Sermon 10 Pentecost - Proper 11A July 20, 2008

10 Pentecost - 20 July 2008 - Proper 11A
Genesis 28:10-19a; Romans 8:12-25; Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
James V. Stockton

‘It is better to give than to receive,’ so taught the Apostle Paul quoting Christ Jesus. And we might suggest, along similar lines, that it is better to create than to destroy. This is not so simplistic as it might first sound. Abandoned failing buildings need to be demolished. Social systems that have outlived their usefulness to humanity need to be brought down. All that said, it is still better to create than to destroy. And if this, too, sounds simple, consider the effort required to create something, compared to the effort it takes to destroy it. How much easier it can be to plant such seeds of destruction as ‘You are evil;’ ‘You don’t belong;’ ‘No one cares about you;’ than to plant the seeds of Gospel of God’s Love for all.

Some of you have heard me tell the story of a farmer named Peer, and of a terrible tragedy that enters his family life. His story is found in the novel titled The Great Hunger, by Johan Bojer. Peer and his wife and daughter live in a small Norwegian farming village. Theirs is a spartan but pleasant way of life, raising enough grain to feed themselves and have also some to sell for to earn a bit of money. One day, a new neighbor moves in at the small farm bordering his. Besides trying to farm a bit, the neighbor also works with tin and solder repairing cookware. He is identified in the novel only as ‘the brazier.’

The brazier is unpleasant and suspicious of everyone. When he sees Peer leaning over the fence to sniff the aroma of the apple blossoms on the tree in the brazier’s yard, the brazier sends his large dog out to chase Peer away. One day, Peer is working in the field, when he hears his wife Merle screaming and calling for help. Peer comes running and finds to his horror, the great hulking menace of the brazier’s dog attacking Peer’s little daughter, Asta. Peer wrestles the dog off of Asta and rushes her inside. But it’s too late; Asta cannot survive her injuries.

With his daughter gone, Peer finds himself as he puts it, ‘at the promontory of existence, with the sun and the stars gone out, and ice-cold emptiness above…, about…, and within…, on every side.’ At the same time, all the town knows what has happened, and the brazier is now hated by everyone. No one brings him pots and pans to repair. No one will sell him or lend him seed to plant. Bojer’s story of Peer and his situation describe a person who suffers the affects of destruction. Having experienced it, Peer begins to realize that he, too, has the power to destroy.

And so it is, that deep in the middle of the night, Peer rises from his bed. His wife watches silently as Peer gathers some things, then quietly goes outside. Peer stands looking across the yard toward his neighbor’s home next door. The lights are out there; the brazier and his wife are asleep. Peer starts moving in their direction.

Passionate circumstances such as leave people ‘ice cold and empty,’ or as fill them with white-hot rage, may well leave them wondering, ‘Is it more blessed to create, or to destroy?’ Even in the days of the apostles, when their ministry is emerging in the early Church, find such passions at work among the Christian community as threaten to destroy it. Who truly comprises this community? The Gospel came first to the Hebrew people of whom Jesus himself was one. Are they then the true community of Gospel? Jesus sent his apostles into all the world, to create a community of disciples of every nation. Are these then the true community of Christ? How is one to know? And what is one to do about those who’ve been allowed in, but don’t belong, and ought not be here?

It’s a problem for the Church that arises as soon as the Apostle Peter baptizes a Roman soldier named Cornelius and his family. It’s a problem for the Church that arises as soon as the Apostle Philip baptizes a man who is an Ethiopian and a eunuch. It’s a problem for the Church that arises as soon as an increasing number of Gentiles are admitted to the fellowship of the Church first by Peter, then by Paul. And as this becomes more and more of a problem, the disciples look back into their time with Jesus and they remember that Jesus once told them this parable.

When the owner of the field tells his servants that their job is to sow the seeds not pull the weeds, Jesus is telling his disciples that it’s not their job to purify a fields that belongs to God; or to purify the membership of a community formed by God’s Holy Spirit. It’s not the job of a disciple, it’s not our job, to try to figure out who is of God, and who is an imposter. Sometimes this can be a job that is hard to set aside. Because the honest truth is that it’s often easier for people, to decide what needs to be torn down than to propose a constructive alternative to build up instead. Sometimes, it will even cross a person’s mind what other Christians, other parishes, other churches ought to do and how they ought to be.

There are, I think, a wealth of unappreciated consultants in our world waiting to tell us exactly what needs to be removed, trashed, wasted, destroyed. This is not to say that we are called to surrender our responsibility to avoid preserving or perpetuating that which is better off ended. While the distinction between destructive and constructive often can be in the eye the beholder, nevertheless, the destructive consequences of such phenomena as illness, poverty, denial of basic rights, terrorism, and war are largely inarguable. These destroyers of the individual human soul and of the collective spirit of humanity, are examples of phenomena that are best destroyed themselves.

But it is to say that, in a world that can be for some, ice-cold and empty and for others, inflamed with angry rage, our job is not to police someone else’s piety; not the current-day equivalent of the Gentile, that lowly outsider who dares to pray to God, and whose prayers God dares to hear; not the stranger from a stranger’s land, to whom God in fact might send us to meet them where they are, and offer them God’s own welcome. It cannot be our vocation to tell God who does and who does not belong to the fellowship that is God’s own creation. Which is why Jesus tells us that this task belongs to another order of God’s Kingdom and to another time, to angels and messengers of God in a season of God’s own choosing. Ours is simply to live and move in what Paul calls ‘the glorious liberty of the children of God,’ to sow the seed of the Gospel where we are, and to care for those that grow there.

In the cold clear and quiet night, the farmer, Peer, climbs the fence into the bare fields of his hostile neighbor. His daughter is gone, and now the brazier himself is condemned by all the village to starve until he moves away. “As for me,” Peer says to the reader, “[What I did,] I did not do…for the sake of Christ, or because I loved my enemy; but because, [while] standing upon the ruins of my [own] life, I felt a vast responsibility. [I came to realize that] humanity must arise, and be better than the blind powers that order its ways; [that] in the midst of its sorrows it must take care that godliness does not die. The spark of eternity was once more aglow in me, and it said: ‘Let there be light.’” And quietly, secretly, in the middle of the night, so that no one will know it is he, Peer reaches into a bushel of seed that he has carried with him, and begins to sow the brazier’s field. “…I went out,” he says, “and sowed the corn in my enemy's field, [in order] that [for him and for me] God might exist.”

Today, tomorrow, sometime soon, you, I, or someone near us, will meet the ‘ice cold and empty’ in the world, or its ‘white-hot rage.’ In the face of destruction, ours is a call to build a community comprised of people of all sorts and conditions. In the presence of destruction ours is a call to plant and to grow in the broad field of humanity around us, and in the intimate garden of our own hearts, such seeds of the gospel as ‘You really are forgiven;’ ‘You really are loved;’ ‘You really are welcome here.’

And so may Almighty God who, has called all people to live in God’s eternal Love, so unite us in one truth, in one peace, in faith and in charity, that with one heart and soul, we may glorify God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.