Weeds, Wheat, Fruitfulness and Messy Spirituality

Here's the sermon that I shared this morning at St Mary's Runwell: 

This story (Matthew 13. 24-30, 36-43) divides people into weeds and wheat. So, who are the weeds and who are the wheat? Our natural tendency as human beings is to want to know and to assume that we are in the wheat camp rather than the weeds camp.

More worryingly, our natural tendency as human beings is probably to try to identify those who are different from us and attempt to weed them out of our community. That is what we call scapegoating and, interestingly, it is a human tendency that the French cultural critic, Rene Girard, suggests is gradually unmasked and exposed by the Bible. Firstly, because the people of Israel sacrifice animals as scapegoats instead of other human beings (as happened in the nations around them at that time) and then as God himself, in Jesus, becomes the ultimate scapegoat bringing an end to the need for any further scapegoating. “Jesus’ ‘strategy’ as the ambassador from a loving, non-violent Father is to expose and render ineffective the scapegoat process so that the true face of God may be known … in the scapegoat, or Lamb of God, not the face of a persecuting deity.”

It’s not difficult to think of times and places in our society where scapegoating occurs. Whether it’s the scapegoating of refugees that characterises the Government’s Illegal Migration Law or the way we view travellers as different from us or, in the Church, the ways in which the LGBTQIA+ have historically been excluded from leadership and some sacraments. Whichever side of those issues we stand on, we need to beware of arguments often made by those at the extremes which would seek to rid us of those who don’t agree with their position because Jesus, in this story, says that it is not our job to pull up the weeds from the field.

It is not our job partly because, if we were to try, we would pull up the wheat with the weeds. In other words, we do not know, as we look around our church, the Anglican Communion, or our society, who are the wheat and who are the weeds. It is God who “searches every heart and understands every motive behind the thoughts” we are told in 1 Chronicles 28. 9 can see what goes on in our hearts, he knows “the secrets of our hearts,” says Psalm 44 and this is because it is God who created our inmost beings and formed us in our mothers’ wombs, as Psalm 139 tell us.

Therefore, it is for God, not us, to make that judgement in his way and in his time. Jesus warns us that it we judge others, we ourselves will be judged by the same measure we use on others (Matthew 7. 1&2). Again, he is saying that it is God’s place to judge, not ours, and, even, that we are likely to be surprised by the judgements that God makes at the end of time. Sometimes, Jesus says, as in Matthew 7. 21-23, that those who appear to be the most religious are actually those who are among the weeds.

So, it is not our job to judge, but God’s, and he will do so in his way and his time. What we need to do is to trust that that is so and we do this by allowing the weeds to grow together with the wheat. In other words, Jesus is commending here the aspect of Anglicanism that, it seems to me, has always been its great strength and glory; its holding together from its inception of ‘catholics’ (with a small ‘c’) and protestants and in more recent centuries its holding together of the diverse streams that have developed within those traditions – anglo-catholicism, evangelicalism, liberalism, the charismatic movement and so on. To hold these things together is, it seems to me, to show absolute trust in God’s ultimate judgement because we are allowing the wheat and the weeds to grow together.

Rowan Williams, in the opening session of the 2008 Lambeth Conference, encouraged the bishops and archbishops present to “find the trust in God and one another that will give us the energy to change in the way God wants us to change.” That is, he said, “the most important thing we can pray for, the energy to change as God wants us to change individually and as a Communion.” But it is trust in God and one another, he says, that will give us this energy.

Why is that? Well, if all our energy is going into pulling up what we think are weeds then our energies are not going into what makes for fruitfulness. Our responsibility is not to be monitors and judges of others but to allow our energies to flow into developing the fruit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. This won’t happen if we are forever distracted by try to spot and root out weeds but if we trust God to sort out the weeds in his way and time then we can focus on the things that contribute to fruitfulness.

This means that we need to accept what the author Mike Yaconelli called Messy Spirituality. This is the reality “that all of us are in some condition of not-togetherness, even those of us who are trying to be godly.” We’re all a mess, he says, “not only sinful messy, but inconsistent messy, up-and-down messy, in-and-out messy, now-I-believe-now-I-don’t messy, I-get-it-now-I-don’t-get-it messy, I-understand-uh-now-I-don’t understand messy.” Can you identify with that? I know I can.

Yaconelli goes on to claim that Christianity is a messy spirituality for people like us who lead messy lives: “What landed Jesus on the cross, was the preposterous idea that common, ordinary, broken, screwed-up people could be godly! What drove Jesus’ enemies’ crazy was his criticism of the ‘perfect’ religious people and his acceptance of the imperfect, non-religious people. The shocking implication of Jesus’ ministry is that anyone can be spiritual.” To prove his point, he suggests we look at the Bible where we will see that its “pages overflow with messy people” because “the biblical writers didn’t edit out the flaws of its heroes.”

Just look at today’s Old Testament reading (Genesis 28.10-22), where Jacob dreams of angels ascending and descending a ladder from earth to heaven. From the time of his birth, Jacob was associated with trickery and deception. His most notorious acts of trickery were committed against his twin brother Esau. Jacob offered his “famished” brother a bowl of soup in exchange for his birthright as the firstborn son, which was a double portion of his father Isaac’s inheritance. Moreover, Jacob robbed Esau of their father’s blessing, which had been Esau’s right to receive. Nevertheless, Jacob ends up receiving a vision of angels and heaven. That’s nothing if not very messy.

Those who follow God in the pages of scripture are not perfect, far from it, and yet they strive for the perfection of God the Father. We need to be the same, humbly recognising our own fallibilities and therefore bearing with the failings of others yet seeking to change ourselves and supporting others in the changes that they are also able to make. 

So, let us do what Rowan Williams has suggested and pray for the energy to change as God wants us to change, individually and as a church, even as the Anglican Communion: 

Pour down upon us, O God, the gifts of your Holy Spirit, that we may be filled with wisdom and understanding. May we know at work within us that creative energy and vision which belong to our humanity, made in your image and redeemed by your love, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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M Ward - Epistemology.

Growing bread which is broken for the world

Here is the sermon I preached for this evening's Eucharist at St Martin-in-the-Fields:

A few years ago researchers at the University of Warwick devised a novel way to recycle discarded mobile telephones - bury them and watch them transform into the flower of your choice. They designed a mobile phone case made of biodegradable polymer which broke down on the compost heap into a pile of soil nutrients. And then, because the engineers included a tiny transparent window in the case in which they embedded a seed, the final touch was that the case flowers.

The seed lay dormant in its plastic window until the phone cover got dug into the ground. The phone cover then broke down allowing the seed to germinate and, as the flower grows‚ to get additional nutrients from the biodegrading phone cover.

This story reminded me of Jesus’ words from our Gospel reading: “a grain of wheat remains no more than a single grain unless it is dropped into the ground and dies. If it does die, then it produces many grains.” (John 12. 20 - 36)

Just like the mobile phone case which is hard but biodegradable and which contains a seed, “a grain of wheat has a hard, glossy husk within which its life is contained. But if it falls into the ground, then its husk softens and rots and breaks open, and from inside the seed the power of its life begins to push outwards, and the pattern of its life begins to unfold. Roots go down into the soil, and a shoot comes up into the light where it grows stronger and taller and produces an ear of corn.”

Jesus equates that picture of the hard outer husk which has to rot to release the life inside to our choice in life to be either people who love our own lives or people who hate, lose or give away our lives. Those of us who love our own lives reinforce our hard, outer husk. We put up barriers between ourselves and others in order to protect and enjoy what we have for ourselves.

Jesus says that when we live life selfishly, protecting ourselves and what we have, then we have actually lost the essence of life itself. We are dead to the world, its peoples and its wonders because we engage with what is other not for its own sake but only for our sake. When we cannot appreciate other people and God’s creation except in terms of what we can get for ourselves then we are dead to the world and all that is in it. Not only are we dead to the world and all that is in it but we are sterile as well. If we live just for ourselves; if we give nothing away to others but keep all for ourselves; then everything we have dies with us and what we have had is lost forever.

But says Jesus, if we are like the grain of wheat that dies, then we will know what it is like to really come alive and really live. If we allow our protective shell to rot and be removed; if we are focused not on ourselves but on others; if we disregard our own life in this world and follow Jesus in serving others; then we gain, then we come alive, then we see a single grain of wheat multiply and produce many grains.

Stephen Verney points out that when a single grain of wheat produces an ear of corn “there are forty seeds where before there was only one. Next year if those forty seeds are all planted in good soil they will produce sixteen hundred seeds – in the third year sixty-four thousand – in the fourth year over two and a half million – and in the fifth year over a hundred million.” “Gradually out of one little seed,” he says, “there appears a harvest, which men and women reap and grind into flour and bake into bread. So it is that one seed has within it the capacity to feed a multitude of people – if it only first falls into the ground and dies.”

“And so it is,” Verney continues, “that Jesus offers bread to the whole world … He offers himself, his life, to come alive in hundreds and then in thousands and then in millions of others. But first he must die, and if his followers are going to pass on the life then they too will have to learn the pattern of life through death.”

If we are to be Jesus’ followers then we must follow him in the way of life through death which is the way of letting go and receiving back. Then we will share Jesus’ work and he will come alive in us as the seed comes alive in next year’s harvest and we will “be reaped, and ground into flour and baked in the oven, and become the bread which is broken for the world.”

Seeds are a good symbol of the way in which the good news of Jesus is shared. Our words and actions can be seeds in the lives of people who have yet to come to know Jesus for themselves as we share something of ourselves and our faith with them. “Our calling is to live and share the gospel of God’s love revealed in Jesus Christ. We have good news for a hurting world – words of comfort; words of life. To help someone else experience the love of God is indeed an act of loving service, in a world where many people ‘live lives of quiet desperation’.”

Through our words and actions we can be like seeds in the lives of those in our family, our community, our networks and our work. To be a seed we have to become open and give that thing that is of most value in our lives to others; the life of Christ. Whether it is by practical actions or by giving a reason for the faith we have in us; we become seeds when we share the love of Christ where we are.

So, what seeds will we plant in the life of others during this coming week? What seeds can we plant in the lives of family, friends, neighbours, colleagues? Will we, in fact, live our lives as seeds giving ourselves and the love of Christ away to others each day of every week and thereby seeing the grain of wheat become an ear of corn and the corn become the bread broken for the life of the world.

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Michael W Smith - Seed To Sow.

Gift

I am the wheat grain that you sowed
after breaking the topsoil;
imbibing water, putting down roots,
searching for the soil surface
for the leaves of my seedling to emerge.
Captured light energy is transformed
to grow my shoot. Tillers grow
to canopy height, my ear emerges
from its leaf sheath. Forty days
and nights from fertilisation
to harvest ripeness.

You cut my head and thresh me,
separating chaff from grain;
blown, sieved and collected in the shoe.
You carry me where the flow of air
from fans will dry me.
Chilled iron fluted rolls strike me,
shearing me open, releasing my
inner white floury portions.
Reduction rolls reduce me
to smooth powdery flour.

You place me in an oven to warm
before you sieve me
into a bowl containing salt, yeast and
caster sugar. Hand hot water
binds us together as a dough
for kneading. We are placed,
stretched, pulled and lifted
to increase elasticity, smooth and
springy. We are ready to rise
stretching and expanding
to twice our original volume.

Proved by a second rising, we are
ready for baking. Hot and crisp with
a crunchy crust we are placed
on silver plate and taken
to be prayed over, held aloft and broken.
Torn pieces - body of Christ - given away,
consumed; washed down with wine.
Digestive fluids break us down, separating
carbohydrates, fats and protein; releasing
nutrients for absorption into the bloodstream
and transportation round the body.

Finally evacuated as faeces
to fertilise the ground from which
we were taken, the dust
to which all things return. The gift
of life, of food, of communion
passed from seed to plant
to ingredient to food to sacrament
to nutrients. The gift has moved on,
circulating - battered and broken -
expanding in the giving
to transcend our origins.

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The Reese Project - I Believe.