:: EVERGREEN CHRISTIAN CHURCH ::

We have been talking about the basic theological and faith question in today's world. That question is: "What is the Word that gives life?" Religion is about life. And we are exploring life sentences-sentences that are at the center of a faith that calls us to life.

According to Jesus in today's gospel, the Word that brings life is sown by the "son of man"-a phrase full of theological history and meaning that came to be applied to Jesus. It turns out that the son of man is the Son of God and the Son of God is identified in John's gospel and the Christian theological tradition as the logos of God, that is, the very word of God. But other words are sown in this world and they are the words of death, according to this wisdom parable of Jesus. They are sown by the enemy of God and the enemy of life. They are sown by the devil.

The field that results is quite mixed. Good and evil, life and death, grow together. The religious zealots would rush in to pull up all the weeds, to purify the field, to make sure only the righteous endure. But Jesus warns that judgment is not our task nor our prerogative. Judgment belongs to God alone.

Where does this leave us? In a mixed world, a world of good and evil, life and death, grace and sin. Our task is not to act as judges, but to attend to the word that gives life. And this means to attend to this word in the uniqueness of our own lives and context. To choose between the word that gives life and the words that bring death. Faith is not given us to answer all questions, resolve all problems, purify all situations, or act as judgmental religious perfectionists. It is given us for life and salvation. A faith that tries to attend to all evils in the world and to sweep it clean is likely to be a faith that sees itself as the purveyor of salvation rather than the recipient of salvation. It is the kind of faith that sees the speck in others' eyes but cannot see the log in its own eye. In fact, it is the kind of faith that cannot really tell the difference between the speck and the log, between the wheat and the weeds. C. S. Lewis is instructive here. "It is not an abstraction called Humanity that is to be saved. It is you...your soul, and in some sense yet to be understood, even your body, that was made for the high and holy place. All that you are...every fold and crease of your individuality was devised from all eternity to fit God as a glove fits a hand. All that intimate particularity you can hardly grasp yourself, much less communicate to your fellow creatures, is no mystery to him. He made those ins and outs that he might fill them. Then he gave your soul so curious a life because it is the key designed to unlock that door, of all the myriad doors in him."

The message is simple this morning. It is to invite us to see the church as a place where each individual person can be born into life rather than a place of purified perfectionism where there are no weeds. The church and the world is a field, not a hothouse. It is an invitation to, as St. Paul says, "work out your own salvation" in your own specific context, for "God is at work in you."

The head of the British Coal Board once said, "The most important thing to come out of the coal mine is the...miner!" The most important thing to come out of the church is the...person-in his or her own healing, wholeness, salvation and life. Christian faith is not about abstractions. In fact, when we are honest with ourselves, we know that the field of our own life is a mixed field. My life is indeed filled with both wheat and weeds, good and evil, love and apathy. Fields that have no weeds are likely to have no wheat. Lives that have no tares are likely to have no flowers either. Mark Twain once quipped, "The person who has no vices probably has no virtues."

The gospel of Jesus is quite clear. "Leave the wheat and the weeds alone; let them both grow together, Jesus says, letting us know that he does not share our appetite for a pure crop, a neat field, an efficient operation; letting us know that growth interests him more than perfection and that he is willing to risk fat weeds for fat wheat! When we try to help him out a little, to improve on his plan, he lets us know that our timing is off, not to mention our judgment, and that he does, after all, own the field." (Barbara Brown Taylor)

So what of this mixed field that is our own lives and our own church? The wisdom we are called to share in the community of life and faith is the unfathomable mystery of God and the immediate significance of each personal, communal and local detail in the story of redemption. We seek together the word of life and the will and word of God within the idiosyncracies of the wheat and the weeds in the local and personal-the actual place where we live and the named people with whom we live and journey. Here, at its best, we live together in such a way as to narrate and model the biblically described exchanges of grace between God and us inheritors of the old Adam's woundedness and death and the new Adam's healing and salvation....between the weeds and the wheat of our lives and our community's life.

Your life, in its uniqueness of content and context, in its mixture of good and evil, in its mixture of love and apathy, in its mixture of clarity and confusion, in its mixture of wheat and weeds, is what matters to God. You matter to God. There is no such thing as every person and every situation. In the mixed field of God's world and God's church, there are only people with names in particular situations. To speak of every person is to speak of no person. To speak of every situation is to speak of no situation. We live our life together in Christ with the mystery of the human being before we speak to the duty of the human being. The life sentence of the gospel for you today is that you matter in the unfathomable love of God. And when the day comes, and the harvest is made, and the grain is winnowed, and the loaf of bread is baked, we will sit at table together and break this bread and it will taste like no other bread we have ever eaten...or almost like no other bread we have ever eaten! (Point to the table of Holy Communion). Because it will be the bread of life-sown in love, harvested in forgiveness, and baked in grace.

Victor L. Hunter
Pastor, Evergreen Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)

Extra biblical sources used in the preparation of this sermon:

Eugene Peterson, Five Smooth Stones of Pastoral Work

Barbara Brown Taylor, The Seeds of Heaven

Victor L. Hunter, Desert Hearts and Healing Fountains

Preaching Through the Christian Year