a sermon on Romans 13:8-14 and Matthew 18:15-20
preached on September 4, 2011, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Six years ago last Sunday, I stood in front of a worship service down in Oxford, Mississippi, and answered yes to nine questions before becoming a minister. One of them is incredibly beautiful and almost deceptively simple:

Will you seek to serve the people with energy, intelligence, imagination, and love?

Many of you who have been ordained as elders and deacons here have answered that same question, and I think it really describes the kind of attitude we are to bring to service in the church.

This week, as Lisa and I were working on outlining, writing, and editing a couple of documents that are required by recent changes to the Book of Order, we found a strange variation on this great question. One of the checklists of the things that needed to be included in our new document asked if we were doing whatever task with “energy, intelligence, and imagination” – but not love. Who decided that we could do anything without love? Obviously the authors of this checklist had forgotten the great wisdom of the Beatles:

I’m not sure that the apostle Paul would completely agree with Ringo, George, John, and Paul, but love sure seems to be all we need based on the portion of the letter to the Romans we read this morning. Here Paul brackets many important commandments by summing them up in the single action word “love.”

Owe no one anything, except to love one another.

The one who loves has fulfilled the law.

Love your neighbor as yourself.

Love does no wrong to a neighbor.

Love is the fulfilling of the law.

For Paul, love is the center of the way of life for those who follow Jesus – it shapes each and every day as we try to make our lives more and more like the way of life that God intends, as we set aside the old ways that leave us in darkness and take up a new way that brings us the full way of life and light in Christ. That love is what we signify today as we bring one of our children for the Sacrament of Baptism – the love of God that goes before us, beside us, behind us, in us, and through us to show us the way that God intends so that she might know and grow into the light of new life as the new day nears.

For Paul, love sure seems to be all that we need, but as usual, Jesus gives us a dose of reality. In our other reading this morning from the gospel according to Matthew, Jesus talks about what to do when love isn’t quite so present and people do wrong against one another.

It’s a pretty simple process that he proposes. First, directly confront the person who has done you wrong in private. If that works, great – you’re done. If that doesn’t work, go back and take one or two others with you so that no one is alone. If the other person still refuses to come clean about what he or she did wrong, bring the issue to the gathered community. And if that still doesn’t work, send the offender on his or her way. Jesus even says to treat the unrepentant “as a Gentile and a tax collector” – but he himself was notorious for welcoming Gentiles and tax collectors and sinners of every sort into his presence when no one else would!

Jesus continued by suggesting that the disciples had a great deal of power and authority to bind and loose things on earth as in heaven and to make things happen by simply agreeing with one another. He concludes these instructions with a well-known saying that gets used pretty often around small churches like ours: “For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”

But the focus here is less on making a small group of the faithful feel comfortable and more on recognizing the importance of community, for throughout this section Jesus makes it clear that we need one another. We need others to correct us in the ways of love when we go astray. We need others so that we can learn from one another’s right actions and mistakes. And we need one another so that we can see Jesus in our midst, for we can’t see Jesus in the mirror, but we can see Jesus in one another. As pastor Jin Kim puts it, “We are not free from each other; we are free in each other.” (Feasting on the Word, Year A, Volume 4, p. 48)

And so when we put it all together it is in one another that we see the love that we so desperately need, the love that is all we need – not just a romantic love that fulfills a deep carnal desire, not just some halfhearted love that takes and takes and does not give anything back, not just a love that will make sense one day – but when we are at our best we see in one another the love that we see in Jesus Christ – a love that does no wrong, a love that offers honest and real and direct confrontation when things go awry, a love that shines light into the darkness of the world, a love that becomes clear whenever and wherever we gather faithfully as the community of those who love and serve and follow Jesus Christ.

We show that love today in the sign and seal of this water. We show that love whenever and wherever two or three or thirty or forty gather. And we show that love each and every day in our lives in the world, living out the love we have seen in Jesus Christ and in one another as we fulfill the law and love our neighbors near and far with energy, intelligence, imagination, and, yes, love.

May God give us all the love we need – and continue to show us all the love we have seen in Jesus Christ in and through one another – so that we might never leave out love until all things are made new.

Lord, come quickly!

Amen.

a sermon on Matthew 15:21-28 for the 20th Sunday of Ordinary Time
preached on August 14, 2011, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Back in Sunday school, I learned a lot of fun and interesting stories about Jesus healing the sick, but I don’t think we ever studied today’s gospel reading from Matthew. In all those great stories from my childhood, Jesus seemed to welcome anyone and everyone who needed to be healed. He was glad when some folks cut a hole in the roof and lowered down a man on a cot to get through the crowd that had mobbed the house. He stopped everything to offer healing when an unclean woman in the crowd crept up to him and touched his cloak, even though it meant that a more powerful man who sought healing for his daughter would see his daughter die during the delay before Jesus arrived at his house. Jesus even stopped on the side of the road to heal a blind man who didn’t even ask for it.

The stories of Sunday school stuck with me to this day. Over and over again, Jesus reached out to unexpected people who were simply in his path and seemed to be in need to offer them his healing power and touch and to invite them to be a part of the new way of life he was bringing into the world.

So amidst all these wonderful stories I learned in Sunday school, today’s reading sounds quite different, making me wonder if we’re even talking about the same Jesus. Here, when a Canaanite woman meets Jesus and asks him to heal her daughter, he ignores her. It’s almost like he was walking the sidewalks of New York City or something – he doesn’t even acknowledge her and keeps on walking! But she keeps following him and pestering the disciples, so much so that they come and ask Jesus to do something about her: “Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.” Jesus encourages their narrow-mindedness, remarking loudly in hopes that the woman would hear, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”

Still, this Gentile woman does not leave them alone. She finally throws herself at the feet of Jesus, echoing the cries of the psalms: “Lord, help me.” But Jesus has nothing to do with her and instead offers her what sounds to me like an insult to her and her status: “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

But this persistent woman just doesn’t give up. She spars with Jesus one more time: “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.” Jesus gives in. “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And the woman’s daughter is healed instantly.

It makes sense to me why we don’t teach this story in Sunday school – Jesus doesn’t look all that good here. In my view, he comes off as something close to a real jerk. First, Jesus tries to completely ignore someone in need who seeks him out. While countless others have been welcomed to his healing grace, and some have even received it without asking for it or giving permission, here Jesus chooses not to care about the woman. He seems to be too busy – the healer is not in, so too bad if you showed up today expecting something from him. That doesn’t seem to be the norm for Jesus, but it’s what this story makes clear.

But if that’s not enough, Jesus picks and chooses who he will help here based on race and culture and maybe gender too. This woman is not an Israelite, so she’s just not important enough to demand his attention today. But Jesus has healed Gentiles before, so if you ask me, Jesus is just being mean.

And at least to my ears, Jesus seems incredibly disrespectful. You just don’t respond to someone’s plea for help by suggesting that helping her would be like throwing good food to the dogs. For the savior of the whole world to behave in this way toward a woman who just wanted her daughter to be well just doesn’t seem right.

Too often, we try to explain all this away. Several commentators on this story suggest that Jesus is just trying to keep focused on his main mission that he declared from the very beginning – a ministry in and among and toward the people of Israel, a grounding that then gives him the ability to reach beyond this initial group and do something more. Other commentators insist that this story would mean something different to its first hearers, that they wouldn’t be offended by Jesus calling this woman a dog or that his seeming insult to our ears was not quite that bad after all.

But even considering all this, even if there are good theological and narrative reasons for Jesus’ actions in this story, I’m not entirely comfortable with a savior who lives out his mission first by ignoring someone crying out in need and then by comparing her to a dog. Instead, I think our last hymn speaks more truthfully about the way God in Christ responds to the cry of the poor and needy:

Heaven shall not wait for the poor to lose their patience…
Jesus is Lord; he has championed the unwanted;
in him injustice confronts its timely end.

– John L. Bell and Graham Maule

But even if this image of a savior is problematic for us, even if we don’t see Jesus acting at his best here, I think we can still get a little hope from Jesus’ encounter with the Canaanite woman. Here we get a little glimpse of a very human Jesus who is a little more like us. Here Jesus is so focused on the big picture that even he misses out on the small details that matter too. Here Jesus responds to the pressures of his friends and falls short of the kind of interaction with this woman even he would expect. Here Jesus is open to being challenged and called out to embrace new and different perspectives even by people who he tried to shoo off. And here Jesus goes beyond his original assumptions to think about things differently when the old way doesn’t show the fullness of life for all people.

Now this doesn’t mean that we have to like the Jesus we hear about today, and we don’t have to start teaching about him in Sunday school, either, but nonetheless he remains one and the same savior. He remains fully human and fully God. He responds to our pleas for help whether it is the first time or the hundredth time. He heals our every ill and makes us whole as only he can do. He offers up his life on our behalf in his death, and he opens up a new way of hope for us today and every day in his resurrection.

And it is this same Jesus who calls us out of his own experience not to act as he did with this Canaanite woman but to deal generously with all those in need, to embody compassion and hope in every encounter, to share from our abundance and give up our privilege of place and power, to show the new life we have in Christ as we respond to the need of the world, and to join in God’s work of remaking even this world, acting “in our present imperfection” to show that Jesus is Lord even now and steps in to transform all things into the new creation that God intends.

So may we for once not act as Jesus does but instead show the fullness of his love and compassion for all people from the very beginning and cry out in faith and action until all things are made new through the new life we have in him.

Lord, come quickly! Amen.

a sermon on Matthew 14:22-33 for the Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
preached on August 7, 2011, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

It was not a good night for the disciples to be out on the lake alone. They were expert boaters, many of them – after all, Jesus had called several of them to put aside their nets while fishing – but in this storm, they needed every set of hands they could get, including Jesus. But on this night, Jesus had sent them on ahead to the other side of the lake, planning to meet up with them the next morning after a little private retreat for prayer on the mountain, leaving them alone to struggle against the elements on the lake. The wind was against them, the waves were strong from the storm, the boat was taking a beating, and everything looked bleak. An extra set of hands would have helped, not to mention Jesus’ generally calming presence, but when they called out for him, he wasn’t even on the boat but rather off on his own praying.

Does all this sound familiar? I’m not talking about how this was the first text I ever preached on for the congregation here exactly six years ago today – I’m talking about how it sure seems pretty common for us to suffer through similar storms. The storms of life are rough – the waves batter us, the wind pushes us farther out from the land that we know, and sky keeps getting darker and darker. But like the disciples we could probably handle things if it were just the storms battering us. We not only face the wind and the waves – we seem to be so alone as we face them. Right when we need help the most, people don’t seem to show up. When times are tough, no one answers the phone or responds to our emails. Just when we are looking to others to fill in some of the gaps, we find that they are off on vacation or taking care of something that they have deemed more important or even off praying!

In the middle of the storm, just when things seemed to be at their worst, Jesus finished his time of prayer and decided to meet up with the disciples on the boat. He took the easiest and simplest route to join them – he walked out to the boat on the lake. This did absolutely nothing to ease the disciples’ fears and uncertainties amidst the storm – in fact, they just freaked out all the more because it just isn’t normal to see a man walking on water! When he saw all this, Jesus tried to calm their fears with simple words: “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.”

Still, Peter needed more proof that it was actually him, so he asked Jesus to have him come out on the water to meet him. So at Jesus’ instruction, Peter got out of the boat and started walking on the water – the water that only minutes before had been the source of all their fear and uncertainty was now supporting Peter’s full weight, and he had no reason to be afraid. But then he realized what was going on. He thought about exactly what was happening. This lifelong fisherman was walking on water in the middle of a storm that had him and his friends scared to death, and the wind and the waves finally overwhelmed his sense of Jesus’ presence. Peter began to sink and cried out to Jesus, “Lord, save me!” Jesus scooped him up like a divine lifeguard, then chided him for losing his footing: “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” Then as Jesus got into the boat with Peter, the wind and the waves calmed down, and they could do nothing but watch in amazement and worship Jesus because of his amazing signs and wonders beyond their understanding.

Just as happened with the disciples, Jesus often shows up unexpectedly in the midst of the storms of our lives, too. When things get weird and uncertain, something happens to ease our minds and open our hearts to a new way. When need a way out of a time that just seems to be getting worse and worse, something or someone unexpected shows up to change it all for the better. When the wind and the waves batter us and we just need a break, an unexpected visitor comes to calm things down a bit – even if we end up a bit scared of it all at first. But we also get overconfident and overzealous sometimes, wanting to show off what we have learned, hoping to get assurance that this new way that God opens for us will be safe and good and permanent, desiring to feel God’s presence a little more closely than is healthy for us. We end up back out amidst the wind and the waves again, feeling unsafe and uncertain all the more, questioning and doubting what we were up to in the first place, sinking amidst the storms of life, looking for God’s comfort and presence all over again. Still Jesus picks us up and helps us into the boat – then joins us there himself. We might get asked a little about what we were thinking, but that’s only out of the greatest imaginable love – not a critical, dismissive question rooted in fearfulness but an honest query of wonder about how we could ever doubt God’s amazing care and love for us.

So just when the disciples least expected it – and just when they needed it most – Jesus showed up, transforming their uncertainty into hope, their fear into new life, their doubt into confidence, and their despair into joy. May Jesus show up for us, too, today and always. Amen.

a sermon on Romans 8:26-38
preached at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone on July 24, 2011

The struggle and pain of our world seem to weigh so heavily upon us these days. It’s not just the heat and humidity that weigh down our spirits – the seemingly endless debates in Washington where it’s almost as if each side chooses not to budge on exactly the things where the other side will also not move, the economy that just keeps sagging in our lives even though almost all of the traditional measures say that we emerged from recession over a year ago, wars continuing to injure and kill the bodies and spirits of armed forces and civilians everywhere and yet have no real end in sight, and Friday’s horrific terrorist attacks in Oslo, Norway, with dozens dead and injured in senseless and unthinkable violence. Beyond these things in our world, many of us have things that weigh us down in our own lives – the ordinary frustrations of daily life only complicated recently by the dreadful and dangerous heat of the last few days, the illness and hurt that strike us and those we know and love all too often, and the death of our friends and loved ones, anticipated or not, that always makes our spirits sink a little because we have one less companion fully present with us on the journey.

So in moments like these, unintentionally but certainly providentially, the lectionary leads us to these familiar verses from Romans today. Paul knew the kind of pain and sorrow and suffering that we feel in these days, and I think he expected his readers to know it well, too. So he offered these incredible words of comfort and confidence in times of uncertainty to all who need hope for God’s presence. I think it’s worth hearing these words again, this time in the fresh translation of the Common English Bible that I hope we’ll be using more often in worship in the months ahead:

In the same way, the Spirit comes to help our weakness. We don’t know what we should pray, but the Spirit itself pleads our case with unexpressed groans. The one who searches hearts knows how the Spirit thinks, because it pleads for the saints, consistent with God’s will.

We know that God works all things together for good for the ones who love God, for those who are called according to his purpose. We know this because God knew them in advance, and he decided in advance that they would be conformed to the image of his Son. That way his Son would be the first of many brothers and sisters. Those whom he called, he also made righteous. Those whom he made righteous, he also glorified.

So what are we going to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He didn’t spare his own Son but gave him up for us all. Won’t he also freely give us all things with him?

Who will bring a charge against God’s elect people? It is God who acquits them. Who is going to convict them? It is Christ Jesus who died, even more, who was raised, and who also is at God’s right side. It is Christ Jesus who also pleads our case for us.

Who will separate us from Christ’s love? Will we be separated by trouble, or distress, or harassment, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, ‘We are being put to death all day long for your sake. We are treated like sheep for slaughter.’

But in all these things we win a sweeping victory through the one who loved us. I’m convinced that nothing can separate us from God’s love in Christ Jesus our Lord: not death or life, not angels or rulers, not present things or future things, not powers or height or depth, or any other thing that is created [– nothing can separate us from God’s love in Christ Jesus our Lord.]

There’s so much here for those who are enduring the troubles of the world, so much here for all the suffering and pain of our time, so much here for the things that divide us and seem to keep us separated from one another, so much here for anything and everything that makes us want to cry out to God in wonder and sorrow and lament.

Somehow in these simple words Paul manages to pull together the comfort and hope of the Christian faith – the amazement that the Spirit knows our prayers before we can even imagine them or voice anything, the comfort that comes in knowing that God’s relationship with us is so important that God chose us long before we could even think of choosing God, the blessed hope that God’s action for us in Jesus Christ overshadows everything else in all the world and is the seal of so many more promises, the confidence that the ultimate judge is our great redeemer Jesus Christ himself, and the wonder that in life and in death, wherever we are, wherever we have been, and wherever we go, we cannot and will not be separated from God’s love in Jesus Christ our Lord. Whenever we feel distant from God, disconnected from our sisters and brothers, lost in the uncertainty of our lives and our world, these words give us confidence and hope that even now God is transforming the pain and suffering of our lives into something far greater.

But these words seem empty sometimes, too. When the oppressive heat just doesn’t stop and we can’t cool off anymore, Paul’s words fall flat. When our political leaders just can’t seem to sort out how to work together to lead our nation through potential crisis, Paul doesn’t have much to say. And when innocent women, men, and children are bombed and shot by terrorists who claim that their actions are in the name of Christ and that God would have it no other way, these words offer us little comfort.

But then we hear that last promise again: nothing, not even our doubts, not even our emptiness, can separate us from God’s love in Jesus Christ. Nothing – not the struggles of illness or death, not the pain or sorrow of life and living, not the frustrations of a fractured political system, not oppressive heat and humidity, not the economy that just doesn’t seem to be able to fully bounce back, not the things of the everyday that get us down, not even the horrible misuse of the name of Christ that gives us confidence and hope. Nothing can separate us from God’s love in Jesus Christ our Lord.

These are the ultimate words of confidence and hope, words that assure us of everything we need to know, words that seal the promises of God in Jesus Christ upon our hearts. Anglican theologian N.T. Wright pulls it all together:

This love of God calls across the dark intervals of meaning, reaches into the depths of human despair, embraces those who live in the shadow of death or the overbright light of present life, challenges the rulers of the world and shows them up as a sham, looks at the present with clear faith and the future with sure hope, overpowers all powers that might get in the way, fills the outer dimensions of the cosmos, and declares to the world that God is God, that Jesus the Messiah is the world’s true Lord, and that in him love has won the victory. This powerful, overmastering love grasps Paul, and sustains him in his praying, his preaching, his journeying, his writing, his pastoring, and his suffering, with the strong sense of the presence of the God who had loved him from the beginning and had put that love into action in Jesus. (N.T. Wright, “Commentary on Romans,” The New Interpreters’ Bible)

So may the wonder of this love sustain us amidst all the heat and humidity, all the hurt and horror, all the hopes and hitches of our lives, so that we might always live to God’s praise and show all the world that nothing can separate any of us from God’s love in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.

a sermon for the Sixteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time on Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43 
preached on July 17, 2011, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

I’m not a great gardener, but I’m as good as anyone at raising weeds. The backyard at the manse, as some of you know, is  incredibly difficult to keep clear of weeds. There’s a lot of planting space and an older brick patio with plenty of cracks for weeds to sneak through. For a couple years, I just let the weeds take over everything – it was a nice green space, but soon the thorny bushes had nearly suffocated the more beautiful azaleas and other plantings. Thanks to the special efforts of some dedicated church members and my parents, the backyard at the manse is no longer overrun with weeds, although even continuous removal and treatment with the nastiest chemicals isn’t enough to keep the weeds away for any length of time!

Jesus’ parable this morning, as told in the gospel according to Matthew, deals with weeds, so I feel right at home. However, Jesus puts this parable in the midst of a series of stories about the kingdom of heaven and uses these pesky plants to talk about how God’s new way of being will take hold in the world.

So here Jesus tells of a farmer who sowed good seed in his field only to have an enemy come along at night and plant weeds alongside his wheat. When all the seeds – good and bad – sprouted, the damage was apparent, and the farmworkers reported the mess to the farmer. He knew right away that someone had tried to sabotage his crop, thinking that he would rip up the whole field and lose everything for the season. But instead this wise farmer instructed his workers to let the weeds grow alongside the wheat and leave everything to be sorted out at harvest time, the weeds into bundles for burning and the wheat into the barn.

Jesus left the story there, but his disciples were a little confused, so when his message to the crowd was over, they asked him to explain this parable to them. Jesus made it clear again to his disciples that this parable was all about the kingdom of heaven. The Son of Man – seemingly Jesus himself – sowed the good seeds in the world, and the children of the kingdom of heaven were the good seeds that he planted. The weeds were the children of the evil one, planted by the evil one himself. The harvest came at the end of the age, and “just as the weeds [were] collected and burned up with fire, so… the angels will collect out of [the] kingdom [of heaven] all causes of sin and all evildoers… and throw them into the furnace of fire.” In the midst of all this, though, “the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom” of God.

A few years ago, I would have said that this treatment of the weeds was a little harsh – but after dealing with those pesky things in the backyard at the manse, I’m a little less sympathetic. Weeds are just insidious plants. You pull them up, they keep coming back. You kill them with some chemical and another one pops up two inches away. You think you have them beat, then another stalk emerges from out of nowhere. You try anything and everything to get rid of them, and somehow they manage to survive. But the reality is that weeds have their advantages, too. Weeds, like any other plant, reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – a very important thing in this day and age of global warming. Weeds can cover up bare spots and add a touch of green where there was none before. Some flowering weeds add color and interest to an otherwise boring palette of greens, and weeds like dandelions can even be healthy and good food for us to eat. And many weeds keep growing in times of drought, requiring much less water than the carefully-maintained green yards that have become the norm. But when dealing with those weeds in the backyard at the manse – and with the weeds Jesus describes here – it’s tough to see the good in them. As far as I’m concerned, you can burn those up in the fire anytime you want to!

Still, I think there has to be something more to this parable than just a basic and standard condemnation of the plants and people that God doesn’t seem to approve of or a simple statement of who is in and who is out in the world to come. Maybe this parable can give us some insights into this world just as much as it can tell us about the kingdom of heaven. After all, Jesus insisted over and over that the kingdom was not just coming some day soon but was rather being revealed in this world in and through his life and living and so also in and through the continuing faithful work of those who followed him. The farmer may not have just meant his crops for the world to come – maybe what was growing in the field mattered even before the harvest, too. Maybe something was growing there that even he didn’t fully understand. He told his servants not to pull up the weeds until the time of the harvest not just because it’s hard not to disturb the wheat when you pull the weeds but also because you can’t always tell whether something will be wheat or weed until it is harvest time. You can’t always know immediately if some strange, unknown stalk might be the beginning of something unusual and new. You can’t always sort out the good from the bad right away but sometimes need to figure it out in time.

Preacher Ted Wardlaw suggests that this strange delay on the farmer’s part might be purposeful and good, reflecting that “the God who is glimpsed in this parable models for us an infinite patience that frees us to get on with the crucial business of loving, or at least living with, each other.” Maybe even the not-so-good weeds around us can be helpful and beneficial to the good wheat, too! (Feasting on the Word, Year A, Volume 3, p. 264) This doesn’t mean that the weeds won’t be held to account when the time comes, but it does remind us that God’s judgment and redemption will come – but in God’s own time and with God’s own purpose, not ours. Again, Ted Wardlaw gives this more beautiful words than I can: “Christians believe that, for the sake of this hurting and impatient world, and through Jesus Christ our Lord, God’s realm will at last be completed and revealed in all its fullness. Meanwhile, this realm is thriving in us, around us, and even, miraculously, sometimes through us; and God is pleased to let all of it ‘grow together until the harvest’ (v. 30).” (Feasting on the Word, Year A, Volume 3, p. 264-266)

I can speak from experience to say that this approach of letting the weeds and the wheat grow together doesn’t work all that well sometimes, particularly in the backyard at the manse, but I think there is nonetheless some wisdom here for us. We aren’t the ones to decide what gets saved and what does not – we must leave that choice up to God. We don’t have to jump in so quickly to condemn the weeds of our world and potentially destroy the good wheat along the way – God will sort things out when the time is right. And we can even see things growing unexpectedly in the fields of God’s love – we can expect nothing less of our amazing and surprising God.

So may we have wisdom and hope to see the weeds and the wheat in our midst; may we have trust in God the master farmer to grow a harvest enough for all; and may we have love and grace to look for new expressions of wheat even among the weeds as we await the fullness of the kingdom of heaven now and in the world to come. Lord, come quickly! Amen.