Three great lessons today,
but I’ve limited my sermon to the Gospel reading.
We are in Matthew 13, a chapter full of Parables of the Kingdom of Heaven,
and this is a series of 3 Sunday gospel readings from this chapter,
starting last week and continuing next Sunday.
Now when it comes down to it, the parables are about Jesus.
And he tells them to his disciples to bring them into awareness
of the spiritual process he is working in them.
They most often start with “The Kingdom of Heaven is like…”
here, about a man who planted wheat,
but his enemy added seeds for the weed often called darnel.
Initially when all the seed sprouted,
the wheat and the weeds looked the same.
But when the plants got big enough to start producing grain,
then the wheat could be distinguished from the darnel.
Good and bad mixed together,
profitable and unprofitable,
wheat that can become useful for bread and nourishment
and darnel that gives no nourishment, is worthless and useless.
Typically our thought as expressed by the farm hands in this story
is about what can we do to get rid of the darnel,
so that just the beneficial wheat is left.
That’s what the slaves ask the householder.
But the Kingdom of Heaven is like the landowner, the one who sowed the seed,
and he says wait.
He is not going to risk destroying the beneficial along with the worthless,
destroying the life nourishing along with the harmful.
It all belongs;
and one could even say
that the enemy’s action actually serves a purpose.
It shows the reality about what all is included in creation.
Only at the end will it all get sorted out.
I am going to suggest to you that this parable
is not about a moral judgment
that separates the good people from the bad people.
The reason for that:
The parable last week that immediately preceded this one in Mt 13
the ground, the soil represented
the hearts of the people hearing the seed of the word of the Gospel.
This parable is placed right after that,
and so there are intentional connections and parallels.
Jesus is the sower, proclaiming the Kingdom.
We are the soil in which grows the word of the Kingdom
and also words which are worthless,
withering, diminishing to the soul.
The growth of the seedlings
is either for the expansion of the Kingdom within us,
or for the diminishment and frustration of fruitless labor within us,
what sucks the life out of us.
We look on the one hand at what in our lives promotes
life and growth and goodness and compassion and love
and other such characteristics of the Kingdom of Heaven,
and on the other hand we look at what in our lives is diminishment,
is choosing death instead of life, is a contraction of the heart.
If we are honest, we may see that we are not at all successful
in making the spiritually healthy choices,
but that what is life-giving is a gift.
Both wheat and weeds grow together within our hearts,
and we are in need of help.
But can we keep our hands off and wait for the grace to work in our lives?
Or are we going to pull up what WE guess are the weeds?
In last Sunday’s gospel the parable of the sower is a parable of grace,
about the abundance of grain produced
beyond the capabilities of each stalk of wheat,
the abundance of fruit produced beyond human capabilities.
But instead of living in this grace,
our tendency is to want to manage our own salvation,
to deal with what is unfruitful and harmful in our lives ourselves,
through self-improvement programs,
working our own transformation,
and putting it all in moralistic frameworks.
This, we may see, has limited success
and more often than not results in a lot of self-condemnation.
“I failed, I couldn’t change myself.”
And we are back to Romans 7 from a couple of weeks ago,
the conundrum over the propensity to sin.
- And the trouble with self-condemnation is that it often overflows
into judgmentalism about others, making it doubly noxious. -
So we identify ourselves with our inner struggles,
that we may call noxious weeds,
but this is not the Kingdom of God.
If Jesus is the farmer,
then what does he do to save, heal, transform, liberate the situation?
He purifies the hearts of his own.
Where do I see that in this reading?
We need to look at some other passages in Matthew’s Gospel.
Matthew identifies Jesus right from the beginning as the One who purifies.
In the 3rd chapter John the Baptist describes Jesus
as the one who baptizes with fire in contrast to John’s water baptism.
“His winnowing fork is in his hand,” John the Baptist says in Mt 3:12,
“and he will thoroughly cleanse his threshing floor
and will gather his wheat into the barn;
but the chaff he will thoroughly consume with unquenchable fire.”
The process of purification in our lives gets done
finally, thoroughly and with great purity
in a poof, a flash of divine radiance,
if not in this life time,
then when we come face to face with the Divine Radiance
in our last dying breath,
and that burden is eternally lifted .
Now we may have a little trouble with this,
because of such deep involvement that we have had
with this matter of suffering over the weeds in our lives.
If this is where we have had our self-identity all tied up,
then we will actually have a hard time letting go of the suffering.
Think about this in your own life –
what events have indelibly defined you?
marked your identity from that time forward?
Very often it is those events that caused us much suffering.
More than once Jesus had to ask a person who came to him for healing
if they really wanted to be healed,
if they really wanted to let go of their suffering.
If they said yes, then poof, it was done.
They were healed, and life had suddenly changed radically for them. No more identity with lying by the Pool of Bethesda for 38 years,
no more blind begging by the side of the road in Jericho.
Jesus baptizes us with a fire that cleans out the chaff in our lives.
But this is not a fire to fear, unless we are afraid of a shift in our identity.
The chaff, the weeds are about our self identity.
We may discover that what we have built our self-identity around
is what gets burned up
when Jesus shows up with all his fiery radiance.
The fire baptism of Jesus gives us a new identity in him.
This is what Paul wrote about in Romans
that all creation waits with eager longing
until we are refined by this fire baptism
and realize new identity in him – as children of God.
John’s baptism was of repentance, action that we do.
Jesus’ baptism is of fire and the Holy Spirit.
He does all the action. His baptism is the sum of his irresistible work in us.
Now, this matter of the second half of today’s Gospel reading,
the part in which the disciples ask Jesus to explain the parable.
The key verse in this part of the reading is verse 41. This translation reads:
“The Son of Man will send his angels,
and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers,
(Matt. 13:42) and they will throw them into the furnace of fire…”
Now here is a more basic translation closer to the Greek:
“The Son of Man will send his angels,
and they will collect out of his kingdom
all those things that are stumbling blocks, snares, traps,
and the ones operating out of lawlessness.”
The ones doing lawlessness are not doing the will of the Father.
They are out of sync with the created order around them.
They are out of harmony with the whole flow of the Spirit.
They are, one could say, a spiritually ecological mess.
But the righteous, those purified by the fiery baptism of Jesus,
will shine like the sun,
will be ablaze in this fire with divine radiance,
will be transfigured and appear like Jesus did in his transfiguration.
So what do we do with this parable? How do we apply it to our lives?
This is a parable that reminds us that all is a gift of grace,
that God has taken care of it all,
that we can’t even come close to saving ourselves.
But can we cooperate with the Spirit of Jesus at work burning within us
through a willingness to let go of what is noxious and weed-like
when we see it rear its ugly head in our lives,
when we get convicted by our conscience?
That is, can we recognize, let come to conscious awareness,
that which is deadly in our lives,
and then turn to our Lord for dealing with it
and let the Spirit’s purging process work?
When we recognize the weeds,
don’t ignore them, acknowledge that they are there,
and ask for that abundant mercy
which is always there for us.
The Kingdom of Heaven is like the One who plants good seed in his field.
It’s all about Jesus.
And he says, “Wait.
It won’t be your own action that will save you and change you to the good.
Wait, it all will get sorted out.”
So where are we focusing? What are we identifying with?
with our problems and suffering?
or with Jesus?
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