SUNDAY, JULY 23, 2023 | AFTER PENTECOST - Proper 11 (A)

Notes

Isaiah: You are my witnesses!

Good morning,

I told you - here comes the weeping and gnashing of teeth! Matthew sure knows how to spice it up! And you know I am not one to take the bait necessarily - someone who LOVES to preach on heaven and hell would have a field day, especially if they bend a couple of things there and there.

I am not really one to do that…what matters to me is kingdom of God as the traditional churchy concepts of heaven and hell are largely cultural and imprecise. First, let’s affirm it is another agricultural parable that might be less useful for us here in South Plainfield - it’s not like we do not have fields here, but New Jersey sure is VERY urban, especially around here. It talks about the struggle of good and evil, first the good seed is sown by the Son of Man and then comes the devil (diabolos), the slanderous one, the adversary, and sows his bad stuff sneakily. One produces grain (children of the kingdom) and the other weeds (children of the devil) and they are to be separated at harvest, the end times.

On surface level, I can see how somebody could just grab it and then run away with it proclaiming: “repent or you are going to burn in heeeeellll…”

But one cannot build a theological thesis on one verse…or even one passage. So let’s dig in a bit.

Modern theologian Reinhold Niebuhr used this parable to “condemn all forms of Christian attempts to live without sinning [because] this parable does not teach that a specific form of evil does not exist, but that in history good and evil are so mixed (in particular in the church) that we try to distinguish between them only to our detriment” (Hauerwas - Matthew, 131). According to him, we do need to establish goals beyond those of nature and to discriminate between good and evil, but “no matter how high [our] creativity may rise, [we are ourselves] involved in the flow of time, and [we become] evil at the precise point where [we pretend] not to be, when [we pretend] that [our wisdom] is not finite, but infinite, and [our] virtue is not ambiguous but unambiguous. (Hauerwas, 131-132)

Simply put, we are fallible and so is the institution we are a part of! A good call to humility that is in line with our beliefs, but it doesn’t truly address the parable faithfully, perhaps it is more precise to contend with Augustine that “the parable is given to encourage Christians to endure in a world that will not acknowledge the kingdom that has come in Christ” (Hauerwas 132). And it calls to us to have patience even with the devil, “just as Jesus was patient with Judas, so we must be patient with those who think we must force the realization of the kingdom” (Hauerwas 132). Church as Christendom has made this mistake over and over again - colonization, crusades, burning of witches, reformed enforcement of church laws through city councils that happened in Switzerland, holy wars… any time the church took up the sword, it didn’t end well. Judgement is not our job, but God’s!

The servants in the parable want to get rid of the weeds, but the sower tells them not to do it. The point is not to establish some Christian utopia, where everybody is a sinless, perfect Christian. Working towards justice and reconciliation is not an ideological purge. No, it is the growing of what we have, allowing the logos (the seed of the kingdom) to grow within us and the world. There will be evil, there will be weeds, there will be sin in this world, as long as we are in our pre-judgement days. To us belong the positive action - to support what is good, to help people away from the bad and hurtful, to grow wholeness and love, not weeding and burning.

I’d say that is what some of the Christian fundamentalism is not quite understanding, that passing laws that limit and hurt the marginalized - the poor, the immigrants, women of color, the queer and gay… is not the way and very much opposed the kingdom of God. That weaponizing the Bible and the tradition against others is the very same thing that enemies of Jesus have done against those they did not like, including. In some ways, it shows lack of faith in God that they think they can do a better job than God in “sorting things out.” Once you start thinking that way, there is no stopping and there will be always one more person or group to “fix.” In trying to fix others and establish “Christendom”, one may as well become the empire, not unlike the Roman Empire that persecuted the early Church and only stopped, when they decided to continue their dominion through Christian faith and thus the church became more like the Roman empire and not the other way round.

Instead, let us focus on what is good and the love, mercy, and care we can receive for ourselves and give to others, pass it on. Let us tend to the fields and gardens of grace planted by God for us to grow in and take care of at the same time. There will be always a little bit of the weeds in us, to look back to Niehbur’s call to hummility in and out of the church, but even that is a part of us and trying to make ourselves completely weedless would pretty much kill us as those roots go deep. Let us grow in the Lord’s garden, full of hope and love and trust God to sort out the rest. Amen.