Tag: seed

Blessing the small, the least, the last and all those suffering empire.

David HerbertLeave a comment

A sermon for Trinity 20A. I focus on Jesus takes a people bruised and battered by empires to a whole new realm. The readings are printed below. They were Isaiah 45:1-7 and Matthew 22:15-22. It was the emperor in each of the readings which first grabbed my attention.

October 22nd 2023

My Bible

These are the writings of a bruised and battered people who have lived through the worst of times.

This is the reading of a bruised and battered people.

This is their literature. They have treasured it. They have handed it on for the sake of other bruised and battered people.

As always our scriptures are brought to us by a troubled people. It is a troubled people, inspired in the Spirit of God who have chosen the scriptures we inherit and hand on. It is a troubled people who have treasured them and bottled them for us because they have been a a very present help in times of trouble.

They are a people who have had all kinds of suffering inflicted upon them by dominating empires, from slavery in the hands of the Egyptian empire, to destruction of their institutions, to exile, persecution and occupation by the Assyrian, Babylonian, Greek and Roman empires. Their imperial domination, at various times, took their labour, their homes, their institutions, their land, their networks, their lives. Our scriptures give us the very best trauma literature and survival resources. 

For those dominated by powers which are not their own there is always the question, “how do we get through this?”

This morning’s readings, brought to us by a traumatised people feature two emperors. In the red corner we have Cyrus whose Persian empire survived a mere 7 years in the 6th century BC. He is the golden boy amongst emperors. He shows us that it is possible for those rich in power to enter the kingdom of heaven by allowing God to take his hand (and arms) to dismantle empire and repair its damage. He is called the Lord’s anointed in our reading from Isaiah – provides a happy and short interlude.

In the blue corner we have the unnamed Caesar, the Roman emperor. 

The question the unlikely alliance of Herodians and Pharisees ask Jesus is a trick question. The answer Jesus gives isn’t a simple “pay your taxes”. It’s a trick answer. Pay Caesar what is his. What is his? What is rightfully the emperor’s in a land which he has taken from others. It’s a trick question with a trick answer. Underlying both is that harder question of how do we live with this overwhelming, stifling foreign power?

When we read our scriptures we are always bumping into emperors and hearing of the troubles and damage that they bring. That is the context.

I don’t know whether you will agree with this assessment of our own context – that most of us have shared the benefits and privileges of empire, that we might feel uneasy in the aftermath of empire, uncomfortable about what we might have taken from others and unsure about how we begin to repair the damage. 

Empire is always our context. They are built all around us. We may be one of their builders. The superpowers operate imperial models. There are global empires like Amazon and Google (and who should they pay taxes to?) There are the media empires and their hidden persuaders with their bots affecting our habits and views. These are large empires. There are other empires operating the other side of the law – the drug cartels with their barons, the warlords, people traffickers, as well as the little empire builders we see around us. Mr Big always brings favours to some and trouble to many. He is always self serving.

This is our context. And this is the context for Jesus’ teaching about a kingdom and way of life so radically different from the ways of empire. Jesus was tempted by the ways of empire – world domination, stunts and political popularity were not going to be his way. He saw the devil in them.

Instead he helped his followers explore a different realm – a realm in which there is no domination and only amazing grace. To these troubled people Jesus offered an alternative vision of hope. He opens up a kingdom in which everything is small and vulnerable rather than mighty and impregnable.

He casts around for images that we will all understand. To what shall I liken the kingdom of heaven?  To people so often belittled by empires, to people who can so easily be lost or disappeared, to a people whose lives are hidden and voice unheard he likens the kingdom to things that are hardly noticed and that can so easily disappear. Like the mustard seed, the smallest of all seeds. Like the leaven folded into the loaf. Like the scattering of seed.

He trains our eye on the birds of the air and the lilies of the field and says there is no glory in empire, nothing like the glory of the lilies of the field. To those who have little, he shows what can be done with little – feeding 4000, feeding 5000.

He turns the world’s rule upside down by saying to those used to coming last that the rule of his kingdom is that the last come first and the first come last. He turns the world upside down by putting children central to the kingdom of heaven, the qualification for entry being that we have to become small and just like a child.

We love to remember that the son of God came to us as smaller than a child, a baby. The teaching he shares is his learning to be a child. In John’s gospel, Jesus teaches that we have to be born again, to seize the opportunity of a second chance of being children. 

In that gospel Jesus is just a ray of light that shines in overwhelming darkness, the word of God in edgeways. The words that come to mind when we think of God’s kingdom – if we have learned anything from Jesus – is small and vulnerable.

Maybe it is only as I have retired from the church’s institutions and put some distance between myself and the systems and thinking which mimic the ways of empires and powers, that I have seen, as if for the first time, that the kingdom of heaven is only to be understood in things small, hidden and vulnerable, and that the kingdom of heaven is for those who are the last and least chosen in the kingdoms of this world – for the hidden and vulnerable, and for those who are prepared to make themselves small for the sake of the kingdom.

I have noticed this particularly in this year’s successive gospel readings from Matthew.

At the beginning of his gospel Matthew gives us a name for Jesus, Emmanuel. That name means “God with us”. At the end of his gospel he gives us a promise to remember. “I am with you always, to the end of the age.” He shows the battered, bruised and bloodied people the battered, bruised and bloodied face of Jesus – joined with them in their suffering – and he shares Jesus’s blessing of them.

How blessed are you who are poor in spirit – yours is the kingdom of heaven.

How blessed are you who mourn – you will be comforted.

How blessed are you who are meek – the earth will be yours.

How blessed are those of you who hunger and thirst for righteousness. You will be well satisfied.

How blessed are you who are merciful. Mercy will be shown to you as to no other.

How blessed are the pure in heart. You will see God in the smallest and most vulnerable.

How blessed are those of you who are persecuted. Yours is the kingdom of heaven.

This is the blessing of a bruised and battered community. Today we join them in reading their scripture, in their prayer, in their struggles, in their blessing and in the kingdom prepared for them.

Isaiah 45:1-7

Thus says the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus,
whose right hand I have grasped
to subdue nations before him
and strip kings of their robes,
to open doors before him –
and the gates shall not be closed:
I will go before you
and level the mountains,
I will break in pieces the doors of bronze
and cut through the bars of iron,
I will give you the treasures of darkness
and riches hidden in secret places,
so that you may know that it is I, the Lord,
the God of Israel, who call you by your name.
For the sake of my servant Jacob,
and Israel my chosen,
I call you by your name,
I surname you, though you do not know me.
I am the Lord, and there is no other;
besides me there is no god.
I arm you, though you do not know me,
so that they may know, from the rising of the sun and from the west, that there is none besides me;
I am the Lord, and there is no other.
I form light and create darkness,
I make weal and create woe;
I the Lord do all these things.

Matthew 22:15-22

Then the Pharisees went and plotted to entrap him in what he said. So they sent their disciples to him, along with the Herodians, saying, “Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and teach the way of God in accordance with truth, and show deference to no one; for you do not regard people with partiality. Tell us then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?” But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, “why are you putting me to the test, you hypocrites? Show me the coin used for the tax.” And they brought him a denarius. Then he said to them, “Whose head is this, and whose title?” They answered, “The emperor’s”. Then he said to them, “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” When they heard this they were amazed, and they left him and went away.

Dealing with weeds and digging the seeds of Jesus’s teaching

David Herbert1 Comment

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.