Deacon Daniel Gutierrez
July 27, 2008

One of the great blessings of this season is witnessing a majestic transformation of life in Gods universe.   The process begins in early march along the bosque.  Pairs of Canadian geese work methodically along the ditch bank, heads down, intent on the task at hand.     

The Geese are oblivious to the hundreds of people who pass by.  They are much too busy, preparing with a sense of purpose, a sense of belief. Over time, I become accustomed to their activity until one day I notice a difference.

 The Geese are no longer working.  They are now keenly aware of everything.  Necks extended, eyes alert, bodies full – an impressive sight.  Then I understand why.    Barely visible are 3 or 4 small goslings, tucked close.  Awkward and small, they seem vulnerable.  Yet, with each passing week, I notice subtle changes.  They grow stronger and venture a bit farther out from their parents.

They acquire the distinct black and white color pattern.  They transform into something totally new.  Soon, the entire family will take off in flight, upward – as one. And I will be rendered speechless.   Blessed to share in their transformation. Witnessing the true purpose for which they were created. Beauty transformed into something beautiful. 

The moment is always indescribable, that millisecond when the air gets caught in the back of your throat, and you are frozen in complete wonder and amazement.  You feel the presence of God, and your soul glimpses the Kingdom of Heaven.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus is relating the wonder of his Father’s Kingdom.  He is describing the indescribable awe, I experienced, except that one moment - is promised for all eternity.  To describe it, Jesus uses two insignificant objects, nearly imperceptible to the human eye.  He also describes a process to get there.    

A mustard seed, so small that it can fit on the head of a pin.  He uses yeast; your breath can blow it out of the palm of your hand.  Yet, these two tiny objects have amazing potential.  The seed has the ability to grow into a tree, so great that the birds of the air will make their homes in it.  The leaven may be able to grow exponentially  and rise thirty fold, even one hundred fold.  Both have amazing transformational potential.  Is it luck?  Steroids?  Miracle Grow?

Like most of his teachings, Jesus wants us to think.  There is always a story behind the story, a parable among the parable. The solution is not as simple as it appears.   Seeds do not grow into trees on their own; leaven does not become bread by sitting on a table. The mustard seed needs sun, soil, and water.   Leaven needs flour, the hands to mix the ingredients and the patience to rise.  The goslings need their parents’ guidance, protection, and care.  

All depend on nurturing, the life around them to initiate their transformation. Because there is something inherent in the seed that calls it to be a tree, something inherent in a Gosling that moves it to flight. All are encoded with the ability to achieve their ultimate promise.  To grasp their potential, to realize the reason they were created. As the beloved children of God, should we be any different?

These parables highlight how dependent we are on this world and our surroundings.   Neglecting the life around us is devastating on everything and everyone.  If the mustard seed is not nurtured, it will never become a tree.  It will stay small, dormant and fade into the earth.  If the gosling is abandoned, it will starve, fall prey to predators.   It will die.
Just as nurturing and belief support life, neglect and indifference suppress it. 

We see this daily, marriages or committed relationships that are not lovingly nurtured that are not lovingly nurtured will eventually wither and perish.  That love will starve.  If we neglect our relationships with our children, family, the people we love, the life of that bond will become frail and fade away.

We were not created to be small seeds in parched fields. We need life around us.
Everything God created has a place in this world.  Everyone God created has a purpose. For life has meaning, and if we do not nurture it, if we are not nurtured, we will never witness transformation.  

This includes our relationships with our spouses, partners, family, friends.
And importantly, our union with God and Jesus Christ.  For this is why we are created.  Just mustard seed is encoded with the potential to be a tree, the yeast the ability to transform into bread; we are created to be one with the Lord.  

When we were knitted in our mother’s womb, God placed in us his desire for each one of us to return to him.  This is the purpose for which we were created; our lives were meant to share in his Kingdom.  Oswald Chambers wrote that people say they are tired of life; but no one was ever tired of life, they are tired of being half dead while they were alive.  We need to be transfigured by the incoming of a great and new life.

But the active word is transformation and transformation is not easy.  It is not a quick wardrobe change to look good for the moment.  It alters your structure, your outlook on life. We are challenged to live differently to become something new. 

Transformation breaks open that hard outer shell of that small mustard seed and explodes into a tree that gives shelter and sustenance to others. It gets into your body, kneads and twists you like bread dough.  It turns a lump of flour into the bread of life that can feed the world.  Transformation changes an awkward gosling into absolute wonder. 

True transformation is majestic.  So what would cause such a change?  Jesus.  It was written that there was just something so clear and beautiful, something so true, unique and powerful about Jesus that old rabbis would marvel at his teaching, young children would run and sit in his lap, ashamed prostitutes would find themselves weeping at his feet.  Entire villages would gather to hear him speak.

Experts in the law would find themselves speechless, and all people, poor, the rugged working class; the unbelievably wealthy would leave everything to follow him.  Why?  They were transformed by Jesus Christ; they realized that he was their purpose in life. The reason they were created. Their beauty was transformed into something beautiful.

This realization propelled uneducated fisherman, tax collectors and women of faith from a small dark room in Jerusalem out into the world. Their purpose?   To make the world what it was meant to be – God’s Kingdom.  Transformation in Christ gave us those viewed the world not as it is, but as it might be - Archbishop Luwum, William Muhlenberg, Dorothy Day, William Wilberforce, and the millions of unnamed angels that God alone only knows. 
Last week Fr. Brian said that the church is supposed to be very different people finding their common ground in Christ.  Republicans and Democrats, tree-huggers and gas guzzlers, not a monochromatic club of the like-minded. But as members of God’s family, we are also not wooden chess pieces who move stiffly in and out of this sanctuary.

Our call is to the Father, our transformation is in Jesus. But to do so we must have the preparation.    Seeds have soil, yeast has water, and the goslings have their parents.   What do we have?   The Eucharist, simple prayer, the Holy Bible, our sacred cross and one another.  Part of our preparation is providing sustenance for each other, loving one another.   We help each toward our father’s Kingdom.  
Mustard seeds, transformation, and the Kingdom language are not old stories written on dusty sheets of Papyrus.  It is alive and we are living it today.  We bring forth Christ and the Kingdom of Heaven in the fellowship of the Thursday book group, in the work of the dedicated volunteers of the food pantry, in the faces of our children while in their Christian formation classes, through all our pastoral ministries.  
Transformation begins when we step across this sanctuary and introduce ourselves to those we do not know.  When we greet our brothers in sisters in Christ love.  When we hold one another’s hand in times of tragedy and joy.   

Transformation occurs in our communal call to take the message of Christ evident at St. Michael’s into the larger world. God is constantly calling us to transform our hearts and our souls.  To believe in the unimaginable and undertake the impossible.  When we do so, our small seeds will create thousands of acres of trees; our leaven will produce food to feed millions.  

And each of one of us will experience that eternal moment where we cannot catch our breath, where we stand in wonder and awe and experience of the kingdom of heaven, to the delight of our Father. 
   
Amen

July 20, 2008
The Rev. Brian C. Taylor
Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

Today’s gospel consists of two parts. First is the original parable of Jesus, handed down from disciple to disciple for several decades. The second half is an interpretation of the parable, probably written by an editor some 40 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection. 

The editor’s interpretation has Jesus telling us that his parable about allowing weeds and wheat to grow together is really about the end of the age, when angels will come and reap the final harvest, burning up all the wicked people, and rewarding the righteous in heaven. 

This part was written during an extremely polarized and dangerous time. By 70 or 80 AD, the Romans had destroyed Jerusalem and scattered both Jews and Christians around the Mediterranean and Middle East. It was also during the beginning of violent persecutions against Christians. 

It was, for the audience of Matthew’s gospel, the end of the world. They expected Jesus to come back in their lifetime and deal with this horrifying violence, to get rid of those evil people who had wiped Israel off the map and those who were destroying their Christian communities. 

They also expected Jesus to protect and lift up the persecuted faithful who were only trying to follow the gospel, and make them shine like the sun in heaven. It is an understandable hope. 

But what did Jesus mean when he originally told this parable? Taken by itself, it doesn’t necessarily point to an end time when God would separate people into evil and good, burning the former and rewarding the latter.

 The parable is a simple farming metaphor. Jesus tells us to allow weeds to grow alongside wheat. The workers are instructed to avoid trampling through the tender shoots, ripping out what they thought were weeds, destroying the good grain in their zeal. No, let the weeds and wheat grow together until harvest time, when you can really tell the difference between them. 

Told at a time before all the violence against Christians and Jews, this story seems to be about our tendency to judge one another, and to judge parts of ourselves we don’t like. It is about the difficulty of sorting out good from bad, and how if we try to do this too vigorously, we’ll destroy whatever good is there, too. Instead, we are to accept both the shadow and light within ourselves, and refrain from judging others as well, letting God sort these things out. 

This month the bishops of the worldwide Anglican Communion, of which the Episcopal Church is a part, are meeting for their once-in-a-decade meeting in England. It is called the Lambeth Conference. A few bishops from conservative provinces are boycotting the gathering, refusing to sit down with American bishops who consented to the election of a gay bishop, Gene Robinson. 

By their absence they are also protesting against the Archbishop of Canterbury, who, in their minds, has not done nearly enough in excluding Bishop Robinson from Lambeth. They also want the Archbishop to exclude the whole American church, and if necessary, even to kick us out of the Anglican Communion. 

They want to trample through the fields, furiously ripping out the weeds among the wheat. Fortunately, this doesn’t seem to be the majority view, and it isn’t going to happen. 

But it goes the other direction, too, doesn’t it? I’ve heard Democrats talk gleefully about the hope of dominating the Senate, the House, and the White House this year, finally getting rid of all those nasty Republicans. They want to trample through the fields, ripping out the weeds among the wheat. 

And in the immigration debate today, some  - but not all - of those who cry the loudest about militarizing our borders and arresting all the undocumented are motivated by racism and fear of the evil stranger. Everything will be fine if we rip out the weeds among the wheat. 

Psychologists point out that this human tendency is a phenomenon called projection. We cannot tolerate what we think is evil within, and so we project it outward on to others. If I can get rid of it out there, maybe I won’t be tormented from within any more. 

The classic example from years back is The Rev. Jimmy Swaggart, who vehemently condemned sexual immorality again and again on television, until he was caught with a prostitute in a motel room. 

We all project our inner shadow outwards to others. It is just a matter of degree, and whether or not we recognize what we’re doing. I realized some time ago that the strong emotion I felt about our former bishop was partly a projection of my own issues about conflict and about father figures. Parents who go over the edge about a teenager’s messy room might really be trying to deal with their own lack of control in life. 

The church provides us all with a golden opportunity to deal with our projections, if we choose to accept it. In this holy space, Republicans sit alongside Democrats and worship together. Transgendered people come up and get communion right along everyone else. PhD’s and homeless men off the ditchbank, tree-huggers and gas guzzlers  – we’re all equal members of God’s family.

As we live alongside others who are very different from us in the church, we come up against our prejudices, our projections. We make judgments about others here by the way they dress, by the language they use about religion or politics, and in our minds we shift them from the category of “wheat” to “weeds.” 

We have a very effective warning light that goes off on our dashboard that tells us when we’re probably projecting, and then judging others. It is a reaction that is disproportionate to the situation at hand. We can catch ourselves in the midst of a projection when we admit that our indignation against others might, in fact, be about ourselves. 

We can also, as brothers and sisters in Christ, gently wonder aloud to the one who is all worked up about something Methinks thou dost protest too much; what’s really going on here? 

If we are willing to look at ourselves, we shed light on our shadow and we offer God an opportunity to heal us. The way this healing happens, however, is not by ripping out our nasty weeds, but by transforming them into something healthy and good. 

In the Sufi system of personality type called the Enneagram, this is called redeeming those traits that we think of as faults, transforming them from something destructive to something life-giving. The spiritual work that we share with the Spirit is largely this: identifying things about ourselves that are problematic, and then seeing how they can become healthy and good if we apply them in new ways. 

Perhaps the squelched passion that you are ashamed of is, in fact, a potential source of creativity and joy. Perhaps the anger you try to hold at bay is a thirst for things to be set right. Perhaps your perceived lack of faith is a call to leave behind simplistic answers and travel bravely into the mysteries and paradoxes of the spiritual life. 

Jesus advises us to let our weeds and wheat grow up together, until it becomes obvious what they are, when the Spirit will work with us, to transform us. Our inner weeds may turn out to be wheat, after all, and what we thought was good grain God may eventually reveal to be nothing but goatheads. 

And what works within works without: the person whose bumper sticker in the parking lot you disdain may turn out to become a real compadre. After all, Jesse Helms and Bono, the lead singer of the rock group U2, became trusted friends as they worked together to deal with AIDS in Africa. 

That’s what the church is supposed to be: very different people finding their common ground in Christ, not a monochromatic club of the like-minded. 

In the end, the vision of heaven is not a population that has been cleansed of all evildoers, and our own redemption is not a self that has big chunks of it missing. Instead, heaven is a community whose members have finally found their true purpose, with all their traits made useful, and each one of us happy that everyone there has a part to play in God’s kingdom. 

July 13, 2008
The Rev. Brian C. Taylor
Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

Susanna and I sometimes joke that the ¾ of an acre of land we live on is cursed. We wonder if it is poisoned with radioactive waste from Sandia Labs. Maybe we’re just bad gardeners. But in fairness to us, in some places the soil is so rocky that even the weeds don’t have a chance against the scorching sun. In other places the caliche clay is so dense that the roots of the poor trees we have foolishly planted there eventually hit a brick wall and stop growing. I’m astounded at how much soil improvement and water it takes to make a plant just survive here, let alone grow in size. 

I’ve been to Israel. The land there is strikingly similar to ours, so those who originally heard the scriptures we heard today also knew about harsh growing conditions. 

What is attempting to grow in the scriptures for today is not tomatoes or chiles, however, but “the word of God.” Isaiah writes about God’s word that comes down like rain and snow, watering the earth, bringing forth seed and bread. Jesus speaks about the word falling on harsh land, producing nothing, or on good soil, resulting in a generous bounty. What are they talking about? 

We usually associate the term “word of God” with actual words – the Bible. But for the Jewish people, the “word of God” was far more than the biblical text. The word was God’s own expression of self to all creation. The word was God’s wisdom handed down from generation to generation. The word was the sense of justice that God expects of us. The word was the inner light in each person that, later on, the Quakers made so much of. The word was creation itself, the fullest possible expression of the Creator. Everything that God communicates is “the word.” 

The Jews weren’t the only ones who talked about the word. The Greeks had this understanding of word, or logos, that was similar. For them, the logos was the divine order of harmony in creation, and the reason that human beings share with God. And so when the author of John called Jesus the Logos, the Word made flesh, he was saying that everything that God had previously expressed about God’s own self, everything that God had communicated through creation and reason, was now manifested in Jesus himself. 

It is this full self-expression of the Creator, that is meant by the term “word.” The readings today tell us that God spreads this word like seeds, like rain and snow, intending for it to take root and grow, so that all of creation and every person in it would manifest God’s wisdom, harmony, and truth, just like Jesus. 

And so when Jesus talks about “the word of the kingdom” trying to grow in various types of soil, he is saying that God is trying to grow in you, in me, in all of creation. Like a generous sower, a heavenly Johnny Appleseed, God goes about all of creation, continually spreading the seeds of wisdom, beauty, mercy, and justice. But what kind of soil do these seeds fall upon, and will they bear fruit? 

Jesus first speaks of a hard-packed pathway, where the word falls and is immediately snatched up by “the evil one.” Jesus says that this is the person with no understanding, the person whose mind is closed and whose heart is hardened to the things of God. Such people – some of them Christians - have no curiosity about God, no desire to learn the ways of God, no capacity to reflect and wonder. They already know everything they need to know, and nothing can penetrate them. God will still try to reach them – through the beauty of creation, the cry for justice that wells up from the people of the earth, and the wisdom of the ages – but their hearts are hardened. God’s seed cannot grow. 

This is the hardened heart and closed mind of the politician, the religious extremist or the average Joe on the street whose minds are set on one thing: it may be a model of economic prosperity, it may be religious or moral beliefs that they use as a weapon against others, it may be a sense of tribal or national identity. Whatever it is, this one thing hardens the heart and closes down understanding, and God’s self-expression, the word of mercy and justice and hope, cannot get in. From God’s point of view, there is no fruit produced.

Then Jesus speaks of those who might initially receive God’s word with joy, but have no root, no depth, and when things get difficult, their faith withers up and dies. This is the person who is attracted to spiritual wisdom because it is appealing, but they don’t pursue it. They don’t follow it into their own depths to find out what it might teach them. They may read the Bible, they may attend church, but they never let it soak in very far. 

And so when they hear Jesus say “forgive your enemies,” it doesn’t occur to them that this word might apply to their situation. When they are offered opportunities to learn how to pray, they don’t take advantage of them. They don’t read the Bible and meditate on its paradoxes and the way it challenges our assumptions. They don’t try to penetrate the symbolic mystery of the church’s theology and sacraments. They don’t ever do the hard work of learning to trust in something beyond themselves that they can’t see or understand. 

Jesus says that the worst thing about these religious tourists is that they suffer when hard times come. With no depth of spiritual soil, they have nothing to fall back upon when their marriage falls apart, they become seriously ill or someone they love suffers or dies senselessly. Their faith withers in the scorching sun, and they suffer. 

Jesus then addresses the kind of soil that is perhaps most familiar to us, the kind that is so crowded with the thorny cares and lures of the world, that God’s self-expression is choked, strangled before it has a chance to grow. This is the busy, anxious, distracted tendency that St. Paul warns against in the second reading today, when our “minds are set on the things of the flesh” instead of the things of the Spirit. No time for poetry, no time for walks in the woods, no space to wonder and appreciate. 

Well, all of this would be bad news indeed if the scriptures didn’t hold out the hope of fertile soil. Isaiah wrote about the word watering the earth, accomplishing what God intends, giving God’s people joy and peace. Paul wrote of life and peace that is promised to those who set their minds on the Spirit. Jesus spoke of good soil that brings forth fruit a hundredfold.  

It is possible to cultivate good spiritual soil that can receive the abundant seeds that God is continually sowing. If we consider the converse of each of today’s types of bad soil, we see what Jesus considered to be necessary. 

First of all, he seems to recommend a softened heart rather than a hardened pathway, a kind of vulnerability that is like earth that has been turned over and exposed to the elements. This means that we stay open to the suffering of the world, to the aching in our own hearts, to the unanswered questions we struggle with. It means that we try to understand others who are most different from us, those who keep our soil turned over. It means that we try to trust even when we have no guarantees, to go forward into uncertainty with faith. 

Secondly, Jesus suggests that we develop some depth of insight about the things of the Spirit. Pursue your curiosity, investigate your faith: as it says in the well-beloved Collect of our prayer book “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.” Don’t skip over the hard parts of scripture; don’t put aside perplexing things like the Trinity or the fusion of divine and human in the Incarnation. Let the mysteries of the faith puzzle you, allow your assumptions to be challenged; listen and wait. God will take you more deeply into the word. 

Finally, in this parable Jesus obviously invites us to leave behind the cares and occupations of this life, so that there is room for the seed of God to grow. Work isn’t everything. Accomplishing tasks and solving problems isn’t everything. We cannot worry things into submission, and there are always going to be loose ends, unresolved conflicts. 

Turn to God, who always is. Give thanks, give praise to your Creator and the abundant way God continually spreads the seeds of beauty, harmony, hope, and mercy all around. Set your mind on the Spirit, forgetting for awhile the problems of this world, so that you can smile with a soul that is light and free. 

Imagine your heart to be like rich, dark, nutritious soil. Soften it. Dig deeply and keep it turned over. Weed out the choking thorns. Then the purpose of God’s rain and snow that fall from the heavens will be accomplished. We will bear fruit and yield thirty, sixty, even a hundredfold of blessings for ourselves and for everyone and everything we touch. 

We're sorry, the full text for this sermon is not available at this time.