has commanded.
I must confess, when I hear this expectation from God I find myself on the side of all who cry out, why me Lord? I am weak, without knowledge, and prone to human temptations. Surely, you don’t mean us? We cannot agree on so many things, how in the world are we to go and make disciples, baptize them, and teach them obedience when we don’t always obey? Do you see the folly in this Lord? We just cannot cut it as disciple makers.
Are we so bold to think we can refuse God on this? Have we forgotten the story of Jonah? Jonah was a prophet, one of God’s special messengers. One day he heard God speaking to him. “I want you to go to Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian Empire,” “I have seen the wicked things that go on there. I know how disobedient the people are. I want you to go there and preach my message. But Jonah did not want to go to Nineveh. Instead, he ran in the opposite direction. He found a ship that was sailing away from Nineveh, paid his fare, went aboard and hid himself. That’s what we all too often do. We hide ourselves.
It did Jonah no good. A storm came up, the boat was sinking, he was found and it was discovered he had run from God. So the crew of the ship threw him into the sea. As soon as Jonah hit the water, a huge fish rose up and swallowed him whole. He was frightened and cried out to God. Help me Lord; I know that you are able to save me.” Suddenly Jonah felt himself being thrown forward out of the fish’s mouth. As you might imagine, Jonah couldn’t wait to be in Nineveh!
You see, Jonah was commissioned by God to go and make disciples, to baptize them, and to teach them about obedience to everything God had commanded. Who better to teach about obeying everything God has commanded than one who has refused to follow what God commanded and with such dramatic results!
Despite his disobedience, Jonah discovered that God never left him. God did not leave him alone in the belly of the fish, and God did not leave him alone in Nineveh. Jesus does not leave us alone either.
I see in this ending of the seasons a time to reconnect to our roots. Our Christian roots, grounded in the Holy Trinity and our call to go, to baptize, and to teach. This is not just a call to pastors, or elders, or the most faithful believers. It is a call to each of us.
When my brother, Jim, was about to have life threatening surgery he made his confession to a priest. He prayed, “Bless me Father for I have sinned, it has been 30 years since my last confession.” Jim didn’t surprise God. God already knows about us. God knows that we have sinned and not lived God’s commandments; we have not lived by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. God knows that we have not lived for the love of God and that we have not lived in union with the Holy Spirit.
We don’t surprise God. God is infinitely patient with us but God doesn’t have different expectations of us if we worship daily or 30 years go by without a word.
The Holy Spirit may lay dormant in our soul but we are never alone. Remember, Jesus said, I am with you always, to the end of the age. Jesus did not add a warning, I am with you always... if… These promises God makes with us are unconditionally binding for all times and places.
David Livingston, when asked what had sustained him in all of the perils of his pilgrimage in Africa, answered by quoting this same verse. It is said that when his wife died in Africa he helped with each step of her burial, he opened his New Testament and read this text, turned to his African associates and said, “Jesus Christ is too much of a Gentleman not to keep His word; let us get on with the task.”
Let us go on with the task, Dr. Livingston said, making disciples, for that is what we are called to do. We may wonder if that includes us all. Must we not have special energy, special skills, something special. Being so ordinary, how, pray tell, might we make disciples?
The same way Jesus did with those he came into contact with. He loved them, he blessed them, and he helped them, all of them, even though some of them did not care. He loved them none the less. That’s how we have been treated by God. We are loved even when we ignore God, even when we forget about or become disinterested in God and the grace God has for us. We are blessed abundantly and helped by God in ways we do not often recognize.
It is no accident that God loves us. God created each of us. God is still providing for each of us. God’s goodness, God’s grace you see is not a one time gift.
We will proclaim again this Sunday our faith in the Trinity. We proclaim it in our profession of faith when we recite the Apostles Creed. We believe all that is promised in the gospel and a summary of our belief is found in that Creed.
God promised us, remember, he is with us always, to the end of the age! God promised us his son Jesus is the Savior of the world and we are to entrust ourselves completely to his care, giving thanks each day for his wonderful goodness.
God promised us we are enabled to faithfulness and holy obedience by God’s presence within us in the person of the Holy Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit who enables us to love, know, and serve Jesus Christ.
It is the Holy Spirit who nurtures, corrects, and strengthens us with the truth of everything God has commanded of us.
He is, praise God, with us, until the end of the age.
May the grace of God, the love of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with us all. Amen
061911.gpc
It happens every year about this time. There is a frenzy of activity associated with it. Everyone closely associated with it feels its pressures. The community holds its collective breath until it is finally done. Families, I suspect, are affected by it most.
It may have all the high drama of a crime scene investigation show on television. There are elements of frenzied and panic filled climactic activities followed by finality, a sudden abrupt end to it all, and it may take the experts some time to sort out what really happened there.
It is that time honored, much anticipated end of the school year. Teachers and administrators and students long for it with every breath left in their worn out bodies. Parents, on the other hand, are panic stricken. What will we do now that the kids will not be in school? Summer is here, it’s going to get mighty hot. How long till school starts again? What about their grandparents? They will be around to help keep the kids, won’t they???
While school has ended, we here in the church are marking a transitional time too. It began with the extended Easter season where we walked with Jesus following his death and resurrection, next was the Day of Pentecost with our celebration of the gift of the Holy Spirit to the Church. Today is Trinity Sunday and then we move into Ordinary time.
The Church, you see, follows a rhythm of seasons which orders life and influences our worship. Pentecost is typically seen as the end of the liturgical year. The first Sunday of Advent being the beginning.
We find a fair amount of calendar time between Pentecost and Advent. During that time we take summer vacations, find a cool place to go in Colorado, or enjoy the beach or our favorite swimming or tubing place in our own river region. Summer can become a perfect time for rest and renewal.
It is in this spirit, this time of rest and renewal, that the church brings us Trinity Sunday. It seems strange we would begin to slow things down with a story about the Trinity. The Trinity is a complex, thick doctrine. Can we imagine such a difficult concept as Trinity, God in three persons. Our rich experience of the diversity of the one true God is a hard concept to communicate.
In Matthew’s words to us this morning Jesus helps our understanding in a very practical way. Previously in the gospel, an angel of the Lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled back the stone covering the tomb where Jesus was buried and sat on it. The angel said to Mary Magdalene, and the other Mary, who were at the tomb, “Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said. Come, see the place were he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples, He has been raised from the dead.”
There is nothing in literature to compare to the dramatic meaning of this story. Jesus, the Messiah, has risen from the dead. Jesus, the savior of humankind, has appeared to his disciples. Jesus, God’s own son, has brought them and us to a great commission. A commission to go into the entire world and preach the gospel making disciples of all nations.
We hear in this passage the echo of the Genesis reading for this morning. In the creation story God said, ‘let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness.” This is not a command to make us into the physical image of God. It is rather that we are created in God’s image to live together in love and freedom – with God, with one another, and with the world. We are created to be loving companions of others so that something of God’s goodness may be reflected in our lives.
We are reminded in this morning’s scripture that we have been given this specific command from Jesus. We have been charged with a particular function, to go and make disciples, to baptize them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, there’s the Trinity again, and to teach obedience to everything Jesus has commanded.
I must confess, when I hear this expectation from God I find myself on the side of all who cry out, why me Lord? I am weak, without knowledge, and prone to human temptations. Surely, you don’t mean us? We cannot agree on so many things, how in the world are we to go and make disciples, baptize them, and teach them obedience when we don’t always obey? Do you see the folly in this Lord? We just cannot cut it as disciple makers.
Are we so bold to think we can refuse God on this? Have we forgotten the story of Jonah? Jonah was a prophet, one of God’s special messengers. One day he heard God speaking to him. “I want you to go to Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian Empire,” “I have seen the wicked things that go on there. I know how disobedient the people are. I want you to go there and preach my message. But Jonah did not want to go to Nineveh. Instead, he ran in the opposite direction. He found a ship that was sailing away from Nineveh, paid his fare, went aboard and hid himself. That’s what we all too often do. We hide ourselves.
It did Jonah no good. A storm came up, the boat was sinking, he was found and it was discovered he had run from God. So the crew of the ship threw him into the sea. As soon as Jonah hit the water, a huge fish rose up and swallowed him whole. He was frightened and cried out to God. Help me Lord; I know that you are able to save me.” Suddenly Jonah felt himself being thrown forward out of the fish’s mouth. As you might imagine, Jonah couldn’t wait to be in Nineveh!
You see, Jonah was commissioned by God to go and make disciples, to baptize them, and to teach them about obedience to everything God had commanded. Who better to teach about obeying everything God has commanded than one who has refused to follow what God commanded and with such dramatic results!
Despite his disobedience, Jonah discovered that God never left him. God did not leave him alone in the belly of the fish, and God did not leave him alone in Nineveh. Jesus does not leave us alone either.
I see in this ending of the seasons a time to reconnect to our roots. Our Christian roots, grounded in the Holy Trinity and our call to go, to baptize, and to teach. This is not just a call to pastors, or elders, or the most faithful believers. It is a call to each of us.
When my brother, Jim, was about to have life threatening surgery he made his confession to a priest. He prayed, “Bless me Father for I have sinned, it has been 30 years since my last confession.” Jim didn’t surprise God. God already knows about us. God knows that we have sinned and not lived God’s commandments; we have not lived by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. God knows that we have not lived for the love of God and that we have not lived in union with the Holy Spirit.
We don’t surprise God. God is infinitely patient with us but God doesn’t have different expectations of us if we worship daily or 30 years go by without a word.
The Holy Spirit may lay dormant in our soul but we are never alone. Remember, Jesus said, I am with you always, to the end of the age. Jesus did not add a warning, I am with you always... if… These promises God makes with us are unconditionally binding for all times and places.
David Livingston, when asked what had sustained him in all of the perils of his pilgrimage in Africa, answered by quoting this same verse. It is said that when his wife died in Africa he helped with each step of her burial, he opened his New Testament and read this text, turned to his African associates and said, “Jesus Christ is too much of a Gentleman not to keep His word; let us get on with the task.”
Let us go on with the task, Dr. Livingston said, making disciples, for that is what we are called to do. We may wonder if that includes us all. Must we not have special energy, special skills, something special. Being so ordinary, how, pray tell, might we make disciples?
The same way Jesus did with those he came into contact with. He loved them, he blessed them, and he helped them, all of them, even though some of them did not care. He loved them none the less. That’s how we have been treated by God. We are loved even when we ignore God, even when we forget about or become disinterested in God and the grace God has for us. We are blessed abundantly and helped by God in ways we do not often recognize.
It is no accident that God loves us. God created each of us. God is still providing for each of us. God’s goodness, God’s grace you see is not a one time gift.
We will proclaim again this Sunday our faith in the Trinity. We proclaim it in our profession of faith when we recite the Apostles Creed. We believe all that is promised in the gospel and a summary of our belief is found in that Creed.
God promised us, remember, he is with us always, to the end of the age! God promised us his son Jesus is the Savior of the world and we are to entrust ourselves completely to his care, giving thanks each day for his wonderful goodness.
God promised us we are enabled to faithfulness and holy obedience by God’s presence within us in the person of the Holy Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit who enables us to love, know, and serve Jesus Christ.
It is the Holy Spirit who nurtures, corrects, and strengthens us with the truth of everything God has commanded of us.
He is, praise God, with us, until the end of the age.
May the grace of God, the love of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with us all. Amen
061911.gpc
Sunday, June 12, 2011
23 May 2010 “A Pentecost Problem” Acts 2:1-21
23 May 2010 “A Pentecost Problem” Acts 2:1-21
If you are like me, the possibilities of a day like today, Pentecost, with the notion of divided tongues resting upon us while being filled with the Holy Spirit of truth, creates a healthy round of honest skepticism and a stream of unanswerable questions. Then again, you may not be like me.
Through the prophet Joel we learned of God’s promise when God said, “In the last days it will be that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh…”
Being good and faithful folk and taking into account the weight of the evidence for the Trinity and the effects our faith will have, we generally accept this to be true. At the same time, we have rarely stopped having questions about God.
What exactly does this pouring out of God’s Spirit upon our flesh mean? What will it look and feel like? Or more importantly, what will we look like or feel like after this happens? Will we still be who we are or will we be changed into some unrecognizable spirit filled somebody who answers to our name. After all, there are good spirits and bad spirits flying around aren’t there?
Let’s be well informed here. A lot is at stake. Perhaps it should be prayers that we pray and not questions that we ask. Yet, we persist. Exactly what sort of Spirit does God have in store for us, and what difference might that Spirit make in our lives if we are to be poured upon, that’s what we want to know.
Barbara Brown Taylor, an Episcopal priest, has written a wonderful summary of the Acts 2 passage we read this morning. She says, “If you believe the Bible, then there is no better proof that Jesus was who He said He was than the before and after pictures of the disciples. Before Pentecost, they were dense, timid fumblers who fled at the least sign of trouble. Afterwards, they were fearless leaders. They healed the sick and cast out demons. They went to jail boldly, where they sang hymns until the walls fell down.”
I believe we may fairly ask, how did this change occur in them and is this the difference such a change will make in our lives. The last thing Jesus told his disciples to do before He ascended into heaven was to go back to Jerusalem and wait there for God’s promise to come true. They would be baptized by the Holy Spirit and they would be clothed with power from on high.
With little or no idea what any of that meant, they did as they were told. They went back to Jerusalem and there they waited in an ordinary room in an ordinary house, along with the women who had come with them, including Jesus’ mother and his brothers.
For the most part they prayed while they waited, and I expect at least some of them were asking God to tell them a little bit about what they were waiting for. After all, how would they know when the power had come upon them.
They did not have to wait long for the answer to their prayers. On the day of Pentecost, a Jewish festival set fifty days after Passover, they were all together in one place when they found themselves in the midst of a crash course in God’s power.
First there was wind, then there was fire, then they were filled with the Holy Spirit and overflowed with strange languages: one spoke Parthian while another spoke Latin, and two others were speaking Egyptian and Arabic.
They may not have known what they were saying, but the crowd they drew did. Devout Jews from all over the world stood in the doorways and windows, listening to a gaggle of Galileans tell about the power of God in their own tongues so that no one was left confused.
And still it baffled them all, the speakers as well as the listeners. They were in the grips of something that bypassed reason and some of them could not bear it, so they started hunting for a reason. “They are filled with new wine,” someone said. But Peter said no, it was only 9:00 in the morning.
Then Peter got up and delivered a sensational sermon, based on the second chapter of Joel. “In the last days, I (meaning God) will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.”
Peter tells them that is what is happening now. The Holy Spirit of God is being poured out on them and this is how it looks with wind like the wind that revived the valley of dry bones, with fire like the fire that led Israel through the desert, and with tongues like the tongues that erupted at Babel, but in reverse this time. At Babel, God confused human speech so that people could not understand each other anymore; at Pentecost, God reverses that curse. What sounds like babble is intelligible speech, and best of all, it is the gospel truth.
According to Acts, three thousand people were baptized that day. It was the birthday of the Christian church, when a dozen fallible human apostles received power from on high and proceeded to turn the world upside down.
All this happened by the power of the Holy Spirit, which the Bible talks about in at least two ways.
First, as the abiding presence of God in Christ, with all the safety and comfort that relationship promises. Then, secondly, perhaps not so comforting, as the presence of the Spirit that blows and burns into our lives, howling down the chimney and even turning all the lawn furniture upside down.
Ask Job about the whirlwind, or Ezekiel about the chariot of fire. Ask any of us who have felt caught up in the Holy Spirit this way and whether it is something we would like to happen every Sunday morning!
Given this natural tension with the presence of the Holy Spirit, it may seem surprising that in John’s gospel, beginning in chapter 7, we hear Jesus, on the last day of the festival, cry out, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart will flow rivers of living water.’ And John 14 lifts up Jesus’ promise to us, “Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid…the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do…”, even greater.
From Acts we heard: In the last days it will be that God will pour out God’s Spirit upon all flesh. And again from John, “On the last day… Jesus cried out, Let anyone who is thirsty come to me.”
Two bottom line last day truths are evident in Jesus’ Word to us this morning. First, in seeking refreshment from our thirst for life and our thirst from life, life without the soothing relief of life giving waters, we who believe will also be filled with the presence of God almighty, Jesus Christ, in the Holy Spirit. And second, to exchange these conditions of life, having thirst for the Spirit filled, unbounded, uncontrollable, life changing and life giving power of God may be more than we bargained for.
“Only a fool would pray for the Holy Spirit,” says Allan Jones, Dean of the Episcopal Cathedral in San Francisco, “only fools for Christ do.” He goes on suggesting that the Spirit is most present in three open spaces in our lives, “in the unpredictable, in the place of risk, and in those areas over which we have no control.”
All too often we find our lives in one of these places. Life is unpredictable, risk seems a frequent reality and having control is truly the grandest illusion of all. It’s ok then to pray for God’s gentle spirit at such times. It is ok to pray for the living water Jesus offers. It is ok to admit our thirst for truth and justice, for peace and love, for hope and grace, for forgiveness and eternal salvation. It’s ok to admit we feel like we’ve reached the end of our rope, that we are living our last days, that God has abandoned our lives and pray our faith be restored.
It is proper and right that we pray our faith be restored, to increase life’s predictability, not as we would predict it of course but with God’s blessing, and to reduce life’s risks, not as we would reduce them of course but with God’s grace, and to give complete control of our lives to God, as only God will control it, with God’s love.
Then, praise God, God will pour out God’s Holy Spirit upon us. Then we who are thirsty for the hope of God’s life giving grace will come to Jesus for life giving waters. Then our sons and daughters will prophesy, our young men and women will see visions, and our old men and women will dream dreams and in our new lives we will become the vessels filled to overflowing with God’s grace, God’s love and God’s blessings so people around us may be filled too.
This is the change we can expect - filled with joy and peace, love and hope, our hearts will not be troubled. This is what our world will feel like - filled to be God’s eyes and ears, hands and feet, words and heart to the world. Bringing thirsty folk everywhere God’s Holy Spirit, overflowing from us, from you and from me, so others will experience their own Pentecost, and not be afraid.
Let anyone who is thirsty come with hope to Jesus and receive Gods’ life giving Holy waters, God’s Spirit, poured out upon all flesh.
Jesus promised us, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you.”
Our eternal peace is Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the answer to our Pentecost prayers.
Jesus Christ is the powerful difference our lives feel when we are Holy Spirit filled.
The time for questions has passed, the time for prayers is on hold, it is time to approach the font of baptism and to be poured upon again.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen 061211.gpc
Additional resource:
“Lectionary Homiletics”, Volume XIX, Number 3, pages 40-48.
If you are like me, the possibilities of a day like today, Pentecost, with the notion of divided tongues resting upon us while being filled with the Holy Spirit of truth, creates a healthy round of honest skepticism and a stream of unanswerable questions. Then again, you may not be like me.
Through the prophet Joel we learned of God’s promise when God said, “In the last days it will be that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh…”
Being good and faithful folk and taking into account the weight of the evidence for the Trinity and the effects our faith will have, we generally accept this to be true. At the same time, we have rarely stopped having questions about God.
What exactly does this pouring out of God’s Spirit upon our flesh mean? What will it look and feel like? Or more importantly, what will we look like or feel like after this happens? Will we still be who we are or will we be changed into some unrecognizable spirit filled somebody who answers to our name. After all, there are good spirits and bad spirits flying around aren’t there?
Let’s be well informed here. A lot is at stake. Perhaps it should be prayers that we pray and not questions that we ask. Yet, we persist. Exactly what sort of Spirit does God have in store for us, and what difference might that Spirit make in our lives if we are to be poured upon, that’s what we want to know.
Barbara Brown Taylor, an Episcopal priest, has written a wonderful summary of the Acts 2 passage we read this morning. She says, “If you believe the Bible, then there is no better proof that Jesus was who He said He was than the before and after pictures of the disciples. Before Pentecost, they were dense, timid fumblers who fled at the least sign of trouble. Afterwards, they were fearless leaders. They healed the sick and cast out demons. They went to jail boldly, where they sang hymns until the walls fell down.”
I believe we may fairly ask, how did this change occur in them and is this the difference such a change will make in our lives. The last thing Jesus told his disciples to do before He ascended into heaven was to go back to Jerusalem and wait there for God’s promise to come true. They would be baptized by the Holy Spirit and they would be clothed with power from on high.
With little or no idea what any of that meant, they did as they were told. They went back to Jerusalem and there they waited in an ordinary room in an ordinary house, along with the women who had come with them, including Jesus’ mother and his brothers.
For the most part they prayed while they waited, and I expect at least some of them were asking God to tell them a little bit about what they were waiting for. After all, how would they know when the power had come upon them.
They did not have to wait long for the answer to their prayers. On the day of Pentecost, a Jewish festival set fifty days after Passover, they were all together in one place when they found themselves in the midst of a crash course in God’s power.
First there was wind, then there was fire, then they were filled with the Holy Spirit and overflowed with strange languages: one spoke Parthian while another spoke Latin, and two others were speaking Egyptian and Arabic.
They may not have known what they were saying, but the crowd they drew did. Devout Jews from all over the world stood in the doorways and windows, listening to a gaggle of Galileans tell about the power of God in their own tongues so that no one was left confused.
And still it baffled them all, the speakers as well as the listeners. They were in the grips of something that bypassed reason and some of them could not bear it, so they started hunting for a reason. “They are filled with new wine,” someone said. But Peter said no, it was only 9:00 in the morning.
Then Peter got up and delivered a sensational sermon, based on the second chapter of Joel. “In the last days, I (meaning God) will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.”
Peter tells them that is what is happening now. The Holy Spirit of God is being poured out on them and this is how it looks with wind like the wind that revived the valley of dry bones, with fire like the fire that led Israel through the desert, and with tongues like the tongues that erupted at Babel, but in reverse this time. At Babel, God confused human speech so that people could not understand each other anymore; at Pentecost, God reverses that curse. What sounds like babble is intelligible speech, and best of all, it is the gospel truth.
According to Acts, three thousand people were baptized that day. It was the birthday of the Christian church, when a dozen fallible human apostles received power from on high and proceeded to turn the world upside down.
All this happened by the power of the Holy Spirit, which the Bible talks about in at least two ways.
First, as the abiding presence of God in Christ, with all the safety and comfort that relationship promises. Then, secondly, perhaps not so comforting, as the presence of the Spirit that blows and burns into our lives, howling down the chimney and even turning all the lawn furniture upside down.
Ask Job about the whirlwind, or Ezekiel about the chariot of fire. Ask any of us who have felt caught up in the Holy Spirit this way and whether it is something we would like to happen every Sunday morning!
Given this natural tension with the presence of the Holy Spirit, it may seem surprising that in John’s gospel, beginning in chapter 7, we hear Jesus, on the last day of the festival, cry out, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart will flow rivers of living water.’ And John 14 lifts up Jesus’ promise to us, “Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid…the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do…”, even greater.
From Acts we heard: In the last days it will be that God will pour out God’s Spirit upon all flesh. And again from John, “On the last day… Jesus cried out, Let anyone who is thirsty come to me.”
Two bottom line last day truths are evident in Jesus’ Word to us this morning. First, in seeking refreshment from our thirst for life and our thirst from life, life without the soothing relief of life giving waters, we who believe will also be filled with the presence of God almighty, Jesus Christ, in the Holy Spirit. And second, to exchange these conditions of life, having thirst for the Spirit filled, unbounded, uncontrollable, life changing and life giving power of God may be more than we bargained for.
“Only a fool would pray for the Holy Spirit,” says Allan Jones, Dean of the Episcopal Cathedral in San Francisco, “only fools for Christ do.” He goes on suggesting that the Spirit is most present in three open spaces in our lives, “in the unpredictable, in the place of risk, and in those areas over which we have no control.”
All too often we find our lives in one of these places. Life is unpredictable, risk seems a frequent reality and having control is truly the grandest illusion of all. It’s ok then to pray for God’s gentle spirit at such times. It is ok to pray for the living water Jesus offers. It is ok to admit our thirst for truth and justice, for peace and love, for hope and grace, for forgiveness and eternal salvation. It’s ok to admit we feel like we’ve reached the end of our rope, that we are living our last days, that God has abandoned our lives and pray our faith be restored.
It is proper and right that we pray our faith be restored, to increase life’s predictability, not as we would predict it of course but with God’s blessing, and to reduce life’s risks, not as we would reduce them of course but with God’s grace, and to give complete control of our lives to God, as only God will control it, with God’s love.
Then, praise God, God will pour out God’s Holy Spirit upon us. Then we who are thirsty for the hope of God’s life giving grace will come to Jesus for life giving waters. Then our sons and daughters will prophesy, our young men and women will see visions, and our old men and women will dream dreams and in our new lives we will become the vessels filled to overflowing with God’s grace, God’s love and God’s blessings so people around us may be filled too.
This is the change we can expect - filled with joy and peace, love and hope, our hearts will not be troubled. This is what our world will feel like - filled to be God’s eyes and ears, hands and feet, words and heart to the world. Bringing thirsty folk everywhere God’s Holy Spirit, overflowing from us, from you and from me, so others will experience their own Pentecost, and not be afraid.
Let anyone who is thirsty come with hope to Jesus and receive Gods’ life giving Holy waters, God’s Spirit, poured out upon all flesh.
Jesus promised us, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you.”
Our eternal peace is Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the answer to our Pentecost prayers.
Jesus Christ is the powerful difference our lives feel when we are Holy Spirit filled.
The time for questions has passed, the time for prayers is on hold, it is time to approach the font of baptism and to be poured upon again.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen 061211.gpc
Additional resource:
“Lectionary Homiletics”, Volume XIX, Number 3, pages 40-48.
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