Colour Supplement

Articles by Christians around the world

Sunday 20 July 2008

 

Learning to wait

a sermon preached on Sunday 20 July 2008

by Jeremy Harvey - Reader at St. Andrew's Church

Readings for 9th Sunday after Trinity: Gen 28:12-19, Romans 8:12-25, Mt 13:24-30,36-43.

 

An effective religion is one in which helps us live our lives more fully and purposefully. My Christian faith is no good to me unless it helps me with day to day matters as well as giving my life a long-term sense of direction and meaning. What follows are some recent ways in which I have been helped by trying to apply that faith.

 

Take for instance my anxiety about having to travel by train with a bass viol (which is the size of a cello and was in a soft case). Where would I store it? It could so easily get damaged. My wife was remarkably relaxed. ‘Oh, we’ll find a way of keeping it safe. Don’t worry about it!’ Her confidence was reassuring. And find a way we did. We ended up using two long straps and slinging my viol from two jacket hooks so that it rested horizontally alongside the window. It wasn’t a pretty sight, and it inconvenienced those in the inside seats, but it worked.

 

Reflecting on that solution, I recalled  Christ’s advice not to be anxious about what might happen in the future. ‘Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.’ (Mt. 6.34) Learn to wait and trust and you will be looked after, given what you need, and find a way through.

 

That thought led me to the parable of the wheat and the weeds, the second of a batch of seven parables that Jesus told to his disciples and the crowd that followed him. He had given up teaching the crowd: he sensed his hearers were not ‘seeing’ or hearing as he intended. So this time he sat in a boat on the lake (Sea of Galilee) while everyone else stood on the shore. The pivotal moment in the story is when the farmer and his servants find that an enemy has sown weeds, darnel (which looks like a type of wheat) in amongst his wheat. What should they do? Root out the weeds now before they do any more damage? The farmer rejects normal practice (this is not a story about good farming) and chooses to wait – until it is time to harvest the wheat. Then the weeds can be cut down and burnt, and after that the harvest gathered in.

 

The farmer opts to wait, to trust that in time, at the right moment, this un-neighbourly act can be sorted out. Another interpretation (Church Times, 18 July ’08) is that God – amazingly – puts up with us all whether we are good seed (faithful followers) or have rejected, ignored, or disobeyed him (followers of the evil one). In His mad way God opts not to weed any of us out. He lets us all grow together until his day of judgement.

 

Once every ten years the Archbishop of Canterbury calls a Lambeth conference: he invites all the bishops and archbishops of the Anglican communion to join him in daily worship and study. On Wednesday the conference for this decade gathered – not at Lambeth but in Canterbury. (Our daughter, now with Kent Police, is helping to protect the delegates and the city.) Some delegates met  in June at a new rival conference in Jerusalem and have boycotted the Canterbury one. Sadly there are deep differences of opinion within the Anglican worldwide communion over homosexual priests and over women becoming bishops. Rowan Williams is seeking to help the bishops find a consensus – an agreed way through – which reflects God’s will. The Archbishop does not to want to impose a solution.

 

What has the parable of the weeds got to say to us in the Anglican Communion, and in particular to the Lambeth conference meeting now?  I think the parable suggests that our bishops should not take any action now – those who are very critical or unhappy should certainly not try to divide our Church by breaking away and setting up something new: that is not going to help. Rather they should wait, like the wise farmer, until the harvest is due, until a way through has become clear. They should not be anxious about the Anglican communion’s tomorrow but stay in fellowship and let the Holy Spirit guide them.

 

Awkward situations, tricky choices, call us to have a good prayer to use. Here for the bishops and for our needs is this one by Reinhold Niebuhr:

 

O God, give us the grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed,

the courage to accept the things that should be changed,

and the wisdom to know the difference. Amen

 

Jeremy Harvey

 

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