God calls us to come out: 7th after pentecost

The first reading is Isaiah 44:6-8.

The holy gospel according to Matthew (13:24-30, 36-43).

²⁴Jesus put before the crowds another parable:

       “The dominion of heaven may be compared to a man

              who sowed good seed in his field;

                     ²⁵but while everybody was asleep,

                            an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat,

                                   and then went away.

                     ²⁶So when the plants came up and bore grain,

                            then the weeds appeared as well.

                     ²⁷And the slaves of the householder came and said to him,

                            ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field?

                            Where, then, did these weeds come from?’

                     ²⁸He answered,

                            ‘An enemy has done this.’

                     The slaves said to him,

                            ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’

                     ²⁹But he replied,

                            ‘No; for in gathering the weeds

                                   you would uproot the wheat along with them.

                            ³⁰Let both of them grow together until the harvest;

                                   and at harvest time I will tell the reapers,

                                          Collect the weeds first
                                          and bind them in bundles to be burned,

                                                 but gather the wheat into my barn.’”

³⁶Then Jesus left the crowds and went into the house.

       And his disciples approached him, saying,

              “Explain to us the parable of the weeds of the field.”

³⁷Jesus answered,

       “The one who sows the good seed is the Son of Humanity;

       ³⁸the field is the world,

       and the good seed are the children of God’s dominion;

       the weeds are the children of the evil one,

       ³⁹and the enemy who sowed them is the devil;

       the harvest is the end of the age,

       and the reapers are angels.

              ⁴⁰Just as the weeds are collected and burned up with fire,

                     so will it be at the end of the age.

⁴¹The Son of Humanity will send his angels,

       and they will collect out of his dominion all causes of sin and all evildoers,

       ⁴²and they will throw them into the furnace of fire,

              where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

                     ⁴³Then the righteous will shine like the sun

                            in the dominion of their Father.

                                   Let anyone with ears listen!

The gospel of the Lord.

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This week, as many of you know, I was at the Proclaim Gathering for continuing education and renewal.  The theme this year was Healing the Violence, which was particularly poignant in light of our texts for today.  Isaiah with God speaking to a people in exile, the psalmist’s prayer for help while surrounded by a band of violent people, the labor pains of all of Creation in Romans, and a pretty violent parable with burning bundles and “weeping and gnashing of teeth” in Matthew.

As in the texts for today, so too in our lives, violence is all around us.  Physical violence is perhaps the clearest, but even so, domestic and sexual violence can hide behind closed doors, long sleeve shirts, and makeup, going unnoticed by many of us.  The economic violence of a system in which unemployment and underemployment are required, tax loopholes for some, inadequate pay, and lost jobs are all closer forms of violence to many of us.  The violence of language is so easy to slip in and out of that we may not even notice the harm language can do in ignorance, abuse, and harassment.

Violence in its many forms is no stranger to us or to God.  In fact, we hear in Isaiah as God proclaims a different identity, a different way.  As the Israelites prepare to leave their exile and return home, God calls them to come out, to boldly proclaim their faith—their trust—in one God, an anomaly among the dominant, polytheistic culture surrounding them in their exile.  As they prepare to go home, God recognizes the importance of claiming their identity as worshipers and children of our one God in the face of oppressors who worship many gods, reminding them of why they are going home.

It reminds me of Harvey Milk, a gay city-county supervisor in San Francisco in 1978, as he called LGBTQIA folks to come out to their friends and family, to challenge the homophobic Proposition 6 that was going through California’s State Senate.  Milk called on folks to come out because knowing people who are LGBTQIA is how sentiment changes and homophobia is challenged.  That is God’s call through Isaiah and through Matthew to this church today as well: to come out about the God in whom we trust.

When Jesus introduces parables, he frames them in two main ways: he either says what the dominion of heaven is like or he says what it may be compared to.  We don’t always pay attention to this difference and so parables like the one for today can be alarming when compared to Jesus’ other teachings.  Words matter and Jesus isn’t telling us what the dominion of heaven is like, instead, Jesus is comparing the dominion of heaven with the parable he tells.

The dominion of heaven may be compared to this parable of black and white theology from a judgmental “Master” God.  In the parable, especially as many have historically interpreted it, Jesus is the Master of slaves, sowing the seeds to grow the wheat.  But when has Jesus ever identified as this kind of Master?  After washing the disciples’ feet in John 13:13-14, Jesus says, “You call me Teacher and Master—and you are right, for that is what I am.  So if I, your Master and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.”  And later on in Matthew, Jesus says “So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”

So the dominion of heaven may be compared to a theology and worldview in which God exists to exert power over all else.  This other theology separates people into good and evil.  There is no “a little bad” or “kind of good” or “messed up a few times.”  Instead there are “children of God’s dominion” or “children of the evil one,” and never the twain shall meet.

As the parable continues, we wrestle with who gets categorized as which.  Who is pure evil and who is pure good?  And then what happens at the harvest?  In the parable, at the harvest the weeds are collected and bound into bundles to be burned.  And the wheat?  It is also collected, first into the barn, and then to be put into the fire—after all, this was how they cooked in the first century, without any of our microwaves and electric ovens. 

So in the world of black and white theology, in the end, all is subject to fire and all is consumed.  But the dominion of heaven is such that the Master, the Son of Humanity, enters the world as a baby, God-with-us, servant of all.  The Son of Humanity doesn’t send messengers to do the dirty work of picking and choosing who counts as evildoers.  The Son of Humanity enters into the field, growing with us, bridging the gap we create between wheat, which we decide we want, and weed, which we decide we don’t want.  And Jesus’ own self will be cast out for the love of humanity.

And this is the dominion of heaven—a God who joins with us.  The Son of Humanity who casts his lot with humanity.  That is the church we belong to, the dominion of heaven in which we find our resting place, and the community of faith about which God calls us to come out.

In Isaiah, our God, our Sovereign, Redeemer, and Rock is the one who comes to us with grace and a love that claims us as God’s own.  And if this is true, if this is the loving God in whom we trust, then why would we keep quiet?  With a gift as great as God’s love, how can we not proclaim it? 

How can we not come out to our friends and neighbors about the love and care we experience here and which God has for them; the radical welcome and hospitality that say people with immigration papers and without are welcome here; people who are unemployed, underemployed, employed full- or part-time, retired, in school, and homemakers are welcome here; people who have known and survived violence are welcome here.

This is too good not to share.  How could we keep the joy, love, and community of this fellowship from others?  How can we not share it with them?  How can you not come out and proclaim God’s love for all of the hurting world—including yourself and including your neighbor?  Will you come out?

God loves our whole, embodied selves

I also reference Revelation 21:1-6 and John 13:31-35.

 

A reading from Acts 11:1-18

Now the apostles and the believers who were in Judea heard

       that the Gentiles had also accepted the word of God.

²So when Peter went up to Jerusalem,

       the circumcised believers criticized him, ³saying,

              “Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?”

⁴Then Peter began to explain it to them,

       step by step, saying,

              ⁵“I was in the city of Joppa praying,

                     and in a trance I saw a vision.

                     There was something like a large sheet coming down from heaven,

                            being lowered by its four corners;

                            and it came close to me.

                                   ⁶As I looked at it closely I saw four-footed animals,

                                          beasts of prey,

                                          reptiles,

                                          and birds of the air.

                     ⁷I also heard a voice saying to me,

                            ‘Get up, Peter;

                                   kill and eat.’

                     ⁸But I replied,

                            ‘By no means, Lord;

                                   for nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth.’

                     ⁹But a second time the voice answered from heaven,

                            ‘What God has made clean,

                                   you must not call profane.’

                     ¹⁰This happened three times;

                            then everything was pulled up again to heaven.

              ¹¹At that very moment three men,

                     sent to me from Caesarea,

                            arrived at the house where we were.

                     ¹²The Spirit told me to go with them

                     and not to make a distinction between them and us.

              These six brothers also accompanied me,

                     and we entered the man’s house.

                     ¹³He told us how he had seen the angel

                            standing in his house and saying,

                                   ‘Send to Joppa and bring Simon,

                                          who is called Peter;

                                          ¹⁴he will give you a message

                                                 by which you 

                                                        and your entire household 

                                                               will be saved.’

                     ¹⁵And as I began to speak,

                            the Holy Spirit fell upon them

                                   just as it had upon us at the beginning.

                                   ¹⁶And I remembered the word of the Lord,

                                   how Jesus had said,

                                          ‘John baptized with water,

                                                 but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.’

              ¹⁷If then God gave them the same gift

                     that God gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ,                                                                 who was I that I could hinder God?”

¹⁸When the apostles and believers heard this,

       they were silenced.

              And they praised God, saying,

                     “Then God has given even to the Gentiles

                            the repentance that leads to life.”

Word of God, word of life.

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It is good to be back with you all.  The last two weeks of vacation and continuing education were good and yet it is good to be back here.  As my continuing ed while I was gone, I attended the yearly Proclaim Gathering.  Proclaim is a professional community that I am a part of for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer Lutheran leaders in the church. 

This community not only proclaims the gospel to me, but also embodies the gospel with me.  As part of our opening Eucharist this year, we took our calling as members of Christ’s body to heart.  We read through the names of those gathered and as each person’s name was called, that person would stand or raise their hand and call out, “this is my body,” echoing Jesus’ words at the Last Supper. 

As people were named into the space, we tossed or passed balls of red yarn—I like to think of it as our Holy Spirit yarn—to each other, making a messy, interwoven mass of red as we sat together.  As LGBTQ people of faith, we claimed the very bodied space—our embodied place—in the body of Christ, a space that has, in recent history, been denied to us.

While there are many ways that we all embody our faith, physically living into and living out our member-ship in the body of Christ, for me as a queer pastor, Proclaim brings my whole self into ministry and faith.  I don’t need to parse out which parts of me belong—to church, to home, to friends.  My whole being belongs and is celebrated as part of the body of Christ.

In today’s reading from Acts, Peter and the apostles and believers in Judea are confronted with a challenge, a new embodiment of their community of faith.  Up until that point, Gentiles—those who were Greek and didn’t identify as Jewish—had to be circumcised and convert to Judaism before they were considered members of the community of faith.  Their own culture and their unique differences didn’t fit within the community’s understanding of themselves and so they were forced to assimilate, to adapt to the dominant culture of the group, leaving part of who they were at the door.

But that is not God’s will for any of us.  Just as it was for the Gentiles in Acts, our own Presbyterian-ness, our Lutheran-ness, our Christian-ness, is not rooted in our cultural heritages, in how much lefse we eat or when bagpipes are present, how we make tamales, organize our congregation, or even how many pies we bake.  What unites us, the thing that roots our faith, is God, made known through Jesus Christ.   And it is God who loves our whole beings, our whole selves, even when we struggle.

As with the early church in Acts, it takes time to figure out as a community what it means for different groups or types of people to truly be a part of us.  We have to wrestle with how our culture and our identities impact the group.  Does the language we speak force others to leave a part of who they are at the door?  Is our grief or loneliness, still present after so many years, out of place here?

We each have unique gifts, identities, and perspectives, some of which clearly fit, no questions asked, in this part of the body of Christ.  And I imagine many of us have passions or interests or parts of our identity that we haven’t shared with others.  We’re unsure if they make us unfit or too different for the community of faith.   

Maybe we keep things on the surface during fellowship so we don’t have to risk the pain and hurt of opening up and being vulnerable only to have our community abandon or denounce us.  Maybe we just ask and share about the weather and the busy-ness of life instead of asking and sharing what we’re most passionate about.  Maybe we’re afraid of the vulnerability in naming our continuing grief over a loved one’s death, or loneliness without them here.

The community of believers in Judea start out unsure of these uncircumcised believers that Peter baptized—unsure if they really belong, since they are so different.  Even Peter was unsure at the beginning!  He thought he knew the rules.  He thought he knew which food and which people were in and which were out—until God came and shook things up.

Peter says, “the Holy Spirit fell upon them just as it had upon us at the beginning.” And as the Holy Spirit fell, it turned Peter’s understanding upside down.  His faith remained.  He still trusted in the loving God made known to him in Jesus, but now his understanding of God’s expansive, radical love had to change, because “If then God gave [the Gentiles] the same gift that God gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?”

Ultimately Peter realized that he couldn’t hinder God, but he could embrace God’s expansive love, and share his experience of transformation with others.

When we come together to worship or serve or learn, we too get to ask “who am I that I could hinder God?”  and we are given the opportunity to embrace God’s expansive love, beginning even with ourselves.  Being with other LGBTQ Lutheran church leaders helps me live into God’s expansive love.  And being able to share stories from that time with you all also helps me live into it.

What helps you embrace God’s expansive love for you? and for others? and for all of creation?  What do you risk in bringing your whole self into this part of the body of Christ?  Do you know—do you trust—God’s expansive, radical love for you?  Do you know that the Holy Spirit falls upon you just as it did upon Peter and the other apostles at the beginning?  I do.  I know it because I see it in each of you.

God is always coming to us in love for our whole flawed and perfectly loved selves. 

Our whole bodies and our whole lived experiences are the body of Christ, together with the great cloud of witnesses, spanning all of time and space.  The things that make us different and the things that can make us question whether we or another person can really bring our whole selves into the body of Christ                        are also the things that make us more truly the body of Christ together.  Our grief and our loneliness, our differences, are all signs of God’s love for us and God’s love at work through us.

God’s home is among mortals.  Jesus declares, “This is my body.”  God comes to you just as you are.  And just as you are, you are a part of the body of Christ.   

Because love wins.   

Because grace triumphs.   

Because Christ is risen!   

Christ is risen, indeed!  Alleluia!