From Weeds To Wheat

The Gospel reading today seems to suggest, once again, that there are only two types of people in the world: the wheat and the weeds, the good guys and the bad guys, and that the good guys will be OK, as far as God is concerned, but that the bad guys are headed for weeping and gnashing of teeth.  It always makes me nervous when I hear Jesus talking like this, because sometimes I think he might mean it; he might want us to believe that there are only two kinds of people in the world.  After all, so much of the way we have organized ourselves as a society these days encourages us to think this way, and insists that we should choose sides, and decide precisely which side of some imaginary divide we are on.  You don’t need me to rehearse the various choices - they are stark.

Someone has sown weeds among the wheat; that’s the contrast here.  And an enemy has done this, Jesus says; an enemy.  “Do you want us to go and gather them?” the disciples ask.  This question seems natural enough - weeding is as ordinary a task as you can find in a garden, though it’s true that sometimes you risk taking up the good stuff with the bad.

Now, you would think that the key to understanding this parable comes in the explanation that Jesus provides in the latter part of our reading today: “The one who sows the good seed is the Son of Man; the field is the world, and the good seed are the children of the kingdom; the weeds are the children of the evil one, and the enemy who sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are angels.”  It sounds like that’s all you need to know.  But I suspect that that explanation was recorded by someone who was more inclined than Jesus is to push the idea that there are only two kinds of people in the world - weeds and wheat.

And I think that the key to understanding the parable is in hearing the instructions that the Master gives when the slaves ask if they should go out and collect the weeds.  “No,” he says, “Let both of them grow together until the harvest.”

Let both of them grow together.  A literal reading of this text would point out that if you let both weeds and wheat grow together then both simply grow to become bigger versions of what they  started out to be: bigger wheat, bigger weeds.  But I don’t want to read this parable like a literalist, and I don’t think we need to.  I would rather read it like a poet, or a person of faith, or a child of God who knows himself to be in need of saving, amazing grace and forgiveness.  I want to read this parable as a person who is not so sure that there are only two kinds of people in the world.  Or, that if there are, the two kinds of people in the world are good people, and good people in pain.

And isn’t it possible that as you survey the field that is the world, the good people in pain might look a lot like weeds?  Which is why it’s so important that the Master tells the servants not to rip the weeds out yet.  “Let them both grow together until the harvest,” he says.  Is it possible that in the kingdom of heaven, when the weeds are allowed to grow alongside the wheat,  that some of the weeds (maybe most of them?  Maybe all of them?)… is it possible that in the kingdom of heaven, when the weeds are allowed to grow with the wheat, the weeds become the wheat?  The weeds become what it seemed they could not be?  Or that when their pain is taken away, relieved, and soothed, the weeds are shown to have been good people all along - it’s just that they were good people in pain?  Jesus’ way of managing the crop allows for the possibility of transformation while both weeds and wheat are allowed to grow.  And nothing will be determined - nothing - until the harvest at the end of the age.

You might say that my reading of this parable is all very fine and good, but that it doesn’t seem to match up with the plain reading of the text, which clearly indicates that there will be “causes of sin and evildoers” who, at the end of the age will be thrown into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

But I say that there is hope in the Master’s willingness to let the weeds grow together with the wheat.  I say that the hope of transformation is precisely the hope of the Cross.  And I say that what Jesus calls the “children of the evil one” only became his children by abduction, since all of us are born in the Spirit and are “children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ,” as St. Paul said.  And maybe some of us who think we may be only weeds in the field of the Lord are actually wheat that just needs to grow; maybe we ourselves “groan inwardly while we wait for adoption,” to become the children of God we were always meant to be; to become the wheat, to bring forth fruit, and to “shine like the sun in the kingdom of [our] Father.”

It might be that there are only two kinds of people in the world: wheat and weeds.  But by God’s grace, we are all given hope that we can become what God means for us to be, so that at the end of the age, the angels are surprised to find out how easy their task will be.  And all of us - both good people and good people in pain - all of us, when our pain has been taken away, will shine like the sun!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
23 July 2023
Saint Mark’s, Locust Street, Philadelphia

Learning to Listen for the Sound of His Voice

“Come unto me all ye that travail and are heavy laden and I will refresh you.”

There’s a danger in the church these days that we may only be talking to ourselves.  And if that’s the case, then mostly we would seem to be talking ourselves out of believing that Jesus is our Savior, our Teacher, our Healer, our Hope, our Friend, or anyone at all that we really need in our lives - judging by the numbers, I mean.  Whatever we are saying to ourselves doesn’t seem to be doing many of us much good.

What we need is more of Jesus talking to us, I’d say.  But how, exactly, does that happen?  I can stand up here and tell you that Jesus is talking to you when we read that he says, “Come unto me all ye that travail and are heavy laden and I will refresh you.”  But why should you believe me?  What makes it self-evident that the words of an ancient rabbi, written in an also ancient book, and repeated in church, are real and living words being spoken to you or to me in the here and now?

But I make this kind of claim all the time.  I take it for granted that you, or anyone else, might believe me that the words from the pages of the Gospel come alive when we speak or sing them in church - especially the words of Jesus.  And that those words are not simply words from the past that we are speaking in the present, rather that they are words directed to me and to you in the here and now, not only to the people to whom they were first spoken all those ages ago.  Even better, (or worse), I often purport to speak for Jesus, myself.  If I say Jesus is asking to you to come to him, I want you to believe me.  I want you to be able to hear him calling you, even if the voice sounds like mine.  But how does this work?

You can’t come to Jesus if you can’t hear him calling you.  And you can’t hear him calling, if you don’t know the sound of his voice.  And you can’t know the sound of his voice if no one has taught you to listen for it.

We spend a lot of time in church focusing on what has to be said or sung.  The leaflet provides a good example of this: it’s carefully organized with texts, and headings, rubrics in italics, the parts you speak in bold print, other people’s words carefully attributed, composers identified, etc, etc.  The printed leaflet is a tool for making sure we all say the right things in church.  And here at Saint Mark’s we very much hope that anyone coming to visit here for the first time would find it helpful, and won’t be left unable to figure out when to sit or stand or kneel, and what to say when you do, or what someone else is saying or singing.  We’re very careful about what we say here, because we think it’s important, and it is.

But how can we hear Jesus?   How can we listen for and to Jesus?  How can we know the sound of his voice?  If we never learn to listen for Jesus, can we ever be doing anything other than talking to ourselves, while reading from an old book?

Listening for Jesus requires a different set of skills than a bunch of people who merely show up on Sunday mornings to say and sing the right things.  I can think of three overlapping skills that will help us in learning to listen for the sound of Jesus’ voice.

The first is to spend time in quiet.  In many lives, quiet time is a luxury, in others it’s an imposition.  The TV, the radio, and now earbuds have made it very easy to leave almost no space in our lives for quiet.  But quiet time is immensely important in learning to be attentive to the sound of Jesus’ voice.  Remember that in the aftermath of earthquake, wind, and fire, it was in the quiet that the prophet Elijah was able to hear the still, small voice of God.  And one of the purposes of the church is to serve as an echo chamber for the voice of God - to so tune the acoustics of our life together that the ancient echoes of that still small voice, and of the voice of our Savior, come rolling down the caverns of the ages in recognizable tones.  So, it’s important to have time to be quiet.

Quiet time is often a precursor to, or a condition for prayer, which is the second overlapping skill that helps us to lean to recognize the sound of Jesus’s voice.  Most of us need reminders that prayer is meant to be a two-way conversation.  Yes, we may speak to God in prayer, but God also speaks to us in prayer, if we allow ourselves time and space and quietness in which to hear God’s voice.  The best practices for this kind of prayer are forms of contemplative prayer, but other reflective practices, like walking, can also work.  Yes, walking, just walking, with no place particular to go, is one of the best ways I know to make time for prayer in your life.  Whether it’s on a long walk, or in a more carefully honed practice of contemplative prayer, or just a few minutes sitting quietly where no one can disturb you and training intentionally to be present to God and whatever God might wish to say to you, prayer that is listening prayer can help us learn to recognize the sound of the voice of Jesus.

The third overlapping skill for learning to hear Jesus is to spend time in the Presence of the Blessed Sacrament.  That is to say that the third skill is to spend time in the Presence of the living Christ.  The Sacrament - which is the reserved consecrated elements of the Mass, most commonly the Bread which is the Body of our Lord Jesus - the Sacrament is easily misunderstood.  For it is far too easy for the church to assert that Christ’s Presence is made real when the right person says the right words in the right way over the right elements of bread and wine.  But to believe such a thing is to believe in a kind of magic that doesn’t even have a trick for everyone to see.  At least two other things are more or less required if we are to believe that bread and wine can become (and then remain) the Body and Blood of Jesus.  The first is the nearness and availability of the Holy Spirit; and the second is the faithfulness of God’s people.  Any assertion that Bread and Wine can become the Body and Blood of Jesus is related to these conditions of the nearness of the Spirit and the faithfulness of God’s people.

Yes, it’s true that Jesus is objectively Present in the Blessed Sacrament, but not because of what I do.  It’s because of what God does, through the power of the Spirit, when God’s people come together for this purpose.  And the Presence of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament is a lot more like a flame than we realize: requiring both the fact of the Spirit, like oxygen, and the faithfulness of the people to attend to it. What purpose could Christ’s Presence possible have in the absence of God’s people?  The Real Presence of Jesus in the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar is very much like the sound of a tree falling in a forest.

Time spent with the Blessed Sacrament is time spent in very close proximity to the living Lord.  Maybe just a minute or two in the Lady Chapel on your way back from Communion, or the few minutes we spend in that Presence during Benediction, or just time in the church on a Saturday morning before Mass - this is time that allows for the overlap of the other two skills, quiet and prayer, in such a way that it might be impossible to say just which skill you are practicing, since each skill might lead to another, and so on.

These three skills - quiet, prayer, and time with the Blessed Sacrament - are reliable ways to learn to listen for the sound of Christ’s voice speaking to you and to the world.

I’m trying to resist the impulse to explain to you what Jesus means when we hear him say, “Come unto me,” because I don’t think you really need me to explain that to you.  I do think you might need help in hearing that it’s Jesus who is saying it, and that his words are meant for you.  And the skills we need to hear and know the voice of Jesus are falling out of use in many places, even in the church, these days.

The people who built this church wanted all of us who gather in it to be able to hear the sound of the voice of Jesus when we get here, and they wanted us to know that Jesus is speaking to each and every one of us.  That’s why they had these very words carved over the doors, “Come unto me all ye that travail and are heavy laden and I will refresh you.”

But don’t take my word for it.  Use the tools of faith to discern for your own whether of not the living Christ is speaking, right now, in the world and in your own life, your own ears, your own heart.  Be quiet.  Pray.  Spend time in the Presence of the Blessed Sacrament.  And see if Jesus speaks to you.  The sound of his voice may be unique to you in your ears, ion your heart.  And you should know it by the nature and timbre of its sound.  It should sound like peace.  It should sound like forgiveness.  It should sound like mercy.  It should sound like love.  These are important tests to make sure it is really the sound of Christ speaking in your heart.

You can’t come to Jesus if you can’t hear him calling you.  And you can’t hear him calling, if you don’t know the sound of his voice.  And you can’t know the sound of his voice if no one has taught you to listen for it.

But if you can be quiet; if you pray; if you spend some time in the Presence of the Blessed Sacrament, then you won’t have to take my word for it, you will learn what the still, small voice of God sounds like, as you hear God speak to you of peace, forgiveness, mercy, and love.  You may hear the voice of Jesus say many things to you, once you have learned to listen for him.  And very likely, you will hear him say this: “Come unto me all ye that travail and are heavy laden and I will refresh you.  Take my yoke upon you and learn of me, for I am meek and lowly of heart, and ye shall find rest unto your souls.  For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
9 July 2023
Saint Mark’s, Locust Street, Philadelphia

The Economy of Giftedness

The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.  (Rom 6:23)

If you look, you will find that there are people out there in America who are hoping for a return to the gold standard.  The gold standard was the government policy by which the value of currency was defined and guaranteed by a reserve of actual gold bullion held somewhere in vaults.  In theory, and perhaps in practice, if you wanted to turn your paper money in for gold, you could do so, I guess?  The idea behind the gold standard is that gold is a real  precious metal with a real value in the marketplace.  And paper (or coin?) currency, this thinking goes, ought to be little more than a stand-in for the real value of gold.  FDR suspended the gold standard in 1933 to counter the effects of the Great Depression.  And Richard Nixon abandoned it altogether in 1971.  So today, American currency, like most paper money in the world, is what’s called a fiat currency, which means (to grossly oversimplify) that it has a floating value that is determined by market forces.

In a way, you can see the appeal of the gold standard, especially in a world that is enthralled to virtual-this and artificial-that.  It’s nice to know that something in the world is real - especially money.  And what could be a better definition of ‘real’ than a pile of gold sitting somewhere like Fort Knox?

I myself have been making the argument for some time now, that most Americans (and others, too) are delusional in their acceptance of the idea that a market economy is as natural a phenomenon as water seeking its own level.  I’m no economist, but it’s not hard to find economists who will tell you that the idea of a real free-market system is delusional.  Markets do not spring up from the earth like water; you have to build and organize artificial systems (like the gold standard) to create a market economy.  And to do so, you have to decide that a market is better than, say, a monopoly, or a sharing economy… which very much depends on who you are.

The field of economics is really about trying to understand the forces that make societies work (or not), which is of great interest to the church.  No one I know turns to the clergy for economic advice, but here’s mine.

When the silver plates that hold your Sunday contributions are carried to the altar and held up for me to bless, none of you hear the words that I say, but those words come from I Chronicles, in a passage in which the old King David is giving thanks for offerings that have been given for the building of the temple that Solomon will build - gold, silver, wood, bronze, iron, onyx, marble, and precious stones.  And this is what David says, “Yours, O Lord, are the greatness, the power, the glory, the victory, and the majesty…. Riches and honor come from you… it is in your hand to make great and give strength to all….

“But who am I, and what is my people that we should be able to bring this free will offering?  For all things come from you and of your own have we given you… all this abundance… comes from your hand and is your own.” (I Chron 29:14)

All things come of thee, O Lord, and of thine own have we given thee - that’s what I say, every Sunday.  These words, that come to us from the tradition of King David, are among the foundations of what I call the Economy of Giftedness.  You’ve heard me speak of it before.  And I contend that the Economy of Giftedness is the real and true economy of humanity, since everything we have (by which I mean everything) comes from God: everything on this planet, every atom and molecule of our bodies, every gift and talent and human skill, every construct and idea, every tower and every bridge, road and home, and everything it took to build them - all things come of thee, O Lord.  All things come of thee, and of thine own have we given thee!

The Economy of Giftedness is the true economy that makes the world go round, because it is the only economy built on something real, because it is built on the truth that all things come from, God - which is the first tenet of the Economy of Giftedness.  The second tenet of the Economy of Giftedness is that the best things you will ever do with your life will be gifts that you give away (which is, of course, possible because of gifts that have been given to you).

And all of this discussion of the Economy of Giftedness is preamble to try to make sense of one sentence that Saint Paul wrote to the church in Rome.  He wrote this: “The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

At first, it sounds like St. Paul is talking about sin, death, and the afterlife, as though these are the features of God’s economy.  But no one these days really wants to hear about any of that.  Take my word for it.  Almost no one I know is seriously concerned about sin.  I’m not saying it should be this way; I’m just saying this is the way it is.  Almost no one I know wants to talk about death, except to go on refining the ways we can deny and avoid it.  And almost no one I know is harboring an abiding hope for an eternal life-after-death, at least not if it looks much like life on this side of death, but just lasts for ever.  So why should it matter to us, when St. Paul - after hammering the notion of ‘slavery to righteousness,’ like he thinks that any kind of slavery could be perceived as a good idea - out of this painful context, he says, “the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”  What!?!?!

I think that what St. Paul is actually talking about here is the Economy of Giftedness.  And the give-away is that he uses such baldly economic terms.  He is not just talking about the difference between sin and righteousness.  He is not just talking about the difference between death and life.  He is also talking about the difference between wages and gift.

And wages (wages!) are a mechanism of economies like the marketplace, or monopolies, or even socialism.  Wages are what you get paid for what you do.  The Greek word St. Paul uses, is literally the word that described the pay of a Roman soldier - wages!

And wages - the reward for participating in the worldly economy, however it’s organized - wages lead to no where and nothing.  At the end of wages there is nothing, for all that can be bought and sold with wages amounts to nothing, more or less, which is what I’ll call death.

So wages, which are a tool of the market economy, lead to nowhere and nothing.

Now, before I go any further, let me stipulate, as I have done before, that we mostly misunderstand what Jesus means when he uses the term “eternal life.”  What we hear is most likely a term that signifies a never-ending linear lifespan in a nice hotel in the sky called Heaven.  I think this is a gross under-estimation of what Jesus might mean by ‘eternal life.’  I think eternity is not a long and endless string of linear time, but a reality in which everything is always happening everywhere.  And maybe eternal life is being able to perceive the created order as it truly is, as God perceives it, which might be in four dimensions or more.  Maybe eternal life isn’t a measure of time; maybe eternal life is a measure of God’s love.  Whatever eternal life is, for sure, for sure, eternal life is “the free gift of God.”  That’s what St. Paul says.  It’s a gift, a gift, a gift!

And if eternal life is a gift, then it corresponds with the true economy, which is the Economy of Giftedness.  And maybe eternal life is a life lived, not only in four dimensions, not only as God perceives reality, not only where everything is always happening everywhere, not only as the measure of God’s love… maybe eternal life is a life that is actually lived by the rules of the Economy if Giftedness (of which there are only two rules so far).  And those two rules are that everything we have comes from God; and that the best things we will ever do with our lives are gifts that we give to others.

If Jesus has anything to say to the world today, if the church has anything to say for Jesus to the world today, then it has to matter, it has to make a difference, and it has to be real.  And one of the things that I think Jesus may be asking the church to say is this: that we live in a world of virtual-this and artificial-that, in which a vague nostalgia for something like the gold standard could even seem important to some, because, well, it would be nice to know that something in the world is real.  And St. Paul, who was Christ’s great apostle, is teaching us that there is something real to believe in, there is a real economy, based not on a stockpile of gold somewhere, or on the forces of the marketplace, but on the true economy, which is the Economy of Giftedness, in which “the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus.”  And the Economy of Giftedness is based on nothing more or less than the vast stockpile of God’s love, that is not kept stored in deep vaults somewhere, but which is being poured out, day by day, as the gracious gifts of God’s love.

Why any of this might matter is because something there is that makes the world go round.  Something gives us a reason to get up out of bed every morning.  Something guides us in making the choices we make every day, and this something is tied very, very closely to what we believe about the economy, like whether we believe it is based on something real, like a pile of gold, or like the wisdom, promise, and love of God that are at the hear of the Economy of Giftedness.

The longer I live on this earth, the more convinced I am that those words of King David are right and true, and that they tell the real story of what makes the world go ‘round, and what gives us all a good reason to get out of bed in the morning: “Yours, O Lord, are the greatness, the power, the glory, the victory, and the majesty…. Riches and honor come from you… it is in your hand to make great and give strength to all….

“But who am I, and what is my people that we should be able to bring this free will offering?  For all things come from you and of your own have we given you… all this abundance… comes from your hand and is your own.”

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
2 July 2023
Saint Mark’s, Locust Street, Philadelphia