Saturday, July 15, 2023

The Promise: to Become a Blessing to All th Peoples of the Earth Proper 10A

 The Promise: To Become a Blessing to All the Peoples of the Earth

This is the promise God made to Abraham. So far, as the story is told in Genesis, the fulfillment of the promise depends upon Sarah and Abraham having a child, “and he as good as dead” as the treatise called Hebrews reminds us; [i] Isaac survives a near-death experience; Rebecca has the option to say “No” to marrying Isaac; and now one twin, Jacob, tricks his older brother Esau out of his birthright. [ii] And this is just the opening few acts of the story! One has to believe in miracles and/or God’s providence that the promise made it all the way to Jesus some 1800 years later! Along the way there are those who have, as Psalm 119 puts it, let God’s Word be “a lantern to their feet…and a light upon their path.”  And Matthew’s story of Jesus tells us that he applied his heart to fulfill God’s statutes of blessing, compassion, justice, love and forgiveness for all people by forming an ongoing community of disciples “forever and to the end.” [iii]

 

Chapter Thirteen in Matthew marks a new approach to Jesus’s teaching. Up to now he has been rather straightforward in his teaching like the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount. And he has been busy living out God’s statutes of hospitality for all people, including strangers, outcasts, resident aliens, widows, and orphans, all the while challenging those tenured to the status quo and the occupying forces of Caesar’s Empire, Rome. He calls people not to believe in him, but instead to follow him: to be with the people he seeks out, and to heal folks in body, mind and spirit. He encounters resistance, and promises those who choose to follow him that they too will encounter resistance.

 

Now as he speaks to crowds that will inevitably include those who resist the ways in which he fulfills God’s statutes and promises, he begins to teach in parables – parabolic stories that begin in one place and wind up somewhere completely different. That is, like a parabola, the meanings and interpretations continue all the way out to somewhere like infinity! And beyond! That is there is no one way to interpret a parable. In Matthew 13:1-9 the parable is about agrarian practices to a crowd that is largely made up of tenant farmers – indentured “farm hands;” practically speaking, debt-slaves working in a system that rarely allowed one to work off one’s debt – a not unfamiliar predicament within the financial systems of our own day.

 

He says, “Listen! A sower went out to sow!” Those of us who do listen may notice, that this sower seems rather wasteful, scattering the seed all over the place rather than carefully making cultivated rows. Some of the seeds land on rocks, some among thorns and weeds, and just a few, fall on “good soil,” to yield one hundred, sixty and thirty-fold! “Let anyone with ears listen!” That is, despite squandering and wasting much of the seed, this sower ends up with a bumper-crop of completely unheard-of yields!

 

Try to imagine the disciples and the farmers in the crowd hearing this tale as Jesus plays with them. No wheat on earth, then or now, would yield one hundred-fold. No doubt they would have laughed at the very mention of it. Jesus then says, Well how about sixty, do I hear sixty-fold? More snickering and a few cat-calls! People are right! You are a glutton and a drunkard if you think sixty-fold is possible! OK, he says, how about thirty-fold, which lies at least within the slim possibility of best agricultural practices.

 

In the section missing, the disciples take him aside and say, in effect, you are losing the crowd, and may be losing your mind as well! Why are you doing this? He says to them, you have seen how our Father’s world works if we fulfill his statutes of compassion, love, forgiveness and justice for all people, no exceptions, no exclusions. But there are those who just cannot hear this or understand what we are doing. Still, we need to be extravagant like the sower, sowing and practicing the good news of our Father’s kingdom, which is utterly unlike the kingdoms of Israel at present, and Rome at present. But you will understand, and there will be others who will understand – and if we are sworn and concerned to keep God’s righteous judgments, the yields will in fact increase. We must work and do the things we are called to do faithfully, forever and to the end! And most importantly, even those who scoff at us know what we all know: whatever yield we gather is a gift from the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God and Father of us all. It is our Father who makes the rain to fall and the sun to shine and the seeds to grow.

 

We remember that Matthew’s story of Jesus is being told to those who have already seen the destruction of Israel, Jerusalem and the Temple, the very center of Israelite religious ritual for centuries. Everything has been burned to the ground. Yet, the gift of a great harvest still awaits us, says Matthew’s Jesus to the disciples and others who have ears to hear! The power and the witness of the people of God, always fragile and at peril in a world that does not have the lantern and light of God’s Word shine upon their path, nevertheless, the Lord shall be magnified by the generosity of God into a fruitful and extravagant harvest. “Therefore, the church is called to ‘waste itself,” to throw grace and love and compassion around like there is no tomorrow, precisely because there is a tomorrow and it belongs to God!”’ [iv]

 

As imperfect as the church has been in generosity and wasteful extravagance throughout the ages, here we are. The promise of being a blessing to all peoples, fragile and at risk as it may be, has been entrusted to us. We can be hearers and doers of God’s word. We can choose to welcome black, brown, yellow and red people of all nations and all cultures. We can choose to accept all male, female, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transexual, and queer people. We can choose to reach out to all who are free, enslaved, trafficked, oppressed, and in anyway restricted from living life to its fullest. We can offer a world of justice and peace for all people. We can choose to respect the dignity of every single human being – and every creature under heaven as well! We can choose to be responsible stewards of the environment God has created for us to live in – this fragile earth, our island home. And in fact, we have all promised, in our baptism, to choose to live out of all of these truths of God’s Word! Because we have been touched by Jesus and the example of his word and his works. Every day we read the good news, and every day Jesus picks us up and turns us around whenever we stray from his path.

 

There is a tomorrow. And Jesus makes clear to anyone who hears, that tomorrow will be given like the hundred-fold yield of wheat. When we walk with Jesus wherever we may be, we can and will bear bounteous yields with the seeds that he sows! We are the keepers of the promise that has been given to us just as it was to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Jesus! Because he’s our friend he says will do the things he does, and greater things than these we shall do! We can become God’s blessing to all the peoples of the earth! Let anyone with ears listen!



[i] Hebrews 11:12a

[ii] Genesis 25:19-34

[iii] Psalm 119:105-106, 112

[iv] Long, Thomas, Matthew (Westminster John Know Press, Louisville: 1997) p.151.

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