St. John s Lutheran Church, ELCA Walhalla, SC. July 23, 2017 Sermon by Pastor Diana Edis

Transcription

1 Walhalla, SC by Pastor Diana Edis Good morning! What a great day to be the church! I have met a few of you. I plan to meet many more of you. We will have only a short time together but it will be all the sweeter because of its brevity. I know that you don t know much about me so I ll take a few minutes here to give you a brief run-down. I ve been Lutheran since forever. A 4 th generation Lutheran pastor. I am the second of three girls. Mother to two wonderful young women. Wife to an amazing man. I am a Vocational Rehabilitation counselor turned cardiac ultrasound tech called to pastor. Ordained just last year. Always into something new, chaos is kinda my middle name. I am pretty much always up for something new and exciting. Our next adventure will entail immigrating to Canada. And I. am. a weed. Wait, wait no got that wrong. I am wheat! Yes, I m wheat, that s what I meant! God is going to make good bread out of me! I ll rise up higher than all the other loaves! I ll be the sweetest bread you ever tasted! It s those other folks who are the weeds, not me. Can t you tell I m wheat just by looking at me? Oh well, enough about me. I guess it is time for the sermon, eh? Let s pray Lord God, may the words of my mouth and the thoughts of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer. Lord help us today to not understand with our minds. Instead allow our hearts to be opened by these pesky parables. May you tweak our conscience and step on our toes that we may feel your presence and your love for all of your children, wheat and weeds though we all are. AMEN

2 Grace to you and peace from God our father and the Lord, Jesus Christ. I ve got a story for you. It seems that many years ago in the little town that my aunt and uncle live in there was this man who spent all of his free time working on his yard. His zoysia grass was lush, his shrubs were trimmed to within an inch of their lives, a fire ant wouldn t dare show it s little face anywhere near his yard. The neighborhood association may as well have just stopped with yard of the month and given him the yard of the decade award. Some folks swear that they saw him out there with scissors trimming up the places in his yard where the lawn mower just didn t do the job to his specifications. And nary a weed was allowed to survive in all of that beautiful green expanse. Well, there was only one thing that this man loved almost as much as he loved a beautiful yard. That was football. And it wasn t just any football that he loved but a particular team for which he pulled no matter what! Now I m not gonna specify which team it was cause I m in Tiger country up here and I know better. But this fella was bordering on the fanatic when it came to his team. One night during a particularly bitter match-up between his team and their rival this gentleman went a little over the line with his language and his excitement. Some of his friends who supported the other team decided that he needed to learn a lesson. So in the dark of night they crept onto his beautiful lawn of tender zoysia grass with a template in the shape of a certain footprint. Placing that template on the grass they proceeded to seed the paw, I mean the footprint with seed of a differing, hardier variety of grass. The fella in question here wouldn t know for some time that there were, in effect, weeds growing in his lovely lawn but when they made themselves known all would become clear. They would have their revenge. 2 P a g e

3 Now parables are funny things. They are unfinished stories. Things to make you go Hmmm. David Lose, president of Lutheran Theological Seminary Philadelphia and one of my favorite theologians says that Jesus uses parables not to explain things to people s satisfaction but to call attention to the unsatisfactoriness of all their previous explanations and understandings In effect he uses parables to help us understand that we don t understand. And that is exactly what happens. Our misunderstanding leads us to try to corral the word of God into saying something that we can put into a nice little neat box. Something like, You don t look like me. And since I am good wheat and you don t look like me then you must be a weed. Judging is easy when we use ourselves as the measuring stick by which others are judged. But what if we are the weeds? Or what if we are both the wheat and the weeds? If we use our weediness to judge others then the evil one gets to do the judging. But Jesus isn t giving us a formula for us to keep the church pure. Instead he is giving us one perspective on how God sees and reigns in the world. How in God s reign we are given the opportunity to become what God wishes us to be. Matthew says this is what the kingdom of heaven looks like that the wheat and weeds grow up together, maybe even making each other stronger by their differing natures. And neither the weed nor the wheat is the reaper, the judge, but the angels, messengers of God doing the will of God, are the reapers. They sort out those things from our lives that keep us from relationship with God and with one another. Do you have any of those things in your life? Rather than pointing out the splinter in our neighbor s eye let s look at the log in our own. What are the things that keep you from being fully committed to your walk with the Lord? Busy-ness? Prosperity? Family? I know that in the last few months when I was busy keeping a thousand plates spinning for Christ I let my personal devotions fall by the wayside. I was doing the Lord s work but I wasn t allowing myself to be filled by prayer and scripture reading. This is weediness. 3 P a g e

4 4 P a g e Do we think that because we are having tough financial times we can let our tithes and offerings slide, withholding from God the very currency that God uses to support the least, the lost, and the last? Coveting and hoarding the very gifts which God so graciously bestowed on us? This is weediness in what may otherwise be a wheat-filled life. Are you such a fan of your team that you would insult or injure a fan of another team, another child of God? This is weediness. Evil infiltrates our hearts like those grass seeds infiltrated that lawn, revealing over time that our hearts are not the beautifully manicured lawns that we claimed them to be. Maybe they look more like the wild and untamed garden from the Phillip Young book, The Shack. That fellow in the little town? He ended up digging up a huge patch of his front lawn in order to cleanse the yard of the offending weeds. Just like our gospel states, if you tear up the weeds then the wheat dies with it. And the loss of wheat (or even weeds) is never the intent of our God. Our God who claims to love and desire relationship with all the created, wheat and weeds alike and promises with a rainbow never again to send a creation destroying event on the earth. For all my accolades and family pedigree, I am also that tangled mass of garden. I will make mistakes and injure others through things that I have done and things that I have left undone. I ask for your indulgence and your support and I will do my best to return those things to you. So that at least in this little part of God s kingdom we can live in love rather than judgement. Sometimes it takes a parable to encourage us to think, to make us ponder what might be keeping us from the faith that Christ enables in us the world that God would have us live in. What does the kingdom of God look like in your life? Where are your personal weeds? It s an open ended question, no right or wrong answers, a parable for the interpreting. No matter

5 what your pedigree, no matter the size of your house or the number of letters behind your name, we are all only sinners received by grace, saints through the incredible gift of Christ, adopted by a God who knows us and loves us anyway. A jumble of weeds and wheat, but shining like the sun in the kingdom of our Father. Thanks be to God. Amen 5 P a g e