Sermon
7-19-20
Grace and peace to you from God our creator and from our
Savior Jesus the Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, amen.
The Bible is many things. If you have been reading along
with our 90 Day Bible Challenge, it becomes obvious very quickly…. It is a
history book – telling us the story of how God has been faithful to God’s
people in the past, even when we keep messing up. It’s a poetry and song book –
teaching us how to pray, and to give voice to our deepest emotions. It’s
community bulletin board or blog – sharing the hopes, prayers, and concerns of
a fledgling Christian community surrounded by a confusing and scary world. It
is an origin story – revealing to us who Jesus is and how he lived and died and
rose again. The Bible is all of these things and much, much more. But one thing
it is NOT: the Bible most definitely NOT a gardening or farming handbook.
Last week we heard about a sower who went out to sow, who
just scattered seeds around willy-nilly. Here again the farmer in Jesus’ story
needs to take some remedial farmer classes. What do you NORMALLY do when you
see weeds growing in your garden plot? You get down on your hands and knees and
pull those suckers out as soon as possible! You don’t wait around and “see what
happens.” Come on Jesus, everybody knows that! But this story is not a guide to
better gardening.
Because the farmer in the parable waited so long, the
removal of the weeds at this stage would actually cause more harm than good, so
they are left to grow up with crops. Together the crops and the weeds are
watered by the rain, are nourished by the soil, and shone upon by the sun. It
is not until harvest time, many months later, that the weeds are separated out
and bound into bundles to be burned in a big bonfire. Mmmm I can just smell the
pumpkin spice.
But in the meantime, the crops long for the day that the
weeds are finally removed. I imagine the good seed crying out to the master of
the field – Lord, there are so many weeds! Look at them all! They are
everywhere – right here next to us, sharing our sun and water and soil, their
roots becoming intertwined with our roots, their leaves brushing up against
ours. O Lord, why must we wait until the harvest day? Why can’t
they be weeded out TODAY?
The weeds are with us in our newspapers and on the TV
nightly news, filling up space and time with BAD news, corruption within our
halls of government and bad behavior done in the name of God. O Lord, why must
we WAIT until the harvest day?
The weeds are with us in our own communities and our own
families, refusing to wear masks, not social distancing at the beach or in the
supermarket, targeting people because of the color of their skin, sharing scary
rhetoric on social media. O Lord, why must we wait until the harvest day?
But the weeds are also with us …in the mirror. The root causes of sin and evil and brokenness has
been sown within us too. The garden plots of our own hearts have been
compromised. The seeds of the evil one has all too often found that the soil
there is rich and ready. Their roots become deep and stuck fast.
Looking at Jesus’ story from this angle, perhaps our
cries for the swift justice of the Lord are a bit premature. We may want to
reconsider our eagerness to take up weeding in the name of the Lord… For such a
harvest of justice in God’s kingdom would not leave any of us unscathed. So
perhaps it is a blessing that our God is “merciful and gracious, slow to anger
and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.”
God only seems slow because we are living in the middle
of the story. It probably took Jesus less than ten minutes to tell this parable
from beginning to end, but it has taken, and will take, many lifetimes to
live out. We are still in the growing time before the harvest. We’re not “done
growing” yet, which sometime makes it hard for us to figure out which is which,
who is a crop and who is a weed, as we go about our daily lives. From our
vantage point, we can only see a small little plot of land, surrounded by weeds
growing big and strong around us, and within us too. Nothing in our lives are
uncompromised.
It would be silly to ask if you’ve heard of Harry Potter.
Author J.K. Rowling created a literally magical universe where a woman is the
smartest and most powerful wizard, the “little guys” become heroes, and the
power of love overcomes the power of hate. The first book was published over 20
years ago, and this phenomenon has not lost any steam since – a seven book
series, over a dozen movies, and even a play, not to mention Harry Potter World
at Universal Studios. Through this universe, J.K Rowling seems to explore big
ideas like feminism, racism, being an ally, the AIDS crisis, homophobia, PTSD
and mental illness, all with the message of “you are not alone,” bringing
comfort to so many teens and young adults struggling to fit in.
Now, really smart people have pointed out the inconsistencies and problematic areas of this
magical world… but the most successful fiction does eventually take on a life
of their own, much like moving out of your parent’s house, armed with all the
wisdom they have taught you, is a mark of adulthood. Judging by this universe
as a whole, we might surmise that “Parent” JK Rowling believes that this world
– magic and real – is big enough for everyone? ….right?
Well…. It turns out J.K. Rowling said some pretty closed
minded and hateful things on twitter, and her blog last month. It turns out,
she’s your run-of-the-mill, transphobic hypocrite. Like many of us. Except,
none of us created a world where LQBTQIA+ people once felt welcomed. So what
then do we do? How do we separate the storyteller from the story? How to separate
the crops from the weeds? Are the good things from “Harry Potter” tainted,
because they was created by a bigot?
If you want to scrap the entire thing because of all the
hurt JK Rowling has caused you, please do. That is your right.
But maybe… Harry Potter can save Harry Potter. Daniel Radcliffe,
who starred as in the movies’ title role, publicly stated he disagrees with
Rowling, and gives us another perspective. He responded: “To all the people who
now feel that their experience of the books has been tarnished…I am deeply
sorry …. I really hope that you don’t entirely lose what was valuable in these
stories ... If these books taught you that love is the strongest force in the
universe ... then that is between you and the book that you read, and it is
sacred.”
The
story of Harry Potter lives on and might be able to rise about the flaws of its
very human creator. Because that’s what the best stories do – make us long for
a more just world – a world after weeds. It’s why we
read books and watch movies where the endings are happy – or if not, at least
wrapped up neatly with no loose ends. The bad guys get what they deserve. The
lovebirds live happily ever after. The kingdom is a peace. The End: cue the
curtain, and roll the credits.
The weeds will be separated from the grains. The
oppressed will be set free. All the
wrongs will be righted. Sin and death will be no
more. All that is evil in this world will come to an end, and the people here
who truly are evil will be seen for who they are, get what is coming to them.
But we may find ourselves not quite
as pure as we thought we were in the process.
Today is not harvest day. It’s a growing day. It’s a day that
we do put our hope in the Lord,
present with us in the middle of the story, in the middle of the hard stuff.
Because that’s where God is too. …Thanks be to God. AMEN.
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