Eighth Sunday after Pentecost A; 07.19.26; G. Miles Smith+
Psalm 139:1-11, 22-23; Romans 8:12-25; Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
8th Sunday after Pentecost A; 07.19.26; G. Miles Smith+
Sometimes it can be difficult to know what to do with scripture…even when the language is clear. We effectively talked about that a lot this past Wednesday in the Bible study on the Gospel of Mark which Matteo is leading so very well.
Even when the words of scripture are familiar…there can still be a disconnect such that they do not affect us much. Fortunately for us all…there are exceptions… times when…a “light bulb” goes off with scripture. Or as the British Anglican priest John Wesley used to say--when we suddenly find our hearts “strangely warmed”. Or as a theologian could say that the Holy Spirit is speaking to our minds and hearts. Thank God for those moments when the veil is lifted from familiar scripture.
But just in case the veil may be hanging heavily over much that you have already heard so far in worship today, then I am going to offer you a different kind of experience.
So…what if…when we cannot effectively hear a passage of scripture…what if we flip it…and see how it then reads? In other words, what if we tried to imagine it as its opposite. And then see if we can afterwards hear the actual text more clearly. This doesn’t work with historical-story-type scripture texts, but you can do it with the Psalms, the letters of Paul, and the teachings and parables of Jesus.
So I’m going to do that briefly with some of the texts we’ve heard this morning. You might even want to take up your bulletin…and…prepare yourselves!
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So, what if we flipped the Psalm into its opposite…and it read this way:
LORD, I have no idea if you pay any attention to me whatsoever;
Throughout my sitting and my rising up;
I am alone, except for those near at hand.
I travel, I work, I rest
And you…where are you?...
Such knowledge is all too familiar to me;
It is so familiar that I don’t even have to try.
Where then can I go from your Spirit?
Well, pretty much anywhere…
Except maybe church. If I say , “Surely the darkness will cover me,”
Then, predictably, it surely does. There is so much darkness.
I do desire to be known by you, O God…but, on the other hand, not known too well;
I hope that you never care to know my many restless thoughts or wickedness.
Would that be closer to our experience? Sometimes maybe. Hearing it that way can help us realize more clearly that the actual Psalm…is stretching us beyond any habitual ways of living…which presume to be isolated and far from God. The Psalm, as it is written, is giving us the language to try out…you might say…what it can be like to trust…that the LORD does search us out and know us, very intimately.
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Then there’s Paul’s letter to the Romans. What if we flipped the latter part of that scripture passage, such that it read:
I consider that…the sufferings of this present time…cannot possibly be healed… by the glory about to be revealed to us. For the creation is…a mess of blood and tears…and we are quite assured by leading experts that it is going nowhere in particular…beyond what we might manage to accrue to ourselves for a while. But, yes, we do groan inwardly…but we speak of it as little as we can…for is there really any point? For in hope, we would wish to be saved. But hope is not easily seen. And who can hope in what is not seen? And so we hope in what we do see, holding onto it as tightly as possible, and at least we have that much.
Okay, that’s fairly bleak! But, in truth, that kind of bleakness can call to mind where the Gospel of John says in its opening chapter…that “the light [of Christ] shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not conquer it” (v.5). Such a terrible darkness…has long hovered over the world…and nevertheless it is within the bleakness…that the light of Christ came…and still shines.
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And finally, the Gospel of Matthew. What if, we flipped that parable which Jesus told:
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?’ [And here comes the flip.] But Jesus replied, ‘Yes; go out into the fields, and look for anything that looks like a weed to you, and rip it up. And if some of the wheat gets destroyed too in the process, well, that’s just the way it goes, right? Be vigilant then to separate the wheat from the weeds in every generation, for you cannot wait for the harvest of God to come…who knows when--or if--it ever will. And so, gather the wheat and praise the Lord…but find the weeds, collect them, bind them, and burn them.
Actually, this opposite reading ends up sounding more like what Christians have tended to do throughout history—as if that is what Jesus taught us. But hearing it this opposite way makes it all the more clear that that is not what Jesus said. That is clarifying.
Please allow me a moment to digress a bit…in order to get back to what Jesus actually said…hopefully with a little more insight.
One of the late discoveries in my life has been the Dutch painter from the 17th century, Johannes Vermeer. I had of course seen his paintings many times before online and in books—he is, after all most famous for the painting called “Girl with a Pearl Earring” but there are also others. So I had seen some of his paintings but I just thought they were pretty—kind of in a bourgeois, conventional, respectable sort of way. What I discovered just a month ago—right before seeing four of his paintings in the National Gallery of Art--was something that made it possible for me to see his paintings very differently—kind of like what can happen with scripture.
Vermeer painted those especially famous paintings of his--of women…standing or seated…in serene light—he painted those in a time of the devastating Eighty Year’s War in the Netherlands and the even more horrible Thirty Year’s War in central Europe. These were long protracted wars precipitated by the Reformation conflicts between Roman Catholics and Protestants. But this context for Vermeer is detailed effectively in an eye-opening new book entitled Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found.
So, as it turns out, Vermeer lived in the midst of a very intense time of weeding, you might say. Catholic and Protestant armies were massacring entire towns and villages of men, women, the elderly, and children. On and on this went for one hundred and ten years. And at the same time, in the Netherlands the Dutch Reformed Church was weeding its clergy and congregations of those who were considered not sufficiently Protestant and doctrinally pure. And the Catholic Church was doing the same thing within its ranks. That whole time was a phantasmagoria of weeding…violent, bloody, and horrific warfare…along with ecclesiastical weeding tearing Christians apart from each other even within their own countries and churches. In the midst of all that going on…Vermeer lived…and he painted what would become recognized as masterpieces.
His paintings are actually very far from being bourgeois…rather, they are full of a light…that it is now possible to say he intentionally painted as a kind of spiritual light…shining on the women he painted. For “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not conquer it.”
His most beloved paintings now appear to be…a spiritual rebellion against “the sufferings of his present time”…a protest through his art of gentle beauty and radiant light…against the terrible weeding of his time.
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There are easily so many reasons why we may find ourselves unable to hear and receive scripture when we read it.
When it is possible, flipping a text into its opposite might just reveal what is blocking us…by showing us what it is that we already think and do that is contrary to what God is trying to tell us.
Then we may return to the actual scripture and find…that there…God is indeed…bearing us along…beyond our habitual ways of thinking and living in this world…toward a greater light of God’s own.
