Preached by Bill Countryman at Good Shepherd Berkeley

Seventh Sunday After Pentecost, July 19, 2020

Proper 11A: Genesis 28:10-19a; Psalm 139:1-11, 22-23; Romans 8:12-25; Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

We find ourselves in a kind of limbo these days, with no clear path forward or back. We don’t know when our health will be more secure again. We don’t know how our country will move toward fulfilling its own ideals. We don’t know when we’ll be free to be in the same room with one another. We have some new hopes for our health and for our country. And I’m very grateful for zoom giving us this way to share our worship. But, still, we’re living in a bit of a fog—limbo. 

But our Scriptures today have surprised me once again by speaking pretty directly to our situation, even though they would be difficult to connect directly with one another—as is so often the case in the long green season after Pentecost.

I want to begin with our reading from Matthew—that awkward parable about judgement and punishment. I tend to have an allergic reaction to proclamations about God’s judgement. Too often Christians have used them as something to threaten other people with. The whole idea of a God who is just waiting for a chance to send people to Hell—couldn’t we just skip this passage?

Well, the problem then is that judgement does exist and we know it. We’re just more comfortable with it when the name of God isn’t attached directly to it. At least, I feel free to speak of the judgement that Nature is beginning to inflict on the human race. And I accept Martin Luther King, Jr.’s declaration that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

There can be no question but that humanity stands under judgement for all sorts of reasons: our mistreatment of the earth; our mistreatment of one another; our willingness to worship the market before all other gods; our selfishness; the society we have inherited from a past stained by slavery and morphed into a present where “Black Lives Matter” becomes a revolutionary declaration. And none of us can simply wall ourselves off from these judgements. Innocent or guilty, we’re all inescapably involved, and most of us are at least a bit of each. 

The Covid-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement are the prosecuting attorneys. And we are on trial. And, alas, being relatively innocent won’t get us off the hook. The pandemic doesn’t distinguish between those who deserve punishment and those who don’t. It just lays about with indiscriminate violence. And our American racism still seems to punish more victims than perpetrators. 

And what does Jesus’ parable of the Wheat and Weeds have to say to this confusing situation? It tells us that the ultimate judgement won’t happen immediately. And it offers a reason for it. God’s wheat, Jesus says, is for ever being infiltrated by weeds. The particular weed Jesus referred to, it seems, is something called “darnel.” And it’s particularly tricky to deal with because it’s a relative of wheat, and it looks a lot like wheat right up to harvest time, when the wheat seeds turn golden and the darnel seeds black. (Seed wheat, I understand, still has to have the darnel filtered out of it.) 

And the good news of this parable—yes, it does have good news in it—is that God doesn’t let the eager servants rush out and uproot the weeds at once. God gives us time—enough time to become, by God’s grace, more wheat, less darnel. God gives us time to grow into people who give more than we take, who preserve more than we destroy, who are ready to engage in the restoration of the world and the building up of a new, more just community. 

What is the alternative? Jesus describes it in terms of outer darkness, and fire, and wailing and gnashing of teeth. Only the wailing and gnashing of teeth are literal; the rest is metaphor. What is Hell really like? The closest I can come to imagining it is a confined space where Hitler, Stalin, Mao and their like have to deal eternally with one another. None of them can ever get a conclusive advantage over the others. They all fall victim to one another. And they no longer know how to find a way out. That’s the true outer darkness. We don’t want to go there. We know what our reprieve is for: it’s time for us to become wheat.

But what makes that so difficult for us? Paul in Romans calls it “the flesh” or “the body.” I’ve spent a lot of time in my adult life trying to follow Paul’s argument in Romans. (I even wrote a long discussion of it in a book called Reading Other People’s Mail.) But there’s no time in a sermon to unpack Paul’s complicated rhetoric. So I’m just going to tell you where my study has lead me. 

My guess is that when we heard the phrase “sinful flesh” this morning, we all thought of sex. In modern English, what else could anybody think? What Paul means by “flesh” and “body,” though, is something else. It’s our human finitude. Our limitation by time and place and physical strength and mental acuity and, finally, death. If that’s how we think of our lives, life is going to be a matter of struggle. We’ll do what we feel we have to stay ahead of our neighbors and cushion ourselves against the dangers of the world around us. We all become Hitler, and Stalin, and Mao locked up in that confined space together.

The “sinful flesh” manifests itself in fear, in greed, in jealousy, in all the ways we try to make ourselves “safe.” To live in the Spirit, by contrast, is to recognize that we are loved by God and that this is the most important thing about our lives. Paul isn’t saying that it’s wrong to have a job and earn money and pay the rent and take care of yourself and your family. He’s saying it’s wrong to make that your central value in life. True human life is grounded in hope and generosity, based on God’s love for us and everyone around us.

The Covid-19 crisis gives us a new awareness of this struggle. Some people have decided that they’d rather have a good time or pretend that nothing has changed or insist on their personal mask-free liberty instead of protecting the lives of others. And we’re all reaping the consequences. That’s what Paul means by “sinful flesh.” Others have chosen to live in a way that benefits others as well as ourselves. That’s the life of the Spirit. Most of us—we are human, after all—have probably done at least a little of each. Paul exhorts us to live more and more under the guidance of the Spirit.

And that, as Paul says, means living in hope. Not so much the hope of any one thing in particular—the hope of having a vaccine soon, the hope of being able to gather again as church, the hope of being able to move around freely without the aid of a mask. All things worth hoping for—but not guaranteed. What is guaranteed is that we live and will always live in God’s love. That’s a trustworthy hope that can sustain us, whatever else happens.

And I can’t imagine a more hopeful message for our situation just now than the story of Jacob’s experience at Bethel: the heavens wide open, angels coming and going on their earthly rounds, God standing beside Jacob and blessing him and claiming him for God’s own.

Why do I find this so full of hope? Well, just think of who Jacob was at this point in his life. He was born the second of twins, which meant that, according to the rules of his time, his older brother was the real successor. British gentry used to say that every gentleman needed two sons: an heir and a spare. Jacob was the spare. He hated it. He was bright and resourceful. His older brother seemed to him stodgy and conventional and perhaps not too bright. And he longed for some way to reverse the terrible mistake of their birth order. He even weaseled Esau’s birthright out of him in exchange for a bowl of stew, the sort of thing he could so easily have just given him. And now, with his mother as ally, he has stolen Esau’s patriarchal blessing by impersonating him in front of their now-blind father.

In other words, he’s not a model of virtue or generosity. And when we meet him in this morning’s story, he’s also an outcast. He’s in the midst of a long trek from what is now southern Israel to central Syria, where his mother counts on her relatives there to take him in. He’s a shady character, in exile from his family, with few resources, on an impossible mission. 

And God picks him to open the heavens for and to reveal the heavenly ladder, and to give this astonishing blessing to. Why? What I learn from it is that God is in no hurry to judge us, to separate wheat from darnel, to start casting people into outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. God is not an eager, punitive judge. God is out here among us looking for friends, not people to punish.

The good news, you see, is never about how good we are. It’s about how good God is. Whatever our inadequacies, our uncertainties, our failures of hope, God’s love still embraces us. We don’t know what our lives will look like next month—or six months from now—or a year. We don’t know what kind of progress toward justice our country will have made. But we do know that we are loved and blessed, no matter what and that God gives us the space and the hope to become people of the Spirit, not victims of our frightened finitude. We are free to join in the movement toward new life.

Yes, judgement is inevitable. But we are still capable of growth and change. And if God could give Jacob the hope of a new life, God can offer it to us, too. And does.