Sermon

The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost
July 20, 2008

The Reverend Kay Johnson

Think about dandelions on the lawn. How bright they are and round and perky...all those little yellow spikes forming a bright ball. Think about how much little kids like dandelions. And think how much time some people spend getting rid of dandelions...

Or listen to this Sufi story: The horse of a rich man ran away. All his neighbors said, “oh, unfortunate man, to lose your valuable animal.” But the rich man just shrugged, and said, “Maybe.” A few days later the horse came back! -- bringing with it a beautiful wild horse from the plains. “Fortunate man!” said his friends, “to have acquired such a wonderful animal.” But the rich man shrugged again, and said, “Maybe.” A little while later the rich man’s son was thrown as he was trying to tame the wild horse, and he broke his leg very badly, in several places. “Your son will be crippled for life!” said his friends. “What a terrible event!” But again the rich man just shrugged, and said, “Maybe.” A few days after that the Emperor’s army came into the town. The Emperor was going to war, and every able-bodied young man in the village was conscripted into the army. “Oh,” said the rich man’s friends. “Your son’s bad leg keeps him from serving in the army, and he can stay safely with you. How lucky you are!” “Maybe...” shrugged the rich man...And so on.

We don’t know the meaning of life! We don’t know if dandelions are good things or bad things. We don’t know if events are for good or for evil. We dontt know which of the things that happen to us we should celebrate and which we should mourn. Think about the events in your own life. Think about your own story. Did things turn out the way you expected? Sometimes they do...but often they don’t. And of course they are still evolving...you don’t know...we don’t know...what is going to happen next.

That's basically what this morning's Gospel story is about. Good and bad, weeds and wheat are mixed together in the Master's field so intricately that trying to uproot the one would mean uprooting all. To the servants who want to try that, the Master says, "Don't bother -- let it all grow. At harvest time we'll worry about separating it out." If the Master stands for God, the moral seems to be that God doesn’t worry as much as we do about labeling things. God is only interested in the growing.

Probably Jesus never told this story -- it’s an ingroup/outgroup story and that just wasn’t Jesus’s concern -- and certainly Jesus wasn’t the author of the fiercely moralizing allegory. Jesus -- like the Master in the story -- wasn’t interested in labels.

But we are. We keep trying to impose a grid on life -- to decide what’s good, what’s bad, what’s right, what’s wrong. And in fact you can’t live without doing that. You have to put some kind of order on your experience just to get out of bed in the morning. You have to decide -- at some level -- that raising your head and putting your feet on the floor is the right thing to do -- otherwise you’d just lie there forever until you starved to death. You have to teach your children all kinds of things -- give them direction, help them make choices -- in order for them to grow. You have to make all kinds of decisions about how to live your life in the world, and in order to make those decisions you have to weigh options, you have to choose...what’s right, what’s wrong...what’s the best thing to do here...how shall I use my time...what cause shall I support...what’s good, what’s bad, what’s better, what’s worse.

But we take it too far, and then we get stuck. Or at least some of us do. We agonize over decisions, we beat ourselves over mistakes, we compare ourselves to other people, we get eaten up by regrets. And one way to deal with that is to get a little less certain about weeds and wheat, not be in such a hurry to label something “good” or “bad,” “right” or “wrong.” To just leave the dandelion alone, and let it be what it is...which is so many things...a weed and a flower, a wonderfully non-toxic plant that people make medicine and wine from. A first gift that a toddler can make. A pest that can take over your lawn.

We are, each one of us, a garden where weeds and wheat grow side by side. It helps me to remember that - about myself, about other people, about the world. I have my strengths, I have my weaknesses, I have my blind spots, I have my virtues. And I find, in my own spiritual life, that it does me absolutely no good to try to weed my own garden. All I can do, is to invite God into the garden. I can become aware that I am being mean, or sullen, or prejudiced or selfish. But I don't find it to be in my own power to change any of those by myself. The best I can do is to offer my meanness or my prejudice or whatever it is to God. In one of my parishes there was a man who just set my teeth on edge -- I couldn’t stand him! And I prayed about it. “God help me to be open to Richard. Help me. I just don’t like him!” And I heard this voice in my head, which I took to be God’s voice, and God said, “That’s all right, Kay. I like him.” That was a huge and wonderful surprize! And a little while later someone told me about a way in which Richard had helped her a lot. And it seemed to me that I was being both reassured and disciplined -- helped to grow -- both at the same time. My partial, intemperate self was accepted, and acceptable, at the same time that its very partialness was underlined: for I was reminded of how small I am, how little I know, in some sense, how little I matter.

There’s something else: like dandelions, human qualities are aren’t simply positive or negative -- a weed to pull up or a flower to cherish. Are my tears, for instance, a sign that I'm weak and wimpish and running away from something, or do they just show how deeply I feel? Is my anger a sign that I'm mean and demanding or a sign that something is wrong and I should use the strength of my anger to help fix it? Is it “good”? or is it “bad”? is often not a useful question. A better one that I’ve found is, is this life-giving or is it death-dealing? And even that question is not one we can be sure we have the answer to in any given situation.

The image of weeds and wheat growing together is a recognition of ambiguity - that each one of us is complex and dense, and that the world we make together is also not a place of simple goods and bads, rights and wrongs. The law of unintended consequences plagues even the simplest acts of goodness. Paul told me a story about a study on the results of giving computers to poor children. It didn’t raise their reading and comprehension scores, as expected. It lowered them, because the kids were playing computer games instead of doing their homework. But that law of unintended consequences works both ways. The current oil crisis is the obvious example -- it’s a huge hardship for some people but it also forcing us all to stop overdosing on gas -- we’re riding the Metro, buying smaller cars, getting out our bikes...teenagers aren’t cruising on Saturday nights they way they used to...

The image of our inner worlds as a dense jumble of conflicted, and conflicting, thoughts, needs, experiences, perceptions should lead us to be kinder and more patient, both with ourselves and with others. It always helps to honor the rich and mixed garden that is our neighbor as well as ourself. "How on earth can he say that?" "Why is she ignoring me." Well, he says that--whatever “that” is -- out of that whole world he lives in -- of which I am only a part. And she isn’t talking to me, probably, because she's wandering in some other part of her garden, smelling flowers or being bitten by bugs that I never even dreamed of.

We’re complex -- weeds and wheat, sins and virtues -- and we make a world that we often cannot move in without doing both damage and good at the very same time. If I send them to public school they may not get a good education. If I send them to private school or move to a neighborhood with better schools, then the community loses my presence for good. If I use my air conditioner I hurt the environment. If I don't use it, I'm too worn out to be part of this world I'm called to live in.

But the parable says, "don't worry too much about being good. Concentrate on growing." So...how do we stop worrying? Let me go back to the psalm we read today:

Lord, you have searched me out and known me;
you know my sitting down and my rising up;
you discern my thoughts from afar.

You trace my journeys and my resting-places
and are acquainted with all my ways.

I think the next part is the source for the children’s book, The Runaway Bunny:

Where can I go then from your Spirit?
where can I flee from your presence?

If I climb up to heaven, you are there;
if I make the grave my bed, you are there also.

If I take the wings of the morning
and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,

Even there your hand will lead me
and your right hand hold me fast.

In the book, the little bunny runs away, but his mother follows him to the ends of the earth, and in the end he says, “well, I guess I’ll come home then.”

That Mother who pursues us and never lets us go, no matter what, that God in whom we live and move and have our being ---that’s the context in which we grow, in which we fall down and get up, in which we make choices and then make other choices, the context in which we laugh and cry and sing and then cry again...and then laugh again. That Mother who pursues us and never lets us go, no matter what, that God in whom we live and move and have our being -- that’s the safety that frees us -- to be ourselves, and to become, ever more profoundly, our deepest selves.