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Last week Shelaine ended her sermon with this question from the Heidelberg Catechism – what is your only comfort in life and in death? That I belong – body and soul, in life and in death – not to myself but to my faithful savior, Jesus Christ, who at the cost of his own blood has fully paid for all my sins and has completely freed me from the dominion of the devil; that he protects me so well that without the will of my Father in heaven, no one hair can fall from my head; indeed that everything must fit his purpose for my salvation. Now, this morning, I want you to especially take notice of this last sentence – Therefore, by his Holy Spirit, he also assures me of eternal life, and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him. The heart of the good news is that our God is with us and Jesus was trying to convey that through his use of the parable of the wheat and the weeds. But there is something else there as well. Jesus makes it plain that it is also good news that we do not uproot the weeds ourselves because we can’t really tell the difference between weeds and wheat. In other words, the one doing the uprooting will be God, and it is properly not our human concern. The good news is that God is the one who moves and works and convicts hearts and separates and brings together and gives good gifts through the Holy Spirit.
When you read these parables it can become confusing very quickly with all the analogies and myriad images thrown about. And I think to understand what Jesus is about here one must look at the whole context of chapter 13 in which Jesus is talking about the Kingdom and the Spirit and where those people that follow him will be found. He does this, not by concrete examples and commands, but through speaking a bunch of parables one right after the other. And they are not exactly about a one-to-one relationship that this particular thing signifies this other particular thing. They are to be read in a way (all at once, one right after the other) to enable you to momentarily set aside your rational mind, if you will, or your human tendency to always do things for yourself. Jesus wants his hearers to surrender to the Spirit’s leadership, to faith, to trust, even in understanding the Kingdom. He wants them to let go and let God give the insight through the rapid fire of these parables so that it is not mere assent but an Aha!!! Moment about the goodness of God and God’s Kingdom in their lives. Almost like the way a Zen koan functions in bringing people to a new awareness of the world and their place in it. The Hebrew word that has been translated into the Greek as parable is mashal, a form of language that was meant to tease the mind into insight rather than to be straightforward in communicating a concrete idea. It is language that both conceals and reveals. And that is what we must keep in mind as we read these parables as they cascade across the page into our ears. So, I invite you to close your eyes and let the Scriptures speak to you.
(Read Matthew text here)
I have always loved that last Yes! from the disciples after this rush of mashalim. Did they understand all this? Why of course, Jesus! Somehow, I don’t think they were being totally honest, especially when we continue to follow their walk with Jesus through the gospel. But, after reading the Scripture several times through this past week, I think there is another way in which they might have been completely truthful. And that is they were totally throwing themselves, surrendering themselves into the arms of Jesus’ understanding of God and the Kingdom. For through these parables and Jesus’ teaching, they are challenged to leave behind their pedestrian, pragmatic world that treats God as irrelevant and enter a new world where God is the primary reality. They didn’t know a lot but they knew enough to follow this man Jesus of Nazareth and try to grasp what he was saying about God’s Spirit in the world. Notice in these mashalim that Jesus is not primarily concerned about a future apocalyptic consummation of fire and judgement like many of his contemporaries. Yes, he does mention a future separation instituted by God but he does not spend much time describing in detail a future golden age on a transformed earth or the streets of gold in the heavenly Jerusalem. No, he is mainly interested in the present dimension of God’s rule right now and that future judgment’s meaning for the present lives of his followers. God’s end-time rule is not out there somewhere floating in the void, but like God’s Holy Spirit is active now - invading the present, confronting men and women with the necessity of decision in the face of it.
This mystery of the Kingdom, that God’s Spirit is always at work in the world, specifically, Jesus says, in the small group gathered around his name. That mystery is still enacted today. In spite of many arguments to the contrary during his own time and even into today, Jesus proclaims that the kingdom of God, God’s action in the world, will come to fruition. While almost imperceptible to the eye or hidden, the Spirit’s work is real and will in God’s good time be revealed to all peoples. And that is not a strictly future reality because it has been inaugurated by Jesus himself and then continued by the same Spirit in those who follow him. The same Holy Spirit of God is working in all of us even now, enabling our call to evangelism and mission in the world for the sake of the world. And we may not think the small thing we are doing is mission, but Jesus says that God is at work in all of us, starting off small and yet able to make something to which all peoples will be drawn to eventually. So, we don’t have to worry about rules and regulations and what we are not doing, but fully trust in the power of the Holy Spirit to draw us into those missional endeavors that God has laid out beforehand for us. It is not up to us, but thank God the good news is that God is at work through us, each and every day, in many small ways. And I know that this family of believers is involved in many things, whether it is formal organizations you volunteer for or simply helping a neighbor do her yardwork, you are involved in proclaiming the Kingdom of God that has come into our lives by the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. In a minute, we are going to ask you to write something down on the 3x5 card if you have not yet done so. Write down any way of the myriad of ways God has enabled and strengthened you to be about his work, and then we are going to ask you to pass those forward so that we can ask God’s blessing upon all of our mission work that is lived out in this particular body of Christ. But before that, I want to give you an example from my own family that God laid on my heart to illustrate this point that Jesus was making about God’s Holy Spirit work in the parables.
My grandmother, whom I have mentioned before, always attended church every Sunday she was able to. So, when she married my Pop she naturally assumed he would go with her. But Pop refused to go. I think part of it had to do with what he witnessed during his time in the trenches of World War One, but Granny did not despair. She simply got ready each Sunday and as she left asked him to go with her. Well, this ritual went on for decades but God was at work during that whole time, using those mustard seeds of a few simple phrases to grow and grow within his heart. And one day, in his 70’s, to her utter joy, he finally said yes. And he was baptized and became as faithful as her until he died. Now some cynic may say he got to be as stubborn and unfaithful as he wanted to as a young man and then got right with God just in time at the end. And that’s not fair. And it might not be. But remember that it is not our job to separate out the wheat from the weeds, it is our Holy Spirit enabled task to simply point to Christ and the good news of the Kingdom. And of course, God was the one acting on my Pop, but he had established long before my Granny was born, that this would be part of her mustard seed of witness to the world. So, no matter how small a thing you are doing or have done for the Kingdom, I want you to hear that God calls all of us and gifts us with Holy Spirit power so that those things that seem small and hidden will one day become large and revealed under His guidance. The Kingdom has come in our Lord Jesus Christ, so let us celebrate our God and how the Holy Spirit guides us to embody the Kingdom this very moment.
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