I don't think I can, but I know God can

 

This morning we get parables from Jesus about the Kingdom of heaven.

Jesus uses everyday things to explain what the Kingdom of heaven is like.

The parables all have in common three things.

One, something small that becomes much more than what it appears.

Two, all of these things are hidden from us.

Three, that once we discovered it, we will give up everything for it.

I suppose one of the sermons that could be given about the parables is a common idea in our culture.

It is an idea that we learn from a very early age.

The idea that we can do it.

No matter how small or insignificant we might appear that if we believe enough, and work hard enough we can overcome anything.

This idea is present in a lot of media.

I know I learned it as a child from the popular children’s book, The Little Engine That Could.

I assume that all of us know that book, so I won’t repeat plot.

But we all know the catch phrase that comes from it, “I think I can. I think I can. I think I can.”

When you’re young this is an important message.

It is important to believe in yourself, and it is important to do your best in whatever you do no matter how small the task is.

However, it is not the message of our parables this morning.

Our parables point to us a different truth.

It is a truth that is rooted in faith in God, and not in ourselves.

In all the parables God plants the hidden nature of the kingdom in small, insignificant, and in some cases opposite things.

In all the parables it is God whose action brings about the outcome.

 

I hesitate to give this sermon this morning, because I know how much it goes against our cultural beliefs.

But also, because it might appear that I am telling people to give up, or not to have hope.

I want to be clear that is not the message I am giving this morning.

Instead, I want to focus our hope and our belief in a different place.

I want to focus our hope on God.

I want us to believe in God.

 

As your pastor I spend time listening to your struggles.

It is the main part of my calling.

And many of you are getting older.

What comes with getting older is losing things.

Losing your physical abilities, your mental abilities.

As one person I was visiting said to me, “Pastor my world keeps getting smaller and smaller.”

Those conversations often end with people giving me advice about how to deal with getting older.

What many of you say to me is, “Pastor don’t get old.”

That is not great advice.

Because I know and you know that is impossible.

Everyone gets old, everyone loses things as they get old.

It is not only inevitable it is also the way God set up our life on this earth.

And no amount of positive thinking, no amount of thinking you can, will change that truth.

 

I don’t know when it will happen, but there comes a time for all of us when we realize that there are certain things that are out of our control.

I don’t know when I discovered that I simply can’t bend the world to my will.

I can’t stop wars, hunger, hatred, violence, injustice.

I can work to eradicate them from my life, but I can’t stop them from happening in the world.

 

I also realize that not everything happens for a reason.

I know that is also not a very popular idea.

The other day was the fifth-year anniversary of my mother’s death.

I will tell you that I can’t find one good reason for her dying.

Five years later it still doesn’t make any sense to me.

Why would my mother, who was a kind gentle person, who didn’t drink or smoke, who ate well, and exercised everyday die.

(Please don’t try to come up with one for me.

That will only tell me you didn’t listen to this sermon.)

Some things just don’t make sense, and there are no lessons to be drawn from them.

 

Perhaps you are worried that I lost faith in God.

And nothing can be further from the truth.

Because those are times when we need faith.

We need faith when there are no answers, when age catches up with us, when it seems that injustice and hatred have won.

That is what faith is for.

 

Consider the parables that Jesus tells this morning.

Yeast is buried in the bread.

It is underneath the surface and does its work in secret.

The Mustard seed is buried in the ground, doing its work beyond our vision.

The fish are beneath the surface hidden from us.

The treasure is buried and lost.

All the parables talk about the hiddenness of God’s work.

We can’t see it.

And to me that is the point.

We need faith to believe that those things will produce something bigger and better.

Faith to believe that the dough will rise and feed us.

Faith to believe that a tree will appear big enough to give us shade.

Faith to believe that God will sort out the good fish from the bad fish.

Faith to believe that the treasure is in the field.

 

Never once after my mother died did, I worry about her.

I knew through faith that God had something glorious in store for her in God’s heavenly kingdom.

When you tell me what you are going through as you age, I never doubt that God is with you giving you the strength to accept what is.

Despite all the injustice and hatred of the world I have faith that God will someday make it right.

 

I was reading this week about a person who had a very difficult life.

His father was a drug addict and would hit him and his mother.

He lost his job and ended up living a life of squaller on the street.

His mother tired of the years died at an early age.

He bounced around from place to place.

He struggled in his own life with drugs and poverty.

He said that when he read this parable of the mustard seed what he thought about was the tree that was produced by the mustard seed.

And he was drawn to the idea that it produced a tree where people find a home and rest.

He suggested that we not call it the parable of the mustard seed, but the parable of the home tree.

That is what God provides for us.

God doesn’t promise us a life that is free from the struggles and sins of the world.

God doesn’t say that if we only believe we will be able to do it.

What God says, is believe in me.

Believe that below the surface of what you can see and know, I am making bread, a safe home, a place of justice, a field of joy.

That is faith.

And I wanted to let you all know this morning that is what we all have been given.

Not a false hope in our ability to control the outcome.

But a living faith in God’s love and grace.

A living faith that tells us that God is always at work.

Even when we can’t see it, imagine it, understand it.

That is what I believe in.

Not that I think I can, but that I know God can.

I hope for all of you this faith that allows you to give control over to God, and believe that God will provide a tree for rest, your daily bread, justice for those who are oppressed, and the joy in knowing that you have the most precious thing in the world, God’s love and grace.

Amen

“Just love everyone, I will sort em out later.” - God

 

It would be nice to be able to root out evil.

This is at the heart of most human endeavors.

We want to create a world that is orderly and makes sense.

We hate a world that is messy, a world were both evil and good reside.

A world were things happen and we can’t easily decide who is the bad person and who is the good person.

A lot of movies divide up the world into good and bad.

The good person overcomes the bad person, and we cheer.

It gives us some comfort.

But real life is so messy.

It is so much harder to live in a world where sinner and saint live not just in different people, but within each of us.

Our parable for this morning shows us the messy world.

Where good crops and bad crops grow together.

They grow without our intention or knowing.

Like our guest preacher last week, I don’t know much about gardening and know even less about agriculture.

I am at heart a city person.

I prefer the comforts of city life.

I prefer concrete and a good restaurant to living in the open growing my own food.

But I was reading this week that the wheat and weeds are imperceivable from one another.

That if that type of weed showed up you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

They would look the same.

And so by trying to pluck up the weeds you would inevitably end up pluck up the wheat too.

 

The thing about humans is that our history is littered with people who have tried to bring order to our world.

Throughout time people have tried to pull up the weeds, to root out what they perceived as evil.

What I am about to say is going to sound weird, I ask you bear with me.

One of the ways to view the totalitarian regimes that arose in the aftermath of World War two were attempts to bring order to what appeared to be a chaotic world.

The world was changing rapidly.

It was bringing with it more and more industrialization.

And with it more and more social isolation, economic division, political ideology.

The rise of Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin where because they offered people a simple explanation for their problems.

They offered simple solutions.

They offered utopian visions of what the world could be.

And in their minds, they offered a way to root out the evil around them and have a better world.

We all know how that story ended.

It ended in concentration camps, in a world war, in the loss of our individual expressions, in the loss of freedom.

Dietrich Bonhoffer talks about it in his book on community.

He says, ““God hates this wishful dreaming because it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious.

Those who dream of this idealized community demand that it be fulfilled by God, by others, and by themselves.

They enter the community of Christians with their demands, set up their own law, and judge one another and even God accordingly.”

He wrote those words as Hitler and Mussolini were consolidating their power.

He wrote them as people were losing their freedoms in the name of progress and a safer, more stable world.

It is a dangerous thing to root out evil.

To try and pull everything up in order to create the world you think is the “right one”.

Jesus this morning warns us against such things.

Jesus asks us to let God make those decisions, to let God be the judge.

Maybe even harder is to trust that God will do that.

That when the kingdom comes God will set things right, and that it is only God who can actually decide properly.

 

I know that temptation well.

I felt it this week.

On Thursday I was walking into our church building and noticed that our rainbow flag was missing.

I have to tell you that it went missing one other time.

At that time, it was clearly the wind that ripped it from the poll.

I found the flag down the street.

So, my first thought was maybe that happened again, there was a strong wind on Wednesday night.

But as I approached the pole, I noticed that the pole itself was bent.

The clips the hold the pole were still there, and there were some fragments on the ground.

I looked around the neighborhood to see if it was anywhere.

It was clearly missing.

This time it wasn’t the wind.

I couldn’t help but notice that this happened after our Reconciling in Christ Sunday last week.

It also happened after I posted a picture from that Sunday of myself, our guest preacher, and Acid Reigns.

It seems to be too much of a coincidence.

Someone was mad, someone didn’t like the message our congregation sent with that service.

And after all of that my first reaction was to think, “We need to get rid of this type of hate in our world.”

My first thought was to call the police, maybe put up a camera.

I was angry about it, disappointed.

But I let it settle in me.

I took a moment.

And honestly, I thought about this parable.

What would it look like for us to root out this evil?

What would we do in order to get rid of people that think the best way to handle our differences is fear and intimidation through vandalism?

 

If you saw the video I posted about this incident on my Facebook page you saw the conclusion I came to.
Whoever tore down our flag did us a favor.

The showed us that our intentional love of people in the LGBTQ+ community was exactly what we should be doing.

We heard a couple of weeks ago Jesus tell us in the sermon on the mount that those who are persecuted and reviled for the sake of Jesus are blessed.

We are blessed for loving our neighbors.

And further in the sermon on the mount that the answer to another’s violence and hatred is not to answer it in kind.

But that love is always the answer.

That when evil is done, we can’t just tear up the roots of the weeds because we will end up destroying the good in the attempt.

 

I don’t think Jesus is telling us to do nothing.

In fact, the opposite.

Do something drastic and not expected.

Instead of trying to root out evil, respond with love and compassion.

I know that is not the way we think about these things in our world today.
I know that is not going to be very popular answer.

What we need now and have always needed is more love and compassion.

I think it is the only way we are actually going to change things in the world, and in ourselves.

As Dr. King once said, "Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that." 

My response was to dig deep for love and compassion even for the person who vandalized our flag.

Many people reached out to me to thank me or encourage me to keep going, for our congregation to keep going.

So many people agreed with me that we can’t respond to hate with hate.

 

And the response from people in our congregation, and some people in our community, was to offer to buy more flags.

To show that we were going to keep on loving people.

 

Nancy Zattler a while ago gifted our congregation with a rock that is engraved a quote from God, “Just love everyone, I will sort em out later.”

That rock is at the entrance of our church by the flowers.

That is exactly what Jesus is asking us to do this morning in our Gospel reading.

That is what we at Concordia Lutheran Church will continue to keep on doing.

Amen

 

 

The Mountains Teach the Lesson

 

They are always there

They mark the time

Forged from tension, erosion, fire and ice

Hills

Valleys

Hike in between

One step in front of the other

What do they care about who sits on these shores

What does it matter

People come and go

Mountains mark the time too long for me to see

But…it does matter me!

To others?

Those summers mattered!

They formed me (others)

These friendships mattered

These lives mattered

Late nights

Early mornings

Long days

Moon and stars

Sunrise – sunset

Songs sung

Dreams prayed

Unaware of danger

Only possibility

Of love

Justice

A better world

You can make a difference

You made a difference

Steps are sure and fast

And it doesn’t matter at all

The mountains will outlive you

The erosion will form new things

The songs will be different

People will change

Life gives way to death

Love hurts

Injustice is real

The pace of our steps slows

The hike is harder

The moon still shines!

The stars come out

The sunrises

Babies are born

Life goes on

Bills are paid

Work is done

Priorities change

The steps keep going

Adjustments are made

Loss happens

There are good and bad

Unexpected twists

Life doesn’t work out the way we plan

It works out worse

And it works out better

Love is deeper

We give up things for others

For our own sanity

We gain things

Nothing is a straight path

We couldn’t have known

 The mountains try to warn us

But we didn’t see

 We didn’t appreciate everything

We took it all for granted

Our steps were too fast

Thought it would last forever

Never imagined it would be us

But it all makes sense

The moon lit waters

The lakes shore

The mountains

The stars

The sunrise

Yourh

Growing old

Mourning the loss

Our dreams

Our love

Each step

All of it wrapped in the universe

All of it part of the greater part

All of it part of God

The mountains teach us the lesson