July 19 ~ we, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, hope for what we do not see...

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Isaiah 44:6-8

Psalm 86:11-17  

Romans 8:12-25  

Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

Sermon by Pastor Joel

If you’ve followed Canadian news over the past few weeks, you’ve probably noticed something. We seem to be sorting ourselves into camps. Every story becomes a contest. One side is right, the other side is wrong. Whether it’s debates over housing affordability, immigration, artificial intelligence, relations with the United States, even the devastation of wildfires, we have become remarkably quick to decide who the good people are and who the bad people are. Social media only makes it worse. The louder we condemn, the more attention we receive. Before long, we begin believing that if only we could remove those people—those politicians, those corporations, those activists, those bureaucrats, those elites, those protesters—then everything would finally be well.

Jesus tells a story that sounds surprisingly familiar. Someone has planted weeds among the wheat, and the workers see the problem immediately. “Should we pull them up?” It seems like an obvious question. Surely the answer is yes. Why would anyone leave weeds in a field? But Jesus surprises everyone. “No,” the landowner says. “Leave them both to grow together until the harvest.” Why? “Because in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them.”

That answer has always made people uncomfortable. It feels passive. It almost sounds irresponsible. Surely wrongdoing should be confronted, injustice opposed, and hatred resisted. Of course it should. Jesus spent his entire ministry confronting suffering. He healed the sick, challenged religious hypocrisy, welcomed the excluded, defended the vulnerable, and stood with those society preferred not to see. This parable is not a call to ignore injustice. It is a warning about something else. It is a warning about the danger of believing that we know with certainty who belongs to God and who does not.

Notice that the servants are absolutely convinced they can tell the wheat from the weeds. They are ready to act. They have no hesitation. The only one who hesitates is the landowner. Not because he cannot see the weeds, but because he understands something the servants do not. Human beings are not very good at making final judgments about one another. Life is rarely as simple as we imagine.

The older I get, the more I realize that every one of us is a mixture of wheat and weeds. We are capable of extraordinary generosity and astonishing selfishness. We can be patient with one person and impatient with another. We can fight passionately for justice while allowing pride to creep quietly into our hearts. None of us is entirely one thing or the other.

Martin Luther understood this better than most. He described Christians as simul justus et pecator—simultaneously saint and sinner. That simple phrase has always struck me as one of the most honest descriptions of the human condition. We are forgiven for our wrongdoing. We are loved despite that wrongdoing and continue to mess up. We are growing, changing, learning, and sometimes stumbling. Which means that whenever we become convinced that we are the wheat and someone else is the weed, we have probably misunderstood the Gospel.

Grace has never been about separating worthy people from unworthy people. Grace is God’s refusal to give up on any of us.

That feels especially important today. Canada faces enormous challenges. Housing remains out of reach for many young families. Food prices continue to stretch household budgets. Communities wrestle with homelessness while trying to balance compassion, safety, and limited resources. Artificial intelligence promises remarkable advances while raising genuine concerns about employment, truth, and the future of human work. These are real issues. Christians should care deeply about every one of them. But Jesus reminds us that our neighbours are never the enemy.

The temptation in every age is to believe that if we could simply eliminate certain people, our problems would disappear. History tells us something different. Every generation has found someone to blame. Every generation has imagined that society would flourish if only the “wrong” people were removed. Jesus refuses to think that way. Instead, he asks us to live together, to love one another, to seek justice, to tell the truth, to protect the vulnerable, and at the same time to resist appointing ourselves as judges of another person’s worth before God.

That is much harder than condemnation. If we are honest with ourselves, judgment feels satisfying. Mercy rarely does. Mercy is slower. It requires humility. Mercy asks us to admit that we do not always see clearly.

I often think about the eclectic group of people Jesus hung out with. A tax collector who worked for Rome. A zealot who wanted to overthrow Rome. People who fished for a living. Women ignored by society. People living with illness. People carrying painful pasts. If someone had suggested cleaning up that group in those early days of Christianity, there wouldn’t have been much of a church left. Instead, Jesus trusted grace to accomplish what judgment never could. Transformation.

That is still how God works. I have seen marriages recover after everyone else thought they were finished. I have seen people trapped in addiction discover freedom. I have watched churches that believed they were dying discover entirely new ways of serving their communities. I have watched strangers become family within our community of faith. None of those stories happened because someone was thrown away. They happened because someone stayed long enough for grace to do its work.

Perhaps that’s what our parable today is trying to say. Not to become indifferent to wrongdoing. Not to pretend injustice doesn’t matter. But to trust that God’s patience is greater than ours. To believe that people are never simply weeds. To remember that every one of us stands in need of mercy. And perhaps to wonder whether the person we have quietly written off may yet surprise us, just as God continues to surprise us.

In the end, Jesus says that the harvest belongs to God. Not to us. And that is great news. Because if the life of the church depended on our ability to sort everyone correctly, there would not be much wheat left. Instead, we live by grace. We grow together. We forgive one another. We work for justice without surrendering to hatred. And we trust that God is not done with us yet.  Amen.

July 12 ~ Giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be... ~ Isaiah 55:10-11

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Isaiah 55:10-13

Psalm 65: 9-13

Romans 8:1-11

Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

Sermon by Pastor Joel

There is a picture that has haunted me this week. It stays with me, even though I am Canadian, a big guy, a white man, and even though I live in one the safest – perhaps, the safest – countries in the world. It is the picture of a commuter on the metro in Washington, D.C. on July 4^th—the 250^th anniversary of U.S. independence. The commuter is a woman. She is Black. She looks small. But that may be just because standing and sitting all around her, even hovering over her, are white men.  Her narrow shoulders look tiny in her subway seat with all of these men wearing white handkerchiefs to mask their faces. They are part of the crowd of 400 from the Patriot Front that marched down the streets on this historic American day. The Patriot Front is a white supremacist group.  They want to recreate America as a white, ethnostate for people solely from European background. To me, they are vile and hateful. I am sure they think of themselves as dissidents.

This week, another piece of media remained with me, this one an essay in The Atlantic about David Thoreau, an environmentalist, writer, and libertarian. The story begins with a moment in Thoreau’s life in 1846, when he was stopped by a tax collector, insisting he pay a poll tax. Thoreau refused – paying the tax, the writer explains, would be supporting the government, and the current government supported slavery, and so Thoreau reasoned that paying the tax would be supporting slavery. Thoreau was sent to jail. He only stayed for one night, but the writer contends that the piece led to his most famous essay: Resistance to Civil Government. In it, he criticizes those who agree with him about slavery but do nothing. His individual conscience is his guide: his only obligation is to do what he believed to be right. He will not, he writes, restrict the freedom of another person, even in the pursuit of those righteous actions; he must ensure, he says, “I do not pursue them sitting on another man’s shoulders.” Thoreau, the Atlantic writer, observes, did not use the word; but he was, of course, a dissident.

And while the image on the metro and the essay about Thoreau rolled around in my mind, I also reflected on the gospel, written by the dissident whose words I most heed in the world, whose teachings remain with me long past all others. Jesus, in our gospel this week, offers one of his simplest parables – the stories of the three seeds and then explains each one in case we missed his point. He tells us of the seed that fell on the path and is pecked up by birds; this is the person who doesn’t understand the gospel, and never hears it.  The seed that fell on shallow soil, grew quickly, but withered in the sun. This is the person who celebrates the gospel when they hear, but never follow it.  The seed that fell in among thorns and were choked by them. This is the person who is distracted by other things – who stands, you might say, on the shoulders of other people – and is eventually destroyed by the cruelty and selfishness of their own actions. And finally there is the seed that grew in good soil and prospered; the person who planted firm roots, the person who thought about their place in the world while they grew and were mindful of those around them, the person who flourished with a life of meaning, and love.

I have always felt the seeds were a little more complex than they first appear. Were those seeds, for instance, dropped on the path not carelessly lost or discarded and forgotten, as happens to too many people in the world. Should we judge their failure to thrive so harshly? Sometimes circumstances happen, and seeds fail to grow – even in the best soil – for no apparent reason at all. Or they need some extra fertilizer, of extra TLC from an expert gardener. Are people also not like those seeds, sometimes in need of a booster dose of TLC? 

But I take Jesus’ point.  When we have the choice – as seeds of the gospel – we should aim for deep soil, and good sun, for the education and insight that gives us knowledge and understanding, for the community that brings light into our lives, and grows us strong enough that thorns cannot choke us and bad winds cannot bend us. That grows us strong enough to be the dissidents we are called to be.

For what else is the gospel but a rebuttal of the base motivations that underpin so much wrong doing in this world – intolerance, greed, corruption, judgement. What else does the good soil of the gospel prepares us for but to do what our conscience knows to be right. To follow the gospel is to be a dissident, to refuse to stand on someone else’s shoulder, to make room in that good soil and share the sun. 

And how do we know which dissidents are right and which are wrong. That’s pretty easy isn’t it? Who mocks the weak and who vows to help them? Who marches to the cross, or to jail, for what they believe to be right? Who puts their names on essays and speaks publicly in the streets? And who hides behind the power of the office? Who wears a mask? 

I wonder what I would do if men marched so blatantly racist on Canada Day? What could anyone do, as one person against 400? But this is Thoreau’s point, and it was the point Jesus made long before that.  We are responsible to our own conscience to do what is right. As Christians, we are responsible to the gospel, which is our conscience, as Jesus presented it. And when enough people are dissidents for what is right, those 400 masked marchers may not disappear. They just no longer matter.  Their chanting becomes a whisper without any power.   

Let us pray that we grow in good soil and warm sun, so that we may be tall and strong dissidents in the name of the gospel. Amen

https://www.theatlantic.com/books/2026/04/henry-david-thoreau-great-american-dissident/686823/

July 5 ~ "Come to me, all you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest." ~ Matthew 11:28

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Zechariah 9:9-12

Psalm 145:8-14

Romans 7:15-25a

Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

Sermon by Pastor Joel

“I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” Does this lament from Paul not resonate with all of us, if we can be honest in t

his moment? How often do we decide we will do one thing – be more patient, more sensitive, less angry – and the next day find ourselves raging insensitively to those around us? Our desire to change is strong; and yet our ability to do so requires such effort that, in moments of weakness, we forget ourselves. Some of us wrestle with this failure so deeply inside, that we cannot admit it, or worse, it seeps into other actions. We have failed to be good, to be better – and so we commit another evil and judge – other people, our family members, and ourselves.

For what else is sin, but failure? And what is more human, than failing more often than – and until - we succeed?

So how reassuring it is to hear Paul in his epistle to the Romans being so honest about his own failures and limitations, his own wrongdoings which he admits to knowing are wrong before he does them. Why do I do the things that do, he asks, despite my best intentions?

The conclusion he reaches to this question is an essential component of the gospel – and foundational to our own beliefs as Christians.

But to understand Paul’s words, we need to know a little about Paul, who was not among the 12 disciples and, by most accounts, never met Jesus in person or heard him preach firsthand. And yet his writing laid out a clear definition of what it meant to lead a Christian life, and his interpretation of law and grace are the source of Martin Luther’s words – the article, Luther said, that “upon which the church stands or falls” – that we are justified by grace through faith.

Paul was born Saul of Tarsus around 65 C.E., a Roman who, according to biblical accounts, lived as a Pharisee and persecuted the early followers of Jesus. He was, as the story is told, headed to Damascus to arrest a group of Christians, when he had his epiphany – or rather his epiphany happened to him. En route, he heard the voice of Jesus, calling his name and asking him, according to the book of Acts, “why are you persecuting me.” In the bright light, Paul was blinded. In Damascus, a disciple of Jesus, named Ananias restored his sight, invoking the Holy Spirit. That experience changed Paul forever. He was baptized, became a follower of Jesus, creating a body of work that would guide the church for the next 2000 years. A recent 2025 paper by a classics professor at St. Olaf College has performed a detailed calculation of the distance Paul travelled preaching the gospel – a total of 12,000 kilometres over land, and 8,000 by sea in the second half of his life, preferring to travel by foot than ship, according to Steven Reece, whenever possible. I note this study because aside from the interesting math, it shows us the level of Paul’s commitment. He got into trouble down the road, from critics who suggested he was telling people to ignore the Ten Commandments, and despite warning from friends continued his message of grace over law. His ultimate fate is unclear, but many believe he was executed. He did more than most – including face persecution – and yet, in his words, he still felt the burden of failure.

Paul writes these words in our second lesson not just to grumble about his mistakes and say a prayer to Jesus, but to present his central argument: that when humans are bound by the law, they became too focused on what they do wrong, and, by extension what others do wrong. The law does not make life’s rules, he would argue; when law is given pre-eminence, it rules our lives. And life ruled by law focuses on punishment for transgressions, it creates days either spent avoiding judgement or casting it.

On the other hand, Paul argued, a life gifted with grace focuses on forgiveness and frees us to do good works, to look beyond ourselves. And by doing so, the hope is that we might transgress less.

It’s important to note that Paul holds to his imperfection; he does not say faith makes one perfect, rather that it helps us free own our imperfections so that we may learn from them, and begin again. And again. And again. And again.

And each time, we are offered the unlimited compassion of Jesus. “Come to me, all you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest,” Jesus says.

This last line in our gospel this morning is a beautiful message, a reassuring promise. And yet it requires little of us, as Jesus says, but a light burden. “Take my yoke upon you,” Jesus urges, “and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart.”

The people he addressed would all have understood what he meant by yoke – which was the harness that allowed two oxen to pull a heavy load, or a person to place on their shoulders to carry two buckets of water. Sometimes, a farmer might even place an older, more experience bull beside a young one, so that the latter might be shown the way.

So, this metaphor carries so much meaning for us. First, a yoke suggests that Jesus walks beside us, not behind us, whipping us into shape. Life’s burdens – those stones we drag behind us - are made lighter because the teachings of Jesus make them lighter, because Jesus helps us pull them along, until we find a way to release them. (And if we never lose those imperfections and regrets – Jesus continues to pull along with us.) Finally, the yoke suggests that Jesus not only shares in the pulling, but will take on more of the burden, when we are weaker, more vulnerable, and less able – just like older, wiser oxen to the young, smaller one.

In this way, that important tenet from Paul, and the message of Jesus, become the yoke itself. An instrument of grace and compassion and kindness, not weighed down by retribution and punishment but lightened by support and forgiveness.

Paul hoped we would remember this for ourselves. But also for others. For we too are called to be the strength that carries another’s yoke when they are burdened by life. And we too are called to practice grace, that puts the law into context, and is never defined by it.

“You will find rest for your souls,” Jesus says. Not to sleep our lives away passively. But rest from the parts of humanity that plague us, so we might send an energized spirit out into the world.

Amen