no crabgrass here, thanks

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PETER’S, ARROWTOWN

and St PAUL’S, QUEENSTOWN

Ordinary Sunday 16 (July 23^rd) 2023

 

 

READINGS:

Genesis 28: 10-19a

Psalm 139: 1-12, 23-24

Rom 8: 18-25

Matthew 13: 23-30

 

For any of you who are viewers of my Gospel Conversation YouTube programme  you will already be aware from my panellist Ellen Clark-King that Matthew the author has constructed his gospel-telling very carefully. Although chapters and verses weren’t invented as aids to reading the bible until many centuries later, nevertheless Matthew has placed at the heart of his narrative a large chunk of Jesus-teachings about what we would now call the reign, or as one of Ellen creatively put it, the culture of God. Matthew is telling his people, and as it happens that includes us (bet he never saw that coming!) that this culture-teaching is at the very centre of all things Jesus.

Over centuries, at least since Aquinas in the thirteenth century, we’ve tended to think more in terms of the death of Jesus as the central theme of gospel, occasionally with a glimpse of resurrection-reference thrown in as a softener, but Matthew is emphatic that God’s culture – a gender inclusive phrase that is preferable to “kingdom” in this context – is the heart of the gospel.

Our task then is to allow our lives to be invaded by Jesus, by Jesus-seed if you like, and in that way to allow ourselves to be overrun by his divine culture. And so … because God’s culture is not monochrome but a kaleidoscope of colour and command and responsibility and longing – we have parable after parable to extend our horizon and confound our expectation. Which, if we let them, they still can after 2000 years.

This parable of the weeds bends over backwards to emphasize that our responsibility is not to mastermind but to allow God’s growth to work within us. Tares and wheat in Jesus’ world looked very similar. But you will find countless contemporary examples here and now, too. Many of you as gardeners will know the problem well: couch or twitch, kikuyu, crabgrass, to name just some of countless examples. For us the task is one of surrender to the life-energies of the seed sown within us; but with a catch. We are called to surrender not to the weeds hidden with the grass of our own life of the life of our community, but to surrender to the energies of the Spirit who will lead us to discern those differences.

This is not to suggest we sit back and do nothing. It is to emphasize that we must offer our lives over and again in exposure to God’s Spirit. It’s not altogether helpful to know what kikuyu or couch (twitch) or crabgrass look like without then doing something about it. It’s not altogether helpful to know what loneliness or poverty look like without doing something about them. Doing something, that is, within our range of capability. God doesn’t ask me to climb ladders, or ask you, if it’s not your think to make public speeches or play for the All Blacks. God tailors, as we see in that stunning metaphor of God clothing Adam and Even as our protypes are sent out of the Garden.

How do I encounter Jesus in this context, how do I represent the culture of God in that context? Where I see in my own life or in the life of the community around me something that is counter-God, how do I speak God-stuff, God-culture, how do I enact God-culture in that realm? Like every good discipline faith takes practice, as Brother Lawrence, the Carmelite, put it in the seventeenth century. Meet together, read together, pray together, all these are training exercises. Pray and think alone, too, in creation, in a garden, a park … sit in a church … read … pray … however that looks for you. Do so alone and together, for these are practices, or can be, of the presence of God.

The call of the Parables of Divine Culture is not to condemn people to the pits of a fiery hell, but to discern and dismiss that within our own lives which needs to be eradicated, and, like ridding ourselves of crabgrass or even wildling pines, to chip away at the bigger questions in society as we can.

To these tasks we are called as we seek God’s help to discern and eradicate the tares, crabgrass, kikuyu and worse in our life and the life of our world.