SPEAKER_00: Blessed be God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: Let's pray together.
SPEAKER_00: Almighty God, to you all sorcerer, all the science.
SPEAKER_00: And from you no secrets are hidden.
SPEAKER_00: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you and worthily magnify thy holy name through Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: Let us pray.
SPEAKER_00: Put away from us, we entreat you, all hurtful things.
SPEAKER_00: Give us those things which are profitable for us.
SPEAKER_00: Through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you in the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: Please be seated.
SPEAKER_01: Today our reading is from Isaiah.
SPEAKER_01: Listen to me, all you that pursue righteousness, and all you that seek the author of life.
SPEAKER_01: Look to the rock from which you were hewed, and to the glory from which you were done.
SPEAKER_01: Look to Abraham, your father, and to Sarah, the wry that did labor for you all.
SPEAKER_01: He was just one when I called him.
SPEAKER_01: But I blessed him and made him many.
SPEAKER_01: For the God who saves has comforted Zion, for she has comforted all her waste places, and she shall make her wilderness like Eden, her desert like the garden of the Creator of all, and her joy and gladness will be found in her, thanksgiving and the song of sound, and her sorrow and mourning will flee away.
SPEAKER_01: Listen to me, my people, and my nation to give me heed, for a teaching shall for me go forth, and my justice or a light unto the peoples.
SPEAKER_01: I will do so suddenly, for my deliverance is near, but my salvation has gone aboard, and with my arms will govern the peoples.
SPEAKER_01: For me the coastlands wait, and for my arm they await.
SPEAKER_01: Lift up your eyes to the heavens and look to the earth below.
SPEAKER_01: For the heavens will smoke like smoke will vanish, and earth like a garment will wear out, and those who live on it will die like men.
SPEAKER_01: Yet my salvation will be forever, and my deliverance will never be broken.
SPEAKER_01: Today the psalm is Psalm 92, read responsibly by the Hatverse.
SPEAKER_01: It is good to give thanks to the ageless God, to sing praises to your name most high, to declare your faithful love in the morning, and trust me by night, upon the ten strings and the harp, upon the life.
SPEAKER_01: For you have made me glad, the wellspring of life by your work, at the works of your hands and her joy.
SPEAKER_01: How great are your works in the womb of creation, and your designs are so very profound.
SPEAKER_01: A righteous woman or man flourishes like a palm tree, and grows like a cedar in a black.
SPEAKER_01: They are planted in the house of she who is holy, and the horse of our God, still producing fruit in their elder years.
SPEAKER_01: They declare that the mighty God is upright.
SPEAKER_02: I could not speak to you all as spiritual, but rather as carnal, as infant in Christ.
SPEAKER_02: I fed you all with milk, but not solid food.
SPEAKER_02: For you were not yet ready for solid food.
SPEAKER_02: Even now you are still not ready.
SPEAKER_02: For you all are still carnal.
SPEAKER_02: Given there is still jealousy and discord among you, you are not.
SPEAKER_02: You are not a carnal and going around.
SPEAKER_02: Are you not carnal and going around as merely human?
SPEAKER_02: For one says I am Paul's and another I'm Apollo's.
SPEAKER_02: Are you not merely a human?
SPEAKER_02: What then is Apollo's?
SPEAKER_02: What is Apollo?
SPEAKER_02: The minister through whom you came to believe, as a Messiah granted to each person.
SPEAKER_02: I planted, Apollo's water, but God produces growth.
SPEAKER_02: Therefore, neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything.
SPEAKER_02: Rather, it is God who produces growth, and the one who plants and the one who waters are alike, and each will receive wages according to their labor.
SPEAKER_02: For we are God's co-workers, working together.
SPEAKER_02: You are God's cultivation, God's construction.
SPEAKER_02: The word of the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus also said to the women and men around him, With what can we represent the realm of God?
SPEAKER_00: Or in what parable shall we put it?
SPEAKER_00: It is like a mustard seed, which when sown upon the earth is smaller than all the other seeds on earth.
SPEAKER_00: Yet when it is sown, it grows up and becomes bigger than all other shrubs, and produces large branches, so that the birds of the heavens can nest in its shade.
SPEAKER_00: Now, with many such parables, Jesus spoke the word to them as they were able to hear, and Jesus did not speak to them except in parables, however, privately, he explained everything to his disciples.
SPEAKER_00: The gospel of the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: Well, a reminder that we are now in the church season that we call ordinary time, and gentle reminder, you've heard this before.
SPEAKER_00: This does not mean nothing happens.
SPEAKER_00: This means this is our time to reorder the liturgy of our lives according to what happened on Pentecost, according to what happened on Trinity Sunday.
SPEAKER_00: And, well, today's no exception.
SPEAKER_00: So I want to share with you first that there is actually very little unique in what Jesus says in the Gospels.
SPEAKER_00: This may come as a surprise.
SPEAKER_00: Other religious teachers, including John the Baptist, pretty much got everything he said.
SPEAKER_00: The one thing that is different about Jesus actually is this particular form of teaching we get today, the form of the parable.
SPEAKER_00: It seems like he invented this particular way of speech, looking through ancient Near Eastern, for lack of a better word, pedagogy.
SPEAKER_00: So you're probably familiar with parables if you've been to church before.
SPEAKER_00: And quite honestly, many of us have grown up hearing that a parable is a way of taking something we don't understand, something that is transcendent or ephemeral, like God or the kingdom of God, and comparing it to something we know very well, so that at the end of the day, aha, God is just like a box of chocolates.
SPEAKER_00: You never know what you're going to get.
SPEAKER_00: Unless you read the instructions, and then you do know.
SPEAKER_00: Right?
SPEAKER_00: So that is called analogic reasoning.
SPEAKER_00: And the analogic reasoning of this parable is very clear.
SPEAKER_00: Faith starts really small, almost imperceptibly small, and can grow into a really big bush.
SPEAKER_00: And to be honest, there's probably a lot of life experience that many major changes in our lives started small and they took root and they grew.
SPEAKER_00: The thing is, if you wanted to say that, you could just say that.
SPEAKER_00: Right?
SPEAKER_00: In fact, it would be much easier to just say faith starts small and then it grows up.
SPEAKER_00: I'd like to, and again, you may find yourself tuning out.
SPEAKER_00: So the window's nice, those windows are nice.
SPEAKER_00: If I lose you, just enjoy the view, right?
SPEAKER_00: But I would like to suggest to you a different way of approaching all parables.
SPEAKER_00: That is to say, parables are not analogies.
SPEAKER_00: Instead, so my preferred uh scholastic teaching goes, parables are metaphors.
SPEAKER_00: Now, in grade school, I learned that there's two kinds of analogies: similes and metaphors.
SPEAKER_00: A simile uses the word like or as, and a metaphor doesn't.
SPEAKER_00: But that's a really silly distinction, right?
SPEAKER_00: Like why would we have two words for essentially the same thing?
SPEAKER_00: It turns out most literary theorists will tell you that metaphors and similes are not comparable, but a metaphor compares two things that are fundamentally incomparable.
SPEAKER_00: A better word for a metaphor is irony.
SPEAKER_00: Well, what would that look like in this parable?
SPEAKER_00: By the way, the mustard seed is not the smallest seed.
SPEAKER_00: Poppies are smaller.
SPEAKER_00: The mustard bush is not the biggest bush either.
SPEAKER_00: It's not.
SPEAKER_00: What's interesting about mustard, though, are a couple of things, and I'll just track with you what these might mean as we go through.
SPEAKER_00: One is that mustard is invasionary.
SPEAKER_00: To give you an analogy, mustard is like mint.
SPEAKER_00: You wouldn't plant it next to your strawberry plant because it will uproot the strawberry.
SPEAKER_00: The other thing that mustard does, very similar to mint, is that it will not over eventually overwhelm the plant you want, it will also overwhelm the flavor of the plant you want.
SPEAKER_00: So again, analogically, if you planted mint next to a strawberry, it's a strange taste you end up with.
SPEAKER_00: Like minty.
SPEAKER_00: Mustard sheds its flavor as well.
SPEAKER_00: Okay, alright, so what could that be?
SPEAKER_00: Well, if God's realm is indeed like an invasionary plant, okay, that takes over the flavor, well, maybe the application is that God is not interested in us having private gardens.
SPEAKER_00: God's not interested in us saying, God, you can take this much of my life, but that ends here, and this is my private time and space.
SPEAKER_00: Perhaps the kingdom of God beckons us, everything in your life should taste like God.
SPEAKER_00: And I'm going to invade it until it does.
SPEAKER_00: And here's the caveat.
SPEAKER_00: You may not even like how the kingdom of God tastes.
SPEAKER_00: I don't always.
SPEAKER_00: I like my private garden.
SPEAKER_00: And sometimes I like being right.
SPEAKER_00: Often, I like being right with the accompaniment that you must be wrong.
SPEAKER_00: So perhaps Jesus is pushing us that those flavors might need to be overwhelmed, invaded.
SPEAKER_00: Take two.
SPEAKER_00: According to, and again, I'm not I'm not this guy, but I've read these guys and gals, according to these guys and gals who do ancient Near Eastern research, there are some customary prohibitions against planting mustard in your garden.
SPEAKER_00: That is to say, it's against the law.
SPEAKER_00: Why?
SPEAKER_00: Because it's an invasionary weed that will overcome all the produce that you have.
SPEAKER_00: So the kingdom of God is like an illegal planting.
SPEAKER_00: Probably.
SPEAKER_00: Here's why I want to say that.
SPEAKER_00: Because the guys who were around Jesus, and we only know about the guys, we don't know the number of the women, and in general, probably the women understood it.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus has to explain this to the men because they probably didn't get it.
SPEAKER_00: They were around him three years, and if you notice every story, they don't know what he's doing at all.
SPEAKER_00: They always say, How can that be, Lord?
SPEAKER_00: And he has to explain it to them.
SPEAKER_00: Why does he have to explain it to them?
SPEAKER_00: Because they, like me, so often don't want to hear what he has to say.
SPEAKER_00: Which is that there are not only ideas, but there are human beings that we would like to make illegal.
SPEAKER_00: We would like to make them illegal because they are not convenient to us.
SPEAKER_00: What does that have to do with weeds?
SPEAKER_00: Well, having grown up with a botanist as a father, the definition of a weed is any plant you don't want.
SPEAKER_00: In an orange grove, a caterily is a weed.
SPEAKER_00: So what kind of people are illegal to God?
SPEAKER_00: Very different people than the ones that are illegal to us.
SPEAKER_00: I don't want to overdo this, but why do people, you know, there's always this saying, and you probably see this on social media somewhere, and your life is better off if you don't look at social media.
SPEAKER_00: We know that statistically.
SPEAKER_00: But I looked.
SPEAKER_00: And there is this phrase, well, why do people, why do we have to have Pride Month?
SPEAKER_00: And of course the answer is because there are people in the world who think they are better off being dead than being dead.
SPEAKER_00: Why don't we have heterosexual pride month?
SPEAKER_00: Because that's every month.
SPEAKER_00: So who's illegal to you?
SPEAKER_00: Because I guarantee you they are not illegal to God, and that's why we hear these stories that are frankly very abrasive.
SPEAKER_00: And then there's this other really weird bit.
SPEAKER_00: Any of you have a garden at home?
SPEAKER_00: Now, what do you not want coming into your garden?
SPEAKER_00: Squirrels and what else eats your stuff?
SPEAKER_00: Oh, birds.
SPEAKER_00: And what's the point of having the mustard bush so that it can support the birds?
SPEAKER_00: I don't know how that's analogic reasoning.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus is inviting us to consider that even our arch enemies, you know, like the ones who just want to take our stuff.
SPEAKER_00: Forgive me for saying this.
SPEAKER_00: In political rhetoric, these are the welfare queens.
SPEAKER_00: We grow our bush to support them.
SPEAKER_00: That's a tough.
SPEAKER_00: Teaching.
SPEAKER_00: You mean we're supposed to?
SPEAKER_00: Apparently so.
SPEAKER_00: And the disciples didn't get it, so it had to be explained.
SPEAKER_00: I don't get it.
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to have to explain it to myself again next year.
SPEAKER_00: So the kingdom of God is like an invasionary weed that wants to take over everything.
SPEAKER_00: It's against the law and it harbors its own natural enemies.
SPEAKER_00: Since that's so hard, it's probably right.
unknown: Right?
SPEAKER_00: That's the criteria.
SPEAKER_00: Since that's hard, it's probably right.
SPEAKER_00: Now look, we are between now and well, November, and I guarantee it won't be over then, we're going to hear a lot about weeds.
SPEAKER_00: You're even going to hear, so and so is the Antichrist, so and so is evil, so and so is illegal.
SPEAKER_00: You're going to hear all of these comments made about human beings, not about aspects of their behavior, about their very personhood.
SPEAKER_00: And I just want to remind you that when you find yourself agreeing with those statements, the weed is you.
SPEAKER_00: Not in your totality.
SPEAKER_00: That's a weed that is blocking produce that God wants to nourish the world.
SPEAKER_00: This may sound funny.
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to take a quick turn into 1 Corinthians.
SPEAKER_00: Because Paul is talking about this really interesting thing that I think we all get intuitively.
SPEAKER_00: Paul set up a ministry in Corinth, and what do you know?
SPEAKER_00: People started bickering about who the better priest was.
SPEAKER_00: Or who the better Sunday school teacher was.
SPEAKER_00: Now, look, it is lovely to know that the person who baptized your baby was a paragon of moral virtue.
SPEAKER_00: We want the best people doing the stuff for us, don't we?
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I do.
SPEAKER_00: I understand that reasoning.
SPEAKER_00: And that's what's happening in the Corinthian community.
SPEAKER_00: They're arguing about which one's the better person, because the better person must be more efficacious.
SPEAKER_00: So, let me rewind 1700 years ago when there was this thing called the Great Persecution.
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you've heard of it, but there was this Roman emperor named Diocletian, and he decided in the year 298 he was tired of the early Christian community.
SPEAKER_00: And the way he would take care of it is he would call in anybody accused of being Christian.
SPEAKER_00: Bounties aren't new.
SPEAKER_00: Texas didn't invent that.
SPEAKER_00: They would call in anybody accused of being Christian, and that person and the spot had to give a sacrifice to the genius of the emperor Diocletian or else die.
SPEAKER_00: As you can imagine, several people, priests and bishops and deacons included, came in and thought, well, you know, God's all about life, so I'll just do this and then I'll go home and I'll repent.
SPEAKER_00: This is called the Donatist controversy, if you want to know the historical term.
SPEAKER_00: It was a crisis for early Christians because they said, well, if the priest who baptized my kid used to be the paragon of virtue, now has committed a vice, maybe the stuff they were representing from God isn't good anymore.
SPEAKER_00: I hope you understand the reasoning.
SPEAKER_00: This is why we're often afraid to talk about heroes, saints, shiroes having made mistakes.
SPEAKER_00: Because we love living in black or white thinking.
SPEAKER_00: We love it.
SPEAKER_00: We don't want St.
SPEAKER_00: Francis to have been a little bit nuts.
SPEAKER_00: We want it to be perfect.
SPEAKER_00: If you'd like to know how the Donatist controversy ends, it goes like this: it is not the virtue of the priest, of the Sunday school teacher, of the actor, lay or ordained, that makes things work.
SPEAKER_00: It is the grace of God that makes things work.
SPEAKER_00: So even those who lapsed, the sacraments work, because it was never about them anyway, it was always about God.
SPEAKER_00: Why do I say that?
SPEAKER_00: Well, I just thought you should know about the Donatisys controversy.
SPEAKER_00: Actually, it's because I think we should remember that people will disappoint us.
SPEAKER_00: And that doesn't make them a wholesale weed.
SPEAKER_00: And there's also something really interesting about Isaiah talking about this planting.
SPEAKER_00: Again, I just am drawn to the weeds because I grew up working for my dad for like$3 an hour for years and years and years.
SPEAKER_00: And this is what we did.
SPEAKER_00: We pulled down weeds.
SPEAKER_00: And there is something really interesting about God's view, perhaps, as opposed to our own view.
SPEAKER_00: We typically like quick incremental change.
SPEAKER_00: Our efficacy is typically measured in minutes, okay, maybe in weeks, but rarely in geologic time.
SPEAKER_00: And there is something interesting about going to places like deserts or even somewhere like Yosemite and seeing essentially a large granite boulder which is impenetrable, have a tree growing out of it.
SPEAKER_00: How did it get there?
SPEAKER_00: Because weeds broke it down over time.
SPEAKER_00: You can't grow a sequoia on top of a granite boulder until there's been enough degradation from smaller plants that have allowed there to be enough soil for that sequoia seed to start to lay a tap root.
SPEAKER_00: Why am I mentioning sequoias?
SPEAKER_00: Because that's the equivalent of a cedar of Lebanon.
SPEAKER_00: It was the biggest tree in the ancient world people knew about.
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you've seen these.
SPEAKER_00: Boulders, out of which are growing trees.
SPEAKER_00: And maybe it's because God understands that what we call weeds an inconvenient actually might even be doing something for us.
SPEAKER_00: So often we might look in the mirror and want to uproot and punish ourselves and pull this stuff in that we don't like.
SPEAKER_00: And perhaps, perhaps those things we don't like about ourselves over time might just be preparing the soil for something that can be productive.
SPEAKER_00: You might be thinking, Mike, that just sounds like moral relativism.
SPEAKER_00: No, I think it's about grace.
SPEAKER_00: I think it's about grace.
SPEAKER_00: And I think it reminds us, actually, that if we had one wish from the genie in the bottom, perhaps the very best wish we could have is to be content with who we are.
SPEAKER_00: Oh no, I want more money.
SPEAKER_00: I want my 30-year-old body.
SPEAKER_00: Those things are transient.
SPEAKER_00: The only thing that's not is God loves you.
SPEAKER_00: And if God loves you, weeds and all, weeds and all, birds and all, and surely God loves the birds in your life.
SPEAKER_00: And the weeds that live across the street in your neighborhood.
SPEAKER_00: And surely God doesn't garden the world like we do.
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna have to explain this to myself next year.
SPEAKER_00: By the way, we get this parable every year.
SPEAKER_00: We get this every year, I think, because it's hard.
SPEAKER_00: And I'll just tell you, this is gonna be the most personal thing of all, and I know it's crazy.
SPEAKER_00: I hate mustard.
SPEAKER_00: I absolutely hate it.
SPEAKER_00: Uh as a kid, I just didn't eat condiments.
SPEAKER_00: I like I'm condiment phobia.
SPEAKER_00: And that even fits this even better, right?
SPEAKER_00: Part of my condiment phobia is you ever got mustard on a white shirt?
SPEAKER_00: I know it's the turmeric, not the mustard.
SPEAKER_00: I know that.
SPEAKER_00: But it's packaged in the yellow bottle, right?
SPEAKER_00: And if you've ever left the lid off in the fridge, it all tastes like that.
SPEAKER_00: And I hate it.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I'm scared to think like, what would happen if you took a picture of your esophagus after you ate?
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it would be all yellow, right?
SPEAKER_00: And I actually think there's something really important to me saying that I hate that condiment, and the kingdom of God is like things I hate.
SPEAKER_00: I actually think that's really, really important.
SPEAKER_00: It's like things I hate.
SPEAKER_00: And I think we're invited, frankly, to continue to reorder our lives, not until they look more like we want them to, but until they grow like and taste like and are completely uprooted by the kingdom of God thinking.