Live for that day when God’s peace is all in all. Love for that day when God’s light leaves no shadows.
These are the darkest days of our lives. December draws a long shadow, and we find ourselves longing for light.
These days seem to go on without end.
These are the days Isaiah fought through and hoped through 3000 years ago: the same old, the same old. the dark ages all over again. This is the mean time.
This is the time to cherish those who’ve kindled hope, those we’ve bound in scripture who hoped in God when the world felt just as heavy as ours. This is the time to pray. This is the time to keep watch. This is the time to live for another day, to love towards another day when the times will finally be a-changing.
These are very mean days when nations make war on nations, There may be no world war, But there are too many wars for us to call this peace. The world is at war, and we are all caught up in a global propaganda war.
These are very mean days when dark forces create a hostile environment for those seeking asylum and sanctuary, days which leave so many children hungry and too many families poor,
when budget after budget miss the opportunity to make things better.
These days, however bright the weather may be, are dark days to too many people.
And so – these are the very days to keep hope alive, to pray for the day when God’s kingdom comes on earth, as it is in heaven, to live for the day when God’s word settles disputes; to love for the day when nation will not take up sword against nation, and nor will we need to train for war any more.
Imagine that. Imagine the difference when the weapons of war, the resources of war, become tools for farming and feeding and healing.
Imagine the difference if the resources of war were turned to farming. Not just in the fields of our own villages, but in Gaza’s broken orchards, in Ukraine’s shelled wheatlands, in every place where the soil has been scorched, and the hands that sow can no longer harvest.
Isaiah’s dream has dirt under its nails. It is a farmer’s dream, a peacemaker’s dream – swords hammered into ploughshares, spears repurposed as pruning hooks, the earth tended again.
And here’s another theme none of us can avoid, if we care about justice and peace: we need to be prepared in these days of darkness. Advent comes with a wake up call. The time has come for us to wake up, says Paul, (Romans 13) and be ready for the Day of the Lord – the day we live for, the day we pray for, the day we love for.
For Advent I’ve downloaded an app which notifies me of Fajr – the prayer Muslims offer from dawn to sunrise. So, this morning, at 6.05, my phone buzzed to tell me it was time to pray, and I was reminded of all those who rise while the world is still dark to end the night and hope for the day.
First they wash, then raise their hands to acknowledge the greatness of God. They then recite the Surah:
In the name of Allah – the Most Compassionate, Most Merciful. All praise is for Allah – Lord of all worlds. the Most Compassionate, Most Merciful, Master of the Day of Judgment. You ‘alone’ we worship and You ‘alone’ we ask for help. Guide us along the Straight Path the Path of those you have blessed – not those You are displeased with, or those who are astray.
Then they bow They stand and say, “God hears the one who praises him.” They prostrate themselves, grounding their forehead, palms, knees and toes on the earth – and from the ground they praise God. They finish by turning their head to the right and to the left with a prayer of peace in both directions. Then they are ready for the day (and, dare I say, they’ve given themselves a good work out!).
There is something holy about any people who pray before the sun comes up. They remind us what Advent is for: ending the night, and hoping for the day.
And we are among those holy people imagining that day which will end all days of wrongdoing, when God’s word is truly heard.
That is why our time of prayer is taken up with praying for the coming of God’s kingdom, on earth, as it is in heaven. Christians will always use their prayer time for that – It’s what Jesus taught us.
It is a prayer of imagination. It is a prayer for dawn in the dark. It is a prayer for the day when …. the day God’s peace is all in all, the day God’s light leaves no shadows.
And so we live for that day — when, as Revelation imagines, there will be no more mourning, crying or pain, the day that will see an end to night.
Until that day we keep watch, keep warm, and keep hope alive these dark days.
This sermon was preached for the Second Sunday before Advent — sometimes called Kingdom Sunday, and this year also marked as Safeguarding Sunday. It begins with the prophet Malachi’s vision of a day when “the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its wings,” and when God’s people “will go out and frolic like well-fed calves.” It’s a vivid, earthy picture of freedom — hope that doesn’t float above the world but thunders joyfully across it. Hope, as it turns out, has hooves.
‘Surely the day is coming; it will burn like a furnace. All the arrogant and every evildoer will be stubble, and that day that is coming will set them on fire,’ says the Lord Almighty. ‘Not a root or a branch will be left to them. But for you who revere my name, the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its rays. And you will go out and frolic like well-fed calves.’ (Malachi 4:1-2a)
I thought I’d let Malachi do the talking this morning.
He did his talking 450 years before Christ after the Jewish community had returned from exile. They thought everything was going to be hunky-dory. The Temple had been restored, the worship re-established, and people hoped – and expected – that Israel would be great again.
But the glorious renewal never materialised. It rarely does.
The community Malachi is speaking to is one that had expected to be spared the ways of the arrogant and the evildoers. Instead they found themselves small, struggling and disillusioned. They are weary. They are disappointed. They’ve had enough.
And into that discouragement, Malachi tells them not to give up.
In my last parish we lived next door to a dairy farm. The farmer knew how much we loved the moment when the cows were released into the fields after winter – those first few minutes when they leap and dance and frolic before settling down to graze away their days. On our final day there, as a goodbye, he freed the cows (earlier than he normally would) just so we could watch them. A little gesture of joy and encouragement.
Watch the moment when these animals are released and leap into life. This is the kind of hope we’re talking about — wild, earthy, triumphant (From the Funky Farmer)
That’s the image Malachi gives us: “You will go out and frolic like well-fed calves.” Imagine that, he implies. Feel it. Let that joy into your bones.
The day is coming, the day to end all days, the day we’ve prayed for, the end of wrongdoing, the end of misery, the end of oppression, the end of the arrogant, the end of the evildoer.
But between the promise and its fulfilment, they still had to live through some very tough times indeed. They still lived between a rock and a hard place.
He’s speaking to a community who’ve given up waiting for times to change, who’ve lost hope. And he may as well be speaking to us.
Things haven’t changed that much. His times are still our times. The arrogant and the evildoers still seem to carry the day, and we too can feel like a struggling and disillusioned generation. We get weary. We get disappointed.
This is one of the readings appointed for today. And its words speak, with beautiful conciseness and clarity, of the day we all pray for – the day when everything broken will finally be set right.
And what Malachi offers is not a vague or floaty hope. Not a “pie in the sky when you die” kind of hope. Not the sort of hope that shrugs and says, “Well, it won’t happen in my lifetime—maybe someday, somewhere else.”
No. Malachi’s hope is earthed. It has muscle and movement. It has sun-warmed skin and strong legs. It leaps. It runs. It frolics.
Hope, in Malachi’s vision, is not an idea. It’s an animal set free.
Hope has hooves.
And because hope has hooves, it doesn’t wait politely for the world to improve. It doesn’t sit still until things get better. It doesn’t retreat into a dream or escape into the clouds.
Hope is not about leaving this world behind; it’s about this world being set right.
The freedom Malachi imagines does not happen “up there” or “somewhere else” but here—in the fields of our own lives, in the soil beneath our feet, in the communities that have grown tired and heavy with disappointment.
Hope is grounded. Hope is embodied. Hope is movement.
And that is why those who have given up hope so often spiritualise it, soften it, postpone it. They make it so distant that it no longer touches the earth. They reduce it to wishful thinking or to a future reward instead of a promise that breaks into the present.
But real biblical hope always has dirt on its feet. It always has skin in the game. It always demands something of us.
It is a hope with hooves— a hope that will not stand still because God will not stand still.
And so we pray for that day. Every time we say the Lord’s Prayer — “your kingdom come” — we are praying Malachi’s prayer. We’re praying for the day when wrong is ended, when justice rises, when the oppressed stand tall, when the broken are made whole, when healing breaks out like sunlight over a cold field.
But praying for that day is not passive. It is not waiting-room spirituality. It is preparation. It is participation. It is permission for God to rearrange our lives as well as the world.
Paul, writing to the Thessalonians, puts it plainly: “Never tire of doing good.”
Never tire. Not when we get weary. Not when hope feels heavy. Not when the world seems to resist every effort toward kindness, justice, truth.
Because if hope has hooves, we need to keep ours moving.
Doing good is not an extra. It is not the garnish on Christian faith. It is the shape of hope lived out. It is the daily, steady work of aligning our lives with the world God is bringing into being.
And Jesus, in the Gospel reading, speaks of upheaval— nations in uproar, wars and rumours of wars, the ground trembling beneath our certainties.
But then he says something deeply strengthening: “Do not be afraid.”
Not because everything is fine — it isn’t. Not because everything will suddenly get better — it may not. But because God is with us in the meantime, and it is precisely in these mean times that our hope matters most.
The world being turned the right way up is bound to be unsettling. Those who profit from cruelty won’t like it. Those who cling to power will resist it. Those who prefer darkness will fear the light.
But discipleship has always been lived with courage. Courage to do good when others give up. Courage to tell the truth when lying is easier. Courage to protect the vulnerable when it costs something. Courage to embody hope when cynicism is fashionable.
And that brings us to Safeguarding Sunday.
We haven’t mentioned it until now — and that’s intentional — because safeguarding isn’t a special theme for one Sunday, or a box to tick, or a duty we dust off once a year.
Safeguarding is simply hope in practice. It is the grounded hope Malachi speaks of, the persevering hope Paul commends, the courageous hope Jesus prepares us for.
Safeguarding says: in this community, in this place, every person matters. The vulnerable are protected. The wounded are listened to. The frightened are safe. This is a place where harm is named, not hidden, and where healing is made possible.
Safeguarding is part of the way we pray “your kingdom come.” It is part of the way we “never tire of doing good.” It is part of the way we “do not be afraid.”
It is hope with hooves — hope that moves, hope that watches over, hope that makes room, hope that keeps all God’s people safe until that promised day dawns and we go out and frolic like well-fed calves.
So today we keep our hope alive, we keep our feet moving, and we keep one another safe.
Hope doesn’t just have feathers, as Emily Dickinson writes in her poetry. Hope has hooves.
The calling of God’s people in every generation is to keep faith in these mean times, to never give up hope in these mean times, to never stop loving in these mean times. These are the things we need to keep going forever, faith, hope and love, until the day comes which sees the end of the arrogant and the evildoer, the day the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its wings.
Until then, we keep faith. We keep hope. We keep love.
This is a sermon for the 7th Sunday after Trinity, inspired by Jesus’s so-called parable of the weeds, which is also his second parable of the sower. The text, Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43, is at the foot of this post.
The Sower at Sunset by Van Gogh. He painted over 30 pictures of The Sower. As a missionary he perhaps saw himself as a sower. He loved the land, its people and their commitment to their toil in soil. These parables meant a lot to him.
There isn’t a word of today’s gospel which is impossible for us to understand, is there? Jesus is talking to Jewish peasants as a Jewish peasant of things they knew well. This is the second parable of a sower and one of several parables about seeds.
Last Sunday’s gospel was the parable of the sower who sowed seed – even as we heard the gospel, some of it will have fallen on stony ground, some among thorns, and some in good soil where it might have rooted through the week. Come next week and we will be celebrating the gospel where the kingdom of heaven is likened to a mustard seed, the smallest of all the seeds in the mind of Jesus.
The language is simple, and the meaning is simple. Jesus explains: the sower is the Son of Man, the field is the world, the good seed are the people of the kingdom, the weeds are the people of the evil one and the evil one is the devil. That is how Jesus explained it then.
Van Gogh’s Sower in the background. He painted over 30 pictures of The Sower. As a missionary he perhaps saw himself as a sower. He loved the land, its people and their commitment and love of the daily toil. These parables meant a lot to him.
These parables are simple – and small. They’re for us to dig into.
The sower might be anyone who sows the seeds of faith, hope and love. The field could be more specifically our field of work, or our field of study. The field could be anything, anything we are folded into, society, family etc (fold and field are the same word).
The enemy could be anyone – even our very selves. Sometimes our biggest enemy is ourselves. We get the word enemy from a Latin root – the en of enemy means not, and the –emy ending is where we get the name Amy, meaning friend. So the enemy is anyone who is not friendly, the unfriendly
The weeds may be the enemies’ effect. Those weeds may be injustices, insults, prejudice, condemnation, curse – anything that nips hope in the bud. They may be temptations and cravings, or the unfriendly voices we replay in our minds, or the way of thinking we return to when we are tired or have worn ourselves out. It could be pain we suffer. It could be personal assault or it could be something more systemic and societal like the phobias such as xenophobia which affect our attitudes to the extent we become the un-friendly ones. The weeds may be so many things. They grow around us and they grow within us.
It is so hard living like this, particularly when we are hard pressed on every side, and particularly when so many weeds grow within us. There is never a time when we are not vulnerable.
It is hard being, as it were, the seed planted by the sower in a field where the weeds threaten to overwhelm and throttle us. And it’s hard for any sower to see weeds growing where they have planted so carefully. So much so, that the perennial question is “what shall we do about the weeds?”.
The weeds are the big question at the heart of the parable. What are the weeds? Where did they come from? What should we do about them? This simple parable goes to the heart of what we find most difficult. How can we live with our enemies? How can we live with such unfriendliness? How can we live with these weeds?
This parable may be simple, but the challenge Jesus makes is so difficult and demanding and so countercultural.
What shall we do about the weeds? In our world, where nothing is perfect, where there is so much wrong, where we have so little control, where we are exhausted – how shall we live like this? What shall we do with the weeds to ensure a crop yield of hope, dignity and righteousness?
What is the gardener’s answer? It is interesting that our scriptures begin in a garden, and here we are in a garden with Jesus hearing the question, what shall we do with the weeds?
The gardener’s answer is surely, “get rid of them”, “pull them up”, “poison them”, “cut them down”, “kill them”. Our default position is to cut the enemy out of our lives, to hate them and have nothing to do with them.
But Jesus’s answer is to leave them, because killing them may uproot the good seed. His concern is to protect the roots of the good seed, the people of the kingdom of heaven. If you listen carefully to the language of the gardener it is all violent – poison, cut, kill, eliminate. It is actually the language and practice of the terrorist, and all those who want to make a short cut to their final solution.
Jesus is teaching us to live with trouble, at a time we have little control, when we are surrounded by the effects of so much that is un-friendly. This has always been the way. God’s people, God’s seed, have always been in the world where there is so much wrong, cohabiting with weeds of unfriendliness. Sheep amongst wolves, Jesus described us. Jesus’s teaching was only ever for the poor and the poor in spirit – for the good seed planted in a field of unfriendliness and the effects of enmity.
And he wants to protect us, his seed, so that we develop strong roots of righteousness and grow a harvest of blessing. He is teaching us to live with enemies including the many times when the enemy turns out to be ourselves.
The violence of “poison, cut and kill” not only makes victims of our enemies, but also undermines the roots of righteousness. Jesus is teaching another way. That way he stated plainly in the Sermon on the Mount: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbour and hate your enemy. But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.” (Matthew 5:42-45). He exemplified it on the cross when he prayed for those who were killing him.
Jesus is teaching us a new way to live with our enemies.
Another teacher, and another example of the good seed planted in a field:
Howard Thurman was a black American preacher born in Florida a year after Van Gogh painted The Sower – in the heyday of white supremacist rule. He had a profound effect in the civil rights movement. In that sense he was “good seed” – a person of the kingdom. He was brought up by his grandmother, Nancy Ambrose. She had been a slave on a plantation in Madison County, Florida. She was a woman of great faith and a member of Mount Bethel Baptist Church. Good seed again. But listen to how the seed was planted in her and how she planted the seed in her grandson – and listen to the language of farming in what Thurman wrote:
Thurman’s whole life was dedicated to those “whose backs were against the wall”, as one whose back was against the wall. He says that the question of all those whose backs are against the wall, whose life and identity has been stolen, is “Who am I? What am I?” His awareness of being a child of God was drilled into him (notice the language of seed drilling) by his grandmother.
“The idea was given to her [planted] by a slave minister who held secret religious meetings with his fellow slaves. How everything quivered in me with the pulsing tremor of raw energy when, in her recital, she would come to the triumphant climax of the minister: “You – you are not niggers. You – you are not slaves. You are God’s children.”
That’s how that man found out who he truly was in the eyes of God. It was drilled into him by his grandmother who had the idea planted in her by other good seed in that slave plantation of hostile racial bigotry. And roots of righteousness grew, and spread through the words and teaching of Thurman, through the seeds he transplanted to the book I have just quoted – a book which Martin Luther King always carried with him because of the good seed it contained.
Who can measure whether the seed of the slave minister, Nancy Ambrose, Howard Thurman, Martin Luther King and all their seeding yielded a crop hundred times, sixty times or thirty times what was sown?
Have you noticed how small everything is that Jesus uses to teach his disciples? He keeps using seeds, which even by his own admission can be choked and lost, probably thinking all the time of his own life and the lives of his disciples which could at any time be choked and lost. He is simply teaching us the hardest lesson of all, about how to live with enemies.
And he uses seeds to do that. In a world ripping itself apart in an arms race, where we are dominated by size, Jesus is pointing us to a new way of being – small. That’s the way. It’s not by acting big. The people of God don’t kill their way out of trouble. They don’t do away with the enemy. They live vulnerably with the enemy, all the time growing roots of righteousness and discernment.
This parable is like a seed planted in a field. It has so much energy to grow. It’s not about weakness. It’s about strengthening disciples for their life in the field. It’s not about submission, but is preparation for mission of those, like good seed planted in a field.
Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43 Jesus told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field. But while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away. When the wheat sprouted and formed heads, then the weeds also appeared. “The owner’s servants came to him and said, ‘Sir, didn’t you sow good seed in your field? Where then did the weeds come from?’ “‘An enemy did this,’ he replied. “The servants asked him, ‘Do you want us to go and pull them up?’ “‘No,’ he answered, ‘because while you are pulling the weeds, you may uproot the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest. At that time I will tell the harvesters: First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles to be burned; then gather the wheat and bring it into my barn.’” Then he left the crowd and went into the house. His disciples came to him and said, “Explain to us the parable of the weeds in the field.” He answered, “The one who sowed the good seed is the Son of Man. The field is the world, and the good seed stands for the people of the kingdom. The weeds are the people of the evil one, and the enemy who sows them is the devil. The harvest is the end of the age, and the harvesters are angels.“As the weeds are pulled up and burned in the fire, so it will be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil. They will throw them into the blazing furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Whoever has ears, let them hear.
There are some words you just want to roll around in your mind isn’t there? “Harrowing” did its work on me when I saw this poem by Parker Palmer, which he describes as “taking form” within him.
Harrowing
The plow has savaged this sweet field
Misshapen clods of earth kicked up
rocks and twisted roots exposed to view
last year’s growth demolished by the blade.
I have plowed my life this way
turned over a whole history
looking for the roots of what went wrong
until my face is ravaged, furrowed, scarred.
Enough. The job is done.
Whatever’s been uprooted, let it be
seedbed for the growing that’s to come.
I plowed to unearth last year’s reasons –
The farmer plows to plant a gleaning season.
Grits and Grains 