Sermon preached by Fr. Tom at St. Thomas, Plymouth
July 20, 2014
Proper 11 – Pentecost 6
“May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be an acceptable offering in your sight, Oh Lord, my strength and my redeemer.”
Every one of us has wished the church was a better place. We see “Jesus Saves” bumper stickers on cars driven by total jerks. We get mad at each other. Sometimes we are embarrassed by the actions of people who are TV evangelists and do stupid things that give other Christians a bad name.
I think there is a temptation for Christians to believe that they are the “chosen” and others have fallen short. Other people might call themselves Christians, but their faith is somehow defective. This is one of the evil things about denominations. They emphasize differences and separate us.
They say there was an Episcopalian who died and went to Heaven. St. Peter offers to take him on a tour. So they see the New Jerusalem. It is glorious, but as they pass a door, St. Peter gestures for the man to be very quiet and they tiptoe past. They continue on their tour, and as they are on the way back, they pass the door again. Once more St. Peter gives a signal and they silently tiptoe past the door.
Once they are a safe distance away, the man asks St. Peter, “Who is behind the door?” St. Peter tells him that is where the people go who believe you have to be baptized by immersion. They think they are the only ones here.”
There is something about the practice of a faith tradition that seems to put up walls and close doors. We want it to be an exclusive club somehow, and can be intolerant of people who are not like us. A lot of Christians spend a lot of time condemning one group of people or another. Maybe WE don’t condemn other people, but we can usually think of things that would make the church better, and these things all involve someone being more like us.
In the Gospel lesson today, Jesus taught his disciples how to deal with fellow-Christians who appear to be in the wrong. Jesus told the story of a farmer who had a wheat field. But an enemy came at night and sowed weeds among the wheat. If he pulls the weeds now, he will pull up the wheat. Jesus says the farmer should wait for the harvest, and they will be sorted good from bad.
Last week the Gospel was the Parable of the Sower. We heard about the Word of God being planted and wanted to be the good ground where the Word grows and produces. We want out church to be the good ground. We want to be that good ground ourselves.
Now when I started this sermon, I mentioned how other Christians can irritate us or they can seem to fall short of our expectations. Wouldn’t it be nice if they just went away or stopped calling themselves Christians? We read this Scripture, and we think “They were planted by the devil. If we could just get rid of them, everything would be better.”
But Jesus says:
“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.”
There are two issues here as I see it. First we are not to judge. We are not the ones who separate the wheat from the weeds. We are liable to get things wrong. We might think someone was planted by the devil, but we can’t tell for sure. We see only the surface, but God sees the heart. In the end, God will set things right. For today, we are stuck with people we don’t like. We are stuck with people we may find it tough to tolerate.
The reapers are the ones who can tell the good from the bad. The Gospel tells us that “The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers.” The angels are the ones who can tell who is in and who is out – not us.
The second issue is that God has a plan. We also don’t know God’s plan for someone we don’t like. Maybe our witness is supposed to be part of their finding Jesus and turning their lives around. Maybe God intends for their witness to be part of our growing in the faith. Maybe God has already redeemed that person and we just can’t see it because we see through a glass darkly. Maybe our own sin is getting in the way?
One way or another, God sees in ways we don’t. God has a plan.
Now it does not matter if the weed we see is in this congregation or it is is is a church down the street. God hasn’t sent us to judge. God has sent us to love. God will take care of the judging.
That can be difficult to appreciate, because we struggle with pride. We want our opinion to be right, and we tend to be intolerant by nature. We are intolerant by our sinful nature though. This parable tells us to leave the judging to God and His angels.
Intolerance of other Christians makes us less effective as a church. Just before his death, Jesus prayed that we Christians might all be one so “that the world may believe that you sent me” (John 17:21).
Jesus wants us to be united so that “the world” – those who don’t believe will come to believe in Him. If Christians are divided and fighting each other, it drives people away. It is the wrong kind of witness. So let’s quit fighting.
A few years ago, the Soviet Union broke into separate countries. We have been reading a lot about one of them – the Ukraine in the news recently. With the loss of a central government which had oppressed the church, people could be more open about being Christians, and many people returned to the faith. There is a problem though when you have decades of oppression. The churches had no resources or materials developed for converts and teaching. They had a strong tradition of the Orthodox Church, and there were priests. That was about all they had.
Gospel Light Publications decided to help. Gospel Light is a conservative publishing house. We would probably call them fundamentalist. They specialize in Sunday school materials and other materials for children. They produce materials for conservative Baptists. They decided to develop materials especially tailored for Russian people.
Gospel Light offered to help the Russian Orthodox Church. Russian Orthodox leaders tend to be suspicious of the West in general and Protestants in particular. The President of Gospel Light said, “It took us about two years to win them over.”
Gospel Light enlisted the help of the Orthodox Church in America to produce materials for the Russian church. They had all sorts of artwork that they could have used. It is the kind of artwork you have all seen. There are drawings of Jesus and the disciples wearing bathrobes and healing people. There are pictures of happy shepherds tending flocks. It is the art you find in religious coloring books for children. That isn’t the kind of art that Russian Christians find helpful, so Gospel Light hired artists to produce art in the Byzantine tradition.
Gospel Light had materials organized in a particular way. There were Old Testament stories, New Testament stories, pictures for children to color, and crafts for Vacation Bible School. But the Orthodox Church follows a lectionary, so Gospel Light reorganized everything to fit the Orthodox calendar.
Gospel Light encouraged American congregations from various denominations to adopt Russian congregations. The result was a beautiful example of what can happen when Christians quit judging and start loving.
A cynic might say, “Gospel Light was just trying to exploit a new market to make a buck,” but there are easier ways to make a buck. I believe that the people at Gospel Light were responding to a nudge by the Holy Spirit that pulled them out of their comfort zone. They helped people who had been enemies and had a faith tradition that was very different.
My takeaways this morning are simple. By that I mean they are easy to understand. I am not saying they are easy to do.
First, God does not call us to judge. He will take care of that.
Second, we should be attending to our own sins and not worrying so much about how someone else if falling short of God’s grace.
Finally, God calls us to love each other and quit fighting. This is the way can be effective witnesses to God’s grace and the power of redemption.
I have said these words in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen