July 19, 2026

I don't often want to do this, but I'm going to start this morning with a few things that annoy me. One are lectionary mixtapes—these sort of chopped-up lectionary readings we get where the editors of our lectionary decide to pull verses from here and pull verses from there and knit them together. The other are time changes. I detest time changes. So you would think that I'm really excited and enthused about these efforts presently underway to move us fully into Daylight Saving Time. But even more than time changes, I detest Daylight Saving Time. If we're going to move anywhere, I would rather we actually move fully into Standard Time.

And I'm not alone on this. My friend and colleague at Princeton University, Kara Slade, has mentioned that Standard Time is actually more befitting of our religious calendar and the way in which we orient ourselves in our daily prayer life, and in the seasons and patterns of our praying. When we're in Daylight Saving Time, things kind of go awry. But it's not just a liturgical or religious sensibility; Lindsay Bever and Aaron Steckelberg of the Washington Post published an article on Thursday identifying all of these health consequences to us being in Daylight Saving Time all the time. We actually don't sleep as well, we have higher incidence rates of heart disease, of diabetes, of all of these other health issues. It seems as though Standard Time is a better alternative than full Daylight Saving Time.

But there's a connection here with what we encounter today, because in a way, time is kind of a constructed concept. We, in our cultural context and society, have a way of thinking about time, a way of constructing it and utilizing it. But that's not shared around the world. Different cultures and different peoples at different times throughout history have had myriad ways of constructing and designating timeliness. And yet, even though it's this constructed concept, it has a real, physical, concrete reality to it. It has a real, physical, concrete implication on our life.

I want to connect that to this concept of parable. You know, I talked last week about how we're moving into this season of parables of Jesus, that he's going to be educating us, admonishing us, teaching us through the use of parable for the next little while in our lectionary cycle. Sometimes, in our tradition, in our culture, we can get into the habit of dismissing the teachings we hear because we take them as story, as metaphor, as some way disconnected from reality.

But parable is powerful. Parable also has this real, concrete, immediate implication and impact on our lives. The term parable comes from the Greek parabola, which is literally to "throw side-by-side." It's a comparative word, comparing one thing to another. It's actually the same concept of a mathematical parabola, where you have sort of a symmetrical parallel on one side and the other.

William Stringfellow, the great lay Episcopal theologian that I often reference, has used the concept of Babylon in the biblical narrative as a parable in this Greek sense that it is a side-by-side comparison. We have the historical rootedness of Babylon, of the experience of the Israelites' exile in Babylon, but then Babylon becomes this kind of metaphor, this parable, this comparison to each and every age of the oppressive system, of the powers and principalities of this world that function to impose their will on the people of God. He shows how Babylon is used effectively in the New Testament as this concept of oppressive power, and how even in our age today, we have Babylons in our own context—these powers and principalities that weigh us down. But there's a real, tangible concreteness; these are not physical Babylons, these are not the Babylon of the past age, but they nevertheless function in a clear, concrete sense in the experience of our lives.

And that's sort of similar to this use of parable that we have, as we've received it, from the Middle English—this sense of vignettes or of metaphor. It's a story, but a story with an important real-world application to it. It's this character of storytelling, but not storytelling that's removed from reality. It is storytelling that has a deep and lasting implication for how we are to live our lives. It is how we experience truth and the way we live into truth in each age.

And so that brings me back to my second gripe about lectionary mixtapes, because we actually have a whole little section of Matthew chapter 13 that we miss today. If you look at your reading, it jumps from verse 30 to verse 36. This makes some sense because it's Jesus offering the parable of the wheat and the weeds and then immediately explaining what the parable means. But these five verses in between, I think, help deepen our engagement with what Jesus is teaching today.

It begins in verse 31:

He put before them another parable: "The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches."

He told them another parable: "The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until it was all leavened."

Jesus told the crowd all these things in parables; without a parable he told them nothing. This was to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet: "I will open my mouth to speak in parables; I will proclaim what has been hidden from the foundation of the world."

So I want to take all of that together this morning. First, to understand that parables let us see truth that is not always so clear, not always so evident. I think this is what Jesus is indicating when he quotes Psalm 78 there at the very end of verse 35: that sometimes this use of metaphor, this use of storytelling, in fact, enlightens our ability to see truth more clearly.

Secondly, the principle teaching in today's lesson—the one that we hear about these wheat and weeds in the same field—is that the judgment of what is wheat, what is weeds, how they are to be handled, and how they are to be dealt with at the end of the age, is God's work alone, or at least the divine powers alone. We, as the Christian faithful, are not the sowers. We are not the harvesters. We are the wheat among the weeds. This isn't to say that we shouldn't grow, that we shouldn't work to overcome the weeds, or that we shouldn't work to overcome the entanglements and oppression of the weeds of this world. But ultimately, the judgment of those weeds, the systematic judgment of that oppression, is the divine authority alone, and it is for the powers of righteousness at the end of the age to deal with.

And so then that brings me to the third observation, reflecting on the two parables that we miss in this interlude period. When we consider ourselves the wheat among weeds, that can feel very overwhelming, disorienting, and it can almost feel disempowering. Because what are we to do? What are we to do when there's so much evil, so much corruption, so much ill in the soil around us?

Well, we're reassured that the minute, minuscule, tiny little kernel of faith that we cultivate—our rootedness in the rich soil of God's vineyard—is in and of itself sufficient. Even as mustard seeds, even in difficult, in inhospitable circumstances, we can grow into these fruitful, life-giving, nourishing spaces of support, of compassion, of nurturing love. And two, that we, as yeast, can leaven the whole of three measures of flour. What seems like a minuscule amount of faith or work or ability to change the world has these ripple effects that grow and multiply and become larger and larger with time.

I was thinking about that just this past week. You know, about four months ago, we were approached by our partners at the Uptownie Hub about piloting a new way of being a support to our community. In addition to doing our bi-monthly packing of staple goods at the Hub, they said, "Would you be interested in doing a market at the church with fresh produce, with meat, with other forms of support?" And so we said yes. Each month, we prepared to support 100 people. I think the first month we had 35 or 36. The next month we were in the low 40s. Last month we had 56. And this month we had 62.

It's slow. It's incremental. It's not yet that maxed-out 100, but we're seeing the ripple effect. We're seeing the way in which this tiny little stuff of faith is beginning to grow. It's beginning to take root. It's beginning to have a deeper and more impactful reality on the community and world around us.

And so this morning, friends, we confront what at first seems like this kind of difficult reading—one in which, in one way, we might just take the sense that we are to cultivate our own lives, grow to be the fruitful wheat we can be among this patch of weeds, and simply take this as an internal admonition to cultivate our own spiritual health and vitality. But if we take it fully, with the two other parables couched between, we see that it's not just about our own experience, taking care of ourselves. Rather, in being rooted, in nourishing and enriching our faith life and spiritual vitality even in times of difficulty and turmoil, we have an impact on the world around us. We have a ministry to the world around us.

This parable transitions from a thing of just kind of metaphorical storytelling into a concrete, real implication for how we are to be, who we are to be, and the resulting impact that our life as this community can have on the world around us. And it grows. It grows in these small, incremental ways. We have this immediate impact on the community here in Damascus, which then has a larger impact on the regions of northern Montgomery County, which then has an impact on Montgomery County as a whole, and the region of the DMV as a whole, and then the whole of the East Coast, and the whole of the nation, and the whole of the world. Through this effort, through this faithfulness, we grow and multiply in the goodness that we share, and the goodness that comes forth from the fruit of the work that we are doing.

There will be these times—these times of frustration and difficulty, these times where the weeds seem to be overtaking us and overrunning us. But if we remain faithful to our call, if we remain faithful to who we are, if we stay true to being the wheat among those weeds, then God will take care of the rest.

I leave you with one final example. I've used this before, but it's such a good one, I'd like to come back to it again and again. In the depth of the apartheid experience in South Africa, Desmond Tutu actively engaged in work to oppose the system of apartheid. He got to a breaking point in his life where he got overwhelmed; he couldn't see any kind of path forward. He was at a retreat center, and he retired to a cross at this retreat center. He knelt on the kneeler before it and just prayed for what seemed like hours on end.

And a resolution came to him. He turned around the next day and went in to P. W. Botha, the prime minister of South Africa at the time, and he said, "I have an invitation to you. Come and join us. We have already won. You may seem to have the upper hand at this moment, but justice will win out. Justice will prevail at the end of the day. And so, I will lay aside this anxiety I have about having to fix this myself, and I have given over that transformation to God. God will prevail at the end of the day. My work to you is to invite you into the reality of that transformed life that is eventually coming. It may not be tomorrow, it may not be next week, it may not be next year, but justice will prevail. And I invite you to join with me in that movement towards justice."

It didn't happen the next day, and it didn't happen the next week, but truly, it did eventually come to fruition. The system of apartheid collapsed, and Desmond Tutu's invitation remained. The great work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission brought the sides of deep and lasting opposition together to find a new way, a new day, a new path forward.

So let us be that wheat among the weeds. And in being that wheat among the weeds, in that faithfulness, let us let God do God's work. Let us be the yeast. Let us be the mustard seed. So that with whatever faithful, incremental steps we take, we may more significantly point towards the coming arc of justice, of transformation, of new life that is yet on the horizon.

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

July 12, 2026

Years ago, when I was training to be a psychotherapist in my professional counseling degree, I was taken with a rather obscure and kind of fringe psychotherapist named Milton Erickson, who spent most of his career working in Arizona. Milton Erickson had some rather strange ideas about the use of hypnosis in a medical or psychotherapeutic setting, and those are kind of the legacies and the things that people still remember about him most today.

But he had another element of his overall theory that I found incredibly captivating, and one that I still, to some degree, find myself utilizing in my own pastoral context. It was said that his office, where he would receive clients and work with them, was filled with knickknacks and little items and remembrances from his life. As someone who struggles very significantly to get rid of things, there's a part of me that still resonates with that.

Erickson would encounter people in the places that they were in in their life—the struggles that they were bringing to him to process in therapy—and he would listen with this attentive, engaging ear, and then often respond to them by telling a story. He would use one of his little knickknacks or pull something down from a shelf to talk about the implication and the memory that this item had for him, or the thing that it came from in his life experience. This was rooted in a deep belief that sometimes what breaks people open is not a kind of blunt, direct assessment of their condition, but this sort of roundabout way of addressing their issue through telling a story, giving an example, or offering a parable that helps them see their circumstance anew—to see it in a different light and reflect on it in a totally new way.

That kind of storytelling mechanism, that rather roundabout way of working with people and meeting them where they are, is quite foreign to our way of being in our cultural and societal life in the United States. We're pragmatic people. We're straightforward and blunt people. We like to deal with the concrete, material things of this world. And yet sometimes, what is most impactful, what is most life-changing and transforming, is story.

I'm thinking about that this week because we're beginning to shift into a new element of this season of Ordinary Time after Pentecost. You may remember—and I've talked about this a lot over the last few weeks—we are coming out of this middle section of St. Matthew's Gospel where we have these very explicit, concrete admonitions that Jesus is offering, especially in the commissioning that we encountered in chapter 10 where he says, "Go to communities and do this." You can't get much clearer than that.

But now, beginning this Sunday, we enter into this period where we are going to be receiving teachings from Jesus that are couched in story, in parable. This, overarchingly, was Jesus' teaching mechanism throughout the whole of his earthly ministry. The great New Testament scholar from Lebanon, Kenneth Bailey, observed that this was at the heart of how Jesus preaches and teaches in the world. Dr. Bailey observes:

"Jesus was a metaphorical theologian. That is, his primary method of creating meaning was through metaphor, simile, parable, and dramatic action, rather than through logic and reasoning. He created meaning like a dramatist and a poet, rather than like a philosopher. In the Western tradition, serious theology has always been constructed from ideas held together by logic. In such a world, the more intelligent the theologian, the more abstract he or she usually becomes, and the more difficult it is for the average person to understand what is being said. In contrast, the popular perception of Jesus is that of a village rustic, creating folktales for fishermen and farmers. But when examined with care, his parables are serious theology, and Jesus emerges as an astute theologian."

I want to reflect on that and spend some time on it this morning, because I think we find ourselves in a similar context today. I'll give you an example of how we don't always think about these things in the most helpful of ways.

In the post-war years after World War II, much of what had been done theologically in the United States and in Europe fell by the wayside. There was no example or framework for understanding the depth of the suffering, the pain, and the destruction wrought by the Second World War. Theologians were struggling to figure out how to account for that. You had a whole slew of folks—probably names that few of you recognize—who began to try to wrestle with that philosophically and theologically: the Niebuhr brothers, for example, Paul Tillich in Europe, and Karl Barth. They had a lasting impact on the work of theology, and they are people that those of us like me still read in seminary to this day. But the power of those observations is rather limited to the people who can understand the dense theological positions that they are articulating.

In another way, though, two great storytellers also wrestled with the exact same realities, the exact same challenges to their faith. J.R.R. Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings, and C.S. Lewis wrote The Chronicles of Narnia. In their own way, these works are just as rich, just as dense, and just as meaningful theological reflections on the horrors and atrocities of the world wars as any dense theological treatise. Yet, what they did in those works of fiction—in those parables, in those stories—impacted generations of folks that came after them. They helped us to more robustly and fully acknowledge the places of corruption and death that the world so often puts before us, while simultaneously pointing to the hope and the everlasting promise of new life and transformation that is also around us. It's in the power of those stories that so many found a path forward, perhaps through social times of darkness or even personal times of struggle and lament.

And so today, as we are presented with one of the first parables of Jesus' ministry that we encounter in this liturgical season, I want us at the outset to think about the power and meaning that story can have in our lives to shape and form how we encounter our faith in new and renewing ways.

Today's parable is a rather straightforward one. Almost as a kind of entry into this way of teaching theologically, Jesus gives us an easy out because, at least with this parable, he gives the story and then tells you exactly what it's about. He gives you an explanation immediately after offering the parable. He says that we have a sower, and this process of spreading and planting seeds, some of which fall on paths, some of which fall on rocky ground, some of which fall among thorns, and then those very few that fall on the good soil that is cultivated and brings forth growth.

Unfortunately, in explaining this parable, Jesus kind of frames it around the individual experience of faith. He explains that there are some who receive the word inconsequentially because it makes no sense to them; it's a completely foreign language and they have no context for understanding. There are some who understand to a degree, but are either upon rocky ground or in the thicket of thorns where that understanding cannot deepen, flourish, and grow into something greater. And then finally, there are those who have the context, the support, and the system that nourishes and strengthens them so that they grow most robustly and completely in their faith.

Where I think Jesus' explanation can sometimes be a little bit unhelpful for us in our context today is that, in a society and culture that is so individualistically focused, we hear this parable as a parable strictly about us as individuals. We tend to hear it in a limited, bifurcated way where we, as individuals, are permanently categorized: we are either those who have fallen on good, nourished ground, those who have fallen on rocky or thorny ground, or those who have no context for understanding any of this and are simply lying on the pathway of life.

At the end of the day, I don't think that is completely what Jesus is talking about. Certainly, there is an element of individual, personal faith experience that we can reflect upon in our own journeys through our life experiences. But there's an immense power and value in assessing this same parable in the life of who we are as a community. What does it mean for us to be nourished in good soil, to be able to grow and thrive with good systems of support and good networks of nourishing relationships?

Furthermore, if we extend this metaphor out, seasons of growth are not singular; they are cyclical. This may be a season in which the sowing didn't go as planned and wasn't as productive as we wanted it to be. But there's always another season on the horizon, another opportunity to attempt again, to sow again, and to plant anew. In the spiritualized experience of our faith, these seasons are immediate opportunities; we are not beholden to the seasonal patterns of the physical world.

The moment that we assess that the seeds we have sown have fallen on rocky ground, or have fallen on a pathway where what we attempted has no comprehensibility or viable path forward—or maybe we've sown into the thickets where we've seen some initial growth but feel the weight of the material, oppressive systems of the world around us—we have an immediate opportunity to sow again. We can try again, attempting to cultivate anew a good and rich season of planting and flourishing.

All of this comes back to this sense of story. So often, we can get wrapped up in the material, concrete things of this world. We can see the seasons of life in the parish and in our lives measured purely in the order of balance sheets, numerical attendance in worship, or other concrete metrics of growth in our community. But more powerfully and profoundly, we have an opportunity to think about what this says as a narrative journey of who we are.

What does it mean not to have our minds set on the flesh, as St. Paul talks about—the things of this world and the material concerns that can so often consume our attention—but rather to have our minds set on the Spirit? To focus on the overarching story that God is unfolding in our world and in our community—the story of completion that God is about in each and every moment.

We live in the reality of the ways that we have seeds to cultivate, and the ways in which we are the seeds being cultivated. It is not either-or, but both of those things at the same time. How is it that we are being nourished, or seeking nourishment through systems of support and finding those places of rich soil to root ourselves in within our own community? And how are we also, then, being the rich soil for other seeds to take root and grow?

So my invitation for us today, friends, as we step into this season of storytelling—this season of great metaphor in these parables that we will encounter from Jesus in the months ahead—is to begin thinking about our life journey as individual Christians and as the community of St. Anne's through this great framework of story. Think about who we are and what it is that we do. How do we share the joy and the fullness of what God is doing here? How are we that narrative, that song of creation going forth ahead of us to renew and refresh the earth around us?

How do we focus, not on the material, substantive things of this world, but on the things of true joy and life? The things of transformation that will address and relate to the material things of the world, but will not be limited by them, and will forever seek to put them in their proper context within the larger, unfolding story that God is telling in this place, in all places, at this time, and at all times.

And so, friends, to go back to that admonition from St. Paul today: as we seek to both be good seeds and rich soil, and rich soil for good seeds to grow in, let our minds not be set on the things of flesh and death, but may they be set on the mind of the Spirit, which is life and which is peace.

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