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PENTECOST 10A

July 20, 2008                                                                            

 

SCRIPTURES  

 

           - We are climbing Jacob's ladder

-This parable appears only in Matthew.

-In the present, good and evil are mixed up. In the future good and evil will be sorted out and separated!

- The parable shows that the signs of the Kingdom are never pure and unambiguous.

- We don't like ambiguity.  We want a line in the sand.

- 'From literature: The Crucible' or "The Scarlet letter" 

-Tare:  the word in Jesus' parable that  is interpreted weed should be tare. The tare was a bearded darnel plant.  In its immature stages it looked  almost identical to wheat. .Only when the tare put on its seed could it  be distinguished  form the wheat. (you will  know them by their fruit)  Preaching book by Russell Anderson

- Just as the world is an ambiguous, mixed up place, so are we ourselves mixtures of the good and the bad.

-The central problem in the parable is not the weeds and wheat, but the impatience of the slaves and they assumption that they knew exactly what their lord wished. Stoffregen

-The Pharisees in Jesus' day sought to be good "weeders". They considered Jesus and his group as some of the weeds.
-Darnel is a poisonous weed.  It is closely related to and, in its earliest stages of growth, is hard to distinguish from wheat.  As the crop grows, it is impossible to separate the darnel from the wheat.  The roots of the two plants are so intertwined that to pull the  one would uproot the other.  Osterley

-These verses contain the parables of the Mustard Seed (31-32) and the Leaven (33) which are part of the Gospel next Sunday, and the explanation of the use of parables (34-35).

-Sometimes God’s justice seems to take a long time, because God is patient and kind. We should learn from God to treat those who differ from us with gentleness and patience.

-One aspect that is overlooked is that what happens to the field, and in the world, also happens within each of us. "We can also grow impatient with God when our prayers to uproot some personal weed seem to go unanswered  Dan Nelson.

- People are not plants,  Wheat is always wheat and a weed is always a weed but the person I think is a weed today may prove down the road to be a better plant than I am.  J.E.Kalas

-There are indeed, weeds in the field  of this world, of the church and of our own lives.  But that doesn't mean that all is lost. 

-In Malthie Babcock's words:  that though the wrong seems oft so strong, God is the ruler yet. (This is My Father's World) 

-  The field belongs to God.  The enemy is the interloper, intruder, late comer but has no primary

    rights.

-Tares are “bearded darnel, mentioned only in Matt. 13:25-30. It is the Lolium temulentum, a species of rye-grass, the seeds of which are a strong soporific poison. It bears the closest resemblance to wheat till the ear appears, and only then the difference is discovered. It grows plentifully in Syria and Palestine.”  The problem with taking our hoe to the evil weeds of the world is that good and evil sometimes look so much alike.  It only becomes clear later.  Rev. Todd Weir

-A psychoanalyst once said "Inside all of us there is a zoo, but we are to be the zoo keeper." Which means we must continue to take care of ourselves, to honor all the parts of our life, and realize that even the weeds come from God.

-Let God deal with the alleged weakness of others! Deal inclusively. This does not mean avoiding challenge and confrontation, but it does mean: never ceasing to have compassion, never writing people off Loader

-"The kingdom of God is like..." and then we get the mix-up in the field. The Kingdom is messy, a mixed garden where the good stuff and the bad stuff is so intermingled it's not safe to separate them! The kingdom is not just when the weeds are burned and the wheat is gathered in, that is, at the END of the parable. The kingdom is like the present we live in right now. Desperate Preachers

-"we're both wheat and weeds together"

SERMON: "GET ON WITH IT"   The parable seems to be saying, there may not be a lot we can do about the weeds ‘out there’ but we all contribute to the darkness in the world and there is much we can do about our own weeds.  So as Peter Gomes would say,  let’s  “Get on with it” because time will eventually run out.   Lindy

-We are beings in process God takes us at what ever point we may be at.

-Your tyrants are not outside but inside. (fear, guilt, anger)

-The struggle with evil within ourselves begins with self knowledge   Gomes

-Sin is a birth defect...lacking faith in our creator. Kafka

-Evil is an attempt to hide from self.

-The only evil in the world is in our hearts. That's where the battle should be fought. (Ghandi)

-Evil is not our essence...God intended us for better things. Walter Wink,

-         Evil is WITHIN us, “shadow”. 

-         Evil is not shadow but our refusal to meet our shadow is evil. Jung

- Everything we can become, we already are.

-The state of sin exists before we do wrong.

-Something we were withholding made us weak until we found out that is was ourselves.  R.Frost

-We are not tempted because we are evil but because we are human

-Do you really want God to eradicate all evil? Let's say that God eradicated all evil at midnight tonight, how many of us would be standing at 12:01? None of us.

-Nothing we do to punish someone will heal us.

·         Religion is: theological deodorant; spiritual nourishment; power collectors;  celestial boot camp; church boutiques.

·         Humanism is pulling yourself up by your own boot straps. Lindy Black

 -Sin is never reaching our destiny.

-Cure for disease only found after cause is isolated

-We are all wounded healers.

-The best we can become is redeemed sinners.

-The greatest work of the devil is that he has made us believe there is no devil  Gomes

-He who looks outside, dreams; who looks INSIDE , awakes. Carl G. Jung

-Those who have a deep and real INNER  life are best able to deal with outer life. E. Underhill

-Longfellow The real journey in life is INTERIOR 

-I am certain there will be three surprises in heaven: I will see some people I never expected to see. There will be a number whom I expected to see who will not be there and the biggest surprise is that I will be there.

 

 

 

 

QUOTES

- "Weeds are a post-Eden fact of life"    J.E.Kalas

- "Live and let die"   Anderson

-"Weeds are the demanding souls who drain the energy and budget of a congregation and then leave in a huff, saying they want to find a more caring church." Pulpit Resource

-"You defend God like you defend a lion -- you get out of his way."

-  We have met the enemy, and he is us.   Pogo

-"Choose your enemies carefully, because you become like them." (It can be very easy to become intolerant with intolerant people, or angry at the people who are angry at us, or bigoted toward bigoted people. By seeking to destroy our enemies, we usually condemn ourselves because we have become just like them.)

- Be careful lest in fighting the dragon, you become the dragon

-Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. Blaise Pascal,Pensees

- The tiniest hair casts a shadow   Goethe

-There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root. Thoreau

 

ILLUSTRATIONS

1.  “In one of the first crusades, knights from western Europe blew through an Arab town on their way to the Holy Land and killed everyone in sight. It was not until later, when they turned the bodies over, that they found crosses around most of their victims’ necks. It never occurred to them that Christians came in brown as well as white.” So because of the fact that we often can’t tell the wheat from the weeds, and that they are so often intertwined, we see that the landowner seems more interested that things grow than he is in a pure or clean or uniformly tidy field.  Barbara [Brown] Taylor

2.  America  is finding out that rooting out the evil of terrorism is not as simple as pulling out these rogue tare-ists from amidst the wheat of Iraqis who want freedom and democracy.

3.The psychologist Carl Jung would have approved of the parable of the wheat and tares.  Jung explored the nature of the unconscious “shadow” that lives in each soul.  The shadow gets filled with all the things that we repress because we don’t want to know them.  It is the garbage can of the soul where we try to toss out our unexamined greed, narcissistic selfishness and all the other seven deadly sins of which we can never seem to rid ourselves.  Out of site this garbage rots and pollutes and unconsciously drives our actions.  We think we have rid ourselves of our trash, yet it controls us behind the scenes of our conscious thought.  Jung believed that we needed to learn to recycle our trash.  By acknowledging our garbage and knowing it is always there, we are better able to understand ourselves, to grow and to act with true compassion towards ourselves and others.  Just as we are learning to recycle and compost so trash isn’t such a big problem, examining our shadow side is healthier than trying to pitch our sins into the hefty bag.  Perhaps this trash and recycling metaphor is a modern translation of wheat and tares.  Whether we are talking about weeds or garbage, it is a caution that our quest for purity can lead to wrong ends when we ignore what is within our own sou

4.  Workaholics harm themselves and others by caving in to the persistent urge to do something, take action, or control events when the opposite is needed. Workaholics are reluctant to let matters unfold naturally, so they rush in to fill the perceived void of inactivity with anything that will keep themselves busy and events churning. as a result, problems often grow larger because workaholics cannot leave them alone. Situations get worse because of irritation from their constant tinkering, from forcing premature activity, or from spending too much time with small matters, thereby granting them greater importance.   Alban Institute

5.In Saint Louis an unemployed cleaning woman noticed a few bees buzzing around the attic of her home. Since there were only a few, she made no effort to deal with them. Over the summer the bees continued to fly in and out the attic vent while the woman remained unconcerned, unaware of the growing city of bees that was taking up residence just above her ceiling. The whole attic became a hive, and the ceiling of the second-floor bedroom finally caved in under the weight of hundreds of pounds of honey and thousands of angry bees.  This is a parable about neglect.  Just let things go until one day they cause the roof to cave in.

 

HUMOR

- He who throws mud, loses ground.

-There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root. Thoreau

- Cyrus McCormick invented the  mechanical raper which put many men out of work.  (Peter Gomes)

-  I think you have a barrel problem, not an apple problem

 

CHILDREN

 

PRAYER PHRASES

- Ps. 139 :  1-2, 7-10 , 23-24

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