The Parable of the Weeds, a sermon based on Mark 4: 26-29, preached on June 23, 2024

Last Thursday, I attended the funeral for Tim Moran. Tim lived in our neighborhood, and he worshiped with us here at First Presbyterian Church whenever he didn’t feel like driving down to his church in Midtown. We met Tim and his wife, Mary, not long after moving into our house in July of 2017. We were thinking about how to decorate and renovate our new home when we learned that Tim made his living by selling reclaimed wood. He salvaged old long-leaf pine timbers from log cabins and smokehouses built generations ago and sold them out of his warehouse, so we asked him to help us find some beams to build a bookcase for my wife, Sara’s, new office. He invited us to his warehouse where all these pieces of ancient wood were stored. We fell in love with four thick beams, each maybe 10 feet long. He gave us the price, which I’m sure was discounted, but the thoughts of new home expenses gave us cold feet. We started thinking about the moving costs we’d just paid, how we needed to build a fence, paint walls, possibly replace appliances in our new home, and quickly felt like those beautiful beams were too great a luxury. We told Tim we’d have to think about it and reluctantly walked away. Later that same day, we pulled into the driveway, and there the four beams were, stacked next to our back door. It was a gift, and it was a gift that neither of us were expecting, which is the way it goes with so many blessings. They surprise us. We don’t expect them, and yet, if they’ve happened in the past, why wouldn’t they come again? Might the Kingdom of God be something like such an unexpected blessing? This morning, we continue our summer sermon series on the parables of Jesus with what I’m calling “the parable of the weeds.” In this parable is a man who has little to nothing to do with a weed that springs up in his field. He doesn’t water it. He didn’t plow the ground in which it was planted. There is no mention of fertilizer or pruning. This weed seems to have sprung up despite of him rather than because of him, and yet when it bears fruit, he grabs the sickle for the harvest for it’s not a weed at all but a plant that bears grain. This is what the Kingdom of God is like, Jesus says. “The Kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how.” Consider this weed, which he’s done nothing to produce, and consider your blessings, which you’ve done nothing to earn. We humans sometimes we forget about the blessings and start to think that it’s all up to us, or at least I do. How many sleepless nights have I spent tossing and turning, trying to work out some crisis in my head? How many nights have I spent asking myself, again and again, “What am I going to do? What am I going to say?” as though it were all up to me. It’s not all up to me. I remember that when I can’t find something that I’m missing. When I can’t find my car keys or my pocketknife, at first, I’m certain that what I must do is look harder for it. However, it turns up once I finally stop looking. Likewise, so often has it been the case that I spend a restless night worrying about a problem, thinking through what I was going to say, when it resolved itself on its own, like a gift I wasn’t expecting, like a weed that turned into grain. The author Mark Twain was famous for saying, “I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.” So it has been with me. That’s how it always is with these sermons. Every week, I start writing these sermons with the same thought in my mind. I look at that blank sheet of paper and think: “How am I going to fill up the page? Do I really have anything else to say?” I often worry about what I’m going to say all week long, when the reality is, all I need to do is wait for God to tell me what to say. I need to get better at watching for God’s hand at work and listening for God’s voice. God’s always speaking, but the thoughts in my head are racing so quickly, I listen more to my own worries than His assurance that I need not be afraid. This week, I went to Tim’s funeral. As I said before, he came to our church when he didn’t feel like driving down to All Saints’ Episcopal Church in Midtown. That’s where the funeral was, and during the service we sang one of my favorite hymns, “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling.” The third verse goes like this: Finish then thy new creation. Pure and spotless let us be. Let us see thy great salvation Perfectly restored in thee. Changed from glory into glory, Till in heaven we take our place, Till we cast our crowns before thee, Lost in wonder, love, and praise. Do you ever get lost in wonder? Do you ever step back from the work on your desk to consider the work of God’s hand? Do you ever take a break from whatever it is that you must do to give thanks to God for what God has done? Do you ever consider how weeds grow without us? Or how many blessings fall right into our laps? And when you consider the future, will you remember all the good that God has done in the past to assure you that even if you can’t do it all, God is in control? My friends, we are coming closer and closer to election season. I’ve been dreading it for months already, for I’m tired of hearing about how everything hangs in the balance. I’m sick and tired of listening to the news coverage of this next presidential election because it seems like everyone is telling me that the future is uncertain and that no election has ever been so important as this one, as though my vote will determine our destiny, even though never in my life has that ever been the case. I can’t tell you how many of my bad decisions led to my greatest blessings. I can’t tell you how many blessings from God have sprung up like weeds in the yard. I can’t tell you how often it has been the case that finally, in my surrender, once I stopped trying to find the right answer, did the solution appear like my keys under the couch. Don’t listen to the anxiety preached by the 24-hour news cycle, for the Kingdom of God is not like a hard-fought election campaign. The Kingdom of God is not like a marathon that you must train for relentlessly. The Kingdom of God is not like a promotion you earned or a luxury car that you saved for. The Kingdom of God is like a weed that grew without you having to do anything but harvest the wheat from it that you did nothing to earn, and my friends, the Kingdom of God is coming. Jesus said it is coming like a thief in the night, so I’m not going to listen when the world tells me to work harder. Instead, I’m going to remember the voice of God who says, “Come to me all ye who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” I’m not going to listen when the world tells me to be afraid, for Scripture declares, “The Lord is my Shepherd, of whom shall I fear?” I’m not going to listen when they tell me that everything hangs in the balance, for Scripture declares, “We are more than conquerors through him who loved us.” When the world makes me feel like I’ve just got to do something, I’m going to remember the psalm that says, “Be still and know that I am God.” Last Sunday was Father’s Day. My wife, Sara, and our two daughters asked me what I wanted for Father’s Day. Well, I wanted their help. Since we moved into our house, one thing that has bugged me is that half of our front yard is covered in English ivy. That English ivy just takes up so much space. I like that I don’t have to cut it, but I don’t like that I can’t plant azaleas or hydrangeas or something there. It’s just big, green ivy, covering up snake holes and rat dens, as far as I’m concerned, so when Sara and our girls asked me what I wanted for Father’s Day, I told them I wanted their help pulling up ivy, and since last Sunday, we’ve pulled up all of it. I mean all of it. It’s in these huge piles by the street. You can drive by and see it if you want to. Get your picture taken in front of it. It’s a huge pile of ivy that my family helped me pull up while neighbors walked by to watch, and without fail, every neighbor who walked by us working on that ivy said the same thing. “That ivy is coming back.” They said, “You can pull it up. You can spray it with Roundup. You can mow it down, but that ivy is coming back.” That’s what every neighbor said. That might be what you’re thinking right now. If it is, let me ask you this, “If we had faith in God the way we have faith in weeds, can you imagine how it would change us?” If we had as much faith in God that God would never leave us nor forsake us; that the Kingdom of God is coming, no matter how bleak things seem; that the Light of Christ is not going out, no matter how deep the shadow; that God is good, all the time, no matter how bad the news is; that we will overcome, no matter the obstacle, for the Kingdom of God is like a weed that will grow despite of us, and we will eat of its harvest because God is just that good. can you imagine how we would live if we had faith like that? Jesus said, “One with the faith of a mustard seed will move mountains,” and I say, “One who has faith like he does in the weeds in his front yard will never be moved.” Do not be afraid, for He is with us. Do not fear, for He knows our name and will never forsake us. Do not worry about tomorrow, for the Kingdom of God is like a weed that grows no matter how much we spray it. No matter how poor the soil. No matter how little we water. For the Kingdom of God is coming. Halleluia. Amen.

The Parable of the Sower, a sermon based on Matthew 13: 1-23, preached on June 16, 2024

I once heard about a woman whose husband died. Like many, she was surrounded by family and friends. When people got word, they rushed to be by her side. At the funeral, many grieved beside her. Her church supported her, her family was there, yet life goes on. After a while, her family flew home, and her church family moved on, yet she hadn’t moved on. The healing wasn’t complete. There was still a hole in her heart that hadn’t yet healed, and at some point, she stopped trying to get back to life as normal. She stopped doing all kinds of things. If she didn’t feel like getting out of bed, she didn’t. If she didn’t feel like cooking, she didn’t eat. If she didn’t feel like leaving the house, she stayed home. After not attending worship for several Sundays in a row, this woman’s pastor went to visit her. By that point, the funeral had been months before, yet her home was still covered by the shadow of grief. The blinds were closed. The rooms were dark and dusty. There was little to nothing in the refrigerator. She only had water to offer her pastor, and so they sat on her sunporch on the back of the house drinking a glass of water. The sunporch was unlike the rest of the place. The sunporch was open and bright, and there were African violets everywhere. They bloomed from shelves and on tables. They were pink and purple. The pastor was amazed by them, and after complimenting her for her green thumb, he asked the woman if he might take one to a man in the church who had just lost his wife the week before. The woman agreed. The pastor delivered the African violet to the newly-widowed man, and just a few days later, the woman who grew the violet received a thank-you note from the newly-widowed man, thanking her for the gift. This man who received her violet in the wake of his wife’s death wrote to say that in his time of grief, it meant so much to have a plant blooming in his house. In a time of hardship, it meant so much to have something so beautiful to admire. Well, that sentiment touched the woman’s heart. A note like that would touch anyone’s heart, and so she picked up the newspaper on her coffee table, turned to the obituaries, and mailed African violets to those who were mourning. Continuing the practice for weeks, then months, slowly but surely, her own broken heart began to heal. She left the house. She started to cook and eat again. She went back to church. She pulled up the blinds, for when we give of ourselves, something happens within us, and it doesn’t even matter if we don’t receive a thank-you note every time. It doesn’t matter if some of the violets never get watered or go unappreciated, for it is good simply to give. This morning, as we continue our summer sermon series on the parables of Jesus, I want you to know that in the Parable of the Sower, this passage from the Gospel of Matthew that describes a person sowing seed so indiscriminately, so carelessly, so generously, that he didn’t even pay attention to whether the seed went on rocky soil or on the path where birds would eat it, Jesus is telling us, His disciples, about what God is like and how God designed us to be. That’s so much of what our Bible is. Years ago, I was reading the Bible in the waiting room of a doctor’s office, and the man next to me struck up a conversation. He said, “I love to read the Bible, too. It tells us what God is like and how we ought to be.” The man was right about that, so based on today’s parable, what is God like? God is like a sower who throws seed out onto the ground and doesn’t worry too much about where it goes because there is something good that happens just from the sowing. Jesus is like a sower who walks around spreading the Good News like a sower throwing seed indiscriminately, as though it brings him joy simply to spread the Good News, regardless of whether it takes root. That’s not how I sow seed. When I sow seeds, I do all kinds of stuff first because seeds are expensive. This year, I bought my vegetable seeds from the Burpee catalogue, where one packet of seeds costs between $4.00 and $7.00. These are vegetable seeds I’m talking about, not gold nuggets, yet that’s how much they cost. It seems like a packet of them used to cost 50 cents, but not anymore, so when I get my tomato seeds in the mail, I take them down to the basement where I have grow-lights and special soil. I carefully put one or two seeds per hole in this special soil tray that I buy. I have the grow lights on a timer, and I place my trays carefully under the lights so that as many seeds as possible have a chance to take root. Then I go down to the basement every day to check on them as though they were my babies. I once showed my mom the whole operation, and I think it worried her a little bit, either because it scared her how obsessed I’d become or because she wasn’t sure those were just vegetables I was growing down in the basement. I’m not sure which it was, but when the little plants are big enough and the weather is warm enough, I take the baby plants and carefully put them into the soil I’ve turned and fertilized. I’m careful about how I do all this because seeds are expensive. I can’t imagine just throwing them out all around the backyard. If I did that, some would get into the weeds where they’d be choked out. Others would fall onto the driveway where they’d be eaten up by the birds. Some might sprout in the rocky soil, but their roots would not go deep, and they’d dry up. Never would I just throw out seeds so indiscriminately the way the sower in our parable did, but Jesus isn’t really talking about sowing seeds, is He? No. He’s talking about how God is, and how we ought to be, and haven’t some of us forgotten how to be? Last Wednesday, columnist Dick Yarbrough of the Marietta Daily Journal looked back on his childhood to reflect on how far we’ve come. When he was a child, there were only three channels on his family’s black and white TV, and to change the channel, someone had to get up and turn the dial. They had one rotary phone, and if someone called while they weren’t home, no one was there to answer it. The caller would just have to call back. When they wrote letters to relatives in Scotland, it would take three weeks to receive their response. Today, things have changed. They email weekly with relatives throughout the world and receive a response immediately; he’s never away from his phone because it fits in his pocket, and all the channels are on his TV, which he can control without getting up from his La-Z-boy. I’m not as old as Dick Yarbrough, and still a lot has changed since I was a kid. If you would have told 10-year-old Joe Evans about a world where I’d have access on my phone to all the music that’s ever been recorded, and that all the TV shows and movies that have ever been made would be at my fingertips, I would have thought you were describing Heaven. But here’s the question for us in this modern age with so much entertainment right at our fingertips: Now that we have so much to entertain us, are we happier? Last week, our daughters went away to camp in middle Tennessee. It’s a Presbyterian camp in a remote valley. There’s no cell phone signal. There are no TVs. They swim in the cold water of a dammed-up creek. They eat in a mess hall. One night, the mess hall serves Chinese food, and I want you to know that rural Tennessee is not known for Chinese food, and yet they love camp. They love being there. In fact, it’s their favorite week of the year. In a world where we are being constantly entertained, why would they want to go to camp? Or why would they sign up for Road Rules? This morning, our daughters, along with other members of our youth group, left for a weeklong mission trip that we call Road Rules. They don’t know where they’re going. The itinerary is unknown to them. All week, they’ll be sleeping on the floor of church basements as they go from unknown destination to unknown destination, doing mission projects all along the way. Our daughters went last year, and they wanted to go again this year. They didn’t have to be persuaded. We don’t make them do stuff at this church just because their dad is one of the pastors. They wanted to go. Why? Because there is something about doing. There is something about giving. There is something about sharing what we have that nourishes our souls in a way that the glow of our phones or the headlines of our TV screens never could and never will. The Parable of the Sower tells us what God is like, and God is like a sower who casts out so much seed that he doesn’t really worry about who gets it or if his bag will be empty by the time he gets back home. He’s like the peach tree in our front yard that will work all year to produces peaches that it will never eat. God is like that, and in this parable, Jesus is telling us how we ought to be, for we were not created to be entertained. Our purpose in this life is not to eat, drink, and be merry, for we are like the Sower: It makes us happy to give and to share regardless of the outcome. On this Father’s Day, I think about how being a father has taught me some of these lessons. When I think about my own father, I realize that so much of what he did for me, I never thanked him for. I never thanked him for paying the mortgage on time. I never thanked him for keeping the lights on, and yet, now that I’m a father, I realize that in doing these things, while it’s nice to be thanked, it is also a blessing simply to give. It is a blessing to give and to help. It is a blessing to share. It is better to give than it is to receive, and that’s why so many people retire and lose touch with joy and happiness. We weren’t created to watch the news all day. That’s not what we’re here for. We were created to spread the blessings that we have received from the Lamb of God who spread the Gospel on this earth. We received it, and now it is our joy to spread it ourselves. We weren’t built to sit around, but to serve, to give, to sow, to share. Trusting that our God shares abundant mercy with us and this world, share what you have been given. Give. Sow. And be healed. Amen.

Choose Life Over Judgement, a sermon based on Matthew 7: 1-5, preached on June 2, 2024

The week before last I was grateful for the opportunity to go with Sam Collier to a Braves game. I love watching the Braves. They lost, but that hardly took away from it. The weather was perfect. Our seats were great. At the concession stand, they offer a hotdog with bacon jam, so the food we ate was outstanding as well. It was a great day. I love watching the Braves, and there’s only one thing that gets on my nerves while watching a game in Truist Park. I can’t stand how washed-up old baseball players like me will be sitting there, drinking a souvenir size coke and eating a hotdog with bacon jam, while critiquing the players on the field. I heard this man, who got winded walking to his seat, yell: “You should have caught that!” to a player who dove for a line drive. That’s the part that drives me crazy. We’re all sitting there in the stands, some of us would have trouble touching our toes, yet we’ll criticize the athletes who miss a ground ball. Even with a head start, most of us can’t outrun the Freeze, and yet we judge the players who get called out stealing a base. Those of us in the stands, we’re no physical specimens, so how can we criticize those able-bodied athletes? We compare their batting averages, but to see some truly concerning numbers, we should look at our own cholesterol. We compare one pitcher’s ERA to another’s, but what about our blood pressure? Before we go pointing out the spec in the athlete’s eye, let us deal with the log in our own. Today, we begin another summer sermon series. For the last few summers, the Rev. Cassie Waits and I have preached a summer sermon series. We preached on the “I AM” sayings of Jesus a couple years ago. That summer, we preached on all the statements Jesus used to describe Himself, and we asked you to write on ribbons. Do you remember that? Last summer, we preached on spiritual gifts, and we asked you to write on little cards, giving thanks to God for those who had been given the gifts of generosity, artistic expression, and faithfulness. This summer, we’re focused on parables. When Jesus spoke, He often used parables or metaphors. Recognizing that telling someone, “You’re being an awful hypocrite” is likely to make them defensive, Jesus told stories and used images to help people see the truth of their condition. Each Sunday this summer, one of us will try to help you understand a different parable of Jesus, which requires us to try to wrap our heads around the parable for ourselves. This morning, it’s the parable of the speck and the log. To get started on this sermon, I googled, “What’s the meaning of the parable of the speck and the log?” The meaning, according to many websites, was relatively simple: that in this parable, Jesus is trying to tell us that we tend to see the faults of others without recognizing that we are guilty of much greater faults. We focus on the speck in our neighbor’s eye while ignoring the log in our own. That’s true, and what’s more, doing so doesn’t get us anywhere. In the Gospel of Luke, two went up to the temple to pray. One was a priest. The other was a tax collector. The priest, standing by himself, was praying like this: “God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector I walked up here with. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.” That’s an interesting prayer to pray, right? But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and saying, “God have mercy on me, a sinner.” Then Jesus said, “It was the tax collector who went away justified.” Why? In the eyes of Jesus, we’re all sinners in need of forgiveness; It matters not the magnitude nor the flavor of our sin, yet we can be like priests who say, “I must be doing OK because I’m not like this tax collector.” Or we can be like two sisters who snuck ice cream from the freezer while their mother was out. One was eating with a tablespoon and the other with a teaspoon. When their mother walked in to catch them both with the ice cream on their faces and their spoons in their hands, she didn’t care who had the bigger spoon. When two boys fight in class, the teacher doesn’t care who started it. When Jesus comes offering us forgiveness, He’s not impressed that some think they need less forgiveness than others. So long as not a one of us is perfect, we need to be asking Him for help, not standing up in the temple in self-righteousness or pointing out the speck in our neighbor’s eye. Even if our neighbor is guilty, pointing it out won’t make us innocent any more than judging the athletes will make us athletic. Coming out of the 8:30 service, Ken Farrar told me that a football coach was being interviewed about his team’s performance after a loss. The coach said, “Sometimes this happens. Players make mistakes. And while we keep looking for the player who never misses a tackle or drops a pass, he hasn’t tried out yet, but maybe we should start looking for him in the stands because apparently everyone up there can do this better than we can.” Don’t judge your neighbor. Instead, deal with your own issues. In courage and humility, call on Him for help. Remember the tax collector. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, “God have mercy on me, a sinner.” And God did have mercy. He went home justified, but the priest went home with a log still in his eye. Jesus could see it and so could a lot of other people, which is the point of the parable: Those who spend time judging others are blowing their cover. Those high school bullies are hoping that if they spend all their time making fun of other people, no one will notice the secrets that they’re trying to hide. Those churchgoing Christians who use the Bible to condemn their neighbors have a brokenness within them that they’re afraid to face. The more guilt we carry, the more judgmental we become, yet Jesus knows. Jesus knows that attached to the finger pointed in judgement is a sinner in need of redeeming. That’s why He says, “Come unto me all ye who are weary and carrying a heavy burden and I will give you rest.” “If we say that we have no sin we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us. Yet if we confess our sins, he who is faithful and righteous will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” In this church, we confess before God and one another that there is a log in our eyes. Yet we live in a world where it seems at times as though our national pastime isn’t baseball anymore, but casting judgement. It’s like we’re all looking for a reason to feel superior. We live in this divided political climate, and I can see it in your eyes how much you worry about it. I worry about it, too, but here’s what I know: If we could just break the habit of making ourselves feel better by looking down on each other, we will live. One of Abraham Lincoln’s earliest published speeches was one he gave at 28 years of age in Springfield, Illinois. Weeks before, a mob had burned St. Louis. Lincoln took the incident seriously, as a sign of growing division in the United States, which at the time was hardly 50 years old. To our young, fledging republic, full of people who wondered if our country would last the test of time, this is what he said: At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? And by what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step over the ocean, and to crush us with a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth in their military chest; and with a Napoleon Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up among us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free people, we must live through all time, or die by suicide. My friends, I feel our nation pull against the seams that have knit us together. When we split into parties and call one side the enemy, we threaten our very existence. Yet when we kneel before the Cross, together confessing our sins and calling on Jesus for mercy, we will live. Amen.