July 15, 2005
We
Pentecost 9/11A Mt 13.24-30,36-43
Jesus said it’s not a good idea to separate the tares out from the wheat but to “let both grow together until the harvest… ” and then “tell the reapers, Gather the tares first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn” (Mt 13.29f).
It’s not an altogether comforting image. But it’s an accurate one. I was glad when the 1979 prayer book revision resumed using the first person plural for the Nicene Creed. “We believe,” not “I believe.” After all, this is a “we” religion, a wheat and tares religion that we profess. Not because of all those sayings like “there’s strength in numbers” and “united we stand,” but because Holy Spirit is God’s way of being collegial and rather God’s wish that we be the same.
The ambience of my new experience for the first time realizing a half century as a cleric lingers like an echo. And one of the things that keeps surfacing is how thoroughly collegial has been the experience. We do nothing alone save at our own peril and more than likely the peril of others, hence, the indispensability of mentors and all other sorts of companions, spouses, partners, communities, and examples. God bless and forgive them all. Will the fundies never learn that the Bible’s too big a dose to wrap just one mind around, and that it’s an ocean that floats many boats, not just a sauna or even a fountain of one’s own? Congregation means “gather together.”
Denominations, for example, are an affront to God and never, I suspect, what Jesus had in mind. For they imply, do they not, not only that a collegial mind means a common mind — which it does not — but also that we human beings are so smart and so holy that we’ve got it all figured out to the exclusion of those too dense for otherwise. It’s all rock and roll to us, the devil take the hindmost.
This singleness of mind is what plagues the church sorely today. But the reality is — or was — that the church contains both good guys and bad guys. And there are those who would winnow it prematurely before God has a hand in it.
For, you see, even the wheat and the tares are configured pretty much the same way, roots, stems, leaves, need for sunshine and rain. Depending on what part of the planet we’re on, one person’s weed is another person’s flower. In truth we are neither, we are the images of God’s creative imagination, God’s proliferous and ingenious imagination. We are the embodiment of God’s spiritual energy, rooted and nourished to become human.
May the church, then, be a garden in which God’s purpose, God’s plantings may become the resplendent sacraments, the parables of God’s presence. For finally, it is God, alone, who really knows a lily from a thistle.