The Old South Church in Boston

The Old South Church in Boston

A Beautiful, Heady, Exasperating Mix

Sermon by James W. Crawford

Matthew 13: 24- 30*

The Third Sunday in Lent, March 25, 2001

Matthew’s Church in Antioch finds itself in trouble. Some 50 years after Jesus dies, this cosmopolitan church confronts a serious problem. No longer does church membership consist only of Jews confessing the crucified Jesus as Messiah, now they mingle with Gentiles who view this Jew, Jesus, also in a Messianic fashion—indeed, rather than calling him by a Jewish title, Messiah, they use the Greek word, Christ.

But more. You see, the Jews in the church practice their Messianic religion in a certain way: they require male circumcision, and dietary rules define their identity; matters of dress, ritual cleanliness, religious festival observances reflect their orthodox posture. When the Gentiles—the Greek types—join the church, the Jews believe the Gentiles should practice the time-honored Jewish rituals in order for Gentile conversions to rank as authentic. Do you want to be a Christian? You have to be a Jew first, and to do that, you follow the traditional religious regulations of Judaism.

Problem! The Gentiles consider the laundry list of Jewish regulations irrelevant. The Gentiles like to eat pork. They fail to circumcise their sons. They cannot seem to generate the ethnic and religious chauvinism that goes with the celebration of historic Jewish celebrations.

You can see it coming: the church breaks into at least two angry factions. Each faction—one predominantly Jewish, one mostly Gentile—believes the other obstinate, wrongheaded, blasphemous. Each faction, for the good of the organization and for the sake of what they consider pure doctrine and practice, wishes to eject the other. Each faction, ritual Jew or newly converted Gentile, believes they possess the truth, follow the mandates of the Gospel, represent most accurately the person, proclamation and practice of Jesus Christ. Each faction sees in the other a band of religious quacks and pious charlatans deserving the boot or the ax.

Sounds nice, doesn’t it? Your healthy, friendly, neighborhood congregation. Forget it! In face of this factional struggle, with each side blaming and threatening the other with expulsion, Matthew recalls some words of Jesus. In what setting Jesus speaks them we cannot be sure. In any case, this remembered parable appears appropriate for the virulent church fight over who represents the Gospel and who does not, in Matthew’s church. This morning we read “The Parable of the Weeds and the Wheat.” And Matthew directs the parable at precisely this kind of venomous church scrap. Let us take a look at it.

In the first place, Matthew assures us of good seed sown. Good seed! Matthew assures us that in Jesus Christ a truly new age breaks in among us; a new community opens its doors to the world, inviting everyone to affiliate, providing a place at the table for all regardless of connections, bloodlines, academic credentials and bank accounts. Matthew throws open the doors to the religious types who love tinkling bells and aromatic incense and those who love pristine meeting houses, those whose faith is nourished by the prayer book and those by the hymnbook, those who relish bishops and those who give their local congregations the authority of bishops. Matthew offers an image of a community welcoming all those, regardless of sexual identity, gender, physical or mental challenge. He takes our by-laws, our constitutions, our canon law, our treasured traditions, structures and status and tosses them into a vast cornucopia of ecclesiastical claims and dogma, dissolves the walls they represent and grounds this new community in grace, peace, and patience. In the Community of Christ no one asserts, “I’m number one.” No one demands, “Shape up, or ship out.” No one implies by facial expression, tone of voice or blunt declaration, “Get out and stay out.” The community grounded by Jesus carries as its fundamental purpose, not ideological, moral, doctrinal or political purity, but the inclusion of each of us—most especially those among us closeted or barred elsewhere, the anonymous, the neglected, the left out. Good seed, sown!

But by night an enemy comes and sows bad seed. An enemy! An enemy invades, by night. Something operating under the sovereignty of God, but on its own. An Enemy. Something, I think, not of God, but rather lodging in our hearts, our wills, our reason, our desires. This enemy pries us from our loyalty to the all-encompassing community of Christ. This enemy seeks to persuade us that really, we had better look out for number one. This enemy prods us to compare ourselves favorably to others, especially to rivals, to contenders, to that other party, to those in that denomination. This enemy encourages us to inflate our self-image by convincing us we have a corner on the truth; we are the peculiar case and deserve the special privilege. In a church context, “Am I ordained? Call me Reverend, please.” Or in a professional setting: “But I’m a doctor!” Or is it a personal connection, as, say, you encounter the meter maid on Boylston Street: “But I shook hands with Mayor Menino.”

And yes, we get tangled in our institutional illusions as well. “I’m a graduate of Ivy University.” Or, “Don’t you forget I’m a member of the Fauntleroy Club.” Or “We Congregationalists”—or Episcopalians or Catholics or Baptists or Methodists—you name it—possess a special pipeline to the Divine habitat. You have all heard of that splendid Presbyterian grandmother who heard from her grandson that his Sunday school teacher told him Jesus was Jewish. “Well,” she answered, “That may well be, but I assure you, God is still a Presbyterian.”

The enemy convinces us we possess a special credential, a unique truth separating us from others; a certain purity stamping us as an elite tribe. “You over there, trespass at your own risk.”

The enemy infiltrates by seed sown by an enemy at night.

III

And the crop? Well, friends, look around. Here we are. Good grain? Or are we false grain appearing like good grain, with all of the signs of being a healthy, pure crop? Indeed, who are we? What mix of seed do we represent here? As the parable indicates, perhaps it is tough to tell.

Some years ago Don Wells, a member of our Congregation and the President of the Massachusetts Bible Society, brought to our pulpit a prayer delivered by the Rev. Donald Overlock at the Massachusetts Conference meeting. I have never forgotten it. I will recast it somewhat, but it tells truth about the diversity of seed we represent in this room this morning. It is a masterpiece. Listen:

(O God), you have collected us all like seeds in your hand; you, who first planted Eden lush and green. A charismatic here this morning is dubious as to whether your spirit will splatter like the rain against the ark of our voyage, but beside her sits a social activist fearful that our prayers will not lead us to service with the suffering. A pietist wonders why we worry about budgets so much, while a banker thinks we read the wrong Book. A liberal, afraid we avoid matching our faith to current events, will sip coffee later with a conservative who expects to hear quotes from Niebuhr and Kung but scarcely from Nehemiah and Christ. A feminist will check our language for inclusiveness while a Latino waits for the Word to be spoken bilingually. . .

...And yes, a musician will wince at our singing, a teenager explodes at the ponderous pace of our proceedings, a union man will long for some simple shop-steward directions, while an engineer will be clear she could redesign our plant more efficiently. . . Suburbanite, urbanite, rural dweller, small church, medium congregation, cathedral type, strangers and saints, colleagues and adversaries, leaders and followers, male and female, young and old, black and white, brown, yellow, red, children of the children of the sixties, children born and bred in church sanctuaries, the Biblically literate, the Biblically ignorant, united, disunited, optimistic and pessimistic, visionary and reactionary, missile defense cheerleaders and turn-the-other-cheek pacifists, fresh shaven and bearded, painted and slim, curled and bald, bespectacled and blind, physically challenged and temporarily whole, silly putty and precast concrete, timber and toothpick, shale and marble, wide awake and sleepily bored; ready or not, here we are, gathered in covenant again, grain in your field, perhaps not so pure as we would either claim or hope.

Oh friends, I love this church, our congregation and our possibilities for creative, imaginative ministry from this corner. We are here, as Oliver Powell wrote so vividly, a “beautiful, heady, exasperating mix.” But Matthew knows we are half counterfeit and half real, that your minister often gets his priorities upside down and backwards, that inertia weighs us down, that fear clouds our capacity to risk ourselves for Christ’s sake, that so many claims from so many places on our time, our money, our psychic space gobble up both our institutional integrity and our personal commitments. From time to time it just seems as if we find ourselves overwhelmed by obstacles, confused goals, a sense of “Let George do it,” or “Leave it up to Mabel.” This field of the Lords here at the corner of Dartmouth and Boylston looks most frequently like it contains seed from a mixed bag.

III

So what will we do? Rip out the unhealthy elements? Launch an attack on the impure components in the church? They wanted to do that in Matthew’s church. And we know it spelled only the beginning of kick- the-frauds-out-of-the-church. Indeed, we find our own story here at Old South rife with “kick-out-the-frauds” syndrome. Let me remind you of perhaps the most notorious. Back there, for instance, on our rear wall, you will find a plaque to the august judge of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, the cantor who lined out the psalms so this congregation might sing them, Samuel Sewall. Back in 1692, Sewall decided some men and women from this Commonwealth carried evil seed. Along with others, this pillar of the Old South Church decided they must be hanged or pressed to death with heavy weights. It rang a terrible hour in our Commonwealth’s history. Samuel Sewell led the choir on Sunday, and on Monday doomed church members deemed false, fraudulent, destructive weeds. Rip them up, tear them out, expunge them. Preserve our purity.

And this tension troubles churches to this day. Just this week we witnessed the struggle by so-called “faith based organizations” over who will receive government financing for their social service projects. That matter entangled itself in questions of who is legitimate and who is not, who represents authentic faith based associations and who might be classed as sectarian rip-offs and partisan money-grubbers. The new Director of the President Bush’s office assigned to manage the issue found himself described by a Black clergyman as “a white, Roman Catholic Democrat, who voted for Al Gore and who should be reeled in, straightened up, directed to fly right, or be gone.”. . all in the name of faith and justice. Rip him out. Tear this bad grain up by the roots. One is reminded of the Episcopal rector who faxed his Bishop asking if it was all right for him to conduct the funeral of a Baptist. The Bishop faxed back, “Bury all the Baptists possible.” Tear them out. Get rid of them. Maintain ideological purity.

Do you remember Matthew’s response to this radical surgery? He pleads for time. “Wait a minute,” he says. “The lines are not so clear. The wheat and the weeds look too much alike. One is true, one is false, to be sure, but this side of heaven the true and the false look so much alike that to cut one may destroy the other.”

The call, you see, is not for tearing out by the roots, but rather for patient cultivation. We do not need an exorcism; we need to watch and wait. We live in an ambiguous and mixed world; we live with hypocrisy and self-deception; we live amid failure and moral defeat but—Oh! Thank God for Matthew’s imperturbable hope—we live with the patience of never failing, never faltering, Divine love.

Most of us know what patience looks and feels like. Many of us here have experienced human touches of it. I surely have: from a father who bailed me out, built me up, said time after time, “Jim, let’s start from where you left off;” and a mother who still has not given up. You may know of this loving patience because some parent, teacher, friend, colleague, spouse picked up the pieces and began with you, again and again, and again.

That kind of patience saves this kind of church. We live, for instance, with an invitation to attend this church chipped in the puddingstone over our portico, “Behold I set before thee an open door.” Do you know who that invitation welcomes? To be sure, the derelict from the alley, the bag woman on the wall, the con-man from the Square, the troubled ex-con from Bridgewater. Indeed, if I read Jesus right, this church belongs to them. We are the guests here. That sign over our portico serves not as a tentative welcome to a world we may gingerly tolerate; it affirms the world we may gingerly tolerate makes way for us; that Jesus Christ patiently puts up with us, is loathe to let us go, refuses to cut us down and slice us up because—my soul!—some good might be thrown out with the counterfeit. The promise of our Lord’s patience is aimed not simply at whom we consider the crazies, the drunks and reprobates of the world; for all of our deceptive commitments and relaxed discipleship, our craziness, our stupidity, our sin, the promise of our Lord’s patience is aimed at us!

And that patience offered us, that patience we offer others. The clown in the pulpit, for instance, who sometimes cannot tell the difference between the Gospel of the Democratic Party and the Gospel of Jesus Christ, hang on before you write him off. He may be dead wrong, but perhaps some gentle persuasion and exposure to the real thing through your life may help to enrich the crop. Or, for heaven’s sake, this church, with its sluggishness, it deliberate pace, its failure to stir or encourage you, I beg you, don’t give up yet! Serve here, please, as a loving encouraging hopeful critic. You may help to turn it around and save it.

We are a mixed crop, my friends. We write no one off—no one—not the likes of Madeleine Murray O’Hare (may she rest in peace) and her fiery atheistic associates, and not the grump down the hall, the flake on the T, the wino in the alley, the grouch at the cash register, yea, this church on Copley Square. Patience! For this side of heaven who dares differentiate the quality of the crop in the Divinely sown field?

And so we close. The sower symbolized the church in which I grew up. I love that imagery and know it implies a field of good seed sown, a field infected by weeds tangled and tightly wound at the roots with the grain, a thoroughly mixed and scrambled crop: you, me, this church, God’s world. Yet, my friends, I offer good news to you: we flourish in a Divine grain field, mixed crop though we be, and a gracious Patience broods over us, waiting, watching, praying, reaping us finally with inexpressible joy, gathering us, lovingly, blessedly, into Christ’s welcoming presence. What a fantastic prospect!

SCRIPTURE READING

Matthew 13:24-30

He put before them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well. And 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?’ He answered, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The slaves said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ But he replied, ‘No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let 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.’ ”