Sermon: Plant, Grow, Produce

Matthew 13

“Plant, Grow, Produce”

            Today’s parable is all about the good soil.  In order for the seed to grow and produce it needs to fall into the right the environment.  It makes me think of the commercial that is run every spring by miraclegro – they show you a plant grown in ordinary soil and the same plant grown in miraclegro soil.  The miraclegro soil plant is twice as large and produces twice the flowers or tomatoes then the other plant.  Makes me want to buy miraclegro since of course I want the biggest, healthiest plants and flowers possible. 

            But, I have also learned, it takes more than miraclegro to really make the plants grow.  They need to be watered, they need the right amount of sun, they need additional nurture.  Just putting them in the best possible soil is not enough. 

            I have also been amazed, in and around my yard, at what grows and what does not grow.  Seeds from last year’s petunias must have fallen down into the cracks of our driveway around the big flower planters.  Those same flowers that I had such a time with last year, making sure I watered them to keep them alive, without any care at all, grew up out of the driveway pavers and bloomed beautiful purple flowers through the summer.  Go figure. 

            So, as I think about the literal translation of this parable and the spiritual meaning behind it, I wonder why the sower is so careless with the seed.  It seems as if the seed is falling everywhere, including places that it will not grow.  But then, when I think about my own experience to where I have witnessed seed growing despite the best odds, it makes me see this parable in a new light.  The sower is not careless, the sower is willing for seed to fall in non-fertile environments because there is always the possibility.  There is always the possibility that in what appears to be rocky soil, or the beaten path, the opportunity for growth. 

            Our God, is a God of possibilities, a God of risk taking, a God of what might even appear to be careless generosity.  But since our God is also a God of hope, God provides seed in every environment of our lives. 

            So, what is this seed?  Jesus uses everyday objects to help people learn more about God.  So, as he explains this parable, he shares that the seed is the Word of God.  So, then we may need to ask: what is the Word of God?  Is it scripture?  Is it the commandments?  Jesus, himself, reaches back into the scriptures of his people and quotes from Isaiah – about the blind shall see and the deaf shall hear.  The word of God may come to each of us in a different way.  For some, the Word of God is the message of eternal salvation.  For others it is the call for justice and peace and this world.  For others it is to be the light of God’s love.  For others, it is a moral teaching to be a good person.  For others it is the gift of forgiveness.  And with forgiveness, some feel that the Word of God is the call for reconciliation. 

            What is the seed?  What is God sowing so generously upon this world?  What is God expecting to grow and bear fruit?  Can the answer be as simple as love?  We say that God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.  We have the Golden Rule – to love our neighbor as ourselves.  And if the seed is love, if the Word of God is to love others, how do we till the soil so that the environment is fertile?  Do we, as a congregation, see ourselves as the good soil, open and receptive to God’s word?  And if not, what are we willing to do within ourselves, within our congregation, to move towards healing and wholeness and love? 

            And do we believe, that when the soil is prepared, God will continue to throw seed upon us and life will grow?  God never gives up on God’s people.  We are faced with a lot of stress.  Over and over again, when I push certain conversations, there is such concern about our finances and keeping our building open.  We need to name this stress and ask ourselves, in this stress, is the seed of God’s Word for us able to grow?  Bearing fruit for God is not keeping our building open, as hard as that is to hear.  Bearing fruit for God is taking the Word of God and multiplying it:  Multiplying justice, multiplying peace, multiplying love, multiplying forgiveness and reconciliation. 

            Each and every day, God is sowing seed.  The Word of God is constantly falling into our lives.  Jesus is a realist.  He names it as it is.  Some days, the seed falls onto the hardness of our hearts, of our lives and just bounces off.  Other days it takes root but the stress of the world around us just chokes it dry.  And then, then there are days where we have what some call a God moment, and we really feel the joy, the peace, the love of God in our lives and we are renewed and energized and given hope .

God is continually planting, the seeds are continually growing, the soil needs consistent attention, and from there, God desires results.  God desires the seeds to bear fruit.  Your session has  a letter to go home with you all today, a letter that asks for your patience as we journey through this rocky time together, and let us work towards a path of forgiveness, so that together, we truly can bear the fruit God calls us to bear.  Amen.  

sermon: parable of the Yeast -

“Embracing God’s Story in our Lives”

Q: What did the yeast say to the bag of flour?

A: Come on we Knead to be serious! 

Q: Why did Mama Flour and Papa Yeast tell Baby Bread to get a job?

A: He was just loafing around! 
            I can’t even remember the last time, I personally, used yeast.  Once, many years ago, I did try and make my own bread.  But, after all the work, it didn’t really turn out that great so I didn’t try again.  I do have memories of my mother making bread.  Of setting the dough aside, letting it rise, being fascinated by how it grew in the bowl, and then my mother kneading it, setting it aside, and letting it rise again.  I learned, through the power of observation, that there was something special about yeast.  And I was amazed, that such a small amount of it, could be so powerful.  I still am not sure what yeast is.  It is some sort of microorganism, that is actually alive, so when it is in the right conditions, grows and produces carbon dioxide.  The carbon dioxide it is what causes the bubbles which makes the dough rise.  Archeologists believe people have been using yeast to bake bread for over 4,000 years. 

            As I learned a little more about yeast, it struck me that yeast – breathes.  Well, it doesn’t have lungs so it doesn’t really breathe, but it does convert sugar into carbon dioxide.  In a sense, it does breathe.  Throughout our scriptures, breath is so important.  In the creation story, God breathes into Adam and gives him life.  In one of the resurrection stories, Jesus breathes upon his followers as he offers them peace and sends them out into the world.  Without breath, there is no life.  We even have a method of praying called a breath prayer. 

            Does Jesus know this as he uses yeast as a metaphor for rapid growth?  My guess is that he does.  The Kingdom of heaven is like yeast – that a woman took and mixed with her flour until it was all leavened.  The Kingdom of heaven – God’s reign, God’s peace, God’s presence in the world, just requires a small pinch of an active ingredient that is willing to come alive and breathe, that is willing to come alive and convert the environment around it into something it can use, creating growth.  Is it no accident that Jesus, in this simple parable, speaks of something that can hardly be seen and uses it to illustrate growth? 

            The Kingdom of heaven, this is what is important to Jesus.  He wants his followers, he wants those who will listen to connect to this.  The Kingdom of Heaven.  And then he explains that in something small, growth can happen.  But then, in just a few chapters later, we get another example of yeast:  The yeast of the Pharisees.  Rapid growth can happen in both the positive and the negative.  We have to be careful, we have to use caution, we have to live in this world with both the good and the bad and discern where it is that God is at work and where it is that other powers are at play.    

            And that brings me to the following exercise that we are going to examine this morning.  Last month, I asked you all, what makes you thirst?  If Jesus says to us, I am the living water, come to me and you will not thirst, why is it, that we thirst?  We do, we thirst about so much.  Today, in your bulletin is an insert with a list of where, we, in this particular congregation, are thirsting.  We thirst, we desire, we care deeply about – that is what these expressions are about.  We care for this world, we care for the hurts around us, we care about our community right here in this place.  So, in our care and compassion, when we see things in a way that are not the way in which they should be – we thirst.  As yeast, when we thirst, we are encounter what Jesus calls the yeast of the Pharisees.  We desire the good but we come across the powers that seem to be in contrast to God’s Kingdom, God’s reign. 

            On one side of the insert are the various ways in which you, gathered here in this place, have named as areas in which you thirst.  On the other side is something I have called God’s story.  The Kingdom of heaven is like yeast – that a woman added to the flour until the entire batch was leavened.  God desires us to be a part of God’s story.  As a people of faith, we are called to live into God’s story, we are called to embrace it as our story.   Our call to worship this morning comes from the creation story, where God created the world and called it good and blesses it.  That is our story.  We believe God created this world, and we believe that this world is good.  We also believe that in human free will, not all people choose to participate in God’s story.  And so we live in this tension, we live in this world view that the world God desires is not always the world we encounter.  And that is the list we have before us of where we thirst. 

            The exercise I want us to explore is this:  if we truly want to be the yeast, if we are living into full participation of God’s story then we name and proclaim that God’s story is our story.  We can be the yeast of love, peace, forgiveness, and that we are willing to take God’s story out into the world so the world can be leavened.  All of those places where we thirst, those are places for us to be engaged, to be embedded, to be active participants.  For example:  if we thirst because there are people who are hungry and homeless – learn their story, build a relationship with the other, seek ways to be a resource for those immediate needs.  Being the yeast is messy.  It means losing oneself into the whole in order to produce results.  Once the yeast is mixed into the dough, you can’t pull it back out.  It is in there.  If you thirst for peace in our world, there are so many groups working on ways to promote peace, such as the Rockaway interfaith clergy group that is creating a group called Interfaith Neighborhoods working on building peace in our own communities.  Of course we want war to end, but maybe we need to focus on something right here in our own community.  If we cannot be at peace, how can we expect the greater world to be at peace. 

            And that is the next part of the exercise.  There are two stories – God’s story and the Story of the World.  There is so much anxiety and fear in our world today and we are called to go out and bring God’s story into the mess.  A huge problem exists when we allow the story of the world to come into God’s story.  And that is where some of you named the conflict within our own church family.  We have allowed the story of the world, the yeast of the Pharisees to come into God’s story and we need to address this.  We need to pray about it.  We need to be adult about it.  We need to live into forgiveness and mercy and grace and most of all love.  We need to say, no more, yesterday is gone we cannot change it and from this point on, we will only allow God’s story to be the story we live in this place.  We will be more patient with each other and we will set aside our own fears and anxieties and stress and allow God to guide us as we focus on our role of being God’s yeast. 

            Jesus started small.  He focused his attention on twelve disciples.  He even turned some people away.  If people’s hearts were not ready to be a part of God’s story, he let them go.  Enough people understood what it meant to be yeast that the church grew, enough people desired to encounter the Kingdom of heaven that the Holy Spirit led more and more out into the world and lives were changed and transformed.  We thirst because there is work to be done – so go out into the world and let go of yourself and embrace God’s story as your story as you live your life.  And just like the yeast, you will, by your very nature, convert the environment around you into the Kingdom of heaven.  

Sermon - Unfair Grace

Matthew 20:1-16

“Unfair Grace”

            As a mom, one of the many lessons I am trying to help my girls understand is:  Life is not fair.  Now, for their young minds, we are talking about simple things such as picking TV shows, movies, or which toys we are going to play with.  Fairness is very important to them.  When one gets to pick a show to watch the other expects a turn to pick a show to watch.  It all has to play out even.  And when it doesn’t, tantrums can get thrown with the words screaming out – That’s not fair! 

            In my own life, the first time I really realized how unfair life is, was my senior year of college when I was driving back to college with my car packed with what I needed for the year, including all of my things from my semester in Costa Rica.  In order to break the drive from CT to NC up, I stopped over night at a friend’s place and during the night, someone broke into my car and stole everything.  Now, the thing is, some really sad and tragic things had happened in my community while growing up, but none of them had happened directly to me.  Yes, there were sad things to work through but until the drama was spotlighted directly on me, I really had no idea how unfair things really can be. 

            So, as we read this parable today, it is easy for us to keep it at arm’s distance.  It is easy for us to read it and say, why are they complaining?  Why are they whining?  Why are they upset?  A landlord hirers workers and they work for a day’s wage.  Sounds fair to me.  But there was still more work to do, so he goes out and hires more workers and this is where it gets unfair, this landlord becomes generous and pays these workers a day’s wage.  Wow, bonus for them.  But then he hires more workers and then pays them a day’s wage as well.  Is he being too generous?  Why would he do that?  Doesn’t the landlord know that he is going to make some of his workers angry?  Is he trying to create conflict? 

            As we examine this parable, it is easy to pick sides.  It is easy to say, I can understand why those early workers are upset, they worked hard all day long while the others only did a partial days work.  It is only fair if you pro-rate the other workers pay.  But then, it is also easy to side with the landlord – he is being just and fair in that he is paying what he offered.  He’s not cheating anyone out of anything. 

            Now, Jesus picked money as a focus in his parable as he is teaching his followers about the Kingdom of Heaven.  Money is just a metaphor, but it gets our attention and makes the complaining that ensues understandable.  I’ve been there, I’ve been in a situation where I felt others were rewarded financially and it made me feel underappreciated.  Didn’t I work just as hard?  I was not cheated out of anything, I got what my contract stated, but there was another message being sent outside of the contract and that was about appreciation.  Yes, the landlord paid what he said he was going to pay, but by paying the others the same rate, he underappreciates those first workers. 

            What is fair and what is unfair?  The audience Jesus spoke to would understand the language he is using here.  Most of them were day laborers.  They knew what it meant to go to work at these various times and what kind of pay they would receive.  They would easily be swayed to the complaining of those early workers because it was something they could identify with on an almost daily basis. 

            Perhaps in today’s day and age Jesus would teach this:  The Kingdom of Heaven is like:  People lined up outside the Apple Store for a week prior to the release of the new iphone 6.  On the day of the release, the sales associates started at the back of the line to hand out the phones and those that waited longest received their phone last.  Everyone in line gets a phone, but the order of expectation changes.  Those that waited a week complain that it is unfair that those that only waited one hour received their phone first.  But the message is:  everyone received a phone.  It might not be fair, but it is just.   

A parable is a tool to help teach and the Kingdom of Heaven has absolutely nothing to do with money or iphones.  It has everything to do with God’s grace.  So how does this translate?  Do we really get upset that everyone that labors in God’s vineyard receives the same amount of grace?  To me, it does not seem to be something to squabble about, and yet, part of the parable illustrates our human nature that God’s abundant grace is going to cause conflict. 

So, I started to think about a movie called:  Dead Man Walking. In this movie, a man is on death row for a horrific crime.  He is perceived to me a monster and deserves to die.  Except, there is a nun that becomes his spiritual guide and visits him over and over again talking to him about God’s love and forgiveness.  The family of the victims is irate.  How dare this nun spend time with this awful man.  How dare she try to bring God’s love to him while he is on death row.  This is a really tough movie, but it shows those human feelings of how unfair God’s grace is.  Does a criminal, a murderer, even a terrorist deserve God’s grace? 

Starts to put this parable a little closer to our hearts as we thing about who should be in God’s kingdom and who should stay out.  Prison ministry is a real challenge but Jesus calls us there and there are churches that see this as their harvest, the place in which God sends them.  Even on the cross, Jesus offers grace to the criminal next to him.  Ours is a story of unfair grace the question is, where in the parable do we find ourselves? 

Do we see ourselves as those who have labored since the crack of dawn, or do we see ourselves as the one that comes in at noon?  Or do we see ourselves in this parable at all?  The Kingdom of Heaven is like:  it is like a vineyard with laborers.  But this is not a stagnant story, it is not about a specific set of laborers but an on-going recruitment with more and more workers coming in through the day.  The landlord does not sit around but goes out and finds more workers.  There is movement out of the vineyard and then back into the vineyard, an ebb and flow. 

Now, we can simplify this a little bit and say:  let’s name the church as the vineyard.  If this particular body is the vineyard, how do we interact with each other, how do we perceive the various workers God has brought together into this place?  Do we share ownership with the whole?  And then we need to ask; what business are we about?  Are we about being a part of the Kingdom of Heaven?  The Kingdom of Heaven is embracing God’s grace, right here, right now, in our daily lives.  It is not about eternal life, it is not about being saved through Jesus Christ.  It is about being called into God’s work in this world in which we live.  It is about receiving God’s grace and the desire to serve God out of no other reason than love. 

Next Sunday, we are going to have the community breakfast.  The greater community enjoys this breakfast, God has brought them to us, how are we called to respond?  There are lots of options.  We can choose not to attend; we can come and sit with our friends; or we can partner up and intentionally sit with people we do not know.  As laborers in God’s vineyard, we are called to work and God desires us to build relationships with others, we are called into work right here in the world in which we live.  Deck Hall is our safe place.  We are comfortable there and through the breakfast, God brings us the greater community.  Be present, ask people how they are doing, learn about who they are, everyone has a story to tell.  Or take the opportunity to use the breakfast to invite one of your neighbors, friends, or relatives.  The kingdom of Heaven is about growth, it is about life, it is about moving past what we think is fair and living into God’s presence right here in our midst.  Don’t keep this parable at arms length, let is sit with you, put yourself into it, and let it speak to you in your own story of faith.  Amen.