Sermon – 07-23-23 – Proper 11 – Cycle A
Scriptures: Isaiah 44:6-8; Psalm 86:11-17; Romans 8:12-25; Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
Sermon Title: “Balancing Despair with Hope”

Despair or hope; sinking sand or solid, stable rock? Have you found yourself operating on shifting sand instead of solid rock? Sometimes we even base our lives on water and even just air. Our lives come crashing down, sometimes quickly, sometimes very gradually until we find our lives floating away from ourselves. We are left “high and dry” as we sometimes say. I think “low and wet” would be a better choice of words when our lives crash.

Maybe your life has never crashed! Good for you! You life must have been planted on Jesus Christ the Rock. Probably most of us have found ourselves off a rock at some time in our lives because the grass was growing greener over there.

Hearing the Isaiah passage today, God is actually boasting. “I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god. . . . Is there any god besides me? There is no other rock; I know not one.”

What are some ways of living on shifting and sinking sand instead of on firm rock? Paul is saying in Romans, “. . .for if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit, you put to death the deeds of the body.” Then, you will live.” Is Paul saying that our entire lives need to revolve around God; that if we allow ourselves any non-religious pleasures we are on sinking sand? The secret is this: It depends if we are using our bodies in a way that leads us away from God instead of leading us toward God. Are we thinking that our bodies belong to ourselves and not to God?

Think about when we say God created us and loves us and had plans for us before we were conceived. [Jeremiah 1 and Psalm 139]. Think about when we say that the Holy Spirit dwells within us. Maybe our bodies and minds are something like the field about which Jesus is speaking in our Matthew passage. The weeds and the wheat are growing together.

Evil and wrong are growing with the Good and the right. How can we tell the difference? Which are we in a field of people? Are we the weeds or are we the good plants? I propose that sometimes we are the weeds and sometimes we are the good stuff. It depends how we are acting and what we are saying at a certain point of time. How can we tell which of our deeds or words are okay and which are hurting someone?

Keeping an open mind and thinking of others instead of just ourselves will help us to know what helps and what hurts. If we think how we would feel if someone did or said to us what we are saying and doing to the other person, if we put ourselves in the place of the other person, our mind might go “pop pop” and we find ourselves saying to ourselves, “Oh my, that was very unkind of me. I was only thinking of myself.” Then we are a weed!

On the other hand, when we act and speak kindly – truly kindly – we are the good stuff!

The question is, “How can we be the good stuff most of the time?” Believe me, I think those of you who are here in these pews, being captive and polite, and those of you on YouTube and telephone are very close to being good stuff all the time, maybe even all the time. So you should tell me how you do it.

There is a field next to our yard. The people who use the field sometimes have corn but in recent years, it is soybeans. Have you ever seen a ripe soybean field in the shining sun? It is like a field of gold. That does not happen every year. And one year an evil plant started growing in the corner of this field. It looked nice. It was certainly healthy and ambitious. I thought it was a cucumber vine or a pumpkin vine. Alas, no cucumbers, no pumpkins!

Each year it grew further into the field and was branching out sideways. Finally, the farmer had to lose a season of soybeans and spray the whole field to kill everything. It looked devastated! Awful! Bleak! Especially during the drought of May. But then the rains came. The newly planted soybean seeds grew to be energetic soybean plants. As the earth was once more turning green after the drought, those soybean plants flourished. The evil vine was gone. We will hope it is gone forever. But as you know, evil does not give up easily so we will watch and wait.

Our Matthew passage ends with these words, “Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.” The good plants and the good people will reflect the light of Jesus and be golden like the field of soybeans.

This goodness comes to the people who are standing and building on the rock. This goodness comes to the people who know there is only one God – our God, our Rock.

So when a bit of despair or a deluge of despair hits our lives, we can seat ourselves on the rock that is Jesus and we can watch the hope gently and gradually seep into our souls or hope can explode within us suddenly. Whichever way hope arrives in our souls, we need to celebrate and cling to the rock that is Jesus.