​Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
Proper 12, Year A
July 26, 2020
 
In the world of being a modern digital family, we have shared accounts.  We have a family Netflix account to watch movies and documentaries.  We have a family Amazon Prime account to buy books and watch more movies.  We have a family Audible account to listen to, and share audio books.  As are a multi-generational collective, it is fascinating to review our watch, read, and listen list.
 
Some of the newer titles are about race and contemporary politics, but throughout what I refer to as “Corona Time,” the Thomas collective has been circling back on some old favorites.    
I cannot help but notice that we are trending toward classic narrative, uplifting stories of discovery and becoming, and some things that just make us laugh. 
 
The Harry Potter books and movies have been getting some new listens and watches.  That is a commitment as there are 7 books and 8 movies.  While they are wild and fantastical, they are not all that complicated.  Young Harry and his friends come of age throughout the series, finding their own voices, gifts, and foibles in a classic fight of good versus evil. 
 
Another of our categories I would call: inspiring biography and history.  Through the stories of real people, from folk musician James Taylor, to Alexander Hamilton (the Musical), we engage with the chances and changes of fate and history, complete with confessed flaws and unexpected greatness.
 
The last category, I will just call Pixar.  This is a collective of animated stories about bugs in A Bug’s Life, loveable monsters in Monsters Inc. and Monsters University, and all of the characters of a young girl’s psyche in Inside Out.  Here again, these stories are not complicated, but they are clever takes on realizing who we are, how we grow, and what we can do when we work together.
 
This romp through our watch and listen list is pretty typical as I have tracked the many popular watches and trends in streaming media.  With more time at home, and less time out and about, we are connecting with more narrative style stories than ever.  While there are plenty of tell all books and political polemics to be consumed out there, people are being drawn back to classic telling and retelling of coming of age stories, surprising success stories, and tales of discovering great joy and abundant life.  When art does not exactly imitate life, we seek for art to inspire and reinvigorate life with hope and promise.  A good story, well told, is good for the soul.
 
As we encounter Jesus in today’s gospel, we experience a rapid-fire set of parables (stories) about the Kingdom of Heaven.  Matthew’s gospel is set up most like storytelling of all the gospels.  When we think about this Kingdom of Heaven, we might expect fantastic, regal, and celestial special effects.  We might think of a lavishly decorated place full of everything we want.  We might look for a realm of conquering victory, good crushing evil, and some sort vindication of all that is holy and righteous and good. Instead we hear of a little mustard seed, yeast leavening flour, a treasure found in a field, a pearl picked out as precious, and a huge net full of fish.
 
When Jesus asks his people “Have you understood this?”  Matthew reports that they answered “Yes.”  I bet it sounded more like “Uh, yes?  They had to be a little disappointed in the imagery.  They had to be a little more expectant of something more fantastic, and grander when talking about the glorious “Kingdom of Heaven.”  I suspect this because that may be our reaction as well.  The metaphors are, at best, mixed.  Nevertheless, there they are.
 
In context, we have a group of people following this amazing rabbi, prophet, and healer.  They believe he is purely of God.  They have seen him be and do what no mere human would be or could do.  But they are also people who are occupied, oppressed, poor, and seemingly powerless.  Again, and again, they ask when the big campaign, takeover, and divine reckoning will take place.  They seek to be on the side of Jesus partially because they seek to be on God’s winning team.  Instead, Jesus tells them about seeds, yeast, treasures and fish.
 
In wholeness of its telling, God’s story is not about conquest, victory, and domination.  Those are earthly takes on power and prestige.  Instead, God’s story is about the gentle and insistent force of love wearing down hatred, bitterness, and division.  God’s story is about divine forgiveness and God’s work of changing what is ordinary into that which is extraordinary, even with the most basic elements.
 
The popular theologian, Richard Rohr, puts it this way: “Sometimes, God comes to you disguised as your life.”  If we are seeking something fantastic, it is most likely to start out as something small.  A seed is a remarkable thing, really.  It is a bundle of energy and design that draws energy from water, soil, and sun, all working in concert to make something new and regenerative and quite spectacular.  I see many sunflowers these days and wonder how on earth they became so grand, starting with a tiny little thing we eat in salads.
 
These days, we face big and daunting challenges.  There is a pandemic race to combine science, ingenuity, and hard work to find good medicine and vaccines.  There are standards of public health and safety all of us need to tend and enable.  There are problems of racial and economic inequity demanding thoughtful and active engagement.  And there are our children, parents, and teachers facing the impossible realities of beginning a school year.  My biggest worry was what to wear on the first day.  Their situation is really tough.
 
We are tempted to throw up our hands, declare everything too complicated, too polarizing, and too impossible to address.  But the Gospel story, and all of the other great stories we come back to over and over, do not end in futility and despair.  Instead, they tell us of the simple power of goodness applied liberally and regularly.  They show us love extending us beyond what may be easy or comfortable, beginning with small, but great things. 
 
This is the story that is our destiny.  This is the story that remains as the truth of what is to be.  While we have a role in it, the story is not about us.  The story is about God.  It about finding greatness in the common and ordinary matter of life.  It is about coming of age, the power of working together, and the embedded giftedness in all creation.
 
Why do we come back to this story again and again even in dark times? Because it is true, because it is great, and because God is continuing to tell it in and through us.  Amen.

Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
Proper 11, Year A
July 19, 2020
 
I was taking a college calculus test when the pain really started.  At first, I thought I was just anxious, but then I started sweating and having severe stomach pain.  It was my last class before Spring Break, so when I finished, I caught up with a friend who was my ride home.  It was a miserable journey as the pain got worse and the fever and chills started.  When I arrived at home, I greeted my parents, and went straight to bed.  My sleep was more than fitful, and by morning we all agreed something was really wrong.  We called my doctor and he said to go straight to the emergency room, which we did.
 
There began a medical mystery tour began with blood work, x-rays, and scans.  They ruled out stomach flu and food poisoning, and all kinds of scary diseases, but the pain continued to worsen and the fevers kept spiking.  I knew that something was really wrong and it was not getting better.  Finally, one of the scans revealed excess fluid in my belly so, they decided to do exploratory surgery and find the cause.  My parents were worried.  I was worried.  It became clear that I would not have any kind of quality Spring Break.
 
Fast forward several hours.  I came to in the recovery room, and the doctor asked me how I felt.  I was in pain from the incision, but I told him that whatever it was, I could tell he got it.  You know you must be pretty sick when you wake up from surgery feeling better than you did when you went in.  As it turns out, I had a complicated case of appendicitis.  There had been a rupture and I was septic.  In the days before powerful antibiotics, I would have died.
 
It took a month to recover and I lost a total of 45 pounds.  I could not stand up straight or lift anything heavy.  I still bear a large scar as a reminder of that harrowing experience.  That same general surgeon operated on my father’s neck a few years ago, and he remembered my vexing case some 30 years later.
 
I am still amazed at how I knew and could tell immediately that the surgery had worked.  It was a powerful lesson in healing that I have encountered a number of different times in different ways throughout my life.  When a broken relationship was mended, my whole being felt better.  When I told the truth and took responsibility for my own shortcomings, I was able to forgive more easily.  Jesus told his disciples that in naming the splinter in someone else’s eye, we often miss the log in our own.  As such, we are all a work in progress, striving at times, and failing miserably at others.  In hurting and healing, I have come to believe that we are not the sum of the worst we have been or the worst we have done.
 
This is particularly poignant in the current state of our seemingly ruthless cancel culture.  Cancel culture describes a form of boycott in which an individual (usually a celebrity or public figure) who has acted or spoken in a questionable or controversial manner is shamed and shunned.  While some who need to be called to account, and telling the truth is important, cancel culture leaves no room for repentance, contrition, forgiveness, and reconciliation.  And it seems that just about every corporate or public entity these days is scrambling to make a public statement, declaring what will and will not be tolerated, and offering whatever amends to get ahead of the cancel culture curve.
 
Given the context, this week’s gospel parable of the wheat and the weeds is timely and poignant.  This is another of Jesus’s agrarian metaphors in which the wheat field has been infiltrated by one who sows weeds in order to ruin the crop.  He calls the perpetrator the evil one and the devil, who is meant to be the personification of divisive sin and destruction.
 
In the story, the workers ask the farmer if they should go out and pluck up all the weeds, but the wise farmer tells them not to do so as in plucking up weeds, they might pluck up the wheat.  Instead, he tells them to wait until the harvest when wheat and weeds can be separated.
 
Time and time again, this week’s parable, like last week’s parable, has been leveraged as commentary on the difference between the true believer and those who do not measure up.  The history of the Church is littered with groups and sects who claim righteous purity and choose to isolate themselves from those they judge as weeds.  The seeds of cancel culture are not new to the scene.  Inevitably, those who set themselves up as more righteous fail, finding that human sin follows them wherever they go.  Mega pastors, televangelists, and politicians seem to be some of the most vulnerable as they tend to be the most strident in their condemnations.
 
Once again, it is important to remember that the parable of the wheat and the weeds is about God, and not the righteousness of human works.  While the description of the end of days and the separation of the wheat and the weeds can sound final and foreboding, perhaps there is more comfort there than we might first expect.
 
In the end, at the time of the harvest, Jesus says the angels will come and collect all causes of sin and evil doing and throw it in the fire.  Given the fact that we are all that work in progress, and that we are not either purely great or completely rotten, God knows our flawed raw material.  And if a surgeon can remove causes of pain and disease, surely God Almighty can, and will, weed out that which separates us from God and one another.
 
While cancel culture and the short-lived mercy of humanity might lead us to believe that we are in our we are out, we are good or we are bad, that we are wheat or we are weeds, the economy of God is broader and more encompassing.  This is the God who lets the whole crop grow together.  This is the God who sends Jesus to show us a wide, deep, and forgiving love.  This is our God who promises never to leave us or forsake us, even when we are at our worst.
 
The big take away is that we might go a bit easier on ourselves and on one another.  We might consider that we are not the judge, jury, or arbiter of who and what is worthy of love.  And if we can summon a small measure of the love God has for us and convert that into our own ways of seeing, doing, and being, we will know in that knowing place that we will be healed, and there is hope for all to shine like the sun.  Amen.

​Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
Proper 10, Year A
July 12, 2020
 
Now is the time I started thinking about in the early spring.  It is the time when what has been planted comes to fruition. It is the time when tomato plants are heavy with fruit.  It is the time when sweet corn is available and abundant.  It is the time when peaches and blueberries and strawberries are plump and ripe.  Our farmer’s market has just about everything that is fresh and just about everything else that can be made with what is fresh.  I could go broke there each week.
 
On my day off last week, I journeyed over to the farm where my grandparents once lived.  My grandfather was a part-time farmer and, in his retirement, a massive vegetable gardener.  There are still vestiges grape vines, fruit trees, and a big open space where row after row was tilled and planted.  The old house there has a basement kitchen that was set up just for canning and freezing.  These were people of the land and children of the depression.
 
I guess I come by my obsession with all things grown naturally.  I have started off with a modest container garden, but it will not be enough.  There is nothing like picking a ripe cherry tomato off the vine and popping it in my mouth for an instant snack.  And yes, I am that guy who asks farmers for dented and overripe tomatoes so I can make and jar sauce with my specially designed tomato squeezer machine.
 
As a person of faith, the matters and mechanics of growing things is a lively part of my consciousness.  Paying attention to the rhythms of the natural world helps make sense of life and its vicissitudes.  Seasons and soil, seeds and sowers fuel my understanding of how God works even in high minded ideals of mission and ministry.
 
Even today’s mid-summer gospel arrives in a moment where it is likely to capture this seasonal moment.  Jesus uses gardening parables over and over to speak to his mostly agrarian followers.  The parable of the sower is an old chestnut as it tells of a sower that spreads seeds liberally.  Some fall on a path, some on rocky ground, some among thorns, and finally, some on good soil.  The common interpretation might be for us to shape up, and get right, so that the Word of God, which is the seed, will bear fruit in us.  And we must root out being shallow, or rocky, or thorny.  But that takes us only so far, and to my agricultural sensibilities, misses the point.  The parable is not about us, it is about God.  Sometimes, we get so focused on us that we get lost in process.
 
What Jesus tells us, and what we need to hear, is that God is lavish, abundant, creative, and prodigious.  The Word of God is flung all over, not just where it will bear fruit.  The Way of God, the nature of God, and the promise of God is that God’s can always use our participation, but God does not depend on our goodness or perfection. 
 
Consider where this story begins.  Jesus is surrounded by a crowd, so much so, that he has to get into a boat and speak to them as they stand on the beach.  This is in Galilee.  It is a minor little place where people make their way fishing, foraging, and farming.  These are not the educated elites.  They are mostly illiterate.  They are under the thumb of Roman occupation. They are unarmed, heavily taxed, and being kept in their place.  If the spread of the Gospel depended on them, their abilities, and their resources, we would have much of a story to tell.  But as we know, the Word spread, from person to person and community to community. That is the sign of God’s provision, not humanity’s innate cleverness.
 
And that is the point.  With wild generosity, God will take whatever there is and grow it.  As the twentieth century preacher, Vance Havner reminds us: “God uses broken things.  It takes broken soil to produce a crop. Broken clouds to give rain, broken grains to give bread, and broken bread to give strength.”
 
There is a lot broken in our world, now as ever.  With so much cancelled, on hold, or uncertain we are having a hard time gauging and marking time.  Now is the time I usually get excited for college football to start.  Now is the time when I am used to seeing extended family and going on a vacation or adventure.  Now is the time when kids are supposed to be at camp, schools are beginning to prepare for the upcoming year, and our parish should be preparing for our annual Shrine Mont retreat.  There is grief in not being able to look forward with any expectation or certainty.  It is good to claim that, even if it is hard.
 
But, and this is a substantial but, God’s abundance is not on hold.  God’s love is still as prodigal and prolific as ever.  We may have to focus on the simpler and smaller things.  We may have to shorten our horizon of looking forward and anticipating new life.  We may have to pray with more silence, we may have to seek a little deeper, and we may have to listen a little longer for the voice of creation moving in us.
 
If all else fails, eat a ripe peach, slice a bright red water melon, smell the freshly mown grass, and listen for the birds coming alive each morning.  This is not whistling in the dark, it is choosing to find the light even it has to shine through the cracks of our own brokenness.
 
I found great solace this week in reading Mary Oliver’s poetry.  Her way with words is yet another sign of creative power.  In particular, I was drawn to her poem, I Worried, and I close this with her holy words.
 
I Worried
 
I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers
flow in the right direction, will the earth turn
as it was taught, and if not how shall
I correct it?
Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven,
can I do better?
Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows
can do it and I am, well,
hopeless.
Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it,
am I going to get rheumatism,
lockjaw, dementia?
Finally, I saw that worrying had come to nothing.
And gave it up. And took my old body
and went out into the morning,
and sang.
 
Amen.