Proper 11

I preached this last weekend at St Paul's Cathedral, Buffalo, on the Gospel Matthew 13: 24-30



In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

In pre-Reformation English churches, painted on the wall behind the altar is often a harrowing depiction of Christ returning to judge the world, and to separate out those living into the sheep who enter into heaven and the goats who don’t fare so well. These paintings, called dooms, are rather blatant means to remind church-attending Christians of the realities of the presumed consequences of their actions and to motivate them to move over toward the sheep side if they have some concerns they might be leaning toward goathood.

We don’t often see depictions of dooms too frequently any more, though the material they convey is still present in our world. The Gospel today is a pretty straightforward parable that decides to skimp on the sugarcoating and go right to the heart of the matter: Heaven is real. Hell is real. Judgment and eternal loss and eternal bliss are real. And the one who delivers the message is Christ Himself, the God who came among us in flesh out of love and accepted death on the cross out of love. Christ Himself, the messenger of love, tells us that there is a hell.

When I was younger, I had the amazing opportunity to experience the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola over 8 days. During those 8 days, all of us lived in absolute and complete silence, never once speaking and each day we had a series of meditations. And St. Ignatius designed his Spiritual Exercises so that they begin first with what are called the Eternal Truths: Heaven, Hell, Sin, Judgment, Salvation, Damnation. The goal of these meditations is for the retreatant to reflect on his own relation to these eternal truths: what do I think about Heaven? What is Judgement like? How does it relate to me, and what is my place in the economy of salvation? After the end of the retreat, I seriously was convinced that my intensified understanding of God’s love and of the Eternal Truths would lead me never again to sin. But how that didn’t really pan out is a different sermon for a different day.

But I was fortunate in how the Spiritual Exercises were preached, for those who led it did not lead us to meditate on Heaven and Hell as just rewards for our holiness or depravity, did not use fear of pain to scare us from sin and desire for comfort to win us over to heaven. They preached on love, and that following a path of deeper and more convinced love for Christ that would bring about our own growth in holiness, and that heaven might blossom in our hearts now, in our own mundane lives. I remember that one preacher wondered if the saints who had reached perfection in their earthly lives would even realize at their deathbeds that they had died, as they had been living in heaven for so long that the transition from life to death may not even have been noticeable.

It is interesting in today’s Gospel and in thinking about the medieval Doom paintings to consider that the wheat that is saved and the weeds that are burned are not the only thing that composes a person, that a person is not only weeds or only wheat. But instead, that we are a blend of wheat and weeds, what is burned away as weeds are the aspects of the person that are unloving and inhibit the person from love, and the wheat that is treasured are the aspects of the person that have embraced love of God, neighbor, and self. Understanding the parable and the doom paintings this way, then, we are not wholly lost or saved, but those things in us that need to be changed are purified and lifted up, and those things in us that are already configured to Christ’s love are acknowledged as beautiful and as small pieces of heaven already dwelling in our souls.
I’d like to read briefly what the Book of Common Prayer teaches in the Catechism about the eternal truths, particularly in light of understanding that each of us is composed of a mixture of wheat and weeds:

Q. What do we mean by heaven and hell?
A. By heaven, we mean eternal life in our enjoyment of God;
by hell, we mean eternal death in our rejection of God.

Q. Why do we pray for the dead?
A. We pray for them, because we still hold them in our
love, and because we trust that in God’s presence those who have chosen to serve him will grow in his love, until they see him as he is.

You may have noticed a subtle phrasing in the answer given to the question: What do we mean by heaven and hell? The answer says that heaven is eternal life in our enjoyment of God, while hell is eternal death in our rejection of God. Heaven and hell, then, are not places to which we travel after death, but states of being that exist due to our choices to love God and to continue in that love even after the death of our body, or to reject God, and to live without Him after we die. Our hell is of our own making, our own choices to reject the gift God extends us, the gift to love Him through Christ, through our neighbors and through strangers, through loving ourselves. Hell, as Christ Himself preached, is a very real state, an eternal truth, and each hell is private, of a person’s own choosing and making, it is loss, it is absence, it is not God’s plan, and it is entirely avoidable.
The second Catechism question, the one regarding why we pray for the dead, also had an answer that might have been startling once you consider it. I’m not sure if many of us have reflected on why we pray for the dead. We doubtfully think too often about hell, so prayers for the dead might be even further down on our laundry list of eternal truths to consider. The answer the Catechism provides as reasoning for these prayers is twofold: first, we recognize that our beloved dead are not gone from us, and that they still live in the love of Christ in which they lived while still in an earthly life. Their death, then, was not a break, not even an interruption, but a change from the physical and natural to the metaphysical and supernatural. But we also pray for them because we trust “that in God’s presence those who have chosen to serve him will grow in his love, until they see him as he is.” Here, then, is a reference to there being both wheat and weeds in a person, and there being room to grow in God’s love, room for wheat to replace weeds, even after death.

CS Lewis describes this concept in his book The Great Divorce. In that book, a busload of people die and eventually are transported to a field. The narrator in The Great Divorce witnesses people all around him in this field conversing with bright beings. In one of those conversations, the narrator overhears a bright figure talking to a man with a large lizard on his shoulder. The bright figure invited the man to travel with him over the mountains to go further up and further in, to enter into joy evermore. But the man is concerned about his lizard, and the bright figure tells him that the lizard may not come. It cannot enter into the Kingdom to which they will be traveling. The lizard whispers to the man, telling him that the bright figure is jealous, that he is wrong. The lizard reminds the man how long they’ve been together, how sad the man would be if the lizard were to leave. The man truly wants to leave with the bright figure, and achingly desires to go further up and further in, but the lizard hisses that the bright figure cannot be trusted, that the man knows the lizard and should trust him. The bright figure offers to kill the lizard, but the man asks “Will it hurt?” The bright figure confirms that it will. The man agonizes and considers, weeps and confronts his desire to enter the Kingdom over the mountains but also his attachment to the lizard that even still is clawing into the man’s shoulder. Finally, the man consents, and the bright figure crushes the lizard. The man cries out in loss, and the lizard dies a hissing, violent death. But the narrator then notices that the lizard begins to shimmer, and is transformed into a great winged horse. The bright figure invites the man to mount the horse, as it will fly him quickly over the mountains into the Kingdom. For, the very flaw, the very sin, the very thing to which the man clung though it damaged him, when it’s given up for the Kingdom was transformed into the means by which the man entered into everlasting joy.

We all have weeds mixed in with wheat. We all have lizards we pet and cherish even though they damage us, even though they hold us back. We all struggle on our progress toward growing in love, as the weeds choke us, hold us back, and make us less than we would like, less than Christ dreams we could be. Our progress to grow in holiness, to grow in grace, will not be successful unless we are growing together, as one large field of wheat and weeds. We pray for the dead because we remember that they are with us still, that they are still our mothers and fathers, grandparents and friends, and we also ask their prayers for us. We pray for one another who still are in this life. For we all struggle together to grow into perfection, into the eternal life that has been offered us in Christ.

And remembering the love given us in Christ, the Doom paintings should no longer frighten us, but invite us to seek out in our own souls when we have allowed weeds to choke our grain, when we have ignored pleas for help from strangers, when we have accepted that the poor remain crushed, that the starving remain hungry, that the lost remain unguided. When we look into our own souls, let us pray that Christ’s grace can help us see how to replace weeds with wheat, through works of mercy among those in need, through prayers for those who have died, and for those who are living still and are suffering. When we look into our own souls, let us pray that we may see how the lizards which speak poison into our ears can be set aside and transformed even into strengths that build us up and more completely turn us to Heaven. When we look into our own souls, let us pray that we lay aside fearmongering and anxiety, and stop threatening ourselves and others with a fiery hell, and instead invite love to come and make a home in our hearts, and in others’ hearts that we may turn away from acting out of fear and toward acting out of compassion and love as Christ invites us. What a cheap religion we have if the only reason to love God is to avoid Hell.
God desires each of us to grow into complete perfection, to be all wheat, to become saints, and to bring others along with us. God desires that each of us accept the grace at work within us that strengthens our wheat and burns our weeds, and God desires that we bring others into the love we’ve already experienced.

Each year, on All Saints Sunday in November, we sing the words of I Sing a Song of the Saints of God, which concludes:
They lived not only in ages past,

There are hundreds of thousands still.

The world is bright with the joyous saints

Who love to do Jesus' will.

You can meet them in school, or in planes, or at sea,

In church, or in trains, or in shops, or at tea;

For the saints of God are just folk like me,

And I mean to be one too.

Amen.