(This sermon was delivered to a group recovering from alcohol and drug addiction.) The teacher said: “If you arrange the big things in your life first then you’ll find there’s room for all the rest to fit in neatly.”
Jesus addresses the paradox of sin flourishing side by side and often indistinguishable from virtue. Like old Westerns, the people in this parable are characterized as either wheat or weeds… good guys or bad guys. But real life seldom offers such a binary choice.
Books have been written on the low rate of religious affiliation in the Northwest with Oregon being the state with the lowest percentage of church members. People say they believe in some sort of God, but I dare say for many that God is far away from them.
What's the point of the parable? It's simply this: The Kingdom of God is a mixed bag in which wheat and weeds--good and bad--grow together side by side. You can't always tell them apart. And this. It is possible to do damage while trying to do good.
Do you believe in miracles? I know … you’re church folks and therefore you’re supposed to believe in miracles. But do you? Do you really? We live in a scientific age, an age in which it is almost passé to believe in miracles.
(This sermon was delivered to a group recovering from alcohol and drug addiction.) Before I came into AA, I’d developed a real skill for spotting the faults in others. I thought it was a genuine gift. If you wanted to know what was wrong with you – all you had to do was come and ask me!
The miracle of the loaves and fishes is a tale we have heard over and over since childhood. It is the only miracle recounted in all four gospels. Yet despite its familiarity, its full meaning often escapes our understanding.
I’ve never seen it myself, but I understand that in some churches the center aisle serves as a clearly-marked divider. The men sit on one side of the church and the women and children on the other.
Every time I hear the story of the feeding of the five thousand, I am reminded of reading of a man packing a shipment of food for the poor people of Appalachia. He was separating beans from powdered milk, and canned vegetables from canned meats.
To make a long story short, this King Herod becomes enamored of his brother Philip's wife and divorces his own wife to marry her. John the Baptist condemns this, and ends up a prisoner of Herod, who want to execute him--except that he fears the people's reaction.