Sixth Sunday after Trinity
Although we have been able to resume public worship not everyone is able to attend so the service was recorded and made available online as well as being played in church for those who chose to attend. That can be found here.
Trinity 6
Wisdom of Solomon 12.13,16-19
Matthew 13.24-30,36-43
Revd Preb Maureen Hobbs
After the first reading from Wisdom of Solomon
It strikes me that hope is a commodity we are in danger of running a bit short of at present.
The news this week that the wearing of face masks is to become mandatory in confined public spaces…. and I presume that includes churches …. from next weekend will have been the last straw for some, and long overdue for others.
What is clear, is that while the government is encouraging us all to get out more and to get the economy moving, this does not mean that we are on top of the virus. It has not gone away. And in all probability, we will be faced with an even worse outbreak as Autumn turns to Winter. So ‘hope’ can indeed seem in short supply.
But unlike toilet rolls (!) hope is something that cannot be hoarded.
This week should also have seen the school piling in here in all their chattering excitability to bid the leavers a fond farewell as Year 4 prepares for the new adventure of Middle School in September. Well, the adventure is still there, but the leavers’ celebrations had to move online – and even the Vicar contributed a little bit to that. The Head and the staff and I have tried hard to fill our children with good hope for their future – and I am sure that they will face whatever challenges come their way as they grow up, with a resilience that will have been formed by these last weeks and months of social distancing.
None of us knows how future generations will judge us… As Philip was saying last week, there may well be aspects of our daily behaviour that we take for granted today – like driving cars with petrol guzzling internal combustion engines, – that may seem totally bizarre to our children’s children. Much as we view with horror the activities of the slave owning merchants of the 17th and 18th centuries.
But we can hope; hope that future generations will find better ways to cope with the extremes of climate change and the threat of global pandemics… for the one thing we know for certain is that Coronovirus will not be the last.
And God teaches us – by example – that to be considered righteous, we must be kind… which means not always leaping to judge other people or situations, even when they don’t react or behave in the ways that we think they should. There is only one power who is really equipped to judge. And God sits outside and beyond the constraints of time and space….
We are increasingly dependent on a system of testing and tracing to protect us as we go forward towards August and September. But what if our faith were to be similarly measured? Would we, could we, detect the signs that would tell us if we have experienced a good dose of God’s influence and power in our lives? And what will be the hope of that we pass on to generations yet to come? Is there still hope for us?
After the Gospel Reading
Thank you Roger for that – not forgetting Charlie the dog! And how appropriate to have a farmer telling us a story about wheatfields and weeds while standing in the middle of one!
As with so many of the parables of Jesus, there are umpteen layers of meaning bound up in what probably seems to most of us as a very straightforward and familiar story.
So where do you see yourselves in all this? Are we the wheat? Or are we the weeds? How can we know?
A few weeks ago I saw a message on social media that read – The worse virus of all is the human race! And I have a certain sympathy with that.
When we went into lockdown in March, it did not take long at all for nature to begin to heal herself without the interference and toxic influence of human activity. Seas and the very air we breathe became cleaner. Wildlife began to return to places it had long ago been banished from – do you remember the films of the wild goats in Llandudno? So maybe as human beings we should consider ourselves as the weeds? Growing in God’s good creation alongside all that is good and threatening to strangle and pollute it?
That is a sobering thought – especially when you consider that – at the end of the age – all we may have to look forward to is the fiery furnaces of Hell! Will we be judged and found wanting?
But just as I don’t think we can think of ourselves as the virtuous wheat – just because we call ourselves Christian – I also think that to take a totally negative view of our place in Creation is too simplistic.
I think rather that we are more like the soil in which the crops are growing…. Good Stafforshire/Shropshire sandy loam! Throwing up both the good seed, and the weeds. Because each of us is capable of being both the best and the worst we can be.
In our Gospel message this morning, the reapers want to pile in there with a quick judgement and root out the weeds that threaten to devalue and even poison the crop. But the landowner – God – instead tells them to wait. There will be a time of reckoning – of course there will. But it is God’s task (and therefore, not ours) to sift the grain from the chaff, the gold from the dross, the wheat from the weeds. Waiting on God; being patient, and trusting in his judgment is the hardest thing in the world sometimes, isn’t it? But that is what we are bound as Christians to do. And in the meantime, be kind, be considerate, think of others – not yourself. Nurture the good seed in yourself and if the weeds sometimes threaten to overwhelm the good – ask for God’s help in sorting out what to keep and what to throw out. For only God can be certain. Amen.