Sunday Sermon 5th July 2020

LYNFORD MATT 13:24-43

The Catholic theologian Richard Rohr, who I am sure is familiar to many of you, wrote an essay entitled “To be Biblical.”  He wrote:

“To be biblical is not simply to quote the Bible.  We need to tell that to the fundamentalists.  To be Biblical is not to quote Moses: it is to do what Moses did.  To be Biblical is to do what Abraham did; it’s not to quote the Abraham story.  It is not simply to quote Jesus; it is to do what Jesus did. 

Christians are in touch with the same God Jesus was in touch with, the same traditions Jesus drew insight from.  We are to be building that same unity and creating the same life that Jesus was creating and building.  That is what it means to be Biblical. “

What can we draw from today’s Gospel which will help us to understand how to live our lives drawing on this wonderful heritage we have.   Jesus is still talking about everyday life in Israel, the land, the seed and the weather.  I think the wonderful thing about parables is that Jesus always knows his target audience and he understands the things they understand. 

Last week we had the parable of the sower and today we have gone from the sower to the seeds, or more importantly, the weeds.  This is real life for those who heard it.  They know about sowing seeds and they know all about weeds which destroy the crop. 

This parable only appears in Matthew and it is different from other parables in that it is told to two specific audiences.  Up until this point, Jesus has been teaching the crowds who have been following him. 

But now Jesus teaching is specifically targeted towards his disciples, his inner circle. Matthew tells us that it is they who receive the second part of the teaching.

Some scholars believe that it is very unlikely that Jesus explained his parables to anyone.  They were all so simple that they didn’t really need a deep theological exposition.  So the scholars assume that the interpretation was written by Matthew, perhaps to encourage the small but growing band of Christians in his own community, just to help them understand the difficulties they may face in their faith journey.

And I think Matthew wrote for people like us, who were to follow.  Now I am from  the East end of London, so I don’t know a great deal about farming practices or soils, these things have never played a major part in my life. 

But I do know what it is like to come to faith, and to want to follow and serve God.  We all know what it is like to be Christians in a society which is not always tolerant to others it perceives to be “different”. 

Matthew wrote his Gospel after about 70AD, after the destruction of the Temple, and his work is an attempt to respond to the crisis of the Temple’s destruction.

Because Matthew’s small community of Christians lived within the framework of Judaism, they too would have been suffering a crisis of identity.

And there was also a desire by some parts of the early Christian church to purge what they saw as undesirable elements from their community.  But when I consider the people Jesus was associated with, I think they might all have been considered undesirable.  Society’s outcasts, the sick, the poor, the tax collectors and the prostitutes.  People who might still be regarded as outcasts in our society.

But the desire to achieve purity and perfection in the church was and still is in tension with the Christian obligations to accept, to forgive and to restore. 

I am sure that like me, you will have seen on the TV news the recent conference in Jerusalem of the conservative parts of the Anglican Communion. 

And I am forced to wonder whether there is anything new in the Christian community, for that conference again showed that there are divisions in thought and practice.  Just like in Matthew’s community, there are those who believe that they alone have all the answers and those who might disagree with them need to think again, and come round to their way of thinking.  People who think and act in a certain way may seem unacceptable to others.

I am aware that if I set myself up as a judge of who is acceptable to God and who should be shut out of the church, I would definitely get it wrong.  In seeking to remove those who disagree with my understanding of God, I might harm and disturb the faithful people. 

But most importantly, the task of judging people, of deciding who is good and who is evil, is not ours; it is the task of Jesus Christ.  He alone has the understanding and the secrets of our hearts.

This doesn’t mean that we should be naïve and look at the world through rose-tinted glasses.  We cannot turn our backs on injustice and oppression, on exploitation and destruction.  Christian compassion calls us to look injustice in the face and recognize when others are abused and destroyed. 

It doesn’t mean avoiding challenge and confrontation.  It does mean that we should always act with compassion and with the hope of reconciliation.

God loves each of us unconditionally.  We can do nothing about that.  What we can do something about is how we respond to God‘s love.  We can do something about how we live our lives, so that we grow as good seed.  Jesus tells us that we do not need to fret about others, our responsibility is to ensure that our lives honour our God

AMEN