Sunday Sermon 19th July 2020

MATT 13:24-43     CCM 19/7/20

Today’s Gospel sees Jesus still in farming mode:

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 can infiltrate the crop. 

Jesus seems to be implying that it is sometimes difficult to tell what are weeds and what is wheat, and it is not until they are grown and ripe for harvest that the differences can be seen.

Since the foundation of the church, people have been trying to discern who amongst them will produce a good harvest and who will fail, who is wheat and who are the weeds. And there has also been a desire by some parts of the church to purge what they saw as the weeds from their community. 

We know that Jesus was criticized for associated with people who might be the weeds of society:   society’s outcasts, the sick, the poor, the homeless, the tax collectors and the prostitutes.  Definitely not likely to produce much of a harvest.  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 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.  Our ministry is to love and treat everyone exactly the same, as God’s beloved.

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.  But it does mean that we should always act with compassion and with the hope of reconciliation.

Can we achieve this in our own small way?  I think we can.  When I was priested, I received a lovely card from a priest who had been my dean of studies, and who knew me pretty well.

He wrote in the card Matthew 13:33” The kingdom of heaven is like yeast used by a woman making bread.  Even though she used a large amount of flour, the yeast permeated every part of the dough”.

I remember reading his card and thinking “what the heck does that mean?  What’s he talking about”?  I just had to follow this up.  Some Bible commentators suggest that the yeast or leaven is Satan, who can exert his small influence in large ways.  I wasn’t happy with that answer.

The answer I prefer is about the working of the kingdom in our present age. Firstly, the kingdom of God may have small beginnings, but it will increase. Given time, the yeast will spread through all the dough. In the same way, Jesus’ ministry started with twelve men in an obscure corner of Galilee, but it has spread throughout the world. The

Secondly, the kingdom of God exerts its influence from within, not from without. God first changes the heart of a person, and that internal change has external manifestations. The gospel influence is society works the same way: Christians act as agents of change, slowly transforming that culture from within. 

Think of William Wilberforce, and the abolition of slavery, Dr. Barnardo and his work with poor children, Mother Theresa and her work in India.

And the effect of the kingdom of God will be unmistakable: the whole world will benefit when the kingdom comes. Six hundred years before the birth of Christ, the prophet Habbakuk wrote “The earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea”

Lastly, although the kingdom of God works invisibly, its effect is evident to all. Yeast does its job slowly, secretly and silently, but no one can deny its effect on bread. The same is true of grace.

The nature of yeast is to grow and to change whatever it contacts. When we accept Christ, His grace grows in our hearts and changes us from the inside out.

So what does this change look like?  Well, I am going to leave my favourite theologian Richard Rohr to explain it to us.  This is from his essay entitled “To be Biblical.” 

“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. “

AMEN