I could never just leave my keys in my car. I think I simply would be constitutionally unable to do it. It would take so much effort to break the habit of keeping my keys in my pockets that the psychic stress would be unbearable. It would be as bad as quitting smoking. You should see me trying to leave my house or the office. I have to check to make sure my keys are in my pocket two or three times before I can actually close the door.

Maybe the issue is as simple as city/country thing, although I’m hardly a city boy. But it seems like people here have a different understanding of what keys do. For me, keys close of and protect. For others, maybe for many of you around here, keys open things up, turning a truck from a useless piece of metal to a tool, a means of transportation. You would no more remove the key to protect the truck than you would the steering wheel.

This is an issue faced by many churches, as well. Should we keep our doors locked? Just to be clear, this is in no way commentary on this church’s decision to keep your doors unlocked. As long as my office, where I would keep any confidential information, locks, then I’m fine with whatever you want to do. However, lots of churches over the past few decades have had to make the decision to start locking their doors.

In Steeleville, where my first appointment was, one of the Lutheran churches in town had to make that decision after someone in town began to break in to their offices and use their computer to look up things on the internet that oughtn’t be looked at on a church computer. My mother’s church, back in Blytheville, raised the money to build a beautiful little prayer chapel outside the church that they could keep open twenty-four hours a day. It didn’t take long for that chapel to become a public toilet.

Have you ever seen a pastor’s key ring? Besides house and car keys, pastors will have keys to about a bajillion other things, the doors to one or more churches, the keys to all of those churches facilities, a key to the church van, a key to an office and a file cabinet, and on and on. Our keys rings can be massive. And there’s nothing any pastor wants more than use those keys to unlock everything one last time and open each door and leave them open, allowing the whole world access to everything the church has to offer, but we just don’t live in a world where that’s good stewardship. We are blessed to have what we have, and we have an obligation to protect it.

However, we, as a church, have other things that we can, metaphorically speaking, leave unlocked so the whole world can access. We have to figure out what to do with them. We need to understand the purpose of the church. We need to know whether the church is like a bank vault, where you put priceless treasure away and lock it up to protect it, or if the church is like a food bank, where you keep good things only for the purpose of finding someone who needs them.

Before Jesus gave the keys of the kingdom to Peter, he had to make sure that Peter understood what keys were for. So what questions doe she ask? First, who do others say Jesus is. We live in a world where a lot of false Jesuses are held up as the true one. Turn on your tv some Sunday morning, and you’ll see people promising you that Jesus will give you anything you want if you just pray hard enough, when Jesus told us we’d have to make sacrifices, take up our crosses, if we were to follow him. Go to a book store and you’ll see titles like Jesus: Life Coach.
Friends, Jesus didn’t live, die, and resurrect just to make your life easier. He did it to redeem the world.

We have to be able to think for ourselves. What our culture, our tvs, even our churches and our preachers tell us might be wrong. We have to be able to look at what little we have of Jesus’ life and teachings and decide for ourselves who Jesus is.

And that’s the second question Jesus asks: who do you say that I am? And what does Peter say? You are the Christ, the Messiah, the Son of the living God. The key word there? Living. God is alive. I can’t think of anything more dead than a bank vault. Jesus uses this image in a parable, but he reminds us that coins will rust, clothes will rot away, but real treasure will endure.

Anything of value has to be used, shared, spent. Jesus could trust Peter with the keys because Peter understood what keys are really for. Keys don’t lock things away or keep people out; keys open up, allowing everyone access to what treasures lie inside.

Who do we say that Jesus is? With every action we take, with every decisions that we make as a church or as individuals, we say something about who we think Jesus is. Take a look at your bulletins and notice where our opening prayer is from. The Church of South India. Over the centuries, as Europeans began the brutal conquest of India, missionaries accompanied the soldiers. I mentioned before I had a professor in seminary who was from that part of the world. She said that , before the Church of South India was formed, there were Presbyterian Indians and Anglican Indians and Lutheran Indians and Methodist Indians. One day they looked at each other and realized, hey, we’re all Indians. Let’s work together in one church. Their European and U.S. American counterparts said, wait, you can’t do that! They Presbyterians said the Methodists were heretical, and the Methodists said the Anglicans were heretical, and the Anglicans said the Lutheran were heretical, and they all said the Pentecostals were heretical. But the Indians said, no, those are your distinctions, not ours. Those are white people distinctions. We are Indians.

What were all those European and American theologians and bishops and church leaders saying about the church? That is was a place of separation and distinction, not a place of unity and solidarity. Of course, these Europeans and Americans weren’t meaning to say that Jesus separates us rather than unites us, but that is exactly what they were saying. When can proclaim Jesus with our lips, but more people hear what we say with our actions.

So who do we say Jesus is? We are trusted with keys. We have a certain amount of wealth, both individually and as a church? What I’ve seen so far is that you keep that vault pretty well open, sharing with those in need. So many churches see the purpose of money as being there to keep the institution of the church in business, not understanding that the church exists not for its own sake but for the purpose of proclaiming Jesus Christ. Good for you. And that’s just one of many areas in which you proclaim a living Christ, not a dead one. One place where you proclaim that the kingdom is open to all, not closed of for a few.

Our society worships false gods. We worship gods of security and prosperity. We worship gods that promise safety and wealth. Gods that lock up, gods that separate, gods that pit one nation against another, or one person against another. Alan Greenspan once said that our nation has been corrupted by a kind of infectious greed, and I would suggest that such greed has infected our churches, as well. We want to hoard. We want to sit on large endowments. We want to point at others and call them heretics, heathens, scoundrels, gluttons, drunkards, friends of tax collectors and sinners. What do we say about Jesus when we close our hearts, our minds, and our doors to others, denying them the treasure we have been trusted with?

But that, of course, is not what we are charged with doing. The history of the church is the history of people being cast out for wanting to love others more. John Wesley was harassed for trying to extend God’s love beyond the boundaries of the church walls, to the poor and downtrodden that couldn’t come to church. So he took the keys and opened up the church, extending it to the fields and the coal mines and anywhere else he found people in need of the gospel. Time and again, people have been cast out of the church for trying to open its doors to those others said didn’t belong. For a long time in Arkansas, it was illegal to have an integrated church. Several Pentecostal preachers, white and black, spent time in jail for daring to defy that law, a law devised by people who thought of themselves as good church people with a good scriptural foundation. Who were they saying that Jesus is?

Who do we say that Jesus is? All the knowledge, all the wealth, all the power in the world isn’t going to do us any good if we get that one question wrong. Who do we say that Jesus is? For the grace to answer that question in a way pleasing to God, thanks be to God. Amen.

It’s funny; I’ve started this new thing, I have the freedom to ignore the lectionary and preach any lesson I want, and I choose a lectionary reading I didn’t use a few weeks ago. I have the freedom to leave the pulpit, to leave notes behind, and I still have a manuscript here, on little sheets of paper, so I can hide them in my bible, but I have somewhere to go if I get lost.

We tend to reject freedom. I hope I don’t offend anyone here, but I don’t understand vegetarianism. I can understand not eating salmon or deer or other wild animals, but farm animals are not natural. Whether you accept evolution or believe that Genesis is literally true, cows didn’t come into being in the same way that lions and tigers and bears did. Cows are the result of thousands of years of selective breeding, changing an antelope-like critter into something fatter, smellier, and dumber. The same is true for pigs and chickens and most of the animals we eat.

Cows are about as natural as asphalt. Nonetheless, every now and then a group of animal rights activists will try to free cows from a slaughterhouse. Now, I support animal rights in many respects. I think the animals that give their lives to feed us should be treated with dignity and respect. They should be treated humanely, have freedom to move around, and not be subjected to painful and invasive procedures. I think animals should not be used for any kind of consumer products testing, like cosmetics and the like. In many ways, I am sympathetic to the demands of some animal rights groups, so I’m not just picking on them.

But let me tell you, freeing cows is stupid. You ever try to free a cow? If you’ve got a dog in the back yard and someone opens the gate, the dog runs off. Dogs are smart. If you’ve got a cow in the back yard and someone opens the gate, the cow isn’t going anywhere. Cows don’t want freedom. They wouldn’t know what to do with it.

There’s something similar about elephants. Now, circuses are one of those things that I agree with the animal rights folks about. I think it’s cruel to remove animals from their natural habitat and force them to entertain us. Elephants, as we all know, are extremely intelligent, majestic, communal animals. In the wild they dominate their habitat. But if you take one when it’s small and put a chain around its neck and attach that chain to a stake in the ground, then it grows up thinking that it can’t pull that chain out of the ground, even as an adult, when it could easily yank that chain out of the ground. It becomes accustomed to its slavery and doesn’t seek freedom at all.

Humans are like that. I could have said that after talking about cows, but I’d rather say humans are like elephants than humans are like cows. But I guess we’re like both. We’re offered freedom and we don’t know what to do with it.

Just think about our biblical history. The Israelites are freed from Egypt, and they first thing they do is enslave themselves to a false god, the golden calf. They are offered the freedom of being God’s people, people of justice and mercy, a people whose mission it is to see that justice shall rain down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream, but they chose war and aggression, building up political power and influence, a political campaign that does not lead to safety and security; it leads to exile and destruction.

When Jesus comes along, people are fighting for power. There are lots of little revolutionary groups fighting the Romans. That’s what people wanted from a messiah, someone who would drive the Romans out of the Holy Land. Jesus understands that what they’re seeking isn’t true freedom. One oppressor is overthrown by another; that’s how politics works. Jesus offers us something more; true freedom, grace, freedom from the past, freedom from our failures, freedom, as I stress over and over, to love without worrying about the consequences. And what do we do with that freedom? We develop a religion called Christianity, one of the most rule-bound and oppressive religions there is. You can’t eat such-and-such on Fridays. You have to do this, this, and this in worship. You have to believe this. You can’t believe that. Only people with blue eyes can be pastors. No, only people with black hair can be pastors. The arguments go on and on, as they have been for two thousand years with no sign of stopping. Ever.

Jesus was a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners. Don’t believe me? It says so in the bible. A glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners. I want that on my tombstone. A glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners. That’s who we’re modeled on. This isn’t someone who agonized over whether to serve communion by intinction or in individual cups, or with wine or grape juice. He ate and drank whatever was available from whoever was available. He felt the presence of God in every element of creation, in each stone in his sandal, in each morsel of food. All of this is God’s creation, and Jesus knows that God’s creation is good.

Jesus pulled back the blinds covering God’s presence. He shows to us the very real presence of God in each atom of creation. The movement of an electron around an atom is the circulation of God’s blood. The intensity of the suns heat in August is the passion of God’s love for all creation, us included. From the very biggest things to the smallest, God permeates creation. We eat and breath God. We are constructed of God. That makes all our rules, our petty arguments, seem pretty stupid, I think. Maybe I’m more like a cow than I’d care to admit, anyway–chewing my cud, farting, oblivious to the glory of the world around me because I’m too concerned with my own belly.

A glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners. No one a decent Christian would want anything to do with. But here we are. We have a choice. Will we be decent Christians, following the rules, looking respectable? Jesus offers us, even us who have been Christians for years, decades, Jesus offers us a new life, filled with the glory of God. For the grace to choose being a glutton and a drunkard, a friend to tax collectors and sinners, thanks be to God. Amen.

Needless to say, I hate when that happens. I hate that people think that because I hold a particular job that they have to lie about who they are. It’s a shame that people assume a pastor is going to judge them, but I suppose it’s the behavior of lots of pastors that have taught them that. Maybe this is more common than I think. Are there any teachers out there? Do people try to act smarter around you? Or nurses? Do people try to act healthier?

What bugs me more than that, however, is the stuff people don’t try to lie about. Very similar things to this have happened at previous appointments, although not here. Sometimes I’ll drop by to visit someone, and maybe I’ll knock on the kitchen door. Maybe this person has one of those big french doors in the kitchen, so as I’m waiting for a response I can see into the kitchen. In comes the person I’m visiting, and, when they recognize me, they grab a hand towel and through it over a bottle of wine or a six-pack of beer sitting out on the counter. There’s no need to do that, but I guess I understand why people do it. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with that, either. I mean, unfortunately, people are used to pastors being judgmental. However, the thing that bothers me is that sometimes this person, who wanted to look respectable to the pastor and hid the alcohol, will then during our conversation will try to get me to gossip, or will themselves make a blatantly racist comment.

It seems to me that there’s something wrong with a church in which people have been taught that they need to lie bout what they put in their mouths but feel free to send evil out of them. I guess, especially for Methodists, who were teetotalers from way back, not drinking is a rule. Lots of Methodist drink alcohol, and, though some may find this shocking, there’s nothing wrong with that. Some United Methodist churches even use wine in Holy Communion. But it still seems like a rule that needs to be obeyed, to some, so some Methodists hide liquor when their pastor visits. So there’s a rule against alcohol, which goes into the mouth; what does it say about us that there isn’t such a rule against racism, or gossip, or any of the vile things that come out of the mouth?

There’s something about rules that comfort us. Some people who are embarrassed by having liquor in their house when I come by make a comment about how a glass of wine or two a day is good for you. In this case, a new rule has replaced the old. As times changed, the rules changed with them. God declared Creation not just good but very good. Animals, plants, even chemical processes and physical laws, were all declared good. Nothing God created is evil.

This morning’s reading seems to contain two very different stories, but I think they are tied together by one theme: changing our rules. This is most obvious in the first pericope, where Jesus challenges a rule held dear by the Pharisees. Now, the Pharisees get a bad rap, but they were good people. They just sometimes let their rules get in the way of loving others, just like we do. Jesus, just like many of the prophets before him, was just trying to remind us that loves is more important than the rules. Usually, when Jesus and the Pharisees lock horns, it is when the Pharisees insist on rules that blind them to the reality of love.

One of the most basic doctrines of the faith is the idea that Jesus was both fully God and fully human. We don’t have much trouble with the fully God part. Jesus walks on water, Jesus rises from the dead, Jesus ascends into heaven, check, check, check. We have a good grasp on the fully God part. What we miss too often is the fully human part. We forget that Jesus was human. Jesus felt emotions. Love for Jesus was not an abstract philosophical concept; it was an honest-to-God visceral emotion. When he healed lepers, as much as he loved the person he was healing, he must also have felt revulsion at what the disease was doing to the leper’s body. Jesus is fully human, and susceptible to all that that entails.

One day, Jesus was walking along, and something strange happens. A woman, a gentile woman, begs for his attention. Jesus is shocked, and keeps walking, ignoring her. Obeying the rules of his day. When she won’t let up, he insults her. She calls her a dog. Now calling someone a dog isn’t exactly a compliment in our culture, but then it was even worse. Dogs were vermin, unclean scavengers, not friendly pets. Talk about what comes out of the mouth defiling a person.

Jesus, like the pharisees, has run up against a rule that blinds him to the reality of love. Because he has been taught that gentiles are scum, especially Canaanites, so he cannot see the possibility of loving her. But she is a creation of God, as good as any other. She is part of the creation declared good by God in the beginning.

It’s interesting to me that Jesus happened to use the epithet “dog” when talking to this woman. Dogs are great ones for changing rules. My sister-in-law has always had dogs, and a few years ago she had a malamute named Lokai. Marla, my sister-in-law, had one main rule: no paws on linoleum during meals. And Lokai knew this rule perfectly. At the start of the meal, he would have the tip of his front paws and the tip of his nose right at the line between the den and the dining room. We’d pass around the food, and he’d have one paw one inch into the dining room. We’d take our first bites, and he’d have his nose half an inch into the dining room. By the time we were having dessert, he had crept, without anyone actually noticing, under the table.

So maybe this woman is a dog. Not because she is vile; nothing God created is vile. Maybe she’s a dog because she’s clever. She knows what she wants and she is able to bend the rules ever so slightly to get it. But she knows that she is worthy of God’s love. She knows her daughter is suffering, and God’s love could help her. Unfortunately, she has to remind God of that, as well.

This woman teaches Jesus something about grace. Maybe Jesus was getting too involved with his big project, saving the world. Maybe he was prejudiced against he for being a Canaanite. Whatever the cause, he thought she was beneath his attention. He doesn’t even acknowledge her existence until the disciples beg him to do something about her. Here, in this one man, is all the love and all the compassion of God, and it takes this poor beggar woman to remind him what compassion really means.

One little crumb of grace. One little speck, just what falls from the table, is enough to transform a life. We get so caught up in big gestures. Sometimes, it’s easier to die for the world than it is to live in it. Real discipleship might come in grand sacrifices, but for most of us it’s harder. Discipleship means doing small things, always and everywhere, listening, caring, sharing our crumbs. Disciples get their hands dirty, touching, even if it’s only in a small way, the lives of everyone they meet. Imagine all the moments of our lives as disciples as an ocean. We want to make a big, impressive sacrifice, pouring out all our love and compassion in one impressive moment, like pouring that ocean on a forest fire. But for most of us, it will be spilled out a drop at a time, watering one plant here, giving one person here something to drink, over the course of years and years.

In this reading, Jesus seems to have lost sight of what ministry really is. His heart is so set on Jerusalem that he cannot see the suffering around him. All it takes, for him, is a few words from a stranger to remind him what love really is, what grace really means. He had just spoken about the goodness of God’s creation, but he needed a lesson himself. That lesson came in the form of a woman that nobody should have listened to, that nobody should have loved. For the grace to learn how to love even from those we don’t want to love, thanks be to God. Amen.

One of these was a widow who lived in the house her deceased husband had been born in, and where here kids had been born, and where her grandchildren came to visit during the summer. She wasn’t too happy about the idea of leaving, so she reassured herself by singing, “God Will Take Care of You” over and over.

As the water starts to rise, she’s sitting on her front porch and a guardsman in a Hummer comes by. He says, “Ma’am, the waters getting pretty close to your house. Your car has about a foot of water around it. Let me give you a lift to a safe area.”

She said, “No, hon.” This is Arkansas, and everyone calls each other hon. It’s one of the things I miss most about Arkansas. “No, hon,” she says. “I’m a Christian woman, and I have faith that God will provide. Yes, I know God will provide.”

The guardsman has other houses to check out, so he doesn’t argue. He speeds off and leaves her there, singing “God Will Take Care of You”, over and over.

Well, the water keeps rising, and pretty soon she’s had to leave her porch. She went up to her bedroom and decided to sit out on her balcony. There’s a little awning, so she’s still fairly dry, sitting there, watching the rain, and singing to herself.

After a little while, another guardsman comes by, this time in a light water craft. He’s been told she’s there, and is going around trying to give her and a couple other holdouts another chance. “Ma’am,” he says. “Ma’am, the waters are still rising, and they aren’t stopping nay time soon. Would you please let me give you a ride somewhere safe?”

“No, hon,” she says. “No, I’m a good Christian woman, and I know God will provide. There’s nothing he can’t get me out of. The Lord will provide.”

“Well, ma’am,” the guardsman says, “I think you’re making a bad decision. I don’t know if anyone else will be able to come by and help you.” And so he sped off, to try and rescue some others.

Well, the rains kept falling, and soon the waters rose over the balcony, so she went back inside and climbed up into the attic. She climbed out an attic window onto the roof, and somehow scrambled up to the very top, the highest point on the house, right next to the rooster on the weather vane. There was nothing to keep her dry up there, so she sat there getting wetter and wetter, singing “God Will Take Care of You” over and over.

Taking one more sweep over the county, a guardsman flies by in a helicopter. He sees her there, soaked and shivering. He sees her mouth moving and can’t tell she’s singing, so he thinks she’s delirious. I need to get her to the hospital, he thinks, so he flies down as close as he can get and drops the ladder. “Ma’am,” he yells over the sounds of the chopper, “ma’am, can you climb this rope into the helicopter? I want to take you somewhere safe and dry?”

“No, hon,” she yells, although she’s pretty hoarse at this point from singing “God Will Take Care of You” over and over. “No, hon, I don’t need to be saved. I am saved, and I know that God is going to take care of me. I have children to love and grandchildren to help raise, so I know nothing bad will happen to me. The Lord will provide. I just know that the Lord will provide.

The pilot couldn’t hear any of this, but he could tell she wasn’t going to be climbing the ladder. Since he was alone, there was nothing he could do but fly away and keep looking for people to evacuate.

It didn’t take two much longer for the waters to rise above the roof of her house. She started to get worried, but she just kept singing, “God Will Take Care of You” and, for good measure, she started reciting the Twenty-Third Psalm, too.

Well, of course, she died. When she got up to heaven and met God, she was pretty angry. She said, “Lord, I’ve been a faithful Christian all my life. And all my life, I’ve been taught that if I had faith, then you would provide. What did I do wrong? Why didn’t you provide?”

God, a little shocked, looked at her and said, “Ma’am, what are you talking about? I provided you with a hummer, a boat, and a helicopter. Why didn’t you use what I provided?”

I once heard someone define faith as the courage to jump out of an airplane, trusting God to cath you. I wanted to ask him if he was up for a jump, but I though that might be rude. It seems like every week, there’s a new news story about a child who dies from an easily treatable cause because her parents choose to pray for her instead of treating here. If there isn’t a story like that, there’s a story about a snake handler, a member of that obscure sect of Pentecostals who handle live rattlesnakes in worship, who got bitten by a snake and died. It seems like people forget that God might have better things to do than catch folks who decide to jump out of planes with no parachute. There’s a difference between faithful and stupid.

The woman in the story missed God at work in creation. I think prayer is good at all times, and no less so than when someone is sick. However, I think that so many of the good things that humans have created have been a part of God’s work in creation, especially life-saving drugs and medical procedures. To deny their goodness is to deny that God is at work in creation. The spectacle of a man handling live rattlers is something, but spectacle can distract us from what’s really going on. There’s nothing spectacular about coronary bypass surgery, but that lack of spectacle doesn’t mean that God is not at work through the doctors and nurses and the operation itself.

Both human beings and God have a role to play in the transformation of creation. If, like the woman in the story, we just sit back and expect God to do all the work, I think we will be sorely disappointed. John Calvin, the great reformer and creator of the tradition that became Presbyterianism, Anglicanism, and, eventually, Methodism, believed that every single part of creation, from the smallest raindrop falling to the actions of armies on the battlefield, was foreordained by God. But even he thought it was foolish to walk down a dark alley in the bad part of town at night.

This morning’s reading is permeated by fear. We miss the fear, however, because of the spectacle. Jesus is walking on water! This feat is so great, so unique, that it still connotes divinity, as when we sarcastically say, “he thinks he can walk on water, doesn’t he?” It is a miracle so universally admired, so fascinating, so spectacular, that we want to focus on that, rather than the rest of the story.

But what happens in the rest of the story? The disciples are on a boat in a sea being tormented by storms. Peter is a fisherman, and he knows the damage storms can do. He’s probably lost friends and family to similar storms, loved ones who out to sea and never came back. He’s scared, and he’s scared with good reason. It would be foolish of him not to be scared. But despite his fear, he listens to Jesus and does as he asks. That, frankly, is the real miracle here. If Jesus is God incarnate, what’s so special about being able to walk on water? However, Peter is not God incarnate. Peter is an ordinary human being. A human being trapped in a storm that he knows can kill him. A human being who is terrified. But still, he listens to Jesus and he obeys him.

The real miracle is not that God incarnate can do something spectacular. The real miracle is that a human being was able to obey God through his fear. The miracles of this world are not great, beautiful acts of God. Miracles do come from God, true, but very rarely do they come directly from God. If we expect these grand gestures, these acts of spectacle, then we, like the woman on the roof, are going to miss out. Miracles happen through us, through people like the brave guardsmen who risked their lives in a flood to save those who can’t escape on their own, people like Peter who despite persecution and fear established the church that still blesses the world today.

Carl Sagan once said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. We live in a world full of miracles, things people even fifty years ago couldn’t have told weren’t magic. We can cure diseases that were automatic death sentences even a couple decades ago. Most of us carry around in our pockets or purses a cell phone, which can be used to get everything from movie times to news headlines, just by pushing a few buttons. Of course, these technologies were all developed by human beings, but maybe God was working through these human beings. Our miracles are more subtle than walking on water, but they can often be more profound.

“Do not be afraid.” That phrase is uttered no fewer than seventy times in the scriptures. Fear is the natural human state. We fear for our future, and so we hoard resources. We fear for our property, and so we start wars. We fear for our safety, so we build walls, literally and metaphorically, around our lives, our nations, our hearts. Fear seems to define what it means to be a human being.

But the gospel isn’t about fear; it’s about love. Love may be just one small flame burning in the endless darkness of fear, but that one small flame is enough. That one small flame can ignite the whole world, one person at a time, as we work together, for the glory of God, to transform the world. We live in fear, but God wants something better for us than fear. Jesus offers us something better than fear–love. Not just God’s love for us, but our love for all of God’s creation.

That’s the thing about grace–grace can obliterate fear. Because of grace, we no longer have to fear. We don’t know what our ultimate destination is, but, because of grace, we can trust God’s promise that what is offered to us is worth the journey. We don’t have to worry about earning anything or being worthy of what God offers. We are the beloved of God, so we are free to act without fear. Free to make fools of ourselves, free to fail, free to be wrong, but, most importantly, free to love.

One of the best lessons my mother-in-law taught me is that if someone wants to do something nice for you, let them. If she wants to help out, and we argue, she always says, “Don’t rob me of my blessing.” We are the miracles of this world. Each action we take, no matter how small, can be a miracle, a blessing for someone else. Every word you say, every move you make, can transform someone else’s life, for good or for bad. Each time we act out of love, each time we vanquish our fear and put ourselves out there, risking to love another human being, we have the potential to do something even greater than walking on water. For the grace to face the world in love, not in fear, thanks be to God. Amen.

While we were at home, my brother and I and our friends spent a lot of time out there. It was the one room in the house were the dogs were allowed, although that changed later. Most importantly, it was were we had our video game consoles, our Nintendo and Sega Genesis. We’d spend hours out there, huddled around a space heater or sweating under the oscillating fan. We had to sit on bean bag chairs, because the only other piece of furniture out there was an ancient sleeper sofa. It was the color of the late seventies, all orange and yellow and black. And it was the dog’s. Urchin, our dog, was a dachshund, breed to burrow and hunt badgers. She found the foam material of the couch much easier to burrow through than the ground outside, so over the first few years we lived there, she turned that couch into a mound of yellow bits of foam. That couch was her worst enemy and her best friend.

Well, with both me and my brother off at college, the room was just sitting empty, except for Urchin and her couch. And for the most part, the couch was in there alone. My grandfather had pretty severe Alzheimer’s, and having the dog in his lap calmed him down, so she was spending more and more time indoors, anyway. So, with the den gone, it was natural to turn to the Florida room as the next project for redecorating.

Basically, none of the old room remained. The interior walls were finished, covered in plaster, and painted a beautiful yellow. The concrete floor was covered with wood laminate. The exterior walls were completely replaced with regular, finished exterior walls with huge windows all along them except for the corner, which now boasts a fireplace. It’s a wonderful room, bright in the summer and warm in the winter, and it’s where we spend most of our time when we visit.

When the room was finished, however, my folks realized that now they had nowhere to keep their freezer. They had bought new furniture for the room, now called the glory room, but the exposed workings of the upright freezer sort of took something away from the room. So my parents bought a screen to surround the back and side that could bee seen from the room. It’s a beautiful wooden screen, painted to look like a book shelf. There are painted representations of works of great literature, philosophy, and science. It’s a beautiful screen, and it does a fine job of blocking the freezer, but it has one glaring flaw. Looking at it, you can tell it wasn’t painted by someone who read English. There are subtle misspellings, including a book between Animals and Plants called Dirds.

That just shows the dangers of the scribal system. In the ancient world, really until Gutenberg, the only way to copy books was by hand. There simply weren’t enough literate people to do all the scribe’s work, so most of the people who spent long days copying texts usually didn’t understand what they were writing.

As a result, a literate scribe who had the attention and care to copy exactly what he was given, with no mistakes. So it is very strange here that Jesus praises a scribe who “take out of his treasure what is old and what is new.” Here, Jesus suggests that a scribe who is a part of the kingdom never just copies what she is given to copy; instead, she changes it, fixes it, corrects it when it gets out of date.

For everyone but Jesus, when a scribe changes a text, it is a flaw, like when the painter titled the book on my parents’ screen Dirds instead of Birds. It usually meant that the scribe simply couldn’t read what he was writing, or simply got lost in the repetition, so he confused letters or words.

But for Jesus, a scribe should change things. A scribe trained for the Kingdom is like a master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old. A scribe was trusted with the works. Scribes copied works sacred to Jews and Romans, beautiful epic works like The Aeneid, ancient theological works like the Torah, and they were given a charge to preserve them. Like bankers or stockbrokers, it was assumed that they would faithfully keep track of what they were given, not change it.

Imagine if your banker changed your bank account, and all the accounts in your bank, to reflect what they should be, based on each person’s character. Far more than we do, the ancients valued wisdom, and to change one word of an elder’s wisdom was as serious as if a bank manager started changing around bank accounts. But this is exactly what Jesus is saying a good scribe, a holy scribe, should do.

It’s kind of like redecorating a house. My parents started with a house whose shape and function they liked but whose interior needed updated. Then, as their lives changed, as my brother and I went to college, as my grandparents moved in, even the shape of the house needed to change. They took what they were given and, instead of merely holding on to it, they changed it to better fit the needs of a changing family and a changing world. They took out of their treasure something old, the shape of the house, the building itself, and something new, their dreams for the future, their house transformed by their creative act.

Looking at some of the previous parables in this reading, we see that Jesus doesn’t think that treasure is something to be hoarded. Treasure only has value when it is used. One merchant sells everything he owns in order to buy a pearl of great price. But he can’t eat that pearl or live in that pearl, so he must be buying it to sell for even more. The farmer who buys the field with the buried treasure does so in order to find greater wealth within it. So it stands to reason that a scribe, trusted with the great wealth of ancient wisdom, should strive to increase its value, as well.

I decided last Sunday that for the Sunday evening services I’d be examining parts of the scripture that don’t show up on the lectionary. I promise not to do any of the extended “begatting” passages from the Torah, so if you ever wanted to learn more about some of the stranger, more puzzling, or even more troubling parts of the scripture, then this would be a good time to start coming to the Sunday evening services.

The reason I bring this up, however, is that last week we looked at the story of Daniel and Bel, a section from the fourteenth chapter of Daniel, which doesn’t even appear in most English Protestant bibles. In this story, Daniel wisely sees through the tricks of the priests of the god Bel to expose them as tricksters. King Cyrus of Persia was fooled by these priests, because every day enough food and wine for a hundred people was placed in the temple of Bel, and every morning that food had been eaten. To Cyrus, this proved that Bel was alive. Bel ate food! That is how limited the human imagination is. When Cyrus pictured a powerful god, all he could imagine was a bigger version of himself.

We, however, do serve a living God. Our God is more than we could ever imagine. We participate in a living faith. Nothing alive is stagnant. Living things grow and change and learn. A living faith does not merely hand down what it has received unchanged. A living faith grows and adapts. The problems and challenges of faith change over time, depending on the problems and challenges of the times themselves. When we come to the faith, it should be in the same way that my parents came to their house: honoring what it is, but adapting it to fit changing lives and a changing world.

Unless my understanding of the history of this church is way off, none of you were around when it first opened it doors. (Talk about addition at PS, having social outside. Talk about moving to smaller room at Birds, to meet changing needs.)

One of the great theological debates of the middle ages was “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” One of the great theological debates of the reformation and counter-reformation was, “Is it a sin to read the scriptures if you aren’t a member of the clergy?” It was assumed that it was a sin to read the scriptures if you were a woman. One of the great theological debates of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was, “If the bible mandates slavery, which it does, how can slavery be morally wrong?” They all seem silly and obvious to our modern ears, don’t they?

We, as a church, are engaged in a great number of theological debates right now, and they are all debates that we need to have, because they come out of our changing world. Because the world is different than it was two hundred, five hundred, or one thousand years ago, different kinds of questions are being asked, and answers are being found in new ways. We don’t need to debate whether a child who grew up away from humans would naturally speak Latin or Hebrew, as our ancestors in the faith did. It’s humbling to think that, a thousand years from now, most of our debates will seem as obvious as those from a thousand years ago do to us.

So hear the good news: Jesus died for us when we were yet sinners, which proves God’s love for us. Because we are alive, because God is alive, because our faith is alive, we are free. Jesus violated the Torah when Torah obedience meant not loving someone. He loved a Samaritan woman who had known many men, only five of whom were her husbands. He loved lepers, who the scriptures claimed were unclean and an abomination before God. He worked on the Sabbath, violating one of the ten commandments, when he found someone he could heal, someone in pain.

So, like the scribes, we are trusted with great wealth. However, also like the scribes, as far as Jesus is concerned, we are charged with increasing that wealth. We don’t do that by hoarding it, keeping it under lock and key, stuck in a vault. He do that by spending it, sharing it.

One of the central questions of theology for all times is this: “What is the purpose of the scriptures?” Although I could talk for another hour about that, the short answer is, the scriptures show us how to love God better, so that we can love others better. So how do we increase the value of the scriptures? By showing how they can teach us to love others in new and more powerful ways.

Living in the faith is a creative act, like redecorating a house. We take what is best about what we inherit, and we adapt it. My parents loved the house they bought, but when they saw how, by changing it, they could love my grandparents in a better way, they changed that house. In the same way, we cherish what is best about our faith. However, when parts of our faith cause us to love less, we have to reexamine them. People still use the scriptures, as they had been interpreted for centuries, to justify racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, and a whole host of other evils. But because those interpretations hinder love, they must be replaced with better ones.

A living God is not a god who eats. A living faith is not a faith that consumes. A living faith strengthens those who live in it. It grows us in love, and fills us with peace and compassion. A living faith changes, and we change with it. This is good news, because a living faith means life to all who follow it. Through faith, we see how to love. Through love, the love of God for us and our love for others, we have life. For our life in love with God, thanks be to God. Amen.

First is the limit of human imagination. Science fiction has been around long enough that a new way of looking at it as sprung up. It’s called retro-futurism. We can look back to times predicted by the earliest science fiction and see the ways they failed to predict their future, now our past, accurately. A good example of this is the film 2001, set, obviously in 2001. This film is renowned for getting the science right, but the main story of the film, the account of a manned flight to Jupiter, didn’t actually happen in 2001.

Another famous example is the flying car. As long as cars have been around in the real world, flying cars have existed in science fiction. You can watch movies from the thirties and forties in which people are using rotary telephones and analog watches but they get around in flying cars.

Computers are probably the best examples of the failure of the human imagination in literature and movies. Science fiction computers are usually faster, smarter versions of the contemporary technology. In the original Star Trek, the Enterprise zooms around the galaxy using warp speed, a process that bends space around the ship, but the computers are giant, room-sized boxes that use punch cards and reel-to-reel data tapes. Your cell phone is a more powerful computer than what Star Trek predicted, despite its other fantastic leaps.

Here, in this reading, is a great example of the failure of the human imagination. Cyrus is amazed when Daniel tells him that he worships a living god. How does Cyrus reply? “But Danny! Bel eats a lot of food! Doesn’t that mean he’s alive?” Can you imagine? To Cyrus, life means eating and consuming, expelling waste, reproducing. It’s something to be ended on the whim of a king. Like the imaginations behind Star Trek, when Cyrus pictures a powerful god, all he can imagine is a shiner, more powerful version of himself.

Instead, YHWH, the living God, the Great I Am, the God of the Hebrews, offers us a different understanding of living. God does not consume. God needs no food. How can the God who created all that is rely on creation for sustenance? God doesn’t need to be tended by priests. In this exile that the Israelites are enduring, that Daniel is surviving, there is no temple. There are no priests and official prophets. Still, God endures. God doesn’t starve to death. Most importantly, God is the source of life. Life is a gift from God. Not even the King of Persia, at this time the most powerful human being in the world, can take away a life that God wants to preserve. Daniel is thrown into the lion’s den twice and into a fiery furnace once. But because God wills life for Daniel, not even the king of Persia can take it away.

Another important element of this story is how easily we are fooled, especially when we want to be. Cryus wanted to believe that this powerful god, Bel, was protecting Persia and giving him strength. He wanted to believe it so much that he didn’t even question the word of the priests. It seems to me that people sneaking into the temple and eating the food is a far more likely possibility than a statue coming to life and eating it, but reality didn’t agree with what Cyrus wanted to believe. And because he wanted to believe, he was easily fooled.

We have the exact same thing going on today. Hardly a week passes in which there isn’t a news story about Jesus appearing in the burns on a grilled cheese sandwich or the pattern in wood paneling, or of a statue of a saint crying. People want to see miracles everywhere. And, because we are flawed humans, we would rather believe that God has nothing better to do than appear in a random pattern. Our imaginations are limited, and we want to believe, so we don’t listen when someone tells us those tears come from condensation or from a system set up by a scammer, even though those are far more likely events than the mystical explanations.

But we want to see miracles. We want to feel the power of a mighty god, whether we call it Bel or consumerism. We want to be amazed, whether it’s by a statue magically eating food or magically producing tears. We want magic in our lives, so when someone comes along and tells us how it’s all done, when someone destroys the temple and the god who lived there, we, like the Persians, resent him and want to throw him in the lion’s den.

But this god offers us something better. Our imaginations fail, so when God promises us abundant life, we change that word abundant to eternal. We can’t imagine a better life than the one we have, even though we are so far from God right now. Our imaginations are weak, so we can only picture this life, only a lot more of it.

But God, on the other hand, does not fail. God imagined the universe. Imagine if we had been asked to design the universe. We would have looked at all the nothingness around and designed a universe like that, only shinier and a lot more of it. When we hand our lives over to God, God can rework them as radically as nothingness becoming the created order.

I’m not talking about “getting saved” or “accepting Jesus”. That would be kind of silly to talk a bout here, because if you’re at church on a Sunday night you’ve probably already done that. This is a constant process. We work more and more each day to surrender a little bit more of our lives to God. To see a part that we have saved for ourselves, hoarded away because it guards a guilty pleasure that we can’t imagine anything better than, we see a part of our lives like that, and we trust God to offer us something better.

Our God is a living God. Our God is not a god of bone and dirt, an idol made by human hands. God is offering us life. Abundant life. Radical life. A life we cannot imagine. How are we to respond? This is an especially frightening question for those of us who already think we’ve made the choice. Will we, like the Persians, like so many in our world and in our church, hold on to the idols we have built for ourselves? Will we choose a world of cheap magic tricks because we love the spectacle? Or, not knowing what we are choosing but trusting in God to remake us, do we choose the mysteries that God offers us, the abundant life, whatever that means, and risk all the miraculous changes that will bring? For the grace to choose wisely now and each day for the rest of our lives, thanks be to God. Amen.

It was the people who let them into line that made me angry. These were people who, like me, had waited in line for a half hour or more, and they just let these cheaters beat the system. I thought to myself, if ever there were weeds in this world, these drivers are weeds. These were the lowest of the low. It is because of people like them, I thought, that Western civilization is collapsing. That’s what I thought, anyway, until I got lost in thought and missed the start of the line.

I don’t know what I was thinking of. Maybe I was planning a sermon, or maybe it had just been a long day and I was looking forward to getting home. But there I was, less than half a mile from the exit, and still not in line. And so I became one of them. One of those drivers who sped past the line, only to try to weasel in at the last minute. One of the despised. One of the weeds. One of the ignorant slobs who should know better.

Less than half a mile to the exit. A line of cars that had been waiting, patiently, for their chance to exit. And me, careening along at fifty, looking for a place to break in line. Now, when other cars had done this while I was waiting, I thought their children should be taken from them and put into the care of a more competent person. When other drivers had let these cars break in line before, I thought that they should immediately be arrested and made to attend at least a decade of traffic school. But here I was, in the same situation as the former and relying on th charity of the latter. I probably don’t need to tell you that my opinion of both groups changed somewhat.

But not entirely. After all, I had made an honest mistake. I wasn’t trying to take advantage of others. And the cars who had been waiting in line? They could tell that I was a good and kind person. Perhaps they saw the clergy stickers on my rear window. In any event, they could tell that I had made an honest mistake, so their allowing me to break into line in front of them was not the threat to civilization it was when others did it.

You see, I knew my motivations and my motives. I knew the reasons I did what I did. When others did the same thing, I didn’t know their motivations, and I assumed the worst. When I did it, I knew that I acted only with the best of intentions, without a hint of selfishness. Anyone could see that. That’s what I mean when I say God always sees us in the best light. God knows our motivations and motives, as well, and sees our actions in the same way we do.

Of course, we don’t fool God, even when we fool ourselves. Rather, God just sees us in the best possible light. God sees all of humanity in the best possible light. All seven billion of us. I imagine that gets pretty tiring. One of my favorite little aphorisms that I see on t-shirts and bumper stickers is “My cat knows everything about me and loves me anyway.” God’s love works in much the same way. Another favorite says, “God, give me the strength to be the person my dog thinks I am.” Again, God’s love works in much the same way. When we realize that God loves us as we are, it should make us want to be better.

Weeds never see themselves as weeds, or tares as tares, or caff as chaff, depending on your translation. We’re all humans, striving to survive. And, after all, a weed is only a plant in the wrong place. At our old vet’s office, she has kept the porch lined with petunias for years. In their pots and window boxes, they’re gorgeous. However, birds and the wind have been doing their jobs, and now petunias are springing up from every crack in the asphalt or the sidewalk. They’re still pretty, but they aren’t good for the parking lot.

Last week we talked a little about the difference between parable and allegory. In an allegory, elements of the story stand for other things. Since this reading is a parable, it makes one quick point and probably isn’t intended to represent something else. In this parable, I think the quick point is that it isn’t up to us to decide who’s wheat and who’s a tare. It’s just our job to love everyone, to tend to them like farmers to a crop, and trust in God.

This is, of course, not easy to do. Those bad drivers, for instance, are clearly weeds, and if God doesn’t step in soon to do something about, I think I might have a few ideas to separate them from the wheat. This is even a biblical problem. John wrote his apocalypse to prove that the Romans were the weeds who would be separated from the faithful at the end of thing.

Jonah, of course, is all about separating the wheat from the weeds. After Jonah is freed from the belly of the fish, he goes to Nineveh, proclaiming, “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” And what happens? Nineveh listens. They repent. The king declares a general fast and everyone wears sackcloth and sits in ashes. Because of their repentance, God decides he was wrong about trying to kill them. Did you hear that? God decided he was wrong. Even God can’t tell the wheat from the weeds, sometimes. When the city isn’t destroyed, Jonah isn’t happy. He tells God that these folks are weeds, if there ever were any. These folks are worse than people who break in line on the interstate, Jonah says. He’s so upset by the whole situation that he cries, “And now, O LORD, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.” Did you catch that? He’d rather die than have to accept these people as children of God. And how does God reply? Very simply. He says, “Is it right for you to be angry?”

And, of course, it isn’t right for us to be angry. God doesn’t need our help to separate the weeds from the wheat. No matter how much we wan to help, no matter how good a job we think we’d do, we’d probably just get in God’s way. How many people here have ever paid a plumber or an electrician or a handyman more than we would have if we had just let them alone to work? When we start offering assistance and trying to help, we just get in the way of the professionals. It’s the same way with God. If we try to start calling some people wheat and some weeds, all we’ll do is get in the way of God’s redeeming love.

Does this mean that we just sit back and allow evil to happen, knowing that God will sort it out in the end? Of course not. there is, after all, a difference between declaring the evil of institutions do harm and declaring the evil of individual people. The most obvious examples of that to us, as modern U. S. Americans, have to do with race issues. Slavery, the civil rights struggle, aggression against native peoples, interestingly, these all spring forth from attempts by one group of people to declare another group of people to be weeds. It took brave people to stand up and declare that these institutions were evil, even as they claimed to love the people behind them. Martin Luther King once said that although he loved that racist sheriff who turned a fire hose on children, he was glad he didn’t have to like him.

Another story from the civil rights movement that shows how to hate the institution but love the imperfect human beings behind it concerns a preacher named Will Campbell. Will, a white man, marched with African-American protesters in Selma, Manchester, and Washington, D.C. He served as the chaplain at Ole Miss. He is most remembered today for his words at a civil rights rally. The organizers of the event had just shown a short film in which several members of the Ku Klux Klan had made fools of themselves performing military drill maneuvers. As the laughter died down, Campbell stood up and said what I think might be the bravest words ever spoken. To a roomful of primarily African-American activists, many of whom wore bandages from recent beatings or scars from recent bombings perpetrated by Klansmen, he said, “I can’t laugh at that. I’m pro-Klansman. I’m pro-Klansman because I am pro-human.”

I don’t know how people reacted to those words. I’m not sure how I would have, if I had been there. Those words cut to the root of the problem, though. Those Klansmen were tied into an ideology that called one group of people weeds. Even as that ideology was being challenged, the danger was to take up the flip side as their own ideology, to proclaim that those who called them less than human were themselves less than human. It was an easy trap to fall into. Will Campbell’s words are protection against that.

We’re singing several spirituals today. One of them, “It’s Me, It’s Me”, is about living in a world that’s falling apart but still recognizing our dependence on God. The original version had the lines, “Not the master, not the driver, but it’s me, O Lord, standing in the need of prayer.” Written by a slave, it recognized that even when evil defined the world around you, you have a responsibility to greet the world with grace. I have trouble picturing my life defined by grace like that. Most of us can’t imagine what it would mean to be slaves and still be called by God to love those who denied us our humanity. I feel a little odd even talking about this, because it’s so far outside my experiences. But that grace is essential to Christian life.

In closing, I want to share with you the words of a preacher named Sarah Dylan Breuer. She said, “Don’t be afraid; don’t give in to fear. Give in to love. We’re not called to serve as judge, so judging will only make us more anxious as we try to maintain constant vigilance, always eyeing our neighbors to try to pick out the enemies. Our vocation, our destiny, is better than that.” Breuer points out the freedom offered by this parable. She reminds us that we aren’t being denied something. Instead, we are now free to love everyone we meet. We don’t have to decide if they’re worthy of love or even if they’re capable of loving. All we can do, all we must do, is love them. That is what God calls us to do, what God created us to do. And for the grace to be the people God created us to be, thanks be to God. Amen.

For years, they ran his organization. Always holding his teachings in the highest regard, they ran this organization like a business. They kept the investors happy. They pleased the regulators. They turned a profit, keeping the bills payed and everyone’s pockets full.

And, eventually, the founder came back. He looked at the world around him, and he saw poverty and war. He looked at the organization he had founded, and he saw violence and hatred. He went to the main office, and was shocked at the decay and squalor tolerated by those he left in charge.

He walked into the lobby, and found the reception area untended. The philodendrons and umbrella plants he had selected and tended were wild and overgrown. The elevator didn’t work, so he climbed the stairs to the boardroom. He opened the door, and, despite the squalid conditions of the building, he found twelve men, well-dressed, well-fed. Their eyes opened in shock when they saw him.

“Listen!” he cried. “Let anyone with ears listen!”

“But we did listen,” came the reply. “See, here are all your words, all your beautiful teachings, printed on the finest parchment, bound in the finest leather.”

“Listen!” he cried. “Let anyone with ears listen!”

“But we did listen,” came the reply. “Using your wisdom, we have built up great wealth. We have brought happiness to so many people. And,” they added, “we have made quite a nice little fortune for ourselves.”

“Listen!” he cried. “Let anyone with ears listen!”

“But we have honored your words, published them in all languages, proclaimed your teachings from the mountaintops, shared them with all our friends.”

“Listen!” he cried. “Let anyone with ears listen!” And with those words, the founder left the boardroom, never to be seen again.

“Listen! Let anyone with ears listen!” Don’t ask questions. Don’t analyze. Don’t speculate. Listen.

As I read about this passage this week, I saw a real lack of people just listening to Jesus’ words here. I read biblical literalists who spent pages arguing that Jesus was describing something he actually saw. Okay, but perhaps beside the point. I read historical scholars who discussed the Roman historian Pliny and his account of farming in the ancient world. Pliny once wrote about a single grain that produced four hundred shoots. Okay, but, again, perhaps beside the point. All of these were interesting insights, to be sure, but this kind of discussion is a poor replacement for listening.

I read another preacher who said that we have to stop talking about stories and start telling them. We have to facilitate listening. We have to help others hear the story, not tell them how the story should change them.

What I just told you was not a parable. Parables are almost impossible to write. What I told you was an allegory. Allegories are easy to write. Everything means something else. The founder represented Jesus. The board represented the disciples. The organization was, of course, the church. In an allegory, each aspect of the story represents something else.

Not so with a parable. In a parable, there is just a quick point to be made. The story is simple, and nothing stands for anything else. Here, in this morning’s story, there is one simple point. The sower doesn’t represent anyone. The ground doesn’t represent anything. All that’s important is. . . well, we’ll get to that soon.

For now, just listen. “Let anyone with ears listen!” This guy goes out to plant some seed. It’s a nice day, and it isn’t his seed, so he really doesn’t care too much about it. Some seed lands on the road. Some seed lands in the ditch. But a little bit of it lands in some good dirt. And that little bit of seed produces more than all the other fields in the county combined. Let anyone with ears listen.

A preacher named Beverly Gaventa once said this about parables: “A friend once said that listening to Jesus tell a parable must have been a little like watching someone throw a ball into the air. Instead of reaching its apex and returning directly to earth, this particular ball starts back down and then veers off at a right angle. We watch astonished, and search for answers.” How astonished are we when we hear this story for the hundredth time, especially since we come to it knowing what it means, or what we think it means.

So, as the wizard said in the movie Willow, “Forget all you know, or think you know.” Just listen. Let anyone with ears listen. We’ve all known this type, shiftless, lazy, mind always on something else. You know, your idiot cousin, or that guy at work who never pulls his weight. Well, one of those guys managed to land a job planting for a farmer. You know how this is going to end, right? His head is in the clouds, dreaming up some new scheme to make this month’s rent, and instead of carefully planting the seed where he was told, he just grabs handfuls of it and scatters it to the wind. Sure, some of it lands in the field. However, some lands too close to the road starts to grow but gets wilted by all the diesel exhaust. Some lands on the road itself, and gets squashed by all the traffic. He just winds up dumping most of it.

But that little bit that landed in the field starts to grow. And it grows. And it grows. Now, this guy who did the planting knew he really didn’t do a good job, so when he heard that the farmer who hired him was looking for him, he got worried. But this farmer was wealthy and well-connected, so he knew he’d be in trouble if the farmer had to come looking for him. With great fear and trembling, he rang the doorbell of the farmer’s house. When the door opened, he let the excuses start flying. “I don’t know why the crop was so bad. I planted everything carefully just like you asked. I even used a ruler to make sure the seeds were exactly one inch apart.” The farmer just looked at him blankly until his steam ran out and he finally quit talking.

And the farmer said, “What are you talking about? This is my best harvest ever. I’ve been thinking about retiring, and I want to hire you to manage my farm.”

Now, picture the look on the sower’s face. Think about the shock he must have felt. And there, in that shock, in that surprise, is the Kingdom of God. In that moment of absolute grace and surprise, in that second where the world as the sower knew it to be and expected it to continue to be was torn away, in that instant is the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God is when the world as it was becomes the world as it should be.

One more story. There’s a wonderful radio program called This American Life. On an episode from a few weeks ago a man told this story. When he was a kid, about twelve years old, he got a new bike. His first bike. His younger brother had just gotten one, and now it was his turn. He was so excited. A bike meant to him the first stage of adulthood, although he didn’t know at the time that’s what it meant to him. He could decide where to go without relying on his folks.

The go to the store and pick up the bike. His dad asks him if he wants to ride the bike home or if he wants to load it in the car and ride home with him. Of course he wants to ride it home. His dad warns him not to stop anywhere because they don’t have a lock for it. Just go straight home.

So he rides home, and his brother walks with him. So they’re taking their time, and suddenly they get to the convenience store. Not just any convenience store but the convenience store. You know, the one with the brand new Centipede video game machine. So they stop. I’m an adult now, he thinks. These are the kinds of things that adults get to decide for themselves. So he and his brother take turns. While one plays, the other watches the bike. You can imagine how well that went, though. How can you just stand around outside while your brother, whom you dearly love, is engaged in a fierce battle for his life against a giant centipede? He needs you there with him, for moral support. And to shout, “Watch out for that thing!”

So after a few minutes, there’s no one watching the bike. They’re both glued to the video game. Once they run out of quarters, they go outside, and guess what they don’t find?

They begin the long walk home. A fifteen minute walk takes an hour, because they can’t bear to face their father. Once they get home, they hand around in the front for twenty minutes, too worried to go inside. Finally they get the courage to open the door. The first words out of dad’s mouth are, “It’s in the back. I drove past the convenience store and saw it abandoned. Go out and ride.”

So, for this guy, this was a moment of grace. He realized that sometimes things work out, even when you can’t see any possible way for them to. But he got to talking to his dad as he was preparing this piece for the show, and he found out that his dad had felt guilty about this for years. He felt like he had taken what should have been one of the happiest days of his son’s life and ruined it, filled it with guilt and anxiety. So when he learned that the experience had been one of grace for his son, it became one for him, too. He never felt like redemption was possible for this. After all, he couldn’t go back in time and do something different. So learning that his actions hadn’t caused sorrow but joy, and had taught his son that there is such a thing as grace, he became so joyous that he broke down in tears, right there as he was being recorded for a radio piece.

I realize that my mantra for this sermon has been, “Listen! Let anyone with ears listen!” But now I’m going to interpret. What I think Jesus was trying to tell us here is just what the boy learned when he got home and found his bike, and what the dad learned decades later. That lesson is that grace will win. God’s intentions for creation will be made manifest. God’s kingdom will come on earth as in heaven.

No matter how inattentive we are, no matter how lazy we are, no matter how much we just mess things up, God will ultimately win. That’s grace. The kingdom will not come because of our efforts; most likely it will come despite our efforts. We mess up. We mess up a lot. Think about the ways we have represented Christianity: the crusades, the slave trade, anti-Semitism, war, genocide. Despite all of that, God will still transform creation into a place where justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. It’s comforting for me to know that no matter how bad a representative of God I am, God is so good that love and peace will overwhelm even my mistakes. That’s pretty humbling.

As a people forgiven and saved by grace, we are not a people of the past. No matter how great the injustice, we must strive to turn our attention away from what was and focus on what will be. We are a kingdom people. We are a people sent out create these moments of grace. God has made us whole. God has reached out to us and brought us into the kingdom of peace and righteousness. Now we reach out to others to do the same. For the grace to be a people whose pasts are forgotten and whose future is ever unfolding, thanks be to God. Amen.

Picture that moment, when Peter came to Thomas to tell him that Jesus had risen. Can you imagine as Peter, that lying betrayer, Mr. “I-would-never-deny-you-lord,” tells Thomas that Jesus is alive? Thomas, who when informed of Lazarus’ death was so consumed with grief that he wanted to die too, almost as emotionally distraught as Jesus had been when he accepted his fate in the garden.

And the news came from Peter. Peter, always Jesus’ favorite, even though he asked too much, demanding that Jesus wash not only his feet but his hands and his head also. Peter who ran from the guards and denied being Jesus’ disciple. Now, remember that Thomas was not with the other disciples when Jesus appeared to them, They were locked up in room, too frightened to go out. We don’t know why Thomas wasn’t there, but maybe he was out actually doing what Jesus had commanded, healing the sick, and feeding the poor. So when he missed out on the resurrection, he doubted.

But what miracles sprang forth from that doubt! When he saw Jesus, when he saw he wounds, when he recognized the face of his friend, he was transformed. He heart opened up to the possibility that there was more to this life than we can ever understand. He recognized that in all his striving and working he was working for himself, not God. But through meeting the risen Christ, he accepted the possibility that there was more than his needs at stake.

Have you heard the story of the first modern (that is, since the middle ages) evangelists to India? They accompanied Portugese conquerors and slavers in the early sixteenth century. The evangelists got off the boat and approached the natives. Like all good evangelists, they said, “Friend, have you ever given any thought to the kingdom of heaven? Can you spare a minute so I can tell you about my best friend, a man who died for me?” And the natives replied, “No, sir. We don’t need your heathen religion. But if you really want to know peace and love, let me tell you about my friend, Jesus.” Well, that was a first for the good priests. They weren’t expecting that Jesus would have beaten them there.

And that’s we all tame the living Christ. These good priests had so tied Christ to the Church of Europe that the idea of the faith existing separately was inconceivable. It seems that Thomas had made it to India before he died, starting churches in Persia and Caldea (now Iraq) along the way. Well, these priests did what all Christians do when they’re presenting with something that doesn’t fit into their worldview. They ignored it. For us, ignoring it’s the end of it. We might boycott, whine, or complain to the school board, but it all pretty much boils down to ignoring it. But for these folks, ignoring something meant you had to kill the people who disagreed with you and burn all their stuff. As a result, the traditional site of the tomb of St. Thomas and several other important religions artifacts and stories were lost. However, it was worth it for the priests, because they were able to go home and pretend that they had converted the Indians. The Indians, on the other hand, couldn’t figure out what was up with those crazy white people. The Mar Thoma Church, which may actually have been started by Thomas in India in the year 52, still exists today. Think about that–the Acts of the Apostles, which never mention Thomas, is only about half over in 52.

In a similar way, Thomas had similarly tamed Christ. he was out with the people, healing and preaching, and he thought he had it figured out. Jesus likes me best, he was thinking. I’m out here, risking my butt, and those sissies are hiding in a dark room, too scared to burp. So when those sissies showed up and told him that Jesus had appeared to them, his natural reaction was, yeah, right, you wouldn’t know Jesus if he helped you find a fishing spot (which proves to be the case in the next chapter of John). And he goes right on preaching and healing. What the others had to tell him contradicted the story he had come up with, so he ignored it. So Jesus appears to him, too. Jesus isn’t mean, or scolding, or accusatory, he just gives Thomas what he asked for, exactly what he needed in order to believe.

And Thomas went from there to proclaim the Gospel to a part of the world that the rest of the Disciples ignored. Thomas took from that meeting the knowledge that Christ is too great to be confined to his little world, a world he had defined as Jew vs. Greek, My Works vs. Their Hiding, Me vs. Them, and God is on my side. And what happens? He encounters the living Christ! That’s enough. It’s not Jew vs. Greek anymore. It’s just people who need to know how much God loves them. So need to hear it for the first time, some for the millionth. In fact, forget that Jew/Greek stuff. There’s a whole world out there that’s neither Jew nor Greek, and they need to hear this, too. His encounter with the living Christ breaks him free of all his petty little notions of how the world works, leaving him nothing but his relationship with Christ, which is more than enough for him. No other apostle, not even Paul, leaves the Roman world. But Thomas heads out, ready to encounter the Living Christ everywhere, even in places that no one, not even priests fifteen hundred years later or missionaries in the twentieth century, would think of looking.

What amazing things came of Thomas’s doubt! You might think in seminary you meet a certain type of person. This person is biblically literate, a life-long Christian who knew from childhood they were being called into ministry. And, to an extent, that’s true. However, these people, who have known nothing but certainty their whole lives, don’t last very long in seminary. One of the purposes of a seminary education, as with any education, is to instill doubt. To force you to recognize the ways that what you believe is nonsense, ideas that cannot exist together, or even how what you believe might be harmful.

People who have never doubted their whole lives, people who have known from the start with complete certainty what God wants for them and from them, people like this tend to completely break down at the first hint of doubt. I’ve known quite a few people who ran away from seminary into depression because of doubt, terrified of their doubt, when, in fact, doubt is essential for growth. What we are taught in third-grade Sunday school is fine for third graders, but it is not enough for adults. However, unless we doubt, and, in fact, are encouraged to doubt, the lessons of childhood, we can never learn to be adults.

That’s why, I think, that you find proportionately fewer life-long Christians in seminary and among the clergy than you do in the pews. The average pastor has doubted. The average pastor turned away from the church in adolescence or young adulthood. The average pastor spent years exploring other spiritual traditions, like Wicca or Buddhism, or, like me, atheism. Pastors, successful ones, anyway, have doubted, and it is because they have doubted that they are open to so much more.

Never to doubt is a sin. Never to doubt is to commit idolatry. First, it is to make an idol of our teachers, to suggest that they could never be wrong. Second, it is to make an idol of ourselves and our beliefs, to insist on our own righteousness even as God is pleading with us to see the bigger picture. Doubting frees us from the idolatry of the self and the tradition. Doubting allows us to hear a new and sometimes better message than the one we heard before. What do you hold sacred that God might be calling you to doubt?

Thomas is my patron saint. If I were to ever start a new church, I’d call it the St. Thomas United Methodist Church. Like Thomas, I need to see the proof. So where, you may ask, did I see the “mark of the nails in his hands,” and when sis I “put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side?” I saw it in people just like you. I believe in the resurrected Lord Jesus Christ because I have felt his love and seen his work done through people like you, through a grandmother who put her own failing health on hold to care for a dying husband, through friends who loved me enough to tell me when I was being a jerk, through people in schools and churches and offices who, because of their membership in the Body of Christ, spread love and joy and fellowship around like it was going out of style.

I was once an atheist, but now I believe. I believe because, in a sense, I have seen his wounds. I believe because I have see the work of Christ among those who called on his name. These people loved me as I was, rather than condemn me for my beliefs, and when I saw that love I wanted it, too. I believe because I have seen what happens when people love as Jesus taught and act as Jesus taught. Because I doubted, I was open to seeing something better than the materialistic atheism I professed. I was also open to seeing something good in Christianity, a religion I had long ago dismissed as a religion of hateful hypocrites.

And when, even after I became a pastor, I have had moments where I question why I’m doing it, why I’m going to school, working these long hours, and not seeing any purpose in it, when those moments come, and they do, I know that all I have to do is remember what the church I serve is doing in the world and in the community, and I remember why I do it. I do it because of that love that we share. That’s the wonderful thing about doubt–you can let it do it’s work of purifying, because it can’t hurt anything real. We serve a living God, and God’s life and love are more powerful than any doubt, even mine.

And, even as I believed, I continued to doubt. And as I doubted, something new opened to me every day. Like Thomas, I don’t believe in things I can’t see. If someone tells me that he understands the scriptures and has a personal relationship with God, but is a mean and hateful jerk, then I don’t believe him. But if someone is loving and kind and humble, I believe in his relationship. How’s that for pressure? Not only do you have to be the body of Christ for the world. You have a pastor that’s prone to doubt, and he’s relying on you for his faith. From you will come my faith, my love. Through those gathered here today, I will be able to see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side. And because I have known you, I will believe. And because the world will know us, all will believe. Amen.

At least once a month, we gather together and recite the words, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.” In the ancient world, the wealthy and powerful sent others in their names all the time. The one sent is called a herald. A herald has the legal right to act as the one who sent him. Heralds signed contracts, accepted debts and payments, negotiated treaties, and declared war, all in the name of the one who sent them. In our culture, if you had a herald, she could vote on your behalf, or sign a mortgage, or even enter you into a marriage contract. Heralds are, for all intents and purposes, legally the same person as the one who sends them.

In this morning’s reading, Jesus is sending out the disciples. He defines for us what it means to be his disciple. He reminds us that we are a people who are sent out, taking nothing with us, no money, no extra pair of sandals, no food or water, to act as he acts. To heal sickness, to cast out demons, to proclaim justice and righteousness and the year of the Lord’s favor. In short, Jesus appoints us as his heralds.

We sometimes get hung up on the word disciple. We want to talk about what it means to be a disciple, focus on the intricate details, but there’s nothing confusing about it. A disciple is someone who hangs around a teacher in order to learn to be more like that teacher. There’s nothing magical about being a disciple. A disciple is just someone who tries to do what Jesus did.

Welcoming and greeting is an important part of what Jesus did. No matter who was looking for a place to belong, Jesus welcomed them. Jesus welcomed those that other Jews thought were the scum of the earth. He welcomed Samaritans, he welcomed prostitutes, he welcomed Roman soldiers–worst of all, he welcomed tax collectors, Roman collaborators, worse than Romans themselves.

Greeting people, hospitality, was an important thing in the ancient world. Travelers relied on strangers for food and safety. Unless traveling in a caravan or a garrison of soldiers, people couldn’t take enough food or water with them to last for the months traveling could take. Hospitality was literally a matter of life and death.

All of this places us, the church, in an odd position. As disciples, we are sent out as heralds of the living God. We are to act on God’s behalf. As the body of Christ, we are Christ for the world. Others can only know Jesus through us. But, as a group, we are also put on the receiving side. Even as we go out as heralds, we are to welcome others among us, without judgment or expectation. Again, others can only know Jesus through us. This makes our ability to extend hospitality literally a matter of life and death, as well.

As the body of Christ, we are one body. No matter how far apart, either in miles or in spirit, we are, we are part of the same body. When one of us goes out into the world, all of us accompany that one. When we receive someone among us, all are received, and Jesus with us. But when one is rejected or ignored, then all are rejected and ignored, and Jesus with us, as well.

That is the interesting thing about the interconnectedness of the body. When one person gives even a cup of cold water to these little ones, it is not his hand that turned the tap that gets the credit, but the whole person, and Christ through him. Normally I don’t talk much about reward, but since Jesus brings it up here I’ll point out that it isn’t just one element of the one who acts mercifully that receives the reward. Just as his whole body is rewarded, so, too, is the whole body of Christ rewarded. When a Christian receives someone, welcomes another as a member of the family, that reward is shared by every Sunday school teacher, everyone who modeled mercy and compassion, every person who touched that Christian’s life in some way. Since we are one body, we share one reward.

Of course, the inverse is true, as well. When, through our sin and brokenness, we teach another that disciples hate, the whole body receives punishment. When we stand aside and let others preach war and violence in the name of Jesus Christ, then we share in that punishment, because what one member of the body does, all members do. Just as if your hand steals, it is not just your hand but your whole person who commits that sin. What one of us does, all of us do.

Of course, we take solace in that same unity of the body. It reminds us that saying good-bye is pointless. When I put my hand in my pocket, I don’t say good-by to it first, even though it goes away. When I put a shoe on my foot, I don’t say good-by to it, even though I can’t see it any more. Just so, when we are separated by distance or even by death, we are still part of the same body, no more separate from each other than I am from my shod foot. Farewells are simply not necessary within the body of Christ.

What is necessary is welcoming. As Christians we are focused outward. We look at life, not death. We include, not turn away. We greet. We go out, not stay indoors.

So even as Misty and I say good-bye to you, we are not really separating from you. We are still in communion with long-dead saints, so sixty miles will not separate us from you or you from us. So we return to the words of Jesus Christ, having faith in the unity of his body. We go out secure in this body, knowing that others of the body will nurture us and care for us. We bring others into the body, knowing that by welcoming them we have welcomed Jesus among us.

We enter the world as Christ’s herald. What we do, we proclaim that Jesus does. Whom we love, we proclaim that Jesus loves. Where we go, we proclaim that Jesus is. As the body of Christ, we act with one spirit. For the grace to be worthy of being a herald, thanks be to God. Amen.