SPEAKER_00: Blessed be God, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, and blessed be God's family now and forever.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: Let's pray together.
SPEAKER_00: Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid.
SPEAKER_00: Cleanse thoughts in our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you and worthily magnify your holy name through Christ our Lord.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
unknown: Let us pray.
SPEAKER_00: God recalled with mercy.
SPEAKER_00: Grant that by your inspiration may be right.
SPEAKER_00: By your merciful guiding the Jesus Christ our Lord and in the Holy Spirit, what God will represent as you can church over to the great eye.
SPEAKER_01: Naomi, Ruth's mother-in-law said to her, My daughter, am I not seeking respite for you that will be good for you?
SPEAKER_01: Now is not Boaz our kin with whose girls you have been?
SPEAKER_01: Look, he is winnowing barley on the threshing floor tonight.
SPEAKER_01: Now bathe and anoint yourself and put on your best clothes and go down to the threshing floor.
unknown: Do not make yourself known to the man until he has finished eating and drinking.
SPEAKER_01: When he lies down, note the place where he lies, and go uncover his scythes and lie down, and he will tell you what you should do.
SPEAKER_01: Ruth said to Naomi, All that you tell me I will do.
SPEAKER_01: Then Ruth went down to the threshing floor and did just as her mother-in-law commanded her.
unknown: Now Boaz had eaten and drunk, and his heart was content, and he went to lie down at the end of the heap of grain.
SPEAKER_01: Then Ruth came in secret and uncovered his scythes and lay down.
SPEAKER_01: At midnight the man trembled and turned right where a woman was lying at his scyth.
unknown: Then Boaz said, Who are you?
unknown: And she said, I am Ruth, your slave woman.
unknown: Spread your cloak over your slave woman, for you are a kin redeemer.
unknown: And he said, May you be blessed by the most high, my daughter.
SPEAKER_01: Your most recent act of fidelity is greater than the first.
SPEAKER_01: You have not gone after young men, whether poor or rich.
SPEAKER_01: And now, my daughter, fear not.
SPEAKER_01: All that you have spoken, I will do for you, for all the assembly of my people know that you are a warrior-hearted woman.
SPEAKER_01: And now it is true that I am a kin redeemer.
SPEAKER_01: There is a kin redeemer closer than I.
SPEAKER_01: Spend the night tonight, and when morning comes, if he will redeem you as kin, good, let him redeem you.
SPEAKER_01: If he does not want to redeem you as kin, then as the ageless God lives, I will redeem you as kin myself.
SPEAKER_01: Lie down until the morning.
SPEAKER_01: So Ruth lay at his sides until morning, but got up before one person could recognize a neighbor, for Boaz said to himself, Let it not be known that the woman came to the threshing floor.
SPEAKER_01: Then he said, Bring the cloak you are wearing and hold it out.
SPEAKER_01: So she held it, and Boaz measured out six heaping, six helpings of barley, and put it on her back.
SPEAKER_01: Then he went into the city.
SPEAKER_01: And Ruth came to her mother-in-law, and Naomi asked, Who are you, my daughter?
SPEAKER_01: And she told her that the man what that the man had done for her.
SPEAKER_01: Ruth explained, He gave these six helpings of barley to me, for he said, Do not go back to your mother-in-law empty-handed.
SPEAKER_01: She replied, Wait, my daughter, until you learn how the matter will shake out, for the man will not rest, but will conclude the matter today.
SPEAKER_01: The word of the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: The reading for the second Sunday after Pentecost is Psalm 65, we'll read responsibly by the half verse.
SPEAKER_01: Through wondrous deeds, you answer us with deliverance, O God of our salvation.
SPEAKER_01: You establish the mountains through your might.
SPEAKER_01: The one who silences the roaring of the seas.
SPEAKER_01: They who live at the farthest reaches are awed by your signs.
SPEAKER_01: You attend the earth and water her.
SPEAKER_01: You enrich her greatly.
SPEAKER_02: So the shadow I shadows in house.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus laid out another parable before the crowd.
SPEAKER_00: The realm of the heavens is like a mustard seed that a person took and sowed in their field.
SPEAKER_00: Indeed, it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown, it is the greatest of the plants, and it becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make their nests and its branches.
SPEAKER_00: Then Jesus told them another parable.
SPEAKER_00: All these things Jesus said to the crowds in parables, without a parable, he said nothing to them.
SPEAKER_00: This was to fulfill what had been spoken to the prophet.
SPEAKER_00: I will open my mouth and speak in parables, and I will declare what has been hidden on the foundation of the word.
SPEAKER_00: This is the gospel of the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: And hey, maybe you remember two weeks ago it was Pentecost.
SPEAKER_00: Does anybody remember what we typically call this season, and it's the longest one of the year, what we call this season after Pentecost?
SPEAKER_00: Ordinary time, right?
SPEAKER_00: Ordinary time.
SPEAKER_00: So I just want to make sure you hear what that means.
SPEAKER_00: We often think ordinary means plain.
SPEAKER_00: Like it's just ordinary.
SPEAKER_00: There's nothing special about it.
SPEAKER_00: And I want to remind you where that word ordinary comes in the church.
SPEAKER_00: You probably know that the bishop's right-hand person is called the canon to the ordinary.
SPEAKER_00: So who is the ordinary?
SPEAKER_00: The bishop is the ordinary who orders, like doesn't give commands, but sets order for the vision of the diocese and what it means under his or her leadership to grow into the fullness of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: So when you hear ordinary time, it doesn't mean it's regular.
SPEAKER_00: It means that we have a long season to reorder our lives, having just experienced the miracle of resurrection and the miracle of Pentecost, in which the Holy Spirit jumped over every possible conceivable boundary, including language, that we could put up as human beings to exclude where God is and isn't.
SPEAKER_00: You will need this again next year.
SPEAKER_00: Which is why we will do it every year.
SPEAKER_00: I will need this again next year.
SPEAKER_00: But our solemn duty with ordinary time is not to say nothing special.
SPEAKER_00: It's, oh my God, we had a vision of how you act in the world, and we want to reorder ourselves.
SPEAKER_00: It always starts the Sunday after Trinity Sunday.
SPEAKER_00: We always start with parables.
SPEAKER_00: And I just want to name this that parables seem to be a form of teaching unique to Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus' ethics or nothing new.
SPEAKER_00: John the Baptist said everything Jesus is going to say.
SPEAKER_00: Go back and read the scriptures.
SPEAKER_00: But parables are different.
SPEAKER_00: Parables are this thing that you have to decide what they mean.
SPEAKER_00: A lot of times we say, oh, look, parables are like analogies.
SPEAKER_00: We use analogies a lot.
SPEAKER_00: It's where we compare a thing we understand to a thing we don't understand.
SPEAKER_00: That way we can understand the thing we don't understand, right?
SPEAKER_00: Similes are analogies.
SPEAKER_00: He ran like the wind.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you know this?
SPEAKER_00: So let me give you an example of an analogy.
SPEAKER_00: Faith starts really small.
SPEAKER_00: And over time it goes up big.
SPEAKER_00: That's not really a parable.
SPEAKER_00: I could just say it that way.
SPEAKER_00: And Jesus didn't.
SPEAKER_00: That's because parables are doing something different from analogies.
SPEAKER_00: And I don't know if your teacher taught you this in high school.
SPEAKER_00: I didn't learn this in high school.
SPEAKER_00: I had to go to grad school to learn.
SPEAKER_00: Literary charism to learn that metaphors, unlike analogies, compare two things that are not comparable.
SPEAKER_00: They compare things that are not comparable.
SPEAKER_00: In such a way that you have to re-understand both of them.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, really, what are we going to compare the kingdom of God to?
SPEAKER_00: The way we do stuff?
SPEAKER_00: Sadly, we do that more often than we realize, to our peril.
SPEAKER_00: Which is again why we're in ordinary time, because we need to reorder this.
SPEAKER_00: Does God love transactionally because we do?
SPEAKER_00: Hell no.
SPEAKER_00: So welcome to ordinary time.
SPEAKER_00: And welcome to what parables do.
SPEAKER_00: So look, okay, it's fair to say that faith starts small and grows big.
SPEAKER_00: But sometimes it starts small and it dies.
SPEAKER_00: You might be saying that.
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes faith doesn't go anywhere.
SPEAKER_00: So maybe it's helpful to know, and this is why they send us to seminary, because truthfully, this is like an old book, old customs.
SPEAKER_00: You're going to hear a doozy of one in a second, but agriculturally, I don't know if we get it.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, Jesus is doing a little bit of exaggeration here.
SPEAKER_00: The mustard seed is not the smallest of seeds.
SPEAKER_00: A poppy seed is a lot smaller.
SPEAKER_00: They have those.
SPEAKER_00: The mustard seed does not grow into the greatest of all plants.
SPEAKER_00: It's a bush.
SPEAKER_00: The greatest of all plants is like a sequoia or a redwood or a cedar of Lebanon.
SPEAKER_00: So there's a little bit of exaggeration going on here.
SPEAKER_00: Now, what if I told you, and most of us don't realize this, because we don't have gardens like this, that it's against the Jewish customary law to plant mustard seed in your garden.
SPEAKER_00: It's against the law.
SPEAKER_00: But the kingdom of God is like that.
SPEAKER_00: Why is it against the law?
SPEAKER_00: Because mustard is invasionary.
SPEAKER_00: Like mint, it will send out roots and overturn all the other stuff.
SPEAKER_00: And mint is a good analogy because if you plant mint next to a strawberry, and then a couple weeks later you have one of those strawberries, it's going to taste a little unique.
SPEAKER_00: Like mint.
SPEAKER_00: It's an invasionary weed.
SPEAKER_00: And you know, the other thing about gardens, the last thing you want in your garden, and this is why we thought of scarecrows, is birds.
SPEAKER_00: Because they're going to eat all your produce.
SPEAKER_00: So the kingdom of God is like an illegal weed you plant on purpose in your garden, which will attract predators for the fruits you are looking forward to eating.
SPEAKER_00: If that's an analogy, God help us.
SPEAKER_00: Clearly, this is meant to stretch us somehow.
SPEAKER_00: The kingdom of God is like a weed.
SPEAKER_00: Oh, well, okay, analogically, maybe the kingdom of God wants to invade my life so that everything tastes like it.
SPEAKER_00: Maybe.
SPEAKER_00: But I think we're called to reorder ourselves a little bit a little bit more firmly than that, if you don't mind.
SPEAKER_00: You see, the truth is, I often find myself spiritually and especially morally thinking about who are the threats to my faith, my way of being, and my way of life.
SPEAKER_00: I often think about who the birds are.
SPEAKER_00: And you know what I want to do is I want to get the birds away.
SPEAKER_00: I don't just want to scare them, I'd just rather go hunt them.
SPEAKER_00: Right?
SPEAKER_00: I'd like to shoot those birds dead.
SPEAKER_00: If this sounds like politicians in America right now, it's because they're like me in that way.
SPEAKER_00: But there's nothing about the gospel in that.
SPEAKER_00: The kingdom of God is like us courting those folks that are weedy.
SPEAKER_00: Well, that's really hard to think about.
SPEAKER_00: Who are the weeds in your life?
SPEAKER_00: Now, my dad was a botanist, and he had a nursery, and he told me, and I like this one, he said, a weed is a plant you don't want.
SPEAKER_00: So just think about this.
SPEAKER_00: If you've got a pear orchard, a rose is a weed.
SPEAKER_00: So a weed is any plant you don't like.
SPEAKER_00: I think that Ralph Waldo Emerson said this a little bit better.
SPEAKER_00: He said that a weed is a plant whose virtue is yet unknown.
SPEAKER_00: A weed is a plant whose virtue is yet unknown.
SPEAKER_00: The kingdom of God might be in the weeds.
SPEAKER_00: Now that's interesting for me.
SPEAKER_00: It's something I could cognitively say, but very rarely do I embrace that.
SPEAKER_00: Because here's the thing about that Acts reading that we read.
SPEAKER_00: The disciples did these wonderful things.
SPEAKER_00: Peter's shadow cured people and drove out unclean spirits.
SPEAKER_00: That doesn't sound like really weedy.
SPEAKER_00: That sounds like the power I want.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, don't you want God to like heal your foot without surgery?
SPEAKER_00: Well, I did two weeks ago.
SPEAKER_00: Don't you want God to take those parts of you that drive you crazy and just make them go away?
SPEAKER_00: I mean, listen.
SPEAKER_00: I really wish exorcism was real.
SPEAKER_00: Like you're an alcoholic and I drive it away and you'll never drink again.
SPEAKER_00: I wish that was real, but it isn't.
SPEAKER_00: That's not real.
SPEAKER_00: That does not happen.
SPEAKER_00: That way of thinking takes us right back to the bottom.
SPEAKER_00: So there's that way of thinking, the miraculous and the amazing.
SPEAKER_00: But most of my life is the daily grind, isn't it yours?
SPEAKER_00: And in the daily grind, it is full of weeds.
SPEAKER_00: Which we might be tempted to say, you're not what I want, so let's pull you up.
SPEAKER_00: But instead, I hear Jesus saying, the kingdom of God is in weeds.
SPEAKER_00: And it's in herbs, too.
SPEAKER_00: What about this yeast business?
SPEAKER_00: I mean, look, you probably know that if you're Jewish, you can't have yeast one week out of every year.
SPEAKER_00: That's a preparation for Passover, right?
SPEAKER_00: It's not because yeast is dirty, it's because it's ordinary.
SPEAKER_00: And on the holy night of the Passover, there wasn't time for the yeast to get in the bread, so it didn't have time to rest.
SPEAKER_00: This is not about bad and good.
SPEAKER_00: It's about what's holy and what's regular, and yeast is regular.
SPEAKER_00: You know what else is regular?
SPEAKER_00: A woman being ceremonial unclean one month, one week out of every month because she's on her period.
SPEAKER_00: So here's the story about a woman doing real ordinary stuff.
SPEAKER_00: And those three scoops of flour, that's like 55 pounds of flour.
SPEAKER_00: And what do you know?
SPEAKER_00: The kingdom of God might not be in just the things we consider holy.
SPEAKER_00: It might be in the real, ordinary stuff that sometimes, at least a quarter of a month, well, might even be unclean.
SPEAKER_00: Now that's hard to think about.
SPEAKER_00: Because the church that raised me taught me to know right from wrong.
SPEAKER_00: And I wonder if you'll journey with me for a second to Ruth.
SPEAKER_00: If this isn't here on purpose to make us really question this.
SPEAKER_00: So, look, I don't normally want to talk about things because of our sort of puritanical tradition.
SPEAKER_00: I don't really want to talk about sex, but I'm just gonna have to because we read it.
SPEAKER_00: Okay?
SPEAKER_00: And I want to be really clear that the story of Ruth is about a custom we don't have anymore for which I thank God every day, although it is the reason we have the Episcopal Church.
SPEAKER_00: It's called leverite marriage.
SPEAKER_00: In the old days, if a lady died and didn't have a son, sorry, not the lady, if a man died and he didn't have a son, his next in kin, who probably is the next younger brother, was supposed to impregnate his wife with a son, not a daughter, those were no good, with a son who would replace his elder brother.
SPEAKER_00: I want to make sure you hear this.
SPEAKER_00: Brother number two has a son with wife number one, and the son is now brother number one.
SPEAKER_00: That sounds weird, doesn't it?
SPEAKER_00: Because it is.
SPEAKER_00: Like we don't do that anymore.
SPEAKER_00: Again, thank God.
SPEAKER_00: But this was the expectation, by the way, I told my wife, do not.
SPEAKER_00: My brother is not involved with you, and she's like, don't worry.
SPEAKER_00: Anyway, so and vice versa, right?
SPEAKER_00: This is a little bit of a joke.
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you know this, but Henry VIII married his brother's widow.
SPEAKER_00: Henry VIII married Arthur, his elder brother's widow, Catherine of Aragon.
SPEAKER_00: How did he justify that with the Pope?
SPEAKER_00: He said, it's biblical.
SPEAKER_00: Arthur and Catherine never consummated the marriage.
SPEAKER_00: They didn't have a kid.
SPEAKER_00: So, Pope, I'm willing to marry Catherine, and the son will be Arthur.
SPEAKER_00: It didn't work out.
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you know this.
SPEAKER_00: Like she only had girls and she had a lot of miscarriages.
SPEAKER_00: But that's where the Episcopal Church came from, leverite marriage.
SPEAKER_00: And I want to make sure how weird it is.
SPEAKER_00: And I want to make sure you hear why people didn't want to do it.
SPEAKER_00: If you're son number two, you're supposed to replace son number one.
SPEAKER_00: Now, I don't know if you know how an inheritance works, but the oldest kid gets 90% of goods.
SPEAKER_00: The second oldest kid gets 10%, and the remainders get nothing.
SPEAKER_00: So your older brother died.
SPEAKER_00: Now you're getting 90%.
SPEAKER_00: But you're gonna have a baby with your brother's widow, which is weird, and then that baby is now gonna get 90%, and you're back to 10.
SPEAKER_00: Who wants to do that?
SPEAKER_00: Hence the tension in the story.
SPEAKER_00: So Ruth's husband in chapter 1, verse 2, his name is weak in Hebrew.
SPEAKER_00: It means weak.
SPEAKER_00: And he has a brother named Sick.
SPEAKER_00: And weak and sick, they die a verse later.
SPEAKER_00: So now there's two widows and there's no male to claim the line, and Naomi says, I'm lost.
SPEAKER_00: And Ruth says, I'm gonna stick with you anyway, even though I'm not Hebrew.
SPEAKER_00: They move into town.
SPEAKER_00: Now, options for women were scant before Ruth Bader-Ginsburg allowed women to have credit cards.
SPEAKER_00: I hope you know this.
SPEAKER_00: So not a lot changed for a long time.
SPEAKER_00: Women could rely on their fathers for charity, or they could become prostitutes, or they could glean in fields.
SPEAKER_00: Ruth has been gleaning in fields, like picking up the berries that didn't get picked.
SPEAKER_00: What kind of berries are those?
SPEAKER_00: The gross ones.
SPEAKER_00: Boaz has been giving her extra berries, as it were.
SPEAKER_00: He's been leaving her extras so that she can scrounge for food.
SPEAKER_00: But you know what he hasn't done?
SPEAKER_00: He has not impregnated her so that she can have a son who will take all of Boaz's possessions.
SPEAKER_00: So they decide to take matters into their own hands.
SPEAKER_00: By the way, I'm not making this up.
SPEAKER_00: We just read the story.
SPEAKER_00: I want to make sure I'm really quick.
SPEAKER_00: So, what does Naomi do?
SPEAKER_00: She says, Ruth, I want you to put on some Chanel number five.
SPEAKER_00: I hope you see where this is going.
SPEAKER_00: And I want you to put on your best clothes.
SPEAKER_00: Maybe even put the fish net stockings on.
SPEAKER_00: Then I want you to go to the threshing floor where Boaz has worked all day, but wait till he gets drunk.
SPEAKER_00: You see that?
SPEAKER_00: Wait till he's eaten and had something to drink.
SPEAKER_00: Then I want you to, now this is gonna sound a little graphic, because it is, but it's, I mean, I want you to uncover his thighs, and I want to make sure you understand what that means.
SPEAKER_00: This is a euphemism.
SPEAKER_00: It's even more coded in Hebrew.
SPEAKER_00: Hebrew is a language that only has 10,000 words.
SPEAKER_00: Greek has a hundred thousand words.
SPEAKER_00: And oddly enough, Hebrew does not have words for, well, our bits.
SPEAKER_00: You know?
SPEAKER_00: And Hebrew also doesn't have words for intercourse.
SPEAKER_00: It says, you knew somebody or you lay down with them.
SPEAKER_00: You, I mean, I got to know you.
SPEAKER_00: I could have laid down next to one of my dogs.
SPEAKER_00: So there's this double entendre happening.
SPEAKER_00: And the real double entendre is in Hebrew is the word feet.
SPEAKER_00: The word feet seems to be a double entendre for genitals.
SPEAKER_00: So when you hear that the cherubim and the seraphim have three sets of wings, one with which they cover their face, one with which they fly, and one with which they cover their feet.
SPEAKER_00: It's not their feet.
SPEAKER_00: It's their thighs.
SPEAKER_00: Is that okay?
SPEAKER_00: So I want you to imagine this.
SPEAKER_00: This is not the morality that I learned in church for my daughter.
SPEAKER_00: Ruth gets dolled up and she uncovers his feet.
SPEAKER_00: And what does she do?
SPEAKER_00: She lays down next to them.
SPEAKER_00: And then he'll tell you what to do.
SPEAKER_00: What do you think he's going to tell her to do?
SPEAKER_00: Clearly, Boaz has been stalling and not doing his duty.
SPEAKER_00: So, women do what they've always done.
SPEAKER_00: They say, here's what it takes for us to survive, and frankly, here's what it takes for our family name, which wasn't even ours, it belonged to our father.
SPEAKER_00: We are serving our father and the God of our father by having boy children take on the name.
SPEAKER_00: Now, why did I say, thank God this doesn't exist?
SPEAKER_00: I hope you know why.
SPEAKER_00: This is why we need things like women's rights.
SPEAKER_00: But that's not the world they lived in.
SPEAKER_00: Now, if this sounds kind of weedy to you, it sounds real weedy to me, but understand that without Ruth doing this, there's no King David and there's no Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Because they come from this.
SPEAKER_00: From a woman forcing a man to do what God had commanded, and he chose not to do because it would have impoverished him.
SPEAKER_00: Again, this is why I think we need government, protecting our rights.
SPEAKER_00: I hope you're there.
SPEAKER_00: I said it in a sermon.
SPEAKER_00: Because if you leave it up to people to do when it's convenient for them, what do you know?
SPEAKER_00: We don't like doing things that are convenient for us.
SPEAKER_00: That's why we have regulations, and that's why we hear how we need to reorder our lives.
SPEAKER_00: You see, being faithful to God is not contingent on whether I want to do it.
SPEAKER_00: That's why I come back to church week after week, because it's not about what I want.
SPEAKER_00: We say this in the Lord's Prayer Thy will be done.
SPEAKER_00: Usually what we mean is, God, as long as you want what I want, we're good.
SPEAKER_00: And that's why I think maybe we're being really asked to consider what's weak.
SPEAKER_00: Now, am I going to tell my daughter, hey, when push comes to shove, let me give you a strategy.
SPEAKER_00: Put on the channel number five.
SPEAKER_00: And then wait till they're drunk.
SPEAKER_00: No, I'm not going to do that.
SPEAKER_00: But I also want to recognize there's something so immoral about this that is incredibly faithful.
SPEAKER_00: And I think until we can do that, we live in really, really tight guarded plots that look exactly like we want them to look, and nothing like the kingdom of God.
SPEAKER_00: You ever looked at somebody else and said, you clearly did the wrong thing?
SPEAKER_00: So you have sinned against God and you deserve what you get.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I'll tell you, that's the substance of the movie Les Rod.
SPEAKER_00: It's about a poor man who steals bread because he's starving and he goes to jail for 14 years.
SPEAKER_00: Do you know this play?
SPEAKER_00: And who is the weed?
SPEAKER_00: It's the bishop.
SPEAKER_00: The bishop gives him all the silver so he can start a second life.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's crazy.
SPEAKER_00: I'm not doing that, by the way.
SPEAKER_00: I'm not doing that for you.
SPEAKER_00: And yet that's the redemptive moment of the story, right?
SPEAKER_00: Is that all of this stuff exists not for its own.
SPEAKER_00: It exists to bring us to God.
SPEAKER_00: Weedy, sorry, controversial, which maybe means extraordinary, which maybe means we better reorder what's ordinary for us.
SPEAKER_00: Now, one other thing I want to I want to give you, two other things I want to give you.
SPEAKER_00: Because maybe you don't know what the takeaway is.
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if there is a takeaway, other than what we settle for might not be what God settles for.
SPEAKER_00: The truth is there are parts of myself I don't like very much.
SPEAKER_00: All of us, I don't know if you realize this, you're not just one person, you've got a lot of parts in you.
SPEAKER_00: Some of those parts have names, like the taskmaster, the one who's like, get off your butt, stop being lazy.
SPEAKER_00: Or the accomplisher, like, hey, you're only worthwhile if you do stuff.
SPEAKER_00: Or even the critic that's like, you will be no good, so don't do that.
SPEAKER_00: Anybody know about these parts?
SPEAKER_00: You got them, I guarantee you.
SPEAKER_00: You can hate those parts and you can tell them to leave, and guess what?
SPEAKER_00: They'll never do.
SPEAKER_00: They'll never leave.
SPEAKER_00: Do you know why?
SPEAKER_00: Because they're part of you.
SPEAKER_00: And all that stuff they're doing is trying to help you.
SPEAKER_00: They exist because they're trying to protect you from being hurt.
SPEAKER_00: That's why they say don't try that.
SPEAKER_00: They don't want to see you try and fail.
SPEAKER_00: That's why they say, keep going all the time, because then no one can call you out for being lazy.
SPEAKER_00: Those are parts of you.
SPEAKER_00: They might be weedy in your eyes, but that's because you haven't understood their virtues.
SPEAKER_00: What I'll tell you is trying to kill those parts of ourselves means killing parts of ourselves.
SPEAKER_00: First of all, it won't even work.
SPEAKER_00: And second of all, God loves you just like you are.
SPEAKER_00: So we either become reconciled to our parts or we're always at war with ourselves.
SPEAKER_00: I hope you hear that.
SPEAKER_00: What's great is it's a school of therapy called Internal Family Systems.
SPEAKER_00: And they say, hey, you know, do you want to change?
SPEAKER_00: Do you want to change those parts of you?
SPEAKER_00: You meet them and you appreciate what they've been trying to do.
SPEAKER_00: You say, Oh man, I see what you're trying to do.
SPEAKER_00: I was scolded when I was a kid, and you're just trying to protect that.
SPEAKER_00: And guess what?
SPEAKER_00: We're grown up now, we've got more resources.
SPEAKER_00: So what if I gave you a different job?
SPEAKER_00: What if instead of saying, don't try it, you were like, come on, let's try it.
SPEAKER_00: Usually those parts that you were like, that sounds really fun, let's give it a go.
SPEAKER_00: Right?
SPEAKER_00: This is not a gospel of annihilation that Jesus is preaching.
SPEAKER_00: It's a gospel of reconciliation.
SPEAKER_00: And the truth is, I think if we can't be reconciled to those parts of ourselves we're not comfortable with, how can we be reconciled with somebody who drives or boats or dresses differently from us?
SPEAKER_00: When we hate them, we're actually just hating ourselves.
SPEAKER_00: I don't hear any gospel in that, friends.
SPEAKER_00: I don't.
SPEAKER_00: This is where I think Jesus might be inviting us to consider what's in the weeds.
SPEAKER_00: Now, here's my weed story, and I tell it probably annually.
SPEAKER_00: I want you to hear why I'm an Episcopalian, because it has to do with weeds.
SPEAKER_00: I attended church in downtown Elkahoma, which is like uh inland from the coast in San Diego, and it used to be a real nice white neighborhood.
SPEAKER_00: Everybody was white, and everybody had good white values, and then there was this demographic shift, and what do you know, they built a prison like three blocks away from the church.
SPEAKER_00: So, you know, all of a sudden there was a lot of economic and socioeconomic diversity.
SPEAKER_00: And beyond that, at the time, San Diego had more refugees per capita and per total than any city in the U.S.
SPEAKER_00: That's Houston now, by the way, more refugees than anywhere, including New York City.
SPEAKER_00: But it was San Diego.
SPEAKER_00: So I attended this church, and you know, some of the people, some of the white flight, they didn't flee.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, they moved out, but they still came back to church because it was their church.
SPEAKER_00: The lady in front of me, I always sat in the second room.
SPEAKER_00: The lady in front of me was about 85, and she was dressed like a steel magnolia, and her hair had probably been permed the day before, and it was immaculate.
SPEAKER_00: She wore pearls, and every time she came to the rail, she put on white gloves.
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you've seen them.
SPEAKER_00: It's kind of rare, but it exists.
SPEAKER_00: So there's that lady, like steel magnolia.
SPEAKER_00: And then there's me.
SPEAKER_00: And I've got all kinds of religious weirdness, right?
SPEAKER_00: And I'm just trying to get it all right.
SPEAKER_00: And then there's my six-year-old son who was adopted from foster care, and God, his dad was hard on him, because if he knocked that dealer over, his dad escaped him a death stare.
SPEAKER_00: He came up next to me.
SPEAKER_00: And the person who came up next to him was a Kieran refugee.
SPEAKER_00: She was like from Birmingham, Anmar, during that genocide.
SPEAKER_00: And she became an Anglican in the refugee camp, and she got resettled here in San Diego.
SPEAKER_00: I don't even know how much uh language she spoke, and I do know that every time she came up, she put on a lace veil.
SPEAKER_00: Right?
SPEAKER_00: She came next to my son.
SPEAKER_00: And then the one who came next to her was a homeless guy.
SPEAKER_00: See, the church had coffee hour every week, and I think he just wanted the cake.
SPEAKER_00: I think he just wanted the cake.
SPEAKER_00: But he felt like he needed to go to church to get the cake.
SPEAKER_00: So there he was.
SPEAKER_00: Right now.
SPEAKER_00: So so I've got the steel magnolia, and I've got recovering me, and I've got my traumatized kid, and I've got this refugee, and I've got this homeless guy.
SPEAKER_00: And then all of a sudden there's just one cup.
SPEAKER_00: There's just one.
SPEAKER_00: We didn't get plastic glasses that were like ostensibly sanitary and each other owned, and we got one.
SPEAKER_00: And that's the miracle of the Eucharist, which I hear.
SPEAKER_00: There is one cup.
SPEAKER_00: There is one table.
SPEAKER_00: And all that bitterness I thought was just garbage.
SPEAKER_00: But that's why I come back to the Eucharist every week.
SPEAKER_00: See, there's people who say we water it down by doing it every week.
SPEAKER_00: I need every week to be reminded that there is one cup.
SPEAKER_00: No matter how weedy I might think somebody is, because I don't love myself, God loves us enough to serve us with one.
SPEAKER_00: If you're like me, you are going to need a lot.