Sermon by Fr James Heard, Sunday 23 July 2017, Trinity 6, United Benefice of Holland Park
Sermon by Fr James Heard, Sunday 23 July 2017, Trinity 6, United Benefice of Holland Park
I wonder what you
have made of today’s Gospel reading about the wheat and the weeds. Its pretty
scary stuff:
The Son of Man will send out his angels,
and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do
evil. They will throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping
and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the
kingdom of their Father.
Pretty brutal stuff
here! The American revivalist preacher Jonathan Edwards would love this sort of
passage. On 8 July 8 1741, he preached a famous sermon call ‘Sinners in the
Hands of an Angry God’.
I think he got his
theology completely wrong. It’s got to start and end with love… ‘God so loved
the world… that he gave his Son Jesus Christ’. The Gospel is not based on fear.
And God’s love cannot be restricted to a chosen few, whilst the others are cast
in to the fiery furnace.
The paintings of the
terrors of Hell on the walls of medieval churches are much more interesting
than the paintings of rather static groups of singing angels in heaven. But the
doctrine of eternal hell is a non-biblical later church invention that can only
exist when metaphors of great spiritual depth are turned into literal
descriptions of unbearable sadism. This is a piece of Christian re-thinking
that we can do without, and that flatly contradicts the gospel of the limitless
love of God (Keith Ward, THE TRIUMPH OF CHRISTENDOM, 15 December 2005)
So hearing the Gospel
passage today, we mustn’t go away thinking that we Christians here in church on
Sunday are the pure wheat. We are the special chosen ones who are on God’s
side, we are the ones who will inherit the kingdom, who will shine like the sun
in the kingdom of God. And others (be they non-believers, Buddhists, Muslims
and so on) are the weeds who will be, as the Gospel puts it, ‘pulled up and
burned in the fire’ at harvest time. That’s a crass interpretation of this
passage. It’s a rather repulsive view but it’s a particular interpretation
which I spent much of my life believing.
What we learn from
Scripture is that God’s love is generous, it’s expansive. It reaches to the
very darkest and lowest places of existence and into the very darkest parts – the
weeds, if you like – of our lives. That’s the message we need to draw from this
passage. It’s not us and them. The binary perspective likes to make such
distinctions. But the tares, the darkness, is not ‘out there’ in other people,
other religions, other groups. This parable is a challenge for ourselves, to
look with clarity on those tares within our own lives.
But what about
judgment. The Bible clearly speaks about judgement and I don’t think that we
should ignore or redact those uncomfortable passages in scripture. But the sort
of ‘judgement’ is not one where we are in the hands of an angry God. Along with
atheists, I don’t believe in that sort of God, who seems to take great delight
in punishing viciously those who mess up.
I think the sort of
judgement the Bible describes is one that is profoundly relational. It is the
sort of judgement that is restorative, the sort of judgement that heals. It’s
the sort of judgement where we are in the hands of a loving and compassionate
heavenly father and where we are restored completely to relationship with him,
and where we become the people God originally intended us to be. It's
beautifully depicted in the prodical son story. The judgement of the faith is
one of embrace, and of having a party to celebrate a restoration of
relationship.
The scope of God’s embrace widens even beyond humanity by
including all creation. The eastern Orthodox tradition reminds us that Jesus is
the pantocrator — the lord not just of people but of all things
seen and unseen. The scale and scope of this future hope includes not only each
person and every nation but, as our epistle reading puts it, ‘the whole
creation’ (Romans 8:12–25).
There's an expansive logic to the Christian good news.
God ‘created all things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible,
whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities’ (Colossians 1:16). He will
‘reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in
heaven’ (Colossians 1:20). He will sum up or bring together ‘all
things in heaven and on earth’ (Ephesians 1:10).
In sum, what we may
know from the symphony of Scripture is that nothing and nobody exists outside
the presence of God’s infinite grace and perfect love.
What I think today’s
passages are saying is that ultimately, one day, God will destroy all of the
works of darkness. And we rightly long for the day when death and injustice and
corruption and violence will be destroyed and God will be all in all
(1 Cor 15:28).
In the meantime we see suffering on a cosmic scale – we
often feel overwhelmed when turning on the news to hear about the Grenfell
Tower tragedy, of the abuse of children and elderly, or when we hear about or
corruption, or discrimination. We long for the day when God’s kingdom will be
on earth as it is in heaven. We
are encouraged to believe that a time will come when God will not be distant,
but fully present.
And in the meantime, we are invited to be a part of God’s
kingdom, and to start by doing some weeding, digging up the weeds from our
lives that threatening to entangle us. We are invited to live a life that can stride confidently into
the gap – angered at injustice, grieving at suffering, striving and straining
and groaning. Where we can clearly see the distance between what should be and
what is we work to lift to close that gap. To be individually and as a
community signs of God’s reign.
And we
pray for the day when death and injustice and corruption and violence will be
destroyed and God will be all in all (1 Cor 15:28).