(Seldom has the wonder of the Incarnation of Christ been expressed so beautifully as in this text, created in the era when the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds were being codified and mindful of similar theological affirmations, including that of Philippians 2. It is set here to a plainchant melody from the late Middle Ages, arranged for choir and congregation.)
CALL TO WORSHIP:
Leader: God’s mercies never end; they are new every morning. We gather in gratitude, that our faith may increase.
People: We will sing our songs of praise. We will proclaim the good news of the gospel.
Leader: By God’s grace, we are gathered for worship. In God’s love, we are no longer exiles and strangers.
ALL: We have been called together by the Holy Spirit. We will treasure this special time in sacred space.
(Each stanza of this 1746 enthronement text by Charles Wesley prepares for the final line of the refrain, based on Philippians 4:4. “Lord” is here a title of Christ, rather than a reference to the undivided Trinity. The late 18th-century tune by John Darwall – first used with Psalm 148 – captures the mood well.)
CALL TO CONFESSION:
If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the Truth is not in us. But if we confess our sins before God, we know that through Jesus Christ we already have forgiveness. Therefore, let us confess honestly and seek God’s forgiveness together.
PRAYER OF CONFESSION:
O God, we confess that we often face our world with cowardice. We would rather avoid danger than take a stand against injustice. We want to enjoy privileges not available to others. We wish to keep away from all the cries for help that bombard us.
The problems around us are overwhelming. The distress within us is staggering. Too often we lash out at others, rather than turning to you for guidance and strength. Now, in these moments together, we cry out for help. We want to live with a clear conscience and right spirit.
Remake us, loving God, in the image of Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray. Amen.
ASSURANCE OF PARDON:
Hear the good news!
Be still and trust, for God will act to transform us when we pray. Refrain from anger and forsake wrath, for they have no place in God’s Kingdom. Let us open ourselves instead to the grace, mercy, and peace God offers.
Friends, believe the good news of the Gospel. In Jesus Christ, we are forgiven!
(“From the wilderness of Sin the whole congregation of the Israelites journeyed by stages, as the LORD commanded. They camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. The people quarreled with Moses, and said, ‘Give us water to drink.’ Moses said to them, ‘Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the LORD?’ But the people thirsted there for water; and the people complained against Moses and said, ‘Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?’” Ex. 17:1-3)
(“Therefore, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed me, not only in my presence, but much more now in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” Phil. 2:12-13)
(“’What do you think? A man had two sons; he went to the first and said, “Son, go and work in the vineyard today.” He answered, “I will not”; but later he changed his mind and went. The father went to the second and said the same; and he answered, “I go, sir”; but he did not go. Which of the two did the will of his father?’ They said, ‘The first.’ Jesus said to them, ‘Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you….’” Matt. 21:28-31)
May the Mind of Christ My Savior (ST. LEONARDS)(Kate Barclay Wilkinson wrote this prayerful hymn text in 1912 in six stanzas, inspired by Philippians 2:5: “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.” Little is known about Wilkinson’s life: a member of the Church of England, she was involved in a ministry to girls in London and a participant in the ecumenical Keswick Convention Movement, whose motto was “All One in Christ Jesus”.)
PRAYER OF INTERCESSION:
God of mercy and healing, you who hear the cries of those in need, receive these petitions of your people that all who are troubled may know peace, comfort, and courage.
Individual Prayers of the People, concluding with:
Life-giving God, heal our lives, that we may acknowledge your wonderful deeds and offer you thanks from generation to generation through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
THE LORD’S PRAYER:
Our Father, who art in heaven, Hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.
(This 1870 text by Caroline Maria Noel may well be a hymn based on a hymn, for scholars say that the passage behind it – Philippians 2:5-11 – though not in the style of Greek poetry, shows traits of a communal creedal statement capable of being sung. It is set here to one of composer Ralph Vaughan Williams’ most sonorous tunes.)
CHARGE AND BENEDICTION:
Let us go out into the world in peace, returning no one evil for evil, but overcoming evil with good.
And may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with us all, both now and forever. Amen.
(This text was written by American Baptist Lydia Baxter in 1870, only 4 years before her death. Though an invalid and bed-ridden for much of her adult life, Baxter was an ardent student of the Bible and a source of strength and cheer to all who knew her. She would tell her friends,“I have a very special armor. I have the name of Jesus. When the tempter tries to make me blue or despondent, I mention the name of Jesus, and he can’t get through to me anymore.”)
(“From the wilderness of Sin the whole congregation of the Israelites journeyed by stages, as the LORD commanded. They camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. The people quarreled with Moses, and said, ‘Give us water to drink.’ Moses said to them, ‘Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the LORD?’ But the people thirsted there for water; and the people complained against Moses and said, ‘Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?’” Ex. 17:1-3)
(“Therefore, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed me, not only in my presence, but much more now in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” Phil. 2:12-13)
(“’What do you think? A man had two sons; he went to the first and said, “Son, go and work in the vineyard today.” He answered, “I will not”; but later he changed his mind and went. The father went to the second and said the same; and he answered, “I go, sir”; but he did not go. Which of the two did the will of his father?’ They said, ‘The first.’ Jesus said to them, ‘Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you….’” Matt. 21:28-31)
The Apostle Paul has a talent for painting beautiful pictures of how our Christian lives ought to work . . . but how they too seldom do work out, in practice.
Today’s Philippians passage is a perfect example.
Remember, this is a letter that Paul seems to have written in a rare good mood, to a church he’d helped to found which was actually doing a lot of good work and making him feel like a proud papa. The Church at Philippi had been a “go-getter” congregation from the start, with the formidable businesswoman Lydia responding to Paul’s preaching in Acts 16 by insisting that Paul and his co-worker come to her house and that her entire household, including all her employees, be baptized. Within days, apparently, there was a thriving new church meeting in Lydia’s house and ready to support Paul’s continuing ministry in any way they could. So Paul is writing to some of his favorite people, and going out of his way to praise them for what they’re doing right.
When he gets around to handing out some constructive criticism to them – as he inevitably does! – his exhortation to improvement is phrased almost gently, and made as simple and nonthreatening as Paul can manage. It’s almost his version of “Discipleship for Dummies”, or something of the sort, intended to be extremely ‘user-friendly’ and make far more use of the carrot than the stick.
Let’s listen again to what he’s telling the Philippians. He starts out with an “If” that he knows everybody will be able to agree with, to say “yes” to (like a good salesman, who knows that if he can get the customer to say “yes” to whatever he says first, then the sale is halfway made). “IF there is any encouragement in Christ…” – which, of course, there IS (lots of it, in fact!). “IF there is any consolation from love…” – and who could say there is NOT? “IF there is any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy…”
IF any of these things are true, he says (and, of course, they are abundantly true), THEN it should be possible for the Philippian Christians (and for us) to do the following – “Make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being of full accord and of one mind.”
Sure, Paul. Christians all getting along with one another, agreeing together about everything in the church? What could be easier?
Except, of course, it doesn’t seem to be easy at all. The more you care about your faith, your church, your beliefs, and the more of yourself you invest into your church, the harder it is to step back, sometimes – the harder it is to go along with what other members of the church want to do, when you feel so very strongly that it should be done differently, or even that God would want it to be done differently.
This is already a tall order, a fairly difficult homework assignment, but Paul doesn’t stop there. Oh, no! He goes on. IF any of these things are true, THEN we should “do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit,” but in humility regard others as better than ourselves. Each of us should look not to our own interests first, but to the interests of others, putting the good of others ahead of what would benefit or please us.
And in case we should be wondering why we should do all of this, again, Paul tells us, putting it into the simplest possible terms: We should do this, because this is the same mind that was in Jesus Christ.
If there is ANY encouragement, consolation, sharing, compassion, and sympathy, Paul says, then we should live this kind of unselfish, humble, loving life together. And Paul says this, knowing that we – like the Philippians – will have to admit that yes, there is a LOT of this kind of good stuff available to us through our faith in Christ. So how much more, then, should we be demonstrating this Christ-like mind!
Except that, for the most part, we aren’t demonstrating a Christ-like way of living together, or anything even close to it. And neither were the Philippians, as good as they were and as proud of them as Paul was.
So, now don’t we feel guilty? If there was the least amount of any of these excellent qualities available to us in Christ, we should be able to live together in selfless unity, Paul seems to be saying. And, instead, even with Christ supplying all this support and encouragement, we still quarrel and hate and too often put our own interests first. Wow. God must really despise us, huh?
But that’s not the point at all, as Jesus tells us in the reading from Matthew today: it’s not whatever dumb, stupid, selfish things we’ve done or said or decided to do in the past that count, but whether we’re willing to grow beyond them, to change our attitudes and start trying to do better now. Our salvation is not a broad, smooth, ready-made interstate highway down which we can sail at top speed. Rather, our salvation is more like a road construction job: slow, bumpy, hazardous in places – and seeming to go on forever with no visible signs of improvement sometimes! – but getting better, . . . with God’s help and a lot of patience.
We’re probably ALL a long way from having the mind of Christ, at this point. If we have any doubt about the contrast between our mind-set and Christ’s, Paul – who’s still trying to make things as simple as possible for the Philippians and for us – uses the words of one of the earliest Christian hymns (words that must’ve been already as well-known to the Philippian Christians as the words to “Amazing Grace” are to us) in order to spell it out. Just look at the description of Christ’s love, humility, obedience, and trust in God that is found in this ancient hymn which Paul quotes in verses 6-11: being equal and one with God, Christ still was willing to EMPTY himself, taking on the form of a slave — taking on HUMAN form, in other words.
If you’re anything like me, you probably try not to have ANY emptiness in your life, anywhere. No empty cupboards, no empty rooms, no empty time, and certainly very little emptiness in your prayer life (because if I stop filling up my prayer time with MY words and my thoughts, God might actually speak to me and tell me something I don’t want to hear!). If I leave any empty space ANYWHERE in my life, in fact, I feel like I’ll lose control over that space, over that time, and who knows WHAT might fill up that time and space, if I don’t fill it up first? I’m too full of my own wants and needs and vanities and stresses – far too full to be able to tolerate any empty time in prayer or any empty space in my life.
Yet Christ emptied himself COMPLETELY, this ancient hymn declares, and demonstrates the ultimate in vulnerability, going so far as to be born as a human infant – surely, one of the most helpless and vulnerable creatures on earth! And then, having already lowered himself to our level, Christ humbled himself even by human standards, putting aside all selfish concerns and even basic self-preservation, becoming obedient to the point of death – even the most grisly, humiliating, agonizing manner of execution then known.
When called upon to put aside MY own pride and self-interest and comfort in order to take on some task requiring humility and selflessness, my obedience to God tends to fly out the window. Doesn’t yours? Like the first son in Christ’s parable in Matthew today, my initial reaction when being told by God to go and do is to say, “Heck, no! I won’t go! I won’t do THAT! You ask too much, God. Find someone else.”
But the good news for today is that these decisions of ours to say “No!” to God – “No!” to obedience and humility and putting the good of others ahead of our own interests – do not have to be irrevocable. We don’t have to stay bound for all eternity to those wrong decisions, those bad choices we make. Rather, as Paul tells us, we are called to “work out our own salvation, with fear and trembling” – in other words, with reasonable caution and humility – for it is God who is at work in us, enabling us both to WILL and to WORK for God’s good pleasure. God is at work in us, enabling us to change our minds, if we want to follow the promptings of our heart and soul instead. God is willing to help us put aside our stubborn pride and go out and do what we should have been doing all along. Because God would rather have people who are struggling, with many set-backs along the way – struggling to do better than we said we would (or thought we could) yesterday, or earlier today. God would rather have imperfect people who know that they still have a lot of work to do, a lot of potholes to fill in and bridges to repair, than people who think they’ve already got it made (like the chief priests and elders who confront Jesus in the temple) because they’ve said all the right WORDS and know all the right answers, even though they’re not carrying through on the things they’ve promised to do in church each Sunday. Not carrying through on the promises made at their baptism or confirmation, or in their wedding vows . . . or simply in the words of the Lord’s Prayer, when we make implied promises to God, saying things like, “Thy will be done.”
You know, we shouldn’t feeltoobad that we still have so much work to do in our lives, that we’re still so far from the example set by our Lord Jesus Christ. When I want to feel a little bit better about myself and my response to God’s mercy and grace, I often re-read portions of the book of Exodus, where time after time after time the recently freed Israelites, who have seen God’s miracles up close and personal and have been saved by God over and over again, still doubt and rebel and accuse God and Moses of having lured them out into the desert simply in order to let them perish. Again and again the people of Israel, who are being led to the Promised Land, complain that they’re not getting anywhere, or that the path is too uncomfortable. Like small children on a long car trip, they barely wait for the car to pull out of their own driveway before they start whining, “Are we THERE yet?”
Well, no, we’re NOT “there” yet – we’re not yet at our ultimate destination, we’ve not yet become the people God has called us to be. But God is working with us and in us, to enable us to improve on yesterday’s good choices and repent from yesterday’s mistakes. Just as God is with our brothers and sisters all around the world, who do equally stupid things and stand equally in need of grace and repentance and forgiveness. And through Jesus Christ, who was raised from the dead and exalted over everything in Creation, God invites us to draw nearer to the goal, to heal instead of hurt, help instead of harm, and joyfully obey the God who loves us and saves us and never, ever gives up on us.
(Shaped by its traditional Jewish tune, this selection of English stanzas conveys the essence of the Yigdal, a canticle based on a medieval Hebrew statement of faith about the nature of God and often used in synagogue worship, alternately chanted by cantor and congregation. The hymn is sung here by the choir of Trinity College, Oxford.)
CALL TO WORSHIP:
Leader: O give thanks to the Lord; call on God’s name.
People: Make God’s deeds known among the peoples.
Leader: Sing to God, sing praises to the Lord; tell of all his wonderful works.
People: Make God’s deeds known among the peoples. We glory in God’s holy name, and our hearts rejoice when we seek the Lord.
Leader: Seek the Lord and his strength, and remember the wonderful works God has done.
All: We seek God’s presence continually and give thanks for all that God has done in our world! Let us come into God’s presence with joy.
(The original text of this hymn was written in Welsh by William Williams, a circuit-riding preacher, in 1745, and given the original title, “A prayer for strength to go through the wilderness of the world.” It has since been translated in seventy-five languages. It did not gain its popular tune until the early 20th century, when John Hughes composed ‘Cwm Rhondda’. In both its original text and in English translation, it is a stirring hymn of pilgrimage filled with vivid imagery from Hebrew scripture, including today’s passage from Exodus 14.)
CALL TO CONFESSION:
If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the Truth is not in us. But if we confess our sins before God, we know that through Jesus Christ we already have forgiveness. Therefore, let us confess honestly and seek God’s forgiveness together.
PRAYER OF CONFESSION:
Gracious God, Creator and Redeemer, in reverence we bow before you, giving thanks for your love and seeking your blessings.
Yet, we confess that we have hoarded more than our share of the world’s bounty; that in silence we have consented to the oppression of our sisters and brothers; that we have failed to witness, by word and action, to the freeing truth of Jesus Christ.
In Christ’s name, forgive us and grant us a new birth of spirit, that we may be your instruments of oneness and joy, of healing and peace. Amen.
ASSURANCE OF PARDON:
Hear the good news!
Who is in a position to condemn us? Only Christ, and Christ died for us, Christ rose for us, Christ reigns in power for us, and Christ prays for us. If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation. The old has passed away, and everything has become fresh and new.
Friends, believe the good news of the Gospel. In Jesus Christ, we are forgiven!
(‘The angel of God who was going before the Israelite army moved and went behind them; and the pillar of cloud moved from in front of them and took its place behind them. It came between the army of Egypt and the army of Israel. And so the cloud was there with the darkness, and it lit up the night; one did not come near the other all night.’ Ex. 14:19-20)
(‘We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s. For to this end Christ died and lived again, so that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living. Why do you pass judgment on your brother or sister? Or you, why do you despise your brother or sister? For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God.’ Rom 14:7-10)
(‘“Then his lord summoned him and said to him, ‘You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?’ And in anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt. So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”’ Matt. 18:32-35)
The Prayer of St. Francis (MAKE ME A CHANNEL OF YOUR PEACE) (Though popular opinion credits this prayer to Francis of Assisi, the earliest known printing was in a French religious magazine in 1912. Yet that gentle saint’s spirit seems evident in these words, a quality that has spurred many paraphrases and musical settings such as this one, written and composed by South African born musician and journalist Sebastian Temple in 1967.)
PRAYER OF INTERCESSION:
God of mercy and healing, you who hear the cries of those in need, receive these petitions of your people that all who are troubled may know peace, comfort, and courage.
Individual Prayers of the People, concluding with:
Life-giving God, heal our lives, that we may acknowledge your wonderful deeds and offer you thanks from generation to generation through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
THE LORD’S PRAYER:
Our Father, who art in heaven, Hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.
(This hymn began as an orally-transmitted stanza reflecting on part of today’s epistle reading from Paul – Romans 14:7–8 – and was expanded in 1983 by a Spanish-language hymnal committee to offer additional examples of the many dimensions of life, thereby strengthening the recurring affirmation that we belong to God through them all. In this anthem version, words from Paul’s letter to the Philippians also feature prominently.)
CHARGE AND BENEDICTION:
Let us go out into the world in peace, returning no one evil for evil, but overcoming evil with good.
And may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with us all, both now and forever. Amen.
(Written for an easy-to-sing folk melody familiar in England as well as Wales, this 1939 text by American composer Katherine K. Davis – perhaps most famous for her carol “The Little Drummer Boy” – bears many resemblances to both Psalm 148 and the traditional canticle Benedicite, omnia opera Domini: ‘Bless the Lord, all you works of the Lord’. It is sung here a capella by the Lebanon County Youth Chorus.)
(‘The angel of God who was going before the Israelite army moved and went behind them; and the pillar of cloud moved from in front of them and took its place behind them. It came between the army of Egypt and the army of Israel. And so the cloud was there with the darkness, and it lit up the night; one did not come near the other all night.’ Ex. 14:19-20)
(‘We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s. For to this end Christ died and lived again, so that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living. Why do you pass judgment on your brother or sister? Or you, why do you despise your brother or sister? For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God.’ Rom 14:7-10)
(‘“Then his lord summoned him and said to him, ‘You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?’ And in anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt. So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”’ Matt. 18:32-35)
The Unforgiving Servant – Matthew 18:21-35
The thing that has always impressed me in this parable from the Gospel of Matthew is the incredible stupidity of the servant who is forgiven his huge debt.
I mean, think about it! The man’s behavior is outrageous, almost beyond belief, isn’t it? Having been forgiven a debt equivalent to something like ten million dollars, he turns around and throws a fellow servant in jail for a debt more on the order of a mere hundred dollars. Naturally, word of his ungenerous behavior gets back to the one who had forgiven him, who is justifiably angered by it.
But why would this servant have acted so? Much to his surprise, he’d just been forgiven a debt so huge that there was no way he could ever have paid it back. According to my study notes, a single talent was worth more than fifteen years’ wages for a laborer in those days, and he owed ten thousand talents. This debt must’ve been like a huge rock hanging over his head for a long time, knowing that the day of reckoning would come and he would be unable to repay it. It would have kept him from being able to get to sleep at night and been the first thing he thought of when waking in the morning – always with a sense of dread and shame.
This indebted servant was in a position something like the Israelites in today’s lesson from Exodus 14, caught between a rock and a hard place – facing a choice between drowning in the Sea, on one side, or being killed and enslaved again by Pharaoh’s army, on the other side. Like the Israelites at the beginning of that reading, he must’ve believed there was no way out for him. His possessions, his family, his whole life would be forfeit, and even then the debt would probably still be far short of full payment.
Now, the dread moment had come, but the person to whom he owed the debt had gone far beyond the mercy he’d asked for and had simply forgiven the whole debt outright — had canceled it. Like the Israelites, walking dry-shod through the sea and then seeing all that threatened them engulfed and swept away by the returning waters, he had been suddenly, even miraculously saved and liberated.
You would think that his world would suddenly have become a wonderful place in which to live, just from the sheer relief of it. After all, in the next passage after the crossing of the sea in the Old Testament, in Exodus chapter 15, Moses and Miriam lead the Israelites in singing for joy, praising God for their miraculous deliverance. You would think that the forgiven debtor would’ve felt like that. The sun would’ve seemed brighter, the sky bluer, and everything and everyone around him lovelier than ever before, simply because just when he had been about to lose everything, his life and his freedom had been given back to him, with no strings attached. You would think that his step would’ve been light, with the terrible burden of his debt so suddenly removed, and his heart full of thanks and good-will. You might expect him, upon meeting this other servant who owed him only a hundred days’ wages, to forgive that debt on the spot, wanting to share the joy that he was experiencing.
But, no. Instead, he grabs his poor debtor by the throat, demands immediate payment, and refuses to even grant him more time to pay, preferring to throw his fellow servant into debtors’ prison — a no-win situation for both of them, since the man couldn’t possibly earn enough money to pay his debt while stuck in prison.
So, why on earth would the forgiven debtor act this way? What was going through his heart and mind?
Well, I suppose it could be that this person was just an out-and-out scoundrel, grasping and squeezing and out for everything he could get from the people he met — someone without an ounce of goodness or compassion in himself, but who still knew how to play on the compassion of others. Maybe he was a sociopath, one of those people convinced that the world and its people exist only to be their playthings.
Maybe.
But I don’t think so.
You see, in order for the parable to have real meaning to both the disciples and us, the forgiven debtor had to be an average person, someone like us in many ways. That’s because Jesus intended for each of us to be able to identify with the forgiven debtor, to recognize something of ourselves when we look at this person.
And this normal, average person, who’s not all that different from you or me, acted this way in the parable for one reason: he never wanted to be forgiven in the first place.
If we look back to the beginning of the parable, in Matthew 18:26, we see that this servant begs his lord only to “Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.” Impossibly huge as the debt was, he still cherished the vain, false hope that he could somehow pay it off, if he just had enough time.
Like many a person who becomes addicted to drugs or alcohol or gambling, or other harmful behaviors, and who is not yet ready to admit the reality of his terrible situation, this servant had convinced himself that he was still in control, that he could handle all his problems himself, without help, if he just had a little more time, if he could put off the day of reckoning for a little longer. He was deep in denial, unwilling to admit how powerless he was or how completely messed up his life had become.
Therefore, the king’s act of mercy in forgiving the debt, instead of just giving him more time to fruitlessly try to make good on it, didn’t make him feel grateful or joyful (as we would expect), because it attacked him at his most vulnerable point: his mental picture of himself as independent and self-sufficient. It made him feel small. It made him feel like he was being treated like a child, or someone who couldn’t pay his own way. It made him feel like some powerless, inept person, telling him that the king didn’t really believe he could pay it off. That was a picture of himself that he wasn’t prepared to live with, that he couldn’t tolerate.
Deep down, this person couldn’t accept forgiveness, so of course he couldn’t forgive anyone else. He couldn’t accept the spirit in which he’d been forgiven—a spirit of mercy and compassion. He was stuck in his preoccupation with owing and payment, even though he should have been able to see that his insistence on paying back (or being paid back) every last penny only leads to a situation in which everybody loses. Perhaps he even hoped to make himself feel better, to erase the memory of his own weakness and indebtedness, by making a ‘Federal case’ against the first person he saw who owed him something, however small that debt might be.
Knowingly and unknowingly, we all sin constantly; this we do know. We bring harm to ourselves, to other people, to the world around us, and we turn away from God’s love. It’s a fact for human beings. But it’s not the way we were meant to live, and — deep down — we also know that it’s wrong, that we’re building up a load of debt to God that we can never repay by our own efforts and merit.
But, in Jesus Christ, God forgives all our debts. Our slates are cleaned when we accept Christ into our hearts, and they are cleaned again each time we ask God to forgive us in Christ’s name. We have that promise. Yet, we have trouble accepting that forgiveness. Sometimes, we would prefer to think that we don’t need forgiveness, really, and that given enough time we could find a way to make up for everything we’ve ever done that was wrong or hurtful.
What we sometimes overlook is that God’s forgiveness is not intended to diminish us, to make us feel small and worthless, or rub our noses in the fact that we are sinners — as though we were young puppies prone to having ‘accidents’ on the carpet, slow to be house-broken. Rather, God forgives us in order to give us life and set us free. God knows our limitations and faults, and God chooses to love and accept us, anyway. Out of love for us, God chooses to forgive and forgive, and forgive again.
Maybe you had times as a child or teen, as I did, when you knew you’d done something very wrong, intentionally or unintentionally – times when you became aware that, in some way, you had fallen far short of the expectations that your parents or teachers had for you. I can remember a particular weekend when I was sure my world was going to come to an end on Monday morning. You see, on Friday, my 7th-grade English teacher had discovered that I had not yet done a major project that I’d had weeks to work on, and she had become very angry with me. But, being short of time after class, and because I had promptly burst into tears, she had told me— grimly! —that we would discuss this on Monday. It seems silly, perhaps, now, as I look back on that time as an adult. But back then, I spent the whole weekend in a black cloud of depression, certain that on Monday morning my world would end. I expected that I would be thoroughly balled out, my self-esteem ripped to shreds, and my favorite teacher — the one person in my life who seemed to think well of me, right then, at a really painful period in my young life — would never like me or trust me again. But when Monday morning came, the teacher accepted my apology and didn’t scold me at all. She accepted the fact that I had not done what I knew that I could have and should have done, and she let me know that she still cared about me. My whole world opened up. The sun could shine again, I could laugh again.
That’s just a small, small taste of what God’s forgiveness feels like, when we realize that God has truly forgiven us and granted us salvation. It’s like being pardoned from a death sentence for a capital crime, or learning that your terminal illness has gone into remission. Nothing else seems as important — no minor or major grievances — because nothing else is as important to you as having your life and your freedom back.
The faith that allows us to forgive, freely and wholeheartedly, is simply this: the sure and certain knowledge that God has given us life eternal and freedom from our burden of sin, and that nothing else matters quite as much. With that faith, with that knowledge, we can forgive ourselves, and we can forgive others who sin against us — even those who sin greatly against us. Because not to forgive would be to sell ourselves back into slavery, to live our lives as slaves to our grievances.
I don’t know about each one of you, but in spite of the fact that I know myself to be forgiven and freed by God, I find myself holding onto my grievances against others as if they were something precious and important. I know they’re not. I get no pleasure or profit from them; they only cause me pain. But still I hang onto the reasons I have to be angry at others or to resent others or to feel cheated or mistreated, and I count those ‘debts’ over and over, and hoard them as if they were some treasure of immense value to me.
I think people hang onto their grievances because—like the forgiven debtor who turns around and throws his debtor into prison—we’re trying to prove to ourselves that we’re not so bad, that we’re not really debtors and don’t really need much forgiveness, when you come right down to it. We’re trying to prove to God that we’re much more sinned-against than sinning—as if to say, “I may not be perfect, Lord, but did you see what those people did to me? They’re much worse than I am!”
But the truth is that holding on to these grievances is just too expensive. It costs too much. We can’t afford not to forgive, because it costs us the freedom and the sense of peace that God wants us to have, that Christ died for us to have, and that we receive through God’s love and forgiveness of our sins.
I remember a friend from my first year of seminary (37 years ago) telling me about how his family came to discover this. How they decided to forgive and live. When his mother was pregnant with his elder sister, she was extremely ill, but her doctor just kept saying there was nothing wrong with her. When she finally went to see another doctor, she was found to be suffering from severe anemia, as well as other problems that threatened her own life and that of her child, and which should have been readily detected by her own doctor months ago. As a result of this pre-natal malpractice, her daughter was born severely handicapped. My friend’s older sister would require constant physical therapy and special care, she would never be able to walk or talk, or take care of herself in any way. But the parents decided not to prosecute the doctor who had injured them so. They decided that they needed all their energy in order to be loving parents and to make the best life they could for their daughter. They needed to be free of hatred, anger, or revenge. They needed to forgive that doctor, in order to live and love their daughter to the best of their ability.
In the Romans passage today, Paul points out that it’s not our business to judge each other and to punish the wicked. Christ will be judge of us all. The goal of our human legal system and of discipline within the church should be not to punish, but rather to protect other people, and – whenever possible – to teach and to rehabilitate the wrong-doers, so that they can be restored to fellowship with others someday.
But having the faith to forgive, the faith to surrender our desire to hurt those who hurt us, has never been easy, not even for the strongest of Christians. We can even see this in the Gospel passage.
Many scholars believe that the parable, as Jesus told it, originally ended with the king’s question to the forgiven debtor in Matthew 18:32, “Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?” These scholars suggest that perhaps the writer of Matthew, who has repeatedly demonstrated a concern for seeing that the wicked get what’s coming to them, added the last part, about the wicked debtor being then un-forgiven and handed over to the torturers until he should pay off his impossible debt. The implication would be that even Matthew (who, as a former tax-collector, must have known first-hand the power of God’s forgiveness through Christ) – even he sometimes wanted God’s forgiveness to have some limits, and for sinners to be punished.
But the good news that Christ brings to each one of us through his death on the cross is that God’s forgiveness hasnolimits. We have been and are being forgiven, no matter what the extent of our sins, if we are truly sorry and seek to do better. And we cannot afford not to forgive others. God has given us freedom and eternal life, and these gifts did not come cheap — we know this every time we look at the cross. We can see the terrible price that Christ paid in order to give us these gifts. Therefore, we cannot afford to sell our lives and freedom simply in order to hold onto our grievances and let them run our lives.
Each one of us has received the faith to forgive as a gift of God’s love. So we need to use that gift, to forgive and live.
(Sometimes during His earthly ministry, Jesus would withdraw to a secluded place to pray, as in Mark 1:35, Luke 5:16, etc.. The early church followed Christ’s practice of regular prayer, and Paul encouraged its continuance in some of his letters. This hymn is an expression of the joy that can come when believers, individually and corporately, pray regularly.)
CALL TO WORSHIP:
Leader:Come before God, asking what you will, and God will cover your needs.
People: How can we ask the Ruler of the universe to give attention to our small problems?
Leader: God knows and values you; nothing is too great, too small, or too unlovely for God’s attention.
All: We bring all that we have and all that we are to the throne of grace, trusting God to use it for good.
(This hymn was generated by two 19th-century American centennial celebrations: the 1876 words were to honor the Declaration of Independence and the 1892 music to celebrate the adoption of the United States Constitution. Despite these origins, no specific nation is mentioned in this hymn of praise and prayer for peace.)
CALL TO CONFESSION:
If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the Truth is not in us. But if we confess our sins before God, we know that through Jesus Christ we already have forgiveness. Therefore, let us confess honestly and seek God’s forgiveness together.
PRAYER OF CONFESSION:
O Lord God, we have been so busy with our own pursuits that we have not noticed the treasure hidden in our midst. We have not learned to value things by your standards, rather than the world’s. We do not see lasting worth in the old we discard, nor have we discovered the promise of much that is new.
Forgive us, widen our vision, and grant us fresh opportunities to serve your Kingdom, in Jesus’ name. Amen.
ASSURANCE OF PARDON:
Hear the good news!
We do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words. Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, who loved us and gave himself for us.
Friends, believe the good news of the Gospel. In Jesus Christ, we are forgiven!
(“Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? … For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Rom. 8:35, 38-39)
(“…’Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.’” Matt. 13:52)
(The author and composer Karen Lafferty wrote the first stanza and folk-style tune after attending a Bible study on Matthew 6:33 in 1971. The later stanzas, based respectively on Matthew 7:7 and Matthew 4:4 emerged anonymously. Such meditative singing of scripture is an important form of sung prayer. In this version, the simple tune has been beautifully interwoven with an orchestral performance of Pachelbel’s “Canon in D”.)
PRAYER OF INTERCESSION:
God of mercy and healing, you who hear the cries of those in need, receive these petitions of your people that all who are troubled may know peace, comfort, and courage.
Individual Prayers of the People, concluding with:
Life-giving God, heal our lives, that we may acknowledge your wonderful deeds and offer you thanks from generation to generation through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
THE LORD’S PRAYER:
Our Father, who art in heaven, Hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.
(Franz Liszt used this folk melody for a “Crusaders’ March” in his 1862 oratorio ‘The Legend of St. Elizabeth’, but this hymn had nothing to do with the Crusades. No record of the anonymous German text exists before the middle of the 17th century or of the Silesian folk melody before the first half of the 19th century. The text typically appears with four stanzas, which are all on the theme of the beauty of creation and the greater beauty and worth of Christ, the Savior.)
CHARGE AND BENEDICTION:
Let us go out into the world in peace, returning no one evil for evil, but overcoming evil with good.
And may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with us all, both now and forever. Amen.
(The original text of this hymn was written in Welsh by William Williams, a circuit-riding preacher, in 1745, and given the title, “A prayer for strength to go through the wilderness of the world.” It has since been translated in seventy-five languages. It did not gain its popular tune until the early 20th century, when John Hughes composed ‘Cwm Rhondda’. In both its original text and in English translation, it is a stirring hymn of pilgrimage filled with vivid imagery from Hebrew scripture. Here, an English congregation concludes the singing of this hymn with a final chorus in Welsh.)
(“Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? … For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Rom. 8:35, 38-39)
(“…’Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.’” Matt. 13:52)
Today’s Gospel reading seems like sort of a “Grab Bag” of parables, doesn’t it? Where the previous two Sundays’ readings from Matthew 13 each focused on a single, lengthier parable and its allegorical interpretation (first the Parable of the Sower, then the Parable of the Weeds and the Wheat), today’s selection can make it feel as if we’re jumping from one ‘mini-parable’ to another, one after the other, with little time to focus on the meaning.
To me, it almost seems as though Jesus is patterning this part of his message to his followers on the “scatter-shot” approach of the Sower in Matthew 13:3-9, flinging the precious seed of these parables of the Kingdom of Heaven hither and yon, one after the other, in the hope that if one image doesn’t speak to you, then perhaps the next one WILL reach you and take root in your heart and mind, growing into something wonderful in your life.
Above all, these parables suggest to me that God can and does use EVERYTHING in our lives to reach us, and to teach us, and to build up the foundations of God’s kingdom here on earth. Nothing is lost, nothing is wasted, and nothing is too small or too hidden or too old or too new to be used by God in bringing us closer to salvation.
Let’s look at these parables a bit more closely. To begin with, we have two “parables of the unlikely”: the parables of the mustard seed and the yeast.
Now, the mustard in this parable isn’t unlikely so much because of the contrast between the small size of the seed and the ‘large shrub’ it turns into, but rather because it’s not something you would WANT to sow in your fields. Like the bad seed some enemy planted in the farmer’s field in last week’s parable, that mustard plant in today’s parable was considered a WEED in Jesus’ day. (Picture something more like the pernicious garlic mustard weed that we all know and hate here in Wisconsin, rather than a useful source of spice and condiments.) The mustard plant is another one of the ‘shock’ images that Jesus sometimes throws out to grab our attention and get us to think differently. It’s not a symbol of something majestic or wondrous, but of something UNWANTED. It’s considered a WASTE of good soil if it’s growing in your field.
And then there’s the yeast that a woman adds to her flour to make bread. That’s not unwanted, but it IS disgusting. Remember, there are no tidy packages of ‘Active Dry Yeast’ here. The yeast in Jesus’ day is a live colony of micro-organisms, a gooey mess of gas-producing glopthat’s more often used as a symbol of something undesirable, as when Jesus warns his disciples to ‘beware of the yeast’ of the Pharisees and other bad influences (Matthew 16:6; Mark 8:15; Luke 12:1).
Yet, both the mustard seed and the yeast convey Jesus’ meaning, that what WE may think is useless or ugly or a wrong turn in our life can actually be the start of something wonderful. It can become the means by which the Kingdom of Heaven grows in us and through us and spreads to others who need the Good News just as much as we do.
Even something as appalling and SCANDALOUS as the cross on which Christ died can become the ‘ladder of mercy’ by which we are raised from death and despair and given everlasting life (as the “Jacob’s Ladder” Christmas carol used in last week’s online worship service proclaimed).
Then, there are the “parables of worth”: the treasure in the field and the pearl of great price, both of which are so amazing that they’re worth giving up everything else you’ve ever earned or accumulated in life.
On the one hand, we might think that this reflects badly on the state of your life and accomplishments up until the point when you stumble across that hidden treasure in a field or find that one pearl of great price. I mean, if you can so eagerly and easily give it all up in order to purchase this one, perfect thing, then surely you must not have had much of real worth in your life to start with, huh? What a waste your life must’ve been before then!
But on the other hand, if the person in the parable had wasted their life previously, then how could they have raised the funds needed to purchase that field or that pearl, even if they gave up all that they had? Whatever twists or turns their lives had taken, whatever they’d studied, whatever jobs they’d worked at, whatever skills they’d gained through both good and bad experience, were NOT WASTED, if they allowed the people in the parables to both recognize a treasure in a field or a pearl when they came across it AND be able to put up the collateral to have it for their own.
In Paul’s letter to the Philippians, he speaks briefly of his accomplishments before he became a believer in Christ, his righteousness and zeal, his education and authority. These are not bad things, and Paul certainly makes use of his biblical scholarship and legal knowledge in his work as an apostle. Yet Paul writes that in the light of the value of Christ, nothing of what he used to hold dear or pride himself on seems to matter: “Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith.” (Philippians 3:7-9)
Finally, we come to the “parables of the mixed bag”: the parable of the good and bad fish, and the parable of the householder whose treasury is a mix of old and new.
Though Matthew seems awfully fond of referring to the punishment of the wicked and unworthy in the last judgment, with their weeping and gnashing of teeth, I’d suggest that we consider the mixed catch of fish as another of those “Don’t judge yourself or others too soon!” messages. Just as the Sower apparently can’t tell what ground is good and fertile until the harvest time, when the seed that fell on good ground produces in remarkable abundance, and just as the Master of the field doesn’t think his servants can tell the weeds from the wheat plants until it’s time to harvest the grain and dispose of the rest, so also the whole net full of fish is brought to shore, and only then are the ‘good’ fish sorted out for market and the ‘bad’ thrown away. The fishermen don’t start throwing fish out of their net in mid-catch or trying to re-cast the net to only take in the fish they prefer. They wait until they’re all ashore, to sit down and judge and divide. The worth of the ‘fish’ in the net (us) will be decided at the end, by God, and not by any of us here on earth deciding what our own lives (or the lives of others) are worth, when we’re not done living yet.
As for the scribe who has been trained for the kingdom, whom Jesus compares to a householder who brings out treasures both new and old, I think that refers to all of us, bringing the ‘wealth’ of our lives – including the decisions that may in hindsight have been ‘wrong turns’ or ‘dead ends’, or the hopes and dreams that weren’t fulfilled, the good and the bad and the unlikely and the lovely and the ugly – to serve God’s kingdom, to fulfill our mission and calling here on earth.
There is no waste, there is no life that doesn’t have something unique and precious to offer in God’s service. Everything we have done and learned and suffered had brought us to this point, has helped us to become who we are and given us tools and treasures we can use to build up one another, rather than tear down or reject.
As Paul says in today’s passage from his letter to the Romans, we don’t even “know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words” (Romans 8:26) and “all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose” (8:28). We can’t be certain of much in this life, but the grace of God – which even ‘fixes’ our prayers for us and brings good out of things we thought were bad or wasted – IS FOR CERTAIN. “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, 39 nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:38-39)
(This anonymous Christmas carol set to an English folk melody was first published in England in a collection of old and new carols in 1871 with the title ‘Jacob’s Ladder’, but the words date back at least a century earlier. Its Christmas associations come from its strongly Christological interpretation of Jacob’s vision in Genesis 28.)
CALL TO WORSHIP:
Leader:Welcome, strangers and sojourners, to God’s realm, where there are no aliens or unwanted visitors.
People: When we are with Christ, we know we belong and our lives have a sense of direction.
Leader: All who are led by the Spirit are God’s children, heirs through Christ of life with God.
People: Christ, who was raised from the dead, dwells in us and enlivens our spirits.
All: When we are in Christ, we still live in the world but we are no longer limited by its narrow understanding of life. Let us worship God together.
(Shaped by its traditional Jewish tune, this selection of English stanzas conveys the essence of the Yigdal, a canticle based on a medieval Hebrew statement of faith about the nature of God and often used in synagogue worship, alternately chanted by cantor and congregation. The hymn is sung here by the choir of Trinity College, Oxford.)
CALL TO CONFESSION:
If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the Truth is not in us. But if we confess our sins before God, we know that through Jesus Christ we already have forgiveness. Therefore, let us confess honestly and seek God’s forgiveness together.
PRAYER OF CONFESSION:
O God of dream ladders and burning bushes, we have chosen to live with dulled eyes and spirits, forgetting your gifts and ignoring your challenges. In our insensitivity we fail to realize that you are in this place, speaking to us, calling us to repentance and a new hope.
We do not ask for escape from life’s difficulties, but for awareness and courage to seek you in the stony places of our lives and to use our gifts in your service. Forgive us, and help us today to produce fruits of the Spirit, in Jesus’ name. Amen.
ASSURANCE OF PARDON:
Hear the good news!
God does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities. As far as the east is from the west, so far does God remove our transgressions from us. Forgiveness and healing are God’s gifts to the truly contrite who enter into God’s presence. We hope in what we have not seen and trust in the promises of Christ.
Friends, believe the good news of the Gospel. In Jesus Christ, we are forgiven!
(“’…Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.’ Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, ‘Surely the LORD is in this place—and I did not know it!’ And he was afraid, and said, ‘How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.’” Gen. 28:15-17)
(“The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well….’Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.’” Matt. 13:24-26, 30)
(This anonymous African-American spiritual was based on Genesis 28:10-17, which tells of Jacob’s dream at Bethel. However, the biblical story is only the starting point for the song, which becomes one of persevering in faith and the ascending hope of a slave people, rung by rung and stanza by stanza. The equally anonymous tune is beautifully suited for these words, as the rhythmic pattern suggests climbing a rung on a ladder and then pausing for breath before taking the next step.)
PRAYER OF INTERCESSION:
God of mercy and healing, you who hear the cries of those in need, receive these petitions of your people that all who are troubled may know peace, comfort, and courage.
Individual Prayers of the People, concluding with:
Life-giving God, heal our lives, that we may acknowledge your wonderful deeds and offer you thanks from generation to generation through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
THE LORD’S PRAYER:
Our Father, who art in heaven, Hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.
(These stanzas are selected from a 20th-century English poetic version of an Irish monastic prayer dating to the 10th century or before. The poem was translated into English in the early 20th century by Mary Elizabeth Byrne, and in 1912, Eleanor Hull versified the text into what is now a well-loved hymn and prayer that at every moment of our lives, God would be our vision above all else. They are set to an Irish folk melody that has proved popular and easily sung despite its lack of repetition and its wide range.)
CHARGE AND BENEDICTION:
Let us go out into the world in peace, returning no one evil for evil, but overcoming evil with good.
And may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with us all, both now and forever. Amen.
(This 1841 text by Sarah Flower Adams, performed here by the Londonderry Choir, is about the joy and comfort found in being close to God. The first stanza introduces the theme of the hymn, with the repeated phrase “Nearer, my God, to thee.” The second through fourth stanzas are based on the story of Jacob and the ladder to heaven, found in Genesis 28:10-22. God’s close connection to Jacob in this story is seen as a way of relief from the darkness and “stony griefs” of his human journey in stanzas 2 and 4. The last stanza looks forward to the time when we will come to stand before God in eternal song.)
(“’…Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.’ Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, ‘Surely the LORD is in this place—and I did not know it!’ And he was afraid, and said, ‘How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.’” Gen. 28:15-17)
(“The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well….’Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.’” Matt. 13:24-26, 30)
The point of today’s parable is that we can’t tell who’s a weed and who is good seed – even in our own case! Sometimes the person who seems most unlikely to produce good fruit surprises us. Sometimes we surprise ourselves, thinking ourselves to be weeds that don’t belong in God’s field, only to learn that we are an essential part of God’s good harvest.
Look at Jacob! If he’d had a High School yearbook, he might have been voted “most likely to do serious prison time”, because of how crooked he seemed to be in all of his dealings. At the point we meet him in this reading from Genesis – fleeing from his brother’s righteous wrath and his father’s anger and disappointment, with nowhere to run for shelter but toward his mother’s even more crooked brother, Uncle Laban – you’d be hard put to name someone more UNLIKELY to be God’s servant, or to be the key to God’s plan for his people.
Jacob doesn’t think much of himself, even. He STEALS God’s blessing from his father by pretending to be his brother Esau because he doesn’t believe he CAN be blessed as himself. If there is to be anything good in his life, it seems to him that he’ll have to steal it from someone else.
Now, running away from his father, his brother, and probably even God (he thinks), he stops at a random spot to sleep, and he discovers – much to his dismay! – that the God of Abraham and Isaac is there, too. His automatic response to this discovery as soon as he wakes the next morning is to set up a marker on the spot, and then go ELSEWHERE as quickly as possible. He calls it “House of God”, “Bethel”, and then he tries to leave it far behind him.
But God’s blessing, which he thought he’d stolen merely as another way to get back at his father and the brother his father always loved much more than him, goes with him, as before, all the way to foreign lands, and then back again!
One commentator describes Jacob’s theft of God’s blessing as akin to someone stealing a ride on the back of a tiger, only to discover that once on he really can’t get off, but can only hold on for dear life as it takes him where IT wants him to go. His control over the situation turns out to be largely imaginary.
Jacob has always thought of himself as a weed in God’s garden. Yet, when he stumbles onto the Holy ground that God has conveniently put in his path, God tells him that he is not a weed. God tells him that he is needed and wanted, that he had counted himself out prematurely. He learns that he, who tried to STEAL a blessing, will in fact be the means through which everyone in the whole wide WORLD will be blessed by God.
That’s the point of the parable of the wheat and the weeds, and of much of Paul’s writings in the New Testament. Like the wheat and the weeds, growing together, roots intertwined, it’s hard for us to tell who is who and what is what, even in our own case.
Just when we’re about to give up on ourselves, or on someone else, we stumble across a patch of holy ground, we come to a place where God calls to us in a vision or a dream, or even in another person (and probably someone we least expect!), and God says “I want you.” We surprise ourselves by what we can do, when confronted by a real need, a real crisis. Or others, people we would have discarded as weeds long ago, surprise us by their willingness to help. We find ourselves digging a little deeper, tapping into wells of courage, generosity, and endurance that we didn’t know God had put within us.
And all this happens because God doesn’t give up on us, or on anyone. God waits until the end of the world, until all the votes are in, until the harvest, to judge us. And in the meantime, God is constantly putting patches of holy ground in the way for us to stumble onto.
You see this all through the Bible.
In chapter 3 of Exodus, Moses goes ‘rubbernecking’, merely curious about the unusual sight of a bush that is burning and yet not burned up, and finds himself entrusted by God with one of the greatest missions of all time, to set an entire nation free from their oppressors, using nothing but his shepherd’s staff and the Word of God.
In chapter 2 of the book of Joshua, the prostitute Rahab shields the Israelite spies on her roof, and her house becomes holy ground and a safe haven during the fall of the walls of Jericho.
In the book named after her, Esther wins a beauty contest and becomes queen of Persia, only to discover that that pagan palace in which she lives has turned into holy ground when she risks her life to save the Jewish people from extermination.
In Acts 9, Saul of Tarsus heads for Damascus, breathing threats and murder against the followers of Christ, only to meet the risen Christ on the road, there on the dusty highway, and have his life transformed, becoming Paul the Apostle.
We are surrounded by holy ground: calls to action, glimpses of a Kingdom that is not yet here but which is surely coming. Paul tells us in Romans 8 (starting at verse 19) that the whole creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God, for the freedom of the glory of the children of God, and that we ourselves were saved in hope – saved not because of what the world sees in us, or because of what we can see in ourselves, but because of what God can see in us, because of God’s decision through Jesus Christ that we were worth dying for.
A piece of ground is just a piece of ground, but God’s presence makes it holy. A plant is just a weed, until God causes it to bear fruit. And you and I are just ordinary people, until God calls us and gives us an extraordinary mission: to bring the news of Jesus Christ to the world that is groaning like a woman in labor, struggling to bring life out of death.
We can’t count ourselves, or anyone else, out, because – like Jacob the trickster, running from God after stealing a blessing – we don’t know what we’re truly capable of, until we stumble onto God’s holy ground.
(“For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, “Abba! Father!”it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God,and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ…” Rom. 8:15-17)
(“But as for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.” Matt. 13:23)
The Sower – Luke 8:4-15
What does it take to keep sowing seeds that don’t seem to produce much? What does it take for a person to keep trying to farm in the face of drought and flood or pestilence? What does it take for parents to keep trying to raise their children with love and discipline, in the face of drugs, violence, and a seemingly uncaring world? What does it take to keep each one of us doing our jobs, trying to live like Christians and make the world a little warmer and lighter? What does it take for us to keep trying to be the Church, in all times and circumstances?
What it takes, according to today’s Scriptures, is the spirit of adoption through Christ – the same spirit demonstrated by Jesus’ Parable of the Sower.
When Paul, in Romans and repeatedly throughout his other letters, says that we did not receive the spirit of slavery, to fall back into fear, but have instead received the spirit of adoption as children and heirs of God, he’s giving us the clue to why we keep on in the face of overwhelming odds. Paul sees that spirit of adoption as the source of all our hope and assurance as Christians. The spirit that we have been given as children of God adopted by God to be heirs of the Kingdom, right up there with Jesus Christ – THAT spirit is what enables us to keep on sowing seeds of grace and righteousness, even though we never know which seeds will fall on fertile ground.
Paul sees that spirit of adoption – that LIFE in Christ – as the source of all our hope and assurance as Christians, doing for us what the law of sin and death had been unable to do. The old law, in Paul’s view, is a good diagnostic tool, like an MRI machine to show when something’s wrong inside us, or like those test patterns that the photocopier repair people use to see if everything’s working correctly. The law is great for saying, “if you’re NOT keeping all these commandments and your life does NOT look like this, then you’re in serious trouble.” But the law can’t FIX the problem.
The spirit of adoption that we have been given as children of God, the Spirit of Christ who rose from the dead – that spirit is what provides the ‘cure for what ails us.’ That’s what enables us to keep on going, through all the rough spots, discouragements, and times of loss and grief in our lives. That‘s what keeps us going, believing in God’s love and promises, even when the view around us isn’t very promising.
Paul in his letters and Jesus in his Parable of the Sower went to a lot of trouble to tell us that we already have this spirit of adoption in Christ, the spirit of life and righteousness, and that we need to use it, to act upon it.
So . . . where do we look for it? And how do we recognize it when we see it?
Well, the Biblical scholars are pretty well agreed that Jesus originally told the Parable of the Sower in order to encourage the disciples as they proclaimed the gospel. The message for the disciples at that time was clear: no matter how often they saw the Word of God being rejected or failing to take root in people’s lives, they should just keep on sowing the Good News, because the final harvest would STILL be bountiful beyond their wildest dreams. Though their labor for the gospel might not seem to be producing anything but heart-ache and disappointment, they had the promise that the gospel would be fruitful, that the final results would be unbelievably good.
To keep on sowing our seeds where nothing seems able to grow – to keep on trying to be obedient to the gospel in word and action – even when there doesn’t seem to be any percentage in it, any reasonable pay-off for the labor involved, . . . this takes something more than common sense. This takes faith in God’s promises. It takes a desire to obey God out of love, rather than out of fear or enlightened self-interest.
Fear, after all, is at the heart of Paul’s problems with the old law. The law can tell us what’s wrong with us (we’re sinners – we do and think and will sinful things that are contrary to God’s teachings), but that doesn’t FIX the problem, it doesn’t CURE the disease within us, anymore than a diagnosis of cancer is sufficient to eliminate the tumors, or even to keep them from growing larger, apart from any actual surgery and treatment. In the same way, Paul notes, fear of punishment under the law, fear of death as the wages of sin, simply CANNOT save us.
The actual CURE for what ails us comes only from within – from the Spirit of adoption as brothers and sisters of Christ, the beloved Child of God, transforming us from the inside out, making us dead to sin and alive to all that is good in Christ. And that cure, that salvation, has nothing to do with human ideas of what’s possible or logical or in keeping with common sense.
Common sense, after all, would dictate that the sower in the parable should be more careful with all that expensive seed, because real human farmers can’t afford to waste it, or to let it fall on any but the most fertile and well-prepared ground available. A real sower aims very carefully and accurately, so that no seed falls anywhere but in the furrows of the field, or he soon gets fired (if he’s a hired hand) or goes broke, if it’s his own field he’s planting.
But God doesn’t play the odds. As I’ve noted in previous sermons, the God whom we meet in Jesus Christ (and in the parables told by Christ) is RIDICULOUSLY generous, loving, and forgiving, far beyond the limits set by good sense. God in Christ leaves the 99 sheep on the hillside and seeks the one lost, though doing so is contrary to all human ideas of good sense and fairness. God in Christ scatters the seed of the Gospel everywhere, not just where it’s guaranteed to grow well. And God in Christ takes that ‘seed’ to the ends of the Earth.
Through this parable, God tells the original disciples and us that we don’t – we can’t — KNOW for sure in advance what ground is good and what ground is bad. Therefore, we must sow the seeds of the Gospel EVERYWHERE, regardless of the odds.
And if the sower in the parable, the one whose seed lands on so much unproductive ground, were a slave of God, sent out to sow under such difficult conditions and obeying only out of fear of punishment, that person would soon be overcome by a sense of the uselessness and hopelessness of it all, and would try to abandon or skimp on the task as much as possible.
But it’s a different story if the sower is adopted as God’s Child and Heir, as Christ is (and as we are, through our baptism into Jesus Christ). If the sower is obeying out of love and out of faith in the promise of a splendid harvest, however unlikely it seems at the moment – and a harvest in which the sower has some ownership – then continuing to work diligently, day in, year out, preaching the gospel and trying to live according to its teachings in a world that too often seems dead-set against it, enters the realm of possibility.
Living by the gospel doesn’t always produce a visible harvest, doesn’t always pay off in a way that we can see or understand. Bad things happen to good people – we KNOW this. Crime does seem to pay, for too many. Things we pray for with all our heart and soul are not granted to us. Our loved ones suffer and die, and we feel loneliness and depression at times, even in the midst of good friends and neighbors or our brothers and sisters in Christ. The world talks peace, but always seems to be embracing war and weapons of destruction. Words and actions arising from love of God and neighbor don’t win us many points in the world’s eyes, and are often ridiculed, rejected, or actively persecuted by our fellow human beings, the very people we seek to help. We can hardly help feeling betrayed when too many of the seeds we sow seem to be a dead loss.
I think it was that very same feeling of fear and frustration with a poor harvest which prompted the writer of Matthew to try to explain Jesus’ parable in terms of an allegory, in verses 18-23. (An allegory is a story where every detail or event within the tale represents something else, whereas a parable is a very different kind of teaching tool, designed to turn our world-view upside down and inside out through a seemingly commonplace but often quite subversive story as a whole.)
Having been out in the evangelism field for a while, and having seen much rejection of or falling away from the gospel, Matthew wanted to be able to explain to his contemporaries in the late first-century church just exactly why so many people were missing the boat, nearly fifty years after Jesus had risen from the dead and given the Church the Great Commission to proclaim the gospel to the ends of the earth in preparation for his return to earth. Matthew and his contemporaries wanted to know why so many seeds did not bear fruit, and who was to blame.
Where Jesus in the original parable focuses on the sower and the seed, Matthew puts more emphasis on the responsibility of the soil to be fruitful. Matthew, in his frustration, focuses on why everyone doesn’t believe – or doesn’t KEEP believing in tough times – when the gospel message is so wonderful. Jesus, meanwhile, focuses on the wonder and promise of the fact that somewill believe this awesome news and be very, very fruitful, in spite of the seemingly senseless and imprudent aim of the sower.
But in the end, Matthew too comes back to faith in the harvest, when each seed will bear fruit in the then unheard-of quantities of thirty-fold, sixty-fold, a hundred-fold. Through all the worry, anger, pain, and frustration, there is still the spirit of adoption and life in Christ, the love and the faith in God’s promises.
Through Jesus Christ, God has adopted us as children and heirs – people who do not need to fear, but can be assured of God’s love and faithfulness, even in the midst of the flood and storm. And God has promised that the gospel will triumph over the evils around us, that the harvest in our father’s kingdom (despite all common sense and all appearances to the contrary at times) will be wonderful, fruitful beyond our wildest dreams. So, we can find the will and the strength each day to keep on loving, to keep on giving, to keep on trying to bring the kingdom a little closer, through the way we live our lives and the way we spread God’s Word to others. We can keep on, being guided always by the spirit of our adoption in Christ – the ‘Spirit of the Sower.’
Bethesda Presbyterian Church 