Pentecost 10 - Year A

We, the Christian Church in Australia, are getting great publicity this week, are we not?  The Australian newspaper has featured front page 5 days out of 6 the visit of the Holy Father, the Pope, and all the associated activities and events.  This weekend the front page is adorned with a very powerful photo of Christ crucified, and other photos of the story of the Passion, that was played out around Sydney on Friday.  And there are hundreds of thousands of people involved, including 240 000 young pilgrims from around the globe.  It is all rather awe inspiring and, as I have implied, great marketing opportunity for a product.  Our 21-year-old commented this week – “isn’t it great to see so many young Christians?”  He found it uplifting, as indeed it is.

Seeing the graphic portrayal of Christ on the cross, blood and dirt and agony stretched across his face, going into millions of homes here and abroad, set me wondering about “the product”.  What is being offered here?  I was in this mindset anyway because of the “product” on offer this week in the Gospel, the parable of the weeds and wheat and the serve by Christ, through Matthew, on judgement.  What exactly is being offered here as well…

As marketing entry points, crucifixion and judgement would seem to be pretty tough to work with,  with not much scope for general appeal.  This is an interesting point that a few of us wrestled with in the Friday group as we wiggled and squirmed with weeds and wheat, sheep and goats.  We look to soften “the message,” don’t we, because in our heart of hearts we believe in a Creator God of love who continues to love.  And there is as much biblical evidence of that, through Christ, as there is of a confronting, hard-line God. 

Do we have a God who demands love or fear?  Do we have a Christ who offers life through agony and suffering, or revelationary teaching and healing?  And what do we, as Christian community, offer the world as invitation into this whole God-story?

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who is by the by currently presiding over hundreds of bishops at Lambeth, is renowned for his coining of the phrase “both and”.  It came about through the report of the Mission Shaped Church in 2004 which revealed the need for totally new ways of reaching the unchurched.  That is, with “fresh expressions” of church, of creating invitations to meet people where they are at, rather than just where we are at.  And yet, the pattern of who we are, and caring for who we are, is of equal importance.  And so, he said, we need to be - and we can be - “both and”.  In many ways it has been the church’s continual call to be in mission, while honouring the story of tradition and journey and the people already gathered.

It certainly emerged from our discussions this week that somehow we have to incorporate the reality of the “good news” in the real tension of “both and.” This tension is about living with a God who indiscriminately and generously scatters Godself among all people and creation, and yet also, we are told, has great furnaces of fire waiting for evildoers.  This tension is about a Christ, revered as the Prince of Peace, who confronts people with who they are and gives them choice in uncompromising ways, acknowledging the severe consequences for the wrong choice.

This is the tension of living in the paddock with both wheat and weeds.  The roots of both grow together, intermingling indiscriminately, growing and developing together.  It is this hidden root life that is the part of our life that only God sees in its completeness, its totalness.   To the world we can act and be who we choose to be; it is God who knows the heart of our root system. 

Very interestingly, the type of weed Jesus used in this story, in the original language, was darnell, which looks very like wheat.  This is a key factor in the story, isn’t it?  The world contains the mixture of good and evil, both in community and in individual self.  It is what makes us human, rather than, say, divine.  We accept it, even though we are troubled by it -   we are reminded of Paul’s words in Romans, which we heard a few weeks ago, about that discovery of self that can’t make ourselves be the ideal we dream we could be.  Remember, he wrote “I can will what is right, but I cannot do it.  For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” 

He was speaking of that inner battle that he then writes many words about – and we hear more today – the battle of the flesh and the Spirit.  Cardinal George Pell has written about this as the “primacy of conscience”…that our conscience is the innate human ability to know right from wrong and to prefer right to wrong.  But, he writes, there are many ways you can corrupt your conscience…and he writes, as often is his theme, on the dangers of secularism.

Whatever the angle, God knows we live in a world of wheat and weeds, and that we each contribute to that mixture.  To all appearances we are a field of wheat, but it is never so.  God perceives our roots, and knows where we are tapping our lifeforce into.  Jesus would say, with God backing him up, that the lifeforce is either Him, or not Him.  “Whoever is not for me, is against me” he said.  Seems black and white doesn’t it, and that of course offends not only our knowing image of a loving, encompassing, forgiving God, but also our Anglicanism.  We like to feel guided, don’t we, not directed….

This could be a key insight to not only this parable but also the message we hear from Saint Paul today.  The parable of the wheat and weeds remains a parable; even in his so-called explanation, Jesus does not unpack who are the children of the kingdom and who are the children of the evil one.  What he does acknowledge is that both exist in God’s knowing, and that there will be a final harvest.  In other words, this is judgement but only God knows when, how and who.  And I will be daring enough to say that at no point do I hear Christ say that noone is irredeemable.  We are surrounded by angels, as we also hear in Jacob’s dream today, and the angels will do God’s will.   There will be anguish in judgement as evil is finally destroyed. 

The really, really important understanding is that that destruction of evil has begun already.  If the coming of the kingdom has begun, then so to, in the great tension and event of Christ’s death and life, so too has the beginning of the final destruction of evil.  This is the great hope we live in, and the great hope of God.  As we learn in Jacob’s dream today, God’s hopes are God’s promises.  As we hear from Saint Paul today, creation was created in that hope.  Paul says:

for the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.

Huge theological issues here but the bottom line is hope – that one day God’s hope will be realised in God’s creation.  Paul’s bottom line is also about the choice of being weedy or wheaty in our life – that God’s will actually created the choice of weed and wheat life, because God’s hope is that “creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay”.  God’s hope is God’s promise.  God gave us will, free will, to take on life in its fullness - glory and decay, wheat and weed, and God is willing us, drawing us, hoping us, into the right way of being.

The really, really good news in what has become a rather dense sermon, is that God’s hope is certain.  If we didn’t have that faith, we may as well now resign ourselves to weedy lives.  Our free will is in counter balance to Jesus Christ himself; the front page of the newspaper, of the crucifixion, is actually the greatest good news image we could market.  If we place our will, our life, in Christ himself then all shall be well because it is in the action of his obedience to the cross that the beginning of the end began.  Evil has begun to be dismantled and destroyed, and each life that adds their obedience to Christ’s obedience, not only brings the kingdom closer but also makes evil more distant and lesser.

For in hope we were saved, says Paul.  There is no future tense about it.  We can live in God’s paddock of mixed wheat and weeds, knowing that God’s harvest will triumph and that we are part of it.  Amen.