A Sermon by Benjamin J. Newland
Genesis 29:15-28
Psalm 105:1-11, 45b
Romans 8:26-39
Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52
I am captured today by Romans. Not actual Romans, of course, their days of capturing people are mostly in the past. No, I am captured by Paul’s words written to Roman Christians so long ago. Besides, I don’t really have anything to say about the story from Genesis except to point out that we’re still following the chronological progress of Abraham and his decendants and that I too think it is a very odd story, this tale of Jacob’s fourteen year, oddly commercial courtship of Rachel which wins him not only Rachel but her sister Leah as well. Also they are his cousins. Word of God or not, the Bible is occasionally quite odd.
And so, to Paul’s letter to the Romans. The Apostle Paul is, perhaps justifiably, infamous. He was a man of a very different time, so on occasion his words come to us sounding oddly dischordant—out of synch with the cultural and political mores of our time. Add to this the fact that those who came after Paul, and who put his name on things they wrote, had all of Paul’s passion for ordering the kingdom but little of his possesion by grace and freedom. Thus things are said in Paul’s name that make little sense to us today—things about women in church mostly—and these things have been repeated over the years by preachers ignorant enough of actual Christian practice to think that Paul meant them to apply to women today. I’m not even sure he even meant them to apply in any general way two thousand years ago. Sometimes it can be hard to dig through the cultural accretions, both from this century and from the second, to get to the real heart of Paul’s message.
Yet dig we must, for Paul’s message is nothing more or less than the message of the church about Jesus. The Gospels tell the story of Jesus; they tell of what he did, and what he taught, and what happened to him. Yet Paul is the one, more than any other, who tells us what it meant. And Romans is the letter in which the best of Paul’s thoughts about Jesus come together. And the end of chapter eight, which we read this morning, is the powerful conclusion to Paul’s first great thesis in Romans.
Paul has been talking about prayer, and about how our new and closer relationship with God makes our prayer a critical element in our lives. No longer is prayer simple a way of appeasing an angry God or of eliciting divine favors from a statue in a temple. No, for the Christian prayer is an essential part of how God will remake creation through us.
Prayer has never been a cut-and-dried proposition for me personally. Liturgical prayer is fine, I’ve got no problem there, and I even enjoy contemplative prayer which doesn’t expect too much of me except to sit still and not make any noise, something I learned from my parents when I was younger. It’s the kind of prayer where you speak to God that always makes me uneasy. What am I supposed to say? I always get hung up between feeling selfish by listing all the things and people I like and feeling falsley humble by telling God to just do things the way he wants to since he knows better. As if God needed my permission to work things out.
Thus my favorite collect to end the prayers of the people with has always been the one that says,

Almighty God, to whom our needs are known before we ask: Help us to ask only what accords with your will; and those good things which we dare not, or in our blindness cannot ask, grant us for the save of your Son Jesus Christ our Lord.

This is my favorite collect for the prayers because after praying for some very specific things and people together we admit to God that we may need some help to pray for the things God wants us to pray for. Also, we admit to secretly wanting God to give us good things which we can’t even imagine or dare to ask for. It’s like we’re kids writing to Santa Claus and we know a lot of things that we want but we also want to leave Santa room to bring us something so great that we may not even be aware of it’s existence.
Paul, aware that he has made prayer the key to our participating in the new creation Jesus came to inaugerate, makes allowance for our inability to pray perfectly in the first line of our text for today. Admiting our weakness, Paul assures us that the Spirit will help, interceding for us with “sighs too deep for words”. I love the idea that when human words fail to meet the awesomeness of God the solution is not better words but something subvocal. The NRSV “sighs” is good, but I actually like the NIV a bit better with it’s earthly, labor intensive “groanings”. This is actually the tail end of Paul’s logical and rhetorical tour de force and now he prepares to deliver the finale—his coup de gras on our new connection to God and the inaugerated new creation he’s calling the Kingdom.
Before we get to that conclusion though, a couple words on the Gospel reading for today. I’ve largely ignored it not because it isn’t good but because it’s too good. Any one of the several parables crammed into today’s Gospel reading would make a good sermon. To be faced with so many means treating each too briefly; so here’s the brief treatment, in reverse order: The parable about the net and the fish is basically the same as last week’s parable about the wheat and the weeds. If you need more information see last week’s sermon. The parable called the Pearl of Great Price is about exactly what it says it’s about: that one thing that is of more value than everything else and how when you find that thing you have to pursue it with everything you have. The parable about the treasure hidden in a field is the same kind of parable with a farmer demographic instead of a fisherman demographic.
The parable about the woman kneeding flour and yeast seems pretty self explainitory until you learn that a biblical measure is something more than three gallons. Apparently this woman is making bread with ten gallons of flour, which is insane unless she’s working for God, or maybe is God. Also, our translation says the woman mixes in the yeast, which makes sense from a baking standpoint, but this isn’t really about baking so I prefer the traditional King James translation where the woman hides the yeast within the bread.
Then the famous parable about the mustard seed is a Sunday School favorite, and justly so. Now that you are grown up, however, allow me to complicate things: yes mustard seeds are small, but they aren’t the smallest by any stretch. And yes, they grow into big bushes, but no one was going to mistake even a freakishly large mustard bush for a tree of any kind. Birds building nests in a mustard bush is only slightly more likely than you or I moving into a mustard bush. Yeah, it’s possible, but it doesn’t make a great deal of sense. The reason Jesus stretches this metaphor is that a tree was a common symbol of his day for an empire, specifically a post-apocalyptic empire envisioned by fans of the Book of Daniel. Modern fans of J.R.R. Tolkein will recognize this symbol as being one that that author borrowed for his own imagined empire of justice. Jesus is saying, once again, that while God will make creation new, it isn’t going to look like what we think it is going to look like. The Kingdom of God is not a mighty empire like a tree, but a humble empire like the useful, but not really impresive, mustard shrub.
One last thing about all these parables. The church has a habit of imagining itself in the more important role in each one. The church is the yeast in the bread, for example, hidden until it does its work and makes the flour into something new. Or the church is the mustard seed, small until it grows into a mighty, err, bush. That’s not what Jesus said, people. He said the Kingdom of God was like the yeast, or the mustard seed. The church, as much as I love it, is not now and has never been the Kingdom of God. At best, if you insist on putting the church into these parables at all, it is maybe the ring on that baking woman’s hand: moving with the work God is doing, coming into contact with the yeast occasionally but more often with the flour, and doing it’s best to catch the light and throw off some sparks here and there.
Paul had surely heard all these parables and understood them at least as well as any of us. Which I think helps to explain why at the end of his amazingly well organized and structured argument he makes his point not with logic, but with love. He makes the leap in a series of questions: If God is for us, who can be against us? He gave up his son, will he withhold anything less? Who can condemn us? Can anything at all stand between us and God?
And then his answer—probably one of the best five sentences Paul ever wrote (and that is saying something)—a great and mighty rhetorical, NO.

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

AMEN.

View archived copy here.

The Friday Letters
25 July 2008
My Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

Back to the topic of nostalgia, I offer this essay for your Friday reading enjoyment:

Of Tiny Hallways and The Real World

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.

-1 Corinthians 13:11-12

I wanna run through the halls of my high school,
I wanna scream at the top of my lungs.
I just found out there’s no such thing as the real world,
just a lie you’ve got to rise above.

-“No Such Thing” by John Mayer

At one point in High School, by friend Brian and I went back to Badger Mountain Elementary School where we had both spent the first seven years of our public school careers. We were arch enemies back then; it wasn’t until Brian’s family installed a pool in their backyard after our sixth grade year that I invited myself over and we became best friends. In grade school he was a bully, chasing me around and threatening to pound me. He was bigger and faster.

Eventually, I got faster than him, after we were best friends, but he’s still bigger. We fought once in jr. high, just to try it out really, and I pounded on him for all I was worth but he just laughed at me and took it in stride. We’ve never really fought about anything since then.
Badger Mountain Elementary was gigantic. The hallways were wide enough for two classes, each marching in double lines to or from the lunch line, to pass side by side. The walls were white with an orange stripe that ran above head height. If you were marching in the line next to the wall it was fun to reach up and run your hand along the stripe.
The school was a giant square with the Southeastern corner missing. The Kindergarten classes were in the very first part of the Southern arm and you went in through the missing corner. As you went around the square clockwise, you passed the First, Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Grade classrooms, then finally the Lunch Line, and the Gym. Strict separation was maintained at all times; even the playground was divided into wedges extending out from the school, so no First or Second Graders would accidentally run into a dreaded Sixth Grader while playing. At lunch time, when the lower grades had to walk the hallway past the upper grades’ classrooms, we stuck close together in our marching lines, and quickly retreated back to our classrooms to eat at our desks.
That’s how I remembered it anyways, when Brian and I made our return visit from the distant future of high school. It will come as no surprise to you that we discovered the hallways smaller than we remembered them. From six feet tall, the stripe was now at waist level and we could almost touch both walls with extended arms while walking down the middle. It took just a minute to travel from kindergarten to sixth grade now, where it had taken seven years previously. We looped outside to the playground and found the fifth and sixth graders cute rather than threatening.
That experience is what I think of when I’m driving down the road and John Mayer’s song comes floating in off the pop-chart airwaves of my radio. I’ve not been back to my high school yet, but the halls of his high school are the halls of my elementary school, so I can relate. I didn’t scream or run through those halls on my visit, but I can see how you’d want to when you’ve just crashed headlong into a sense of perspective like that.
I don’t know if John Mayer was thinking of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians when he sang the lyrics to his song. I imagine that if he’s heard the passage at all he’s heard it in the context most of us have: a wedding. These lines about childhood and growing up come just before the very famous line about “Faith, Hope, and Love…and the greatest of these is Love”, and so are much overshadowed. It seems to me that Paul is comparing our physical growing up with our growing in faith, and that if we were to look back on our lives of faith from the perspective of a place where we have come face to face with Jesus, we would be just as shocked as I was revisiting the hallways of Badger Mountain Elementary School.
One of the things I remember best about elementary school, indeed about all my formal educational experience, was the oft-used threat of what was to come next. My fifth grade teacher was constantly warning us about how difficult sixth grade would be. The sixth grade teachers didn’t even have to try to scare us; seventh grade was in a whole different building and we were all scared already. High school was the threat all through jr. high, and college all through high school. Eventually the threat took it’s final and most sinister form: the threat of “The Real World”.
“If you can’t hack it here, how do you expect to survive in “The Real World,” it went. “Here” was whatever class, school, or situation you were currently involved with. “The Real World” was apparently what awaited you when you were finished with school and had to get a “real job”. In the song lyrics, a big part of Mayer’s excitement comes from his discovery that “…there’s no such thing as the real world”. He’s right of course, and somehow I always knew that. I knew the threat was empty and that the realness of your world was not dependant upon your current grade level or employment status.
Paul knows it too, only for him the real world isn’t when you have to get a job and support yourself. For Paul the real world is when you really come to know Jesus Christ. It’s tempting to take his somewhat Platonistic description of the dim-mirror-vs.-face-to-face metaphor as an analogy for this life and the life to come, but doing so makes the real world into heaven and puts it beyond our reach. How much better if I can hope to meet Jesus face to face in this life, if not once and for all then at least from time to time. How much more worthwhile the long searching through the dim mirror if we can hope to make eye contact on occasion.
No Such Thing closes with the verse, “I just can’t wait til my ten year reunion/I’m gonna bust down the double doors/And when I stand on these tables before you/You will know what all this time was for.” My high school ten year reunion came and went and I didn’t attend. It was a long way from where I was living at that point, weekend was inconvenient and the trip would have been expensive. Plus, Brian is the only friend from high school I still kept in touch with, and he didn’t go even though he still lives in town. I kinda wish I had gone though. I wonder if the difference in perspective between my (then) twenty-eight year old self and eighteen years old is as great the difference between the fifteen year old me that returned to elementary school and the five years oldme that attended it. I wonder if the shock of seeing the old high school again would have been as great as the shock of seeing the old elementary school was. I wonder if the headlong crash into a sense of perspective would make me nostalgic or hopeful.
It’s good to crash into a sense of perspective every once in awhile. If you’re lucky, and if Paul was right, maybe the perspective will provide a little polish for that dim mirror we’re always looking through.

Peace,

Ben.

A Sermon by Benjamin J. Newland

[The 10th Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 11, Year A]
Genesis 28:10-19a
Psalm 139:1-11, 22-23
Romans 8:12-25
Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

Jesus tells us another story today, another parable. Like last week’s parable this one is agricultural. And, like last week’s parable this one is explained to the disciples afterwards even though the import of the story seems fairly obvious. In fact, today’s parable is very nearly the same as last week’s parable. Last week we talked about seeds scattered; some grew strong and multiplied but others withered, or were eaten, or were choked off by thorns. This week the seeds are sown in a more orderly fashion but an enemy comes along afterwards and purposely sows weeds among the good wheat.

Another similarity with last week’s parable is that this one doesn’t make a great deal of sense agriculturally. If sowing seeds by tossing them about randomly was bad advice for gardeners last week, then leaving the weeds growing alongside the wheat until harvest time is bad advice for farmers this week. Even before the days of directly applied chemical herbicides, removing (or at least hindering) the weeds growing amongst a desired crop would have been a standard practice. Then again, we never really thought Jesus was talking about regular wheat did we?

Where this week’s parable begins to be different from last week’s is in the intentionality of the problem that develops, and the darker tone this lends to the whole story. Last week bad things happened to some of the seeds but that seemed the result of careless sowing more than anything else. There was such an abundance of sowing going on that even though some of the seeds were going to be lost, it didn’t seem that dangerous a situation. This week the sower is much more careful, yet his work is undercut by the presence and action of “an enemy”. This week, all of the seeds are at risk, the entire field is under attack and will remain so until the time of harvest when wheat will be separated from weeds.

There are at least two things that make this parable much more uncomfortable than last week’s. The first is the presence of that “enemy”, who we know by various names throughout the scriptures: The Enemy, with a capital ‘E’, the Evil One, Satan, the Devil, the Tempter, or Beelzebub. Several names but one idea: that of an independent, personified representation of evil. The second thing that makes us uncomfortable about this parable is that for all the disciples wanting a redundant explanation this is clearly a parable of judgment. Neither an anthropomorphic devil nor the concept of divine judgment are concepts that put us at ease today.

Allow me to say something briefly about both of these concepts. First, the Devil has been with us for a long time, yet he has suffered something of a setback since the dawn of modernity. Before the introduction of the scientific method and the more general age of enlightenment, it was taken for granted by pretty much everyone that there was indeed a personified force of evil that willfully caused and instigated harm within humanity. There might have been some debate about whether Satan was a fallen angel or the cosmic force for darkness to balance God’s force for light, but no one really doubted that he was as real as anything else in the world.

After the age of enlightenment many people stopped believing in magic, which was the primary way the western European world had related to Christianity up to that point. The Devil went from being an independent entity made of pure evil to being something more conceptual: a representation of the potential for evil within the heart of each person. This way of understanding the Devil has the advantage of placing responsibility for evil squarely where it belongs 99 times out of 100: with us, and not with some outside influence that we are innocent of. On the other hand, there can be little doubt that the parable Jesus tells has at its heart an enemy that actively works against the ordering of life that God seeks to share with humanity.

This topic still comes up in conversations about Christianity that I have. “Do you believe in the Devil?” is usually how the question is asked, although I also get it in the form of an inquiry about this denomination, “Does the Episcopal Church believe in the Devil?” That kind of question is impossible for me to answer without having a pretty long conversation, which I think is disappointing to half the people who ask it. Yet for me the bottom line isn’t which kind of Devil I’m going to “believe” in. The bottom line is to acknowledge the fact, and deal with the fact, that evil is real, and that it is largely a human driven problem, and yet that it is somehow greater even that us as individuals. None of which makes today’s parable any more comforting.

The second concept I wanted to address in regards to this morning’s story was the idea of a parable of judgment. Jesus tells these stories with some frequency: the wheat and the weeds, the sheep and the goats, the righteous and the wicked, the grain and the chaff. All these are ways of saying that simple religious belief that none of us really enjoy confronting: some are good and some are bad and God is going to eventually sort them out. After the sorting there is generally some sort of burning involved for the bad, which raises the stakes for those of us less than completely convinced of our own goodness.

The parables of judgment, a grouping which all of these sorting stories can be placed, are not very comforting. Ironically, they were meant to be. The idea of a God that decided your fate based purely on merit was once a very comforting idea. Consider the people Jesus told this story to: they were not rich or powerful. Now consider judicial systems the world over, particularly those that existed before the past couple centuries: where justice was not at issue and decision were handed down to those who could pay for them. To the people Jesus talked to the idea of a judge that would decide fairly must have seemed an amazing gift; whether you were in the right or the wrong, to be judged on your own deeds instead of on your ability to pay in either money or favors must have seemed a religious vision.

It is not so black and white as this of course. There were surely fair judges even in antiquity. And there are ways in which even our far more equitable courts of today are tilted in favor of the affluent. Yet overall the observation is true: for Jesus’ audience the primary fear of the judicial system was that you’d be condemned regardless of your own worth. For us the primary fear of the judicial system is that we will be found out for having done wrong and will be punished for it. They were afraid they wouldn’t get what they deserved, while we are afraid we will get what we deserve. A perfectly just God was reassuring to Jesus’ audience in exactly the same way that that God is not reassuring to us. I’m sure there’s a deeper lesson in that somewhere.

For now let me admit to you that I dodge this parable of judgment in just the same way that I dodged last week’s. I refuse to accept that any one person is all wheat or all weed. Instead I choose to believe that each of us are both good planted grain and weeds insinuated through evil. While this doesn’t make the eventual sorting and burning any less intimidating, it does have the effect of making me feel like I’ll survive it: that God’s final judgment, while perhaps painful, will make me into the better version of myself that God had intended me to be all along. May we all receive such merciful judgment at the hands of God when that time comes. AMEN.

View archived copy here.

The Friday Letters
27 June 2008

My Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

This is going to be short and disorganized. I semi-promised you another reflection on nostalgia last week, and I intended to deliver except that I got a phone call this morning at about 7am while settling down in the coffee shop to start writing. My brother Nick, who lives in Sammamish, informed me that he and his wife were off to the hospital to bring the fourth member of the next generation of Newlands into the world. Jieun and I have been on call for babysitting duty in anticipation of this event, so into the car we got and now here I am sitting at my brother’s desk writing you this note while three very excited younsters are watching The Empire Strikes Back while standing up and yelling in the other room. The situation is inherently unstable (apparently I am a poor substitute for my brother when it comes to reading the opening text of a Star Wars movie out loud) and I cannot long leave Jieun alone out there.

A few folks have asked me about the Lambeth Conference, the every-ten-years gathering of all Anglican Bishops that takes place back in the motherland. Said conference got underway this past Wednesday. If you’d like to know more, visit the National Episcopal Church site and look around for links and newsfeeds from Lambeth. Or you could try the official Lambeth Conference website. Our own bishops are making their presence known; Bishop Rivera is one of the “Blogging Bishops” on the official Lambeth blog, while Bishop Rickel has begun his own blog (rather against his better judgement it seems

Breaking News: my brother just called and there’s a new Newland. His name is Noah Thomas, 8lbs. 6oz, and 53cm. I guess they’ve gone to the metric system up here; I can’t do the conversion in my head. In other baby news, Nathan and Mae Scott are also parents as of yesterday. Her name is Abigail Mae and I wrote down all her datails but now they’re sitting on my desk back in Puyallup. Maybe I’ll be able to get at them in time for today’s eClarion. That’s it for now, the natives are getting restless!

Peace,

Ben.

A sermon by Benjamin J. Newland

[The 9th Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 10, Year A]

Matthew 18-23, a parable of growing things…

Hear then the parable of the sower. When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what is sown in the heart; this is what was sown on the path. As for what was sown on rocky ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy; yet such a person has no root, but endures only for a while, and when trouble or persecution arises on account of the word, that person immediately falls away. As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing. But as for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.

I really like gardening. But it turns out I’m not very good at it. I like the idea of gardening. I like watering houseplants, and pulling dead leaves off them. I like sitting on the porches where flowers bloom in pots, soaking up the afternoon sun. If I had a garden to sit in, one that you could get lost in, where you felt surrounded by growth and life and stillness and peace… well, I would sit there every morning, and every evening, and call it prayer. But I don’t have a garden like that. I don’t have a garden at all anymore, and the last one I had was a yard full of scraggly grass and bare patches, and planting areas that sprouted weeds that ate my herbs and flowers. I would forget to water things, and they would dry up. I would ignore the weeding for a few weeks, until it was easier to plow everything under and start again. I like gardening, but I’m not very good at it. Jesus wasn’t very good at gardening either, so I guess I shouldn’t feel bad.

I’ve always been fascinated by the fashion statement that is wearing T-shirts and jewelry that feature the letters, WWJD on them. This stands for “What Would Jesus Do?” and serves to make people feel like they have an answer for whatever comes their way. If you like gardening though, I recommend that you avoid this practice. Let’s say you were in your yard and wanted to plant some carrots. You have the seeds in your hand and are about to place them carefully in the neatly laid out and labeled rows you’ve prepared in your vegetable patch. But then you look down at your hand and see that nice new WWJD ring your friend gave you. “Well,” you think, “what would Jesus do?” Then you toss all the carrot seeds up in the air and walk down the street to the bar to find some sinners to drink with. Sure, some of the carrots seeds fell in your vegetable patch and will probably sprout up later. But half the seeds landed on the patio for the birds to eat, and a bunch fell on the grass where the weed and feed will kill them, and a goodly few went over the fence so your neighbor will get to eat those. Thanks a lot Jesus.

—

Here are my two cents about growing things as a metaphor for the spiritual journey: we like this metaphor. We like the idea of growth, because it sounds like progress, and it sounds organic, and it sounds beautiful. And who doesn’t want to make progress along the spiritual path? And who doesn’t want their spiritual journey to be an organic one? And who doesn’t find the idea of traveling spiritually towards God to be a beautiful idea?

Here’s the problem with that: we are still thinking about gardening. A garden is a relatively small space, into which is poured a relatively huge amount of labor and material. A garden, in short, is not natural. Things grow, in gardens, but only in a controlled, human dominated way. Outside of the garden, growing things are not quite so tame.

A tree is a beautiful growing thing, but trees have the slow and alien strength to shatter stone in ways that humans cannot duplicate without heavy machinery or chemical explosives. A river is a beautiful thing, both physically and symbolically, but rivers cut into the earth with every passing moment. Baby animals are cute and adorable, but if enough food cannot be found they will die, and their parents and siblings will eat them in order to survive.

Before we decide that we want growing things to be the metaphor of our spiritual journey, it might be wise to spend a little time considering how truly wild most growing things really are. The natural world may be vast, and bountiful, and terrifyingly beautiful, but it is also God’s garden, and it is not always a comfortable place to be.

—

Isaiah 55:10-13, the poet speaks of growing things…

As the rain and the snow come down from heaven,
and do not return there until they have watered the earth,
making it bring forth and sprout,
giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,
so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;
it shall not return to me empty,
but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,
and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.
For you shall go out in joy,
and be led back in peace;
the mountains and the hills before you
shall burst into song,
and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.
Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress;
instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle;
and it shall be to the LORD for a memorial,
for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.

The message here is plenty. Life is not a zero sum game. You can have more, and so can everyone else. There is no limit to the amount of life available, so take all you want. Even economists will occasionally try this idea out, saying that while resources on this planet may be limited, wealth is not, as it is created by our work and our impression of value. This works only so well in economics, where we are all pretty much convinced that in order to have more money someone else has got to have less. But the concept works wonders for God. Live it up: life is bottomless. Free refills, on the house.

Abundance is the word of the day, and in this case Isaiah says it better than Jesus. “Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat!” The poet abandons the normally misleading speech of prophets and speaks plainly for once. If you are hungry, have a bite. If you are thirsty, take a drink. The bar is free and the buffet always open. When God invites you to a party (and you were invited), there will be plenty of refreshment and entertainment for all. The word of God goes out into our lives, and it will not return empty handed. That is a promise, but it is also a threat. If you refuse to come to the party, ten street people will be invited in your place. Only they were already invited too, so just come along, will you?

—

That’s what Jesus meant with the whole sower parable too, I think. It’s not good advice for gardeners, so it must have been meant for a wider audience. The point is not the seeds that get eaten, or strangled, or dried out. The point is the seeds that grew, and multiplied, and became an abundance. God has plenty of seed. There is no need to worry about supply shortages, or wasted seeds.

Because of course, the seeds are the word of God, and the ground is our hearts. And we all have stony places in our heart where the seeds cannot thrive. And we all have hearts that will, on occasion, refuse to listen. And we all have a thorny part to our heart, where greed and hate and despair can choke even the word of God. It doesn’t matter though, because we also have good soil in there somewhere, and the seeds of God will find a place to root, and grow strong and plenteous. And Jesus has plenty of seeds. He’ll keep tossing them your way, until something takes root. That is “what Jesus would do.” Just don’t ask him to help plant your vegetable garden.

View archived copy here.

The Friday Letters
11 July 2008

My Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

Numerical shorthand for today’s date is 7-11, which tickles my fancy because that’s not just a date on the calendar but also a fine place to get a slurpee. When I was a kid, living in the suburbs of Richland, Washington (if suburbs is even the right word, Richland not being much of an “urb” to begin with) the local 7-11 was one of the very few destinations I could travel to unaccompanied. It was close enough to walk (taking the unauthorized shortcut through the golf course), or even better was to ride my bicycle. I met my first video game at that 7-11, spent some of my own first earned dollars, had my first brush with the law over some $.05 candy I “forgot” to pay for.
When my mom instituted the “Dad’s Night” dinner policy, which was meant to encourage my father to provide dinner one night per week and give my mom a rest, he neatly sidestepped all nutritional and parental responsibilities by assigning me to make popcorn while he went to 7-11 and got slurpees for everyone. My brothers and I wished it was Dad’s Night every night.
That 7-11 isn’t there anymore, a fact I was reminded of last weekend as I drove past the spot it used to be on my way to visit Brian, my last remaining childhood friend who still lives in the 3Cs. There’s a Wallgreen drug store there now, surrounded by many other stores and apartment buildings that I remember as being untamed desert.
It’s like that, going back to the place you grew up. I normally have a really good sense of direction; I like maps and I can keep north in my head most of the time when navigating around a new place. It doesn’t work like that in the Tri-Cities, which I navigate through an outdated set of extremely vivid memories. I’ve seen a map of Richland, Pasco, and Kennewick, but I can’t make sense of it. “Up” is the direction the back of my house faced, and to see a piece of paper claim that “up” and “north” aren’t the same is very disconcerting.
Add to that the fact that streets, along with everything else, have changed and I spent a lot of time saying, “I think we go this way” while Jieun rolls her eyes and asks didn’t I grow up here? Which, to be fair, I did to her a lot as well when we visited Seoul.
The most mind-boggling though are the things that haven’t changed, like the Spudnut Shop, which I remember as being run by a pretty old couple when I was a kid and is still being opened at 4am every day of the week by the same people a quarter century later. Or, on the less tasty side, Ray’s Golden Lion, which was the scuzziest dive bar I’ve never had the courage to enter when I was a kid and still occupies the same strip of prime retail space all these years later. Maybe the various stains on the sidewalk out front keep anyone else from really wanting the spot.
I’m not sure there’s a point to all this nostalgia, except that it’s summer time and that seems to be the time for such feelings. If I’m still feeling nostalgic next week I’ll try to forge those thoughts into something a little more spiritual. For now, I hope you’re enjoying your summer as much as I am mine. Come join us for the picnic this Sunday and partake of another summertime ritual we can all look back on with nostalgia some day in the future.

Peace,

Ben.

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