Sermon delivered Sunday, July 20, 2014 (6th Sunday After Pentecost, Year A, Proper 11), at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN (Romans 8:12-25, Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43).
“Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where, then, did these weeds come from?”
This question from the parable in today’s Gospel reading gives voice to one of the oldest questions known to humanity. If God is good and intends good for the world, why do bad things happen? It is the classic “problem of evil,” the problem of why evil exists if there is an all-powerful and all-good God in control of the world.
There are two aspects to the problem of evil: one is the question of why people do bad things, and the other is the question of why bad things happen outside of human initiative: natural disasters and the like, things that no person or people caused to happen and so they are called “acts of God” by the insurance companies because there is no one else to blame. Today’s parable deals with the first aspect of the problem of evil: why people do bad things, or why there are “bad people,” so to speak, in our world.
The answer we get from the parable is that the bad people, the “weeds” in our world, to follow the parable’s analogy, are put there by the “evil one,” or the devil. According to the parable, God only planted the good seeds; the weeds were planted by an enemy trying to sabotage God’s harvest. This explanation gets God off the hook in that it attributes responsibility for the existence of the “bad people,” the “weeds,” to someone other than God, but the question still remains as to why God allows these weeds to continue to grow in his field – why not go out and pull them up? In fact, that’s exactly what the slaves in the parable suggest – “Do you want us to go and gather them?” they ask about the weeds. But the master says “no, because in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them.” He instructs them to let the two grow together until the harvest, at which time they will separate the wheat and the weeds.
In the original Greek, the word translated as “weed” in this parable does not mean just any weed in general, but a specific plant, most likely a plant called bearded darnel [1]. The darnel plant is a weed that is bitter and mildly toxic, but in its early stages it looks almost identical to wheat, so that it is nearly impossible to tell the two apart [2]. This is why the master says that in gathering the weeds the slaves would uproot the wheat along with them – they wouldn’t be able to tell what was wheat and what was weeds. It is only after the plant has reached maturity that the darnel turns a slightly different color and is distinguishable from the wheat. But by then, the roots of the two plants have become intertwined and it would be impossible to uproot one without uprooting the other: so the master’s solution is a wise one: “Let both of them grow together until the harvest,” and at the harvest the two can be separated. The wheat and the weeds are allowed to coexist together for the good of the wheat – so that the wheat is not destroyed accidentally in the attempt to destroy the weeds.
Thus, the parable’s answer as to why bad people are allowed to coexist along with good people is twofold: first, it is often impossible to distinguish the two. We can’t always tell which people are the “wheat” and which are the “weeds” in the fields of our lives. Only God truly knows, the God who, as our psalm says, knows us intimately, all our thoughts and motivations and desires.
Secondly, it would be impossible to get rid of the “bad people” without also harming the good – a truth that we see illustrated in the way most of our armed conflicts play out in this world. Every time we as human beings try to “kill the bad people,” we usually wind up killing a lot of innocent people along with them, the so-called “collateral damage” of war. But the master in the parable is not willing to take the risk of “collateral damage.” He knows that every grain of wheat in that field is precious to him and wants to bring them all to the harvest.
And so, we are asked to have a lot of patience, and a lot of trust. Paul says in our reading from Romans that “we hope for what we do not see,” and we “wait for it with patience.” Sometimes when we look around us and we see the weeds growing along with the wheat, we can feel like there is no justice, there is no order or purpose, there is no God. But we are asked to trust that although the wicked seem to prosper and we do not yet see justice in this world, that ultimately God will straighten things out in the end. It is easy to be tempted to take matters into our own hands and try to pull up what we think are the “weeds” in the world around us, but in doing so we may actually do more harm than good. This parable is as much a warning against being judgmental as it is an answer to the problem of evil. We cannot distinguish the wheat from the weeds, so we have to trust the one who knows us the most intimately to make that call.
And even though Jesus explains the parable by saying that the “good seed” are “the children of the kingdom” and the “weeds” are the “children of the evil one,” I’m not so sure that there isn’t a bit of “good seed” and a bit of “weeds” inside each one of us. Our myths, both religious and secular, tend to split the world into the “good guys” and the “bad guys,” but I think a more accurate word would be that there is a bit of “good guy” and “bad guy” in each one of us. Although the moralisms of the Bible always assume there are two clear-cut categories of people, “the righteous” and “the wicked,” the actual people in the Bible are hardly ever so cut and dried. Take Jacob, for example. In our passages from the Hebrew scriptures over the past few weeks, we’ve been reading along in the history of the people of Israel, starting with Abraham and Sarah and moving along through their descendants, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Esau. Just last week we saw Jacob, the man after whom the entire people of Israel comes to be named, cheating his brother out of his birthright. Not exactly hero behavior, is it? Two chapters after that story, Jacob also steals his father’s blessing from his brother Esau. While his father is on his deathbed, Jacob can think of nothing but tricking him into doing something for his own personal gain. And then this week we have a nice story about Jacob encountering the Lord at Bethel, where God tells him that “all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you,” this man who was a such a liar and a cheater! Although Jacob had a lot of unsavory personality traits, God allowed the wheat and the weeds to grow together in Jacob until the harvest. (We can only hope that God straightened Jacob out for all his dishonest dealings when the time came for him to meet his maker!)
The Jewish tradition teaches that inside each one of us is the yatzer ha-tov, the inclination to do good, and the yatzer ha-rah, the inclination to do evil, and both those inclinations compete for our attention. Our spiritual task is to choose to follow our yatzer ha-tov, the inclination to do good, rather than the yatzer ha-rah, the inclination to do evil. If we apply this understanding to the parable of the wheat and the weeds, perhaps it tells us that the reason God does not do away with what we think are the bad parts of ourselves is that in uprooting those parts of us, he would also uproot and destroy the good parts of us. And maybe, just maybe, those thoughts and actions that we think are “weeds” might just be wheat. Perhaps we’re not any better at telling apart the good from the bad inside ourselves than we are at telling it apart in others. And so, we leave it to God to do the judging – about what is “good” and “evil” in other people and about what is “good” and “evil” in ourselves, trusting that at the final harvest, the One who knows all of our innermost thoughts will separate the weeds from the wheat.
---
[1] Nolland, John. The Gospel of
Matthew: A Commentary on the Greek Text. (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2005), p. 545.
Accessed online via Google Books, 15 Jul 2014.
[2] Dick Donovan, Sermon Writer, July 20, 2014 (Proper 11A).
Sunday, July 20, 2014
Sunday, July 6, 2014
Incarnational theology: everything is holy
Sermon delivered Sunday, July 6, 2014 (Fourth Sunday After Pentecost (Year A, Proper 9)) at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN.
Song of Solomon 2:8-13, Romans 7:15-25a
You may have noticed that we read a canticle instead of a psalm as one of the readings today. The word “canticle” comes from the Latin word for “song,” and means just that, a song. The canticles that we say or sing during Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer, and sometimes in the Sunday lectionary are songs from parts of the Bible other than the book of psalms.
Today’s canticle comes from the book of the Song of Solomon, or the Song of Songs, as you may have heard it called. Since we don’t often read from the Song of Solomon in our Sunday lectionary, the only place many of us hear it read is at weddings, which is certainly an appropriate place for it, since the whole book is an extended love poem between two lovers.
The Song of Solomon is one of only two books in the Bible where God is not mentioned. This fact, and the fact that its sole focus is romantic, erotic love, has led to much controversy over its inclusion in the Bible. Why is this book, which is focused exclusively on physical, earthly love and does not mention God, considered one of our sacred texts?
From a very early time, both Jewish and Christian readers of this book have argued that the text is meant to be read allegorical or metaphorically, where the two lovers in the poem are not two human beings in love, but either God and the Jewish people, or Christ and the church. When the speaker talks about “my beloved,” she is not speaking of a literal man, but of God or Christ. The message they then glean from this book is that we should direct the passions we feel for love from other people toward God, that only God can truly fulfill the desires for intimacy that we often look to be filled from our human relationships.
This interpretation is not out of keeping with other parts of the scriptures, where God’s relationship with the people of Israel is described using the metaphor of a marriage or romantic relationship, particularly the Hebrew prophets. But the thing that has made some readers of the text skeptical about that interpretation is the fact that the Song of Solomon does not clearly make that comparison, unlike other books of the Hebrew Bible that do. The book of Hosea, for example, makes a very clear and explicit comparison between an unfaithful wife and the people of Israel’s unfaithfulness in their relationship to God. If you actually read the text of the Song of Solomon carefully, though, it never claims to be about God or anybody’s relationship with God, but about romantic love between two people. And for some reason, both the Jewish and Christian traditions have insisted that it must be about more than just that for it to be considered sacred.
But why must it? Why can’t we accept that this book is simply a love poem celebrating the beauty of romantic love, and that in and of itself makes it holy? As we reflected on this passage earlier this week in our Tuesday morning Bible study, someone in the group observed that even if this passage does not talk about God specifically, it is very “God-like.” They were recognizing a certain sacred quality to the text that is there even if the word “God” is not specifically mentioned, and we talked about how all kinds of things can be sacred or holy even if they do not explicitly have to do with God or church. In this conversation, perhaps without knowing it, the group was exploring the realm of incarnational theology.
What do I mean by that? Well, the school of thought known as “incarnational theology” affirms the goodness of the material world and all things in it as mediators of God’s presence to us. In contrast to a dualistic theology that sees “the material” as bad and “the spiritual” as good and the two in competition and conflict with one another, incarnational theology affirms that this world, this material place of physical stuff, is good and holy, and that we can find the spiritual in and through the material. It is called “incarnational theology” because it affirms that the material world is good because of the incarnation – God’s choice to become human in Jesus Christ and experience this physical world is seen as an affirmation of the inherent goodness in this world. Incarnational theology also affirms that the incarnation was more than just God’s presence coming to dwell in the person of Jesus Christ – through the mystery of the incarnation, the whole world is infused with the presence of God, and all creation is sacred.
Although this view has always been the view of the Eastern Orthodox churches, Western Christianity, in both Roman Catholic and Protestant forms, has tended to see “the world” as something negative or even evil, something Christians should try to avoid at all costs. We see this kind of thinking in the writings of the Apostle Paul, and today’s passage from Romans is a perfect example. In this passage, Paul writes about his struggles to do what is right, and says that it is his body, his flesh, the things of this material world, that prevent him from achieving his spiritual goals. Rather than seeing his body as a gift from God to be celebrated and appreciated, Paul calls it a “body of death”! What a contrast to the joyful celebration of the body that we find in the Song of Solomon, where every aspect of the beloved’s body is described in loving detail, with rich metaphors to the beauties of nature.
This notion of a division between the material and spiritual worlds can be found even in the meaning of the word “holy” in the Hebrew language. While the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the English word “holy” as “having to do with a god or religion” or “religiously and morally good,” the Hebrew definition of the word “holy” means “set apart,” something that is separate and distinguished from regular, ordinary, mundane or “secular” life. In churches that have a high view of the sacraments, as the Episcopal Church does, we tend to think in terms of that Hebrew definition of holiness. Holy water is holy because it is different from other kinds of water, and because a priest or bishop has said a blessing over it to “set it apart” for sacramental use. The bread and wine become holy after the Eucharistic prayer has been said over them and afterwards they are “set apart” from regular bread and wine and treated differently, with more reverence, than regular food. But in terms of our common usage of the word “holy,” we tend to think more in terms of the modern English definition, as something religiously or morally good, something that connects us to God in some way. In that sense, was the bread and wine not already holy in some way before we said the prayers over them? Isn’t all water in some sense holy? Incarnational theology invites us to see sacraments not only in the seven traditional forms that the church has given to us, but everywhere around us, in the most mundane and secular parts of our lives, even in the places where God is not mentioned.
There is a song by folk singer Peter Mayer that illustrates this notion perfectly, and since poetry is so often better than prose at communicating an idea, let me share the lyrics of that song with you. It goes like this:
When I was a boy, each week
On Sunday we would go to church
And pay attention to the priest
And he would read the holy word
And consecrate the holy bread
And everyone would kneel and bow
Today the only difference is
Everything is holy now
When I was in Sunday school
We would learn about the time
Moses split the sea in two
And Jesus made the water wine
And I remember feeling sad
Miracles don't happen still
But now I can't keep track
'Cause everything's a miracle
Wine from water is not so small
But an even better magic trick
Is that anything is here at all
So the challenging thing becomes
Not to look for miracles
But finding where there isn't one
When holy water was rare at best
It barely wet my fingertips
But now I have to hold my breath
Like I'm swimming in a sea of it
It used to be a world half there
Heaven's second rate hand-me-down
But I walk it with a reverent air
'Cause everything is holy now
Peter Mayer was raised Catholic and eventually left the church, so in his assertion that “everything is holy now,” by “now,” he means since he left the Catholic Church and came to a broader understanding of how and where God acts and is present in the world. But he didn’t need to have left the church to come to that realization. Within Christian theology, there is strong support for just the sentiments that Mayer expresses in this song – that “everything is holy,” that “the world is charged with the grandeur of God,” as English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins put it, or, as we say each week in the sanctus, the great song of the church that we sing during the Eucharistic liturgy, “Holy, holy, holy Lord God of power and might, heaven and earth are full of your glory!”
The catechism in the back of the Book of Common Prayer specifically affirms that God’s activity is not limited to the seven traditional sacramental rites as defined by the church. In response to the question, “Is God’s activity limited to these rites?”, the Catechism’s answer is, “God does not limit himself to these rites; they are patterns of countless ways by which God uses material things to reach out to us” (BCP 861).
So we’re in full agreement with Mayer when he says in the concluding verses to his song,
Read a questioning child's face
And say it's not a testament
That'd be very hard to say
See another new morning come
And say it's not a sacrament
I tell you that it can't be done
This morning, outside I stood
And saw a little red-winged bird
Shining like a burning bush
And singing like a scripture verse
It made me want to bow my head
I remember when church let out
How things have changed since then
Everything is holy now
So, from this perspective, we can read something like the Song of Solomon, a love poem that doesn’t specifically mention God, just as it is and still call it holy, without needing to spiritualize it or read into it a metaphor about the “marriage” between God and God’s people.
What things are sacraments and testaments to you in the big wide world out there? Outside of this building, where does God speak to you? What things have you experienced in life that made you want to bow your head in reverence? What are the songs or poems that you would include in your own personal “Bible” of readings that are sacred to you? This week, I invite you to notice the ways that God is present in the world around you and give thanks for them, whether they are traditional places where you expect to meet God or not. It’s all about paying attention, one of the great spiritual disciplines, and as you do so, remember the words of the English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who expressed her own incarnational theology this way:
Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees takes off his shoes.
Song of Solomon 2:8-13, Romans 7:15-25a
You may have noticed that we read a canticle instead of a psalm as one of the readings today. The word “canticle” comes from the Latin word for “song,” and means just that, a song. The canticles that we say or sing during Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer, and sometimes in the Sunday lectionary are songs from parts of the Bible other than the book of psalms.
Today’s canticle comes from the book of the Song of Solomon, or the Song of Songs, as you may have heard it called. Since we don’t often read from the Song of Solomon in our Sunday lectionary, the only place many of us hear it read is at weddings, which is certainly an appropriate place for it, since the whole book is an extended love poem between two lovers.
The Song of Solomon is one of only two books in the Bible where God is not mentioned. This fact, and the fact that its sole focus is romantic, erotic love, has led to much controversy over its inclusion in the Bible. Why is this book, which is focused exclusively on physical, earthly love and does not mention God, considered one of our sacred texts?
From a very early time, both Jewish and Christian readers of this book have argued that the text is meant to be read allegorical or metaphorically, where the two lovers in the poem are not two human beings in love, but either God and the Jewish people, or Christ and the church. When the speaker talks about “my beloved,” she is not speaking of a literal man, but of God or Christ. The message they then glean from this book is that we should direct the passions we feel for love from other people toward God, that only God can truly fulfill the desires for intimacy that we often look to be filled from our human relationships.
This interpretation is not out of keeping with other parts of the scriptures, where God’s relationship with the people of Israel is described using the metaphor of a marriage or romantic relationship, particularly the Hebrew prophets. But the thing that has made some readers of the text skeptical about that interpretation is the fact that the Song of Solomon does not clearly make that comparison, unlike other books of the Hebrew Bible that do. The book of Hosea, for example, makes a very clear and explicit comparison between an unfaithful wife and the people of Israel’s unfaithfulness in their relationship to God. If you actually read the text of the Song of Solomon carefully, though, it never claims to be about God or anybody’s relationship with God, but about romantic love between two people. And for some reason, both the Jewish and Christian traditions have insisted that it must be about more than just that for it to be considered sacred.
But why must it? Why can’t we accept that this book is simply a love poem celebrating the beauty of romantic love, and that in and of itself makes it holy? As we reflected on this passage earlier this week in our Tuesday morning Bible study, someone in the group observed that even if this passage does not talk about God specifically, it is very “God-like.” They were recognizing a certain sacred quality to the text that is there even if the word “God” is not specifically mentioned, and we talked about how all kinds of things can be sacred or holy even if they do not explicitly have to do with God or church. In this conversation, perhaps without knowing it, the group was exploring the realm of incarnational theology.
What do I mean by that? Well, the school of thought known as “incarnational theology” affirms the goodness of the material world and all things in it as mediators of God’s presence to us. In contrast to a dualistic theology that sees “the material” as bad and “the spiritual” as good and the two in competition and conflict with one another, incarnational theology affirms that this world, this material place of physical stuff, is good and holy, and that we can find the spiritual in and through the material. It is called “incarnational theology” because it affirms that the material world is good because of the incarnation – God’s choice to become human in Jesus Christ and experience this physical world is seen as an affirmation of the inherent goodness in this world. Incarnational theology also affirms that the incarnation was more than just God’s presence coming to dwell in the person of Jesus Christ – through the mystery of the incarnation, the whole world is infused with the presence of God, and all creation is sacred.
Although this view has always been the view of the Eastern Orthodox churches, Western Christianity, in both Roman Catholic and Protestant forms, has tended to see “the world” as something negative or even evil, something Christians should try to avoid at all costs. We see this kind of thinking in the writings of the Apostle Paul, and today’s passage from Romans is a perfect example. In this passage, Paul writes about his struggles to do what is right, and says that it is his body, his flesh, the things of this material world, that prevent him from achieving his spiritual goals. Rather than seeing his body as a gift from God to be celebrated and appreciated, Paul calls it a “body of death”! What a contrast to the joyful celebration of the body that we find in the Song of Solomon, where every aspect of the beloved’s body is described in loving detail, with rich metaphors to the beauties of nature.
This notion of a division between the material and spiritual worlds can be found even in the meaning of the word “holy” in the Hebrew language. While the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the English word “holy” as “having to do with a god or religion” or “religiously and morally good,” the Hebrew definition of the word “holy” means “set apart,” something that is separate and distinguished from regular, ordinary, mundane or “secular” life. In churches that have a high view of the sacraments, as the Episcopal Church does, we tend to think in terms of that Hebrew definition of holiness. Holy water is holy because it is different from other kinds of water, and because a priest or bishop has said a blessing over it to “set it apart” for sacramental use. The bread and wine become holy after the Eucharistic prayer has been said over them and afterwards they are “set apart” from regular bread and wine and treated differently, with more reverence, than regular food. But in terms of our common usage of the word “holy,” we tend to think more in terms of the modern English definition, as something religiously or morally good, something that connects us to God in some way. In that sense, was the bread and wine not already holy in some way before we said the prayers over them? Isn’t all water in some sense holy? Incarnational theology invites us to see sacraments not only in the seven traditional forms that the church has given to us, but everywhere around us, in the most mundane and secular parts of our lives, even in the places where God is not mentioned.
There is a song by folk singer Peter Mayer that illustrates this notion perfectly, and since poetry is so often better than prose at communicating an idea, let me share the lyrics of that song with you. It goes like this:
When I was a boy, each week
On Sunday we would go to church
And pay attention to the priest
And he would read the holy word
And consecrate the holy bread
And everyone would kneel and bow
Today the only difference is
Everything is holy now
When I was in Sunday school
We would learn about the time
Moses split the sea in two
And Jesus made the water wine
And I remember feeling sad
Miracles don't happen still
But now I can't keep track
'Cause everything's a miracle
Wine from water is not so small
But an even better magic trick
Is that anything is here at all
So the challenging thing becomes
Not to look for miracles
But finding where there isn't one
When holy water was rare at best
It barely wet my fingertips
But now I have to hold my breath
Like I'm swimming in a sea of it
It used to be a world half there
Heaven's second rate hand-me-down
But I walk it with a reverent air
'Cause everything is holy now
Peter Mayer was raised Catholic and eventually left the church, so in his assertion that “everything is holy now,” by “now,” he means since he left the Catholic Church and came to a broader understanding of how and where God acts and is present in the world. But he didn’t need to have left the church to come to that realization. Within Christian theology, there is strong support for just the sentiments that Mayer expresses in this song – that “everything is holy,” that “the world is charged with the grandeur of God,” as English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins put it, or, as we say each week in the sanctus, the great song of the church that we sing during the Eucharistic liturgy, “Holy, holy, holy Lord God of power and might, heaven and earth are full of your glory!”
The catechism in the back of the Book of Common Prayer specifically affirms that God’s activity is not limited to the seven traditional sacramental rites as defined by the church. In response to the question, “Is God’s activity limited to these rites?”, the Catechism’s answer is, “God does not limit himself to these rites; they are patterns of countless ways by which God uses material things to reach out to us” (BCP 861).
So we’re in full agreement with Mayer when he says in the concluding verses to his song,
Read a questioning child's face
And say it's not a testament
That'd be very hard to say
See another new morning come
And say it's not a sacrament
I tell you that it can't be done
This morning, outside I stood
And saw a little red-winged bird
Shining like a burning bush
And singing like a scripture verse
It made me want to bow my head
I remember when church let out
How things have changed since then
Everything is holy now
So, from this perspective, we can read something like the Song of Solomon, a love poem that doesn’t specifically mention God, just as it is and still call it holy, without needing to spiritualize it or read into it a metaphor about the “marriage” between God and God’s people.
What things are sacraments and testaments to you in the big wide world out there? Outside of this building, where does God speak to you? What things have you experienced in life that made you want to bow your head in reverence? What are the songs or poems that you would include in your own personal “Bible” of readings that are sacred to you? This week, I invite you to notice the ways that God is present in the world around you and give thanks for them, whether they are traditional places where you expect to meet God or not. It’s all about paying attention, one of the great spiritual disciplines, and as you do so, remember the words of the English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who expressed her own incarnational theology this way:
Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees takes off his shoes.
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