How things change

·  Acts 5:27-32

·  Revelation 1:4-8

·  John 20:19-31

·  Psalm 118:14-29

On Monday I mowed my front yard, and then yesterday I spent several hours in back.  It was almost the first yard work I’d done since the rains began to fall, because for a long time it was too wet, and then I was too busy.  It felt good to be out there again, to see what was going on beneath the winter’s growth of weeds, and I began to get excited for what this year’s gardening will bring.  But at the same time I had the feeling of crossing a threshold from which there would be no turning back, because once I start to mowing and weeding, it’s only one step from there to digging, and from digging to planting, and then I’m committed to another seven or eight months of watering and weeding and pruning and harvesting, until the winter comes and I get to rest until it’s time to do it all again.  

There’s a popular saying 12-Step circles that defines “insanity” as “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” Which is kind of how I think of the High Priest Annas in the book of Acts.  In our first reading this morning, the High Priest has brought Peter and the apostles before his council.  But Peter and John have been here before, in the preceding chapter, after they publicly healed a man who had not walked since birth, and then went around telling everyone they had done this in the name of Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah.  On that occasion they were dragged before the council and warned to stop talking that way, and yet here they are again today.  Because they have not stopped preaching and healing the sick, and more and more of the people of Jerusalem are coming to believe what they say about Jesus. 

And for the High Priest it's suspiciously like trying to stir the people up to hold him responsible for Jesus’ death.   It's all part of what is feeling more and more like a recurring nightmare.  After all, Peter and his friends are in the same place where not so long ago Jesus himself stood, and Annas charged him with blasphemy.  From there they took Jesus and accused him of sedition before the Roman governor, who had him crucified, and, by all rights, that should have been the end of him.  But like a weed that keeps sprouting back no matter how many times you pull it, Jesus of Nazareth won’t go away.  And still the High Priest keeps repeating the same tactics of coercion and intimidation and the thinly-veiled threat of violence.

Of course, Peter has his own bad memories of the High Priest, and of the night that Jesus was arrested.  While all the others ran away, Peter had the courage to follow the crowd to Annas’ house and even to enter the courtyard and find a place around the fire.  But there his courage failed, and he denied that he knew Jesus three times before the cock crowed.  And yet now he is back again, and this time he denies nothing, and makes no attempt to conceal who he is.  So while the High Priest and his council keep doing the same thing over and over again, Peter’s behavior has changed completely.  So why is that?  What has happened to Peter and his friends that they are able to stand up boldly and speak forthrightly, where before they were dissembling and slinking around in the shadows? 

Well, Peter answers that question himself.  What happened is something that the High Priest himself helped set in motion, though he did not know it—a awareness that grew in the disciples of Jesus as they watched him falsely accused, and unjustly condemned, and cruelly put to death.   They saw how deep the world’s sickness runs—how mindlessly it goes through its habitually violent motions, how impervious it is to the imagination of something new.  They saw with disgust how their own dreams of quickly and painlessly setting things right were tainted with envy and lust for power.  But God did not abandon them there, in their guilt and horror and self-loathing.  “The God of our ancestors,” says Peter, “raised up Jesus, whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree. God exalted him at his right hand as Leader and Savior that he might give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins.”  Now Peter and his friends cannot help but tell others about the resurrection of Jesus, because  they finally understand what will really change the world. 

And we are not the only ones who know this, Peter says, but God’s Holy Spirit does, too.  In other words, the apostles are not simply going around bragging about a visionary experience they alone were privileged to have. Because the Holy Spirit is the one who speaks through the prophets, revealing and empowering God’s will for the whole nation, and indeed, all creation.  So what Peter is saying is that in the crucified and risen Christ God has revealed, to anyone who’s open to understand, God purpose for everyone, to restore us to sanity, and freedom, and peace.

This revelation is what the Church since ancient times has called “the Paschal mystery.”  “Mystery”, in this context, doesn’t mean the same thing that it does to us today.  It is not a riddle to which we have no answer, or a crime that remained unsolved, but more like the opposite of that.  In the ancient world a “mystery” was a kind of ritual drama through which the participants were able to know what is secret, and see what is hidden—the purposes of God.  And for the apostles the death and resurrection of Jesus was this kind of mystery.  Except it was not confined to the inner precincts of a temple, and it was not for the benefit of a few chosen initiates.  It played in public, in the real world, on the stage of history where everyone could see it.  In spite of that, none of the participants in this ritual drama had any idea they were acting out a mystery, except Jesus himself.  But now Peter and his friends know it too, thanks to the witness of the Holy Spirit.  

The apostles were more concerned with sharing the divine mystery of the resurrection of the crucified than with establishing precisely the facts of what happened.  We know this because the gospels have no problem telling different versions of their most important story, whose details don’t always agree.  And the same is true of the gift of the Holy Spirit.  The Acts of the Apostles separates it from the resurrection by a span of fifty days, to reveal the mystery as a progression of distinct events unfolding through time.  But the Gospel of John connects the gift of the Holy Spirit directly with the appearance of the risen Christ, in a unitive revelation.

Jesus breathed on his disciples, says John, and said to them, "Receive the Holy Spirit.”  And this breathing is more than a pun on the word for Spirit, which in Hebrew and Greek is the same as the word for breath.  It is a reference, I think, to the Second Chapter of Genesis, where God breathes life into the man he has formed from the soil.  Jesus goes on to say, “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”  And in these few words the hidden purpose of God comes to light, because in that same chapter of Genesis we read there was a tree in Garden of Eden, whose fruit gave the knowledge of good and evil, which was forbidden to eat.  And we all know what happened next, how Adam and Eve ate that fruit and brought death into the world.  

But Christ’s resurrection begins the new creation of humankind, in which death is robbed of its power.  And with the gift of the Holy Spirit, the knowledge of good and evil is no longer a fatal trap.  We still have the choice to retain other’s sins, to repeat the old pattern of holding grudges and making scapegoats and condemning them to punishment—otherwise we would not be free.  But we also have the power to do something new, a power that comes from the breath of the risen Christ, from the body that bears the wounds of the cross in his feet and hands and side.  He died that death and yet God gave him back alive as the bringer of peace.  With the gift of the Spirit to help us to choose wisely, he sends us as he was sent.  We who, though guilty, are released from the threat of punishment and the fear of death, are sent to create a new world from the forgiveness of the crucified. 

Bermuda Grass

Genesis 28:10-19a

Psalm 139: 1-11, 22-23

Romans 8:12-25

Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

If you are familiar with Bermuda Grass you know how invasive it is, and how hard to eradicate.  It spreads rapidly, sending out lateral runners that quickly take root and send out new runners from there.  But the underground rhizomes are worse.  These also spread out in every direction, forming a dense mat that chokes out other plants, and if you dig these out, one small section of rhizome remaining in the ground is enough to propagate a new plant and start the cycle over again.  And did I mention that at this time of year the Bermuda Grass is sending up slender stalks with forked seed heads like devil’s pitchforks, and that the slightest movement is enough to shatter them and scatter hundreds of tiny seeds onto the ground? 

I come from a long line of vegetable gardeners, and one of the things I was really looking forward to when we moved to the fine climate of Petaluma, and bought a little place of our own, was being able to grow a bit of our own food.     So you can imagine how delighted I was to move into our new house and discover that the yard is full of Bermuda Grass.  I considered various solutions to this problem, but all of them involved expensive and ecologically-dubious inputs like black plastic sheeting, redwood lumber, manufactured soil products, or herbicides.  I also know from experience that such solutions are temporary, and in the long run can create new problems that are just as hard to solve.

 

So in the end I decided to just start digging in the ground, and carve my vegetable beds out of the Bermuda Grass.  Every spring I’ve dug a new one, and re-dug the ones I dug before, so I now have three vegetable beds, and I think I’ll stop there, at least for now, and work on clearing some ground for vines and fruit trees.  Each time I dig those beds, and add compost and fertilizer, the easier the soil is to work, and the less time I have to spend squatting down, picking out rhizomes of Bermuda Grass.   I haven’t eradicated it, but I’ve accepted that I never will.  And I know that if I ever stop pulling it out around the edges of the beds, or re-digging them every spring, it will take no more than a year or two for it to reclaim my vegetable garden.  But for now, man and weed are in a tenuous balance, and that is good enough for me.

  

You can understand the story of my garden even if you don’t have Bermuda Grass in your yard.  In the same way, when Jesus told the parable of the Weeds in the Wheat it made sense to the people who were listening.  They would have appreciated the realistic agricultural detail in the story, even if nothing exactly like it had ever happened to them.  From their own experience they would have been able to imagine it vividly—the perniciousness of the enemy who sowed weed seeds in a carefully planted field, the dilemma facing the householder, and the practical good sense of his solution.  And this correspondence with their own experience would have made it all the more puzzling to consider this as religious teaching, and all the more startling to hear that this is what the kingdom of heaven is like.

The parables of Jesus make sense as stories about what really happens in the world, and so they are accessible to everyone.  This is also what makes them subversive.  The God whose kingdom is like the seed of a mustard plant, or a woman kneading yeast into her dough, or a man whose wheat field is full of weeds—this God is not the exclusive possession of religious professionals.  His word is not shut up in sacred texts that are hard to understand, but it falls freely here, and there, on the path, on the rocks, and among the thorns, as well as in the fertile soil.  Its harvest of liberating truth is ripe and plentiful, as anyone can see, needing only willing laborers to bring it in.

But the church by-and-large lost the common sense of Jesus’ parables in a process that was already underway when the gospels were written.  Her authoritative teachers began to read them in a way that Jesus himself likely never intended.  Rather than offering them as open-source images of the action of God in the world, they began to convert them into proprietary code, where every figure and action in the story is the outward form of a hidden religious idea.  This soon became the normative way of reading, and teaching, and preaching the parables of Jesus, and remained so for hundreds of years.  

It has only been in last couple of centuries that New Testament scholars have developed the critical tools to make convincing arguments for the way the gospel texts were put together.  They have shown how the different authors used their source material in different ways, and that not all of that material came originally from Jesus.  The Gospel of Matthew, for example, has a particular concern for the problems of internal conflict, order, and discipline in the faith community, and includes material, not found in the other gospels, that specifically addresses those issues.  With that in mind, it is not too hard to see why Matthew is the only gospel to include the story of the Weeds in the Wheat.  It also explains the addition of an allegorical interpretation of the parable, making it about the future destruction of evil and vindication of the righteous. 

This type of allegory was common enough in the 1^st century, and it spoke particularly to people enduring persecution because of their religious beliefs.  The historical-critical study of Matthew suggests that the gospel originated in a Jewish-Christian community suffering in this way.  But while this reading addressed the urgent concerns of Matthew’s congregation, 40 or 50 or 60 years after the resurrection, it doesn’t fit so well with Jesus’ own teaching on the Kingdom of God. 

There was well-established precedent in Hebrew scripture for talking about this Kingdom, but Jesus is unique for his claim that it is not only the foundation of Israel’s identity as a people; it is not merely the guarantee of the authority of the law and the prophets; it is not only the promise of ultimate deliverance from evil and oppression and of the reward of plenty and rest.  For Jesus, the Kingdom of God is most importantly a present power, visibly at work in the realms of nature and human affairs, and impinging on the history of the world in a decisive and unprecedented way in his own life and ministry. 

So it might be more faithful to the mind of Jesus not to abstract from this parable an allegory of the final judgment, but to enter into the concrete situation it describes, to see what it shows us about our present world and the choices we must make there.  We dream of a world of order, of harmony and perfection, where our mate loves and wants and needs the same things we do, and on the same schedule; or of an ideologically and culturally homogenous nation, where everyone, or at least everyone in power, agrees with us; or we imagine a pure market economy, functioning perfectly without the need for political intervention; or of fields where herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides have eliminated every pest from the endless parallel rows of genetically-identical corn.   But instead of this perfect order, we get Bermuda Grass in the yard, Weeds in the Wheat, Muslims in the Middle-East, and Central-American children on the border, a mixed-up muddled mess. 

The frustration of our dreams of perfection continually tempts us to take action to set things right.   But Jesus’ parable puts hard questions to any corrective steps we might take:  do we have the greatness of mind to acknowledge the real presence of evil in the world, with all its destructive effects, and yet also to see that God is this world’s true ruler, who is preparing in the same place, at the same time, an immeasurable harvest of blessing and good?   Beyond that, do we have the humility and the wisdom to admit that we are not able finally to discriminate between what is of God, and what is not?  And most importantly, do we have the faith and the hope to hear the news that the one who can untangle this knot is here?