SIDE BY SIDE Psalm 139: 1-12, 23-24; Matthew 13: 24-30, 36-43.

I could never claim to be a gardener. It just is not me. The very thought of spending an afternoon in a garden makes concrete an attractive thought to me. So you can imagine that I feel rather out of my comfort zone, wrestling with a parable that Jesus told concerning weeds among the wheat. Indeed, my ignorance made it necessary for me to get to some books in order to understand just what is going on here.

What is happening here is that among the wheat that has been sowed are weeds. The weeds referred to here were a real menace at the time of Jesus. They looked like the newly sprouted wheat to the point of being indistinguishable from it. To make things worse, these weeds would entwine themselves around the wheat so that to separate them would mean disaster for wheat as well as seed. And so we find a state of dissatisfaction at the existence of the weeds as well as an instinct on the part of some of the servants to pull up these weeds, only for the owner to insist on waiting until the time of harvest.

Now what is this about for us today? It would be rather neat to suggest that some people are as wheat whilst others are as weeds. The problem with this is that most people in my experience do not fit neatly into categories such as these. Certainly within the church, there is plenty of imperfection. I recall the story of a rather nomadic worshipper. He was constantly on the lookout for the perfect church, the church that would be spiritual enough for him to join. That was until leaving yet another inadequate church, he explained his search to the minister only for her to reply;

Well when you find this perfect church, don’t join it because your presence will take away its perfection.

I know that dear old John Wesley had a thing about Christian Perfection and that his terminology has in many ways been understood, but I for one am yet to encounter the perfect saint. Perhaps, we do well to listen to the guidance of Martin Luther who describes the Christian as being at the same time saint and sinner, or if he is not sufficiently modern, we can listen to that great Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn who once commented wisely;

The line dividing good and evil cuts through every human being.

Indeed, the monk, Thomas Merton, has much to teach us when whilst emphasising the need to strive for perfection, he sees a true perfection in learning to accept ourselves with all our imperfections.

For, an adult understanding of this Parable has to be that which appreciates that we ourselves, our church and indeed our nation are at times expressed in a manner of the weed rather than the wheat. To put too high a view as to the actions of self, church or nation, is in short a form of idolatry in which we equate our perspective with God.

But just as we need to be aware of the weed with us and all we hold dear, we should also be alert as to the signs of wheat in unexpected places. Two year ago, I spent the best part of a month working with the chaplaincy team at a Category B prison. On my first day, I was apprehensive yet by the end it pained me to leave the guys who were doing time. Why? Because some had come to feel like friends and in some of those I knew, I sensed the presence of God. And it is this which puts a Christian perspective at odds with the High Priests of the tabloid media whose judgement freezes people in their very worst moments for all time. No possibility of transformation is taken seriously and it is the acceptance of this destructive outlook which is a sign of a nation that has moved from Christianity.

Returning to the story told by Jesus, we find the servants wanting to destroy the weeds. This, they think will purify the field. And here, we come to an important distinction. The Scriptures have plenty to say about confronting injustice which is an imperative. The Kingdom calls us to stands on behalf of the victims of injustice. However, that is different from the weeding which Jesus, here, rejects - namely the destructive weeding which calls damage. Living at a time when around him were strict Jewish groups whose rules were such as to keep most out, Jesus is here restraining an impulse that has resounded down through the centuries to decide who is in or out of favour and to act rigorously on the finding. I feel that in this story, Jesus is warning against a churchmanship that excludes so many. I feel that Jesus is here warning against a tendency to dehumanise those with whom we are uncomfortable. And oh, if only that warning had been heeded, we might have been spared the slaughter of 5 million people in Europe for alleged witchcraft, anti Semitism with its ultimate horror in the Holocaust and a range of conflicts in which people have seen others as less than fully human. Once more Our problem has been not that we take Scripture too seriously but we have not taken it seriously enough - and that of course is a problem that Islam is also facing at this time.

But whilst, all of this warns about us making the judgements that belong to God, there is also the message of God’s judgement. The language on this is rather vivid. Fiery furnaces and gnashing of teeth are the metaphors applied. Perhaps, we need to treat this language of metaphor with care and not to literalise it. I think what is being communicated by Jesus here is that our actions in this world carry spiritual consequences for ourselves as well as others. And perhaps the biggest spiritual test is whether we are able to find joy in the immensity of Jesus’ love being felt in the most unexpected of places. For if the nature of God is consistent and God is ( to borrow a phrase from a former Bishop of Durham, David Jenkins) as he is in Jesus, then God’s love will surprise us.

That love is strongly shown in our reading from the 139th Psalm. It is a love that just doesn’t let go, a love which pursues us however far from God we go.
A poem that expresses this well is Francis Thompson’s Hound of Heaven. Thompson was a man who seemed to fail in nearly everything he tried. He failed to make it to the priesthood. He failed in his aim to be a doctor. And his dissolute lifestyle led him to opium addiction. One of the weeds, I guess, and yet during the four years in which he was able to stay off the drugs before his depression problems led him to succumb once more, he wrote this poetic classic. Here are just a few lines which describe running from God;

I fled him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled him, down the arches of the years;
I fled him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of mine own mind and in the midst of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.

But of course there is no escape. Look on in the poem and the poet finds no escape from God and God ’s love;

Alack, thou knowest not
How little worthy of any love thou art!
Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee,
Save me, save only me?
All which I took from thee I did but take,
Not for thy harms,
But just that thou might seek it in my arms.
All which thy child’s mistake
Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home;
Rise, clasp my hand, and come.

This morning we come to the Communion Table, we come with the prayer that we might be God’s wheat, that we should not exclude nor should we take on God’s judgement. But instead we come rejoicing in the pursuit of the God who as the Hound of Heaven pursues us when we are as weeds. And that is the God who now invites us to meet with him and receive his acceptance at his Table.

This sermon was preached at Bideford on July 17th at a Communion Service
AMEN

SOWING SEEDS OF HOPE Matt: 13: 1-9, 18-23

On Wednesday evening, I had a fair idea of what I was going to be saying this morning. We were going to be looking at the Parable of the Sower. We were going to see how the seed of God’s Kingdom must be sown in the unlikely places as well as in the safe places, for Christ’s love is a love for which there are no boundaries. Also we were going to see how on some occasions we are unresponsive soil as well as being responsive on other occasions. How, it would have turned out, I do not know, but by Thursday morning, all my efforts at a neat sermon had become obsolete with the London bombings.

These bombs now seem to have killed in excess of eighty people. They happened in places which many of us are familiar with, from our visits to London. They were as the Mayor pointed out, ’an indiscriminate attempt to slaughter, irrespective of any considerations for age, for class, for religion or whatever.’ What happened was a reminder to all of us of the reality of evil in our world although along with evil we saw the other reality which is goodness in the efforts of the emergency services to save lives as well as in individual acts of kindness and heroism by those who happened to be on the scene.

Our prayers have to be with those who have suffered injury, bereavement or indeed uncertainty as a result of these deeds. It has to be our earnest hope that good use of intelligence and sound policing brings the guilty to justice.

Now around us, will doubtless begin a debate as to why this happened. I don’t want to really go into the politics of it here this morning. That is other than to say, if as seems likely, this was an action of Al Qaeda, we do well to ensure that we are not sucked unwittingly into its agenda. Al Qaeda is committed to a battle of civilisations - a battle between the ‘West’ and the community of Islam. This, however, is a fraudulent agenda for Al Qaeda does not represent Islam. When I was taught Islam by a Muslim scholar during my training, I was told that these terror groups represent a heresy. And indeed during the past few days, representative Muslim groups in this country such as the Muslim Council of Britain and the Muslim Association of Britain have as I knew they would, totally condemned this atrocity. A blaming of ordinary Muslims, makes no more sense than blaming us because 10 years ago this week, General Mladic’s army of supposedly Christian Bosnian Serbs, massacred 7,000 Muslims at Srebrenica. It makes no sense and adds to the hatred of the world of which there is already too much.

But let us be clear. Thursday‘s atrocity was about sowing the seeds of hatred. So often this becomes a circle with ever increasing levels of hatred and violence. A circle that is self perpetuating for it has within it no capacity to end it wrongs. I find myself thinking of Martin Luther King’s wise words;

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

In a recent book, the American scholar Walter Wink warns of the dangers of what he terms ‘the myth of redemptive violence.’ This myth which he roots in the Babylonian Creation myth in which the cosmos and indeed humanity are the product of conflict between the gods, sees violence as an inevitable necessity for peace and order. The myth is expressed in much of our popular entertainment and all too often in the affairs of the world. Tyrants and rebels alike seem to buy into this myth whose contradictions are powerfully echoed in George Orwell’s 1984 with violence saving, war bringing peace and might making right.

Wink argues that this destructive philosophy is dominant in our world contrary as it is to the Biblical perspective in which violence from its very beginnings with Cain killing Abel, is seen as a problem to be confronted, confronted ultimately by the self giving of Jesus on the cross.

At a time like this, we need for very different seeds to be planted. We need the seeds of hope to be planted. For that, there is no better example than Jesus. For Jesus is shown in the gospels as the one who constantly plants the seeds of hope for often the most unlikely of people. The man made barriers of race, religion, respectability and gender, are constantly broken down by Jesus who crosses them to offer all sorts of people glimpses into God’s love for them. Time and again, Jesus gives dignity and worth where it has long been denied.

And you know, seeds of hope and compassion can have great effect. I think back in my own life to those who have bothered to plant seeds for me at times when I was at my most awkward. In each of our stories, there are those who planted seeds, the results of which they never saw, but nevertheless seeds for which we can be grateful.

And you know! Seeds can change the world.

Think back to the momentous events of the fall of the Soviet Union. A key figure was Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin is now chiefly remembered as a somewhat hard drinking President whose policies created the robber barons or oligarchs as they are sometimes known. But before all that, Yeltsin had been a key figure in the movement for democratic reform, wishing to go even faster than Mikhael Gorbachev. Yeltsin’s finest moment was when Gorbachev was briefly overthrown by the old hardliners in the military. With Gorbachev held under house arrest, Yeltsin rallied the people of Moscow with the result that the military coup evaporated and Gorbachev was returned to power. Years later, Yeltsin gave an interview in which he said that in those heady days, his inspiration had been Lech Walesa, the Polish electrician who had formed the trade union ‘Solidarity’ and had played a major part in bringing democracy to Poland. Similarly, Walesa has said that he found his inspiration from Martin Luther King and the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Meanwhile, Martin Luther King is on record as saying that what brought him into that struggle was the courage of a middle aged black woman named Rosa Parks who one day decided that she had had enough of being treated as a second class citizen and so refused to give up her seat on a bus for a white man.

Is it stretching it too much to suggest that Rosa Parks sowed the seeds that ended the Communist empire?

The reality that confronts us, is that we all have the capacity to sow seed. Terrorists have shown us how to sow the seeds of hatred. Christ calls on us to dare to sow the seeds of love and hope. For a retired Methodist minister whom I know, who spent years with the Church of South India, the seeds of hope are sown by his keeping in touch with other faith communities in Bradford. When terrorism stretches our sense of community and creates tensions, we should be grateful for the likes of him. But it is not just for such situations that we are called to sow. Her in North Devon, we have our share of alienated people, our share of hurting people, our share of damaged people. For far too many people, hope has been crushed. But we hear this morning of a sower, whose seed is for all. And we are called, without fear or favour, to sow the seeds of hope that point to dignity and acceptance. It is these seeds of hope, that we owe to those who have this morning been baptised for without hope our God given humanity is fatally crushed.

Dare, my friends to hope! Dare to spread the seeds of that hope! For that hope can never be destroyed by the darkness!
AMEN

This sermon was preached in Bideford on July 10th 2005 at a service which included the baptism of three children

REDEMPTIVE VIOLENCE OR LOVE? Zech 9:9-10; Matt 11:25-30

In the past few days I have found myself reading a book entitled, ‘The Powers that Be: Theology for a New Millennium.’ It is written by an American theologian called Walter Wink.
Wink comes from a background in the American civil rights movement and the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. In both of these situations the question of the use of violence in the struggle against injustice has been debated and so it is not surprising that one of the themes of his book is the question of violence.

His contention is that society today is dominated by ‘The Myth of Redemptive Violence.’ The essence of this myth is that violence saves. We see it in much of the cartoons which our children watch. We see it also painfully enacted in both terrorism and war. It is practiced by rebels and rulers alike.

This myth, Wink argues, has a strong religious dimension. In many ways its roots are found in the ancient Babylonian Creation story. According to this story, Apsu the father god and Tiamat the mother god, give birth to Gods. The young gods are so disruptively noisy that the older gods decide to kill them so that they can get some sleep. The younger gods find out about this plot and so before it can be carried out, they kill Apsu. His wife, Tiamat, the Dragon of Chaos plots revenge. Terrified by Tiamat, the younger gods turn to Marduk, the youngest of their number. They ask him to kill Tiamat. Before agreeing to do this, Marduk persuades the other young gods to grant him on the success of his mission, the dominant place in the assembly of gods. And so it is, that Marduk brutally kills Tiamat and out of her body creates the cosmos. Later out of the blood of one of those young gods who opposed him, Marduk creates humans.

So you see, the essence of this myth is that we owe our being to acts of divine violence and our world has evil from the beginning. It is the natural way of things.

Later in the myth, we see the humiliation and revival of Marduk which perhaps is echoed in much of our television and films, the initial defeat followed by the last minute victory of the good guy.

Anyway, the message of the myth is that we can see the victory of order over chaos is won by violence. And furthermore, this myth has had such power as to lead many to believe that perpetual conflict is inevitable and has allowed tyrants to justify their cruelties on the basis that only through violence or the threat of violence, can order be maintained. Indeed many have argued that their cruelties are the will of the Divine.

And today, this myth is still powerful. We see it enacted in the cinema. We see it in many a penal policy. We see it in the justifications of the arms trade. And at present it is rife in international relations.

But this myth is a myth without hope or beauty. And whilst at times Christendom colludes with it, it is a myth which is at total variance with the Christian message. The Genesis accounts of creation are very different. They place creation, not as a result of the hatreds of violent gods, but as a consequence of the loving action of one God. Humans are not given birth in order to fight allegedly necessary conflicts. On the contrary, humans are called to share in God’s loving, caring activities. When violence enters the world with Cain’s killing of Abel, this is not how things should be but a matter that needs addressing, a problem that needs a solution. Violence is not a means of redeeming what is wrong in our world but a sign of the need for redemption. And that redemption comes to us not through force but ultimately through the self giving of Jesus, the God Man, on the cross.

Indeed the chasm between the ‘myth of redemptive violence’ and a Christian viewpoint is shown in our Old Testament reading. Against the background of a painful exile, the prophet Zechariah, looks not to revenge for the age of wrong but instead offers a vision of peace. A vision of a King riding not on a war horse, the chieftain tanks of his day, but on a donkey, a symbol of peace, with a message of peace to all the nations. No nonsense of redemptive violence here. Instead, the path of peace. And of course, it is no surprise that Gospel writers looked back to that prophetic word as they described the coming of Jesus into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, on a donkey.

Do you get the picture? The dominant view of our world today may be ‘redemptive violence’ but the Christian understanding is more one of non violence, albeit creative non violence for Christians can not be passive about injustice. And therein lies the rub. Christianity is not in conformity to the dominant world view. No wonder, the Apostle Paul wrote to the Romans;

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds so that you may discern what is the will of God -what is good and acceptable and perfect.

And that is indeed a tough order, for all of us have within us the temptation to follow the drumbeat of conformity. Yet in following that drumbeat which takes us away from God, we lose something, for as the poet James Russell Lowell put it;

They are slaves who fear to be, in the right with two or three.

And indeed at times, we can feel that to be a Christian is a painful road. How do we live up to it? The struggle to pay the mortgage, the questions as to how long before the housing market whooshes down, the endless testing inflicted upon the young - are not these and other pressures enough? Surely we have all the burdens we can cope with? But no, says Jesus. He has come to take away the rage, to bring calm and value, to give to us a peace of mind. And if we think that to follow his way and to serve him in a world caught up in the ‘myth of redemptive violence’ is too much, he offers us hope and a promise;

Come to me, all ye that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart. And you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

Here we meet the true Divine invitation. An invitation to move from the rages and the spiritual forces that dehumanise - into something so much better, Christ’s abundant life. Yes, there is a cross to carry. Yes, there is a serious calling. But we face it not alone but with the whole Body of Christ. Christ is with us granting his strength, love and peace. Through him, we are caught up in victory of love rather than of conquest, and when we fall he is there not to condemn us but to pick us up.

Elie Wiesel the Holocaust survivor, who wrote that chilling book, ‘Night’ about his path to Auschwitz and his horrendous experiences there, puts it beautifully in his ‘Messengers of God;’

When God created man, God gave him a secret - and that secret was not how to begin but how to begin again… it is not given to man to begin; that privilege is God’s alone. But it is given to every man to begin again - and he does so every time he chooses to defy death and side with the living.

The ‘myth of redemptive violence’ reduces human being to brutes, devoid of a moral base and without any intrinsic value. It excuses barbarity as part of the natural order of things. Our Gospel affirms God’s love for us especially as revealed in Christ. It reveals us all to be of value to God and meriting respect from one another. It reveals to us a God who sticks with us through thick and thin. But more than that it reveals a God who invites to come to eat and drink at his Table where we receive his love and acceptance, and in bread and wine to receive his Life.

AMEN


This sermon was preached at Alwington on July 3rd 2005 at a Communion Service