July 26 ~ It is the smallest of seeds... but when it has grown, it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree

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1 Kings 3:5-12

Psalm 119:129-136

Romans 8:26-39

Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

Bishop Cindy Presiding

Grace and peace in the name of Jesus Christ.

Over the next few Sundays while Pastor Joel is away, we are privileged to hear sermons from some of the leaders across the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada. Bishops and synod staff members prepared sermons for the Sundays from May through September to assist retired clergy like me and lay worship leaders in proclaiming the gospel in congregations across the church. Further, it gives you a chance to learn a little about the ELCIC and what it means to be part of a church that stretches from coast to coast to coast.

The ELCIC was established on January 1, 1986, through the merger of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Canada and the Lutheran Church in America-Canada Section. At the present time, the ELCIC includes about 80,000 members in about 450 congregations across the country.

The church is organized into five regions called synods. St Peter’s Lutheran is a member of the Eastern Synod which includes congregations from Sault St Marie, Ontario to Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. Each synod has a bishop and ours is Bishop Carla Blakley.

The ELCIC is a member of the Lutheran World Federation, a global communion of churches in the Lutheran tradition, living and working together for a just, peaceful, and reconciled world. Since 2001 the ELCIC has been in full communion with the Anglican Church of Canada.

Today’s sermon was prepared by a staff member of the Eastern Synod. Since 2020, the Rev. Christie Morrow-Wolfe has served as an Assistant to the Bishop in the Eastern Synod. She offers accompaniment and care for congregations and other ministries in the process of calling a new pastor, and the formation of new pastors and other rostered leaders. She is married to the Rev. Mark Wolfe and in their spare time, they can be found on the soccer pitch, baseball diamond, community pool or local arena as the equipment managers and taxi service to their two athletic daughters.

Here is Christie’s reflection on today’s gospel, in her own words:

This past school year, I spent a fair bit of time at the kitchen table with my daughter, wrestling with middle school math. A leap in the learning curriculum this grade year made some concepts more challenging for her, so we would find ourselves trying to figure it out, together. What she was learning, I learned a generation ago, so the method was different even if we were working towards the same answer. There was a lot of “that’s not how we learned it, Mom!”. And usually in her showing me how and what she learned in class, it would click for her at the quiet hush of the kitchen table in a way she hadn’t been able to grasp in the busyness of the classroom earlier that day.

To be honest, even though there were tears of frustration (from both of us), I cherished this time with her. And what I hope she remembers is not the math help she might have received (because, honestly, that’s truly forgettable…there’s a reason I studied theology and math is not it!), but what I hope she remembers is the time we spent together. The formulas may fade; the worksheets will be recycled; the test scores won’t matter so much anymore…but what I hope she remembers is the time we sat and faced a challenge, together. I hope she remembers that when something felt confusing, she wasn’t alone. I hope she remembers that someone showed up with her…that there was laughter mixed in with the frustration. That there was patience on some days and grace on the harder days. That there was a place at the table for her questions and curiosities.

Jesus says the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed; like yeast hidden in flour; like a treasure buried in a field; like a pearl of great value.

God’s kingdom doesn’t always arrive in dramatic moments. Sometimes it is hidden in ordinary Tuesday evenings and math homework spread across a kitchen table. The kingdom of heaven looks like people showing up for each other again and again, even when the task itself is rather forgettable. In this case, the treasure wasn’t really the math. The treasure was relationship.

Jesus keeps talking about the kingdom of heaven–but not in ways that are obvious or easy to grasp. There are no grand thrones here, no mighty armies, no clear lines of power. Instead, we get seeds. Yeast. Treasure buried in a field. A merchant searching for pearls. A net scooping up all kinds of fish. It feels…almost…under whelming.

And yet, if we listen closely, there is something quietly radical unfolding in these stories. Jesus is shaping our expectations–not just of God’s kingdom, but of where and how we encounter the holy.

The kingdom of heaven, Jesus says, is like a mustard seed–tiny, easily overlooked. In fact, mustard was often considered more of a nuisance plant than any kind of noble crop. It spreads wildly, unpredictably, taking over gardens and fields. This is not the image of orderly growth or controlled expansion. It’s, in fact, messy. Subversive.

And yet, from this small, unruly beginning comes shelter–branches where birds can rest, where life can flourish. The kingdom, then, is not about dominance. It’s about unexpected belonging.

Then Jesus moves to yeast–another strange image. Yeast is hidden–mixed into flour, invisible to the eye. And yet it transforms everything it touches. Quietly. Gradually. Irreversibly. The kingdom of heaven is not always loud or obvious. It works beneath the surface–in conversations, in acts of compassion, in the slow work of justice, in the healing of relationships, and in the courage to begin again. It’s the kind of transformation that doesn’t make headlines, but changes lives.

And then, treasure. A person stumbles upon something hidden in a field, and filled with joy, gives everything to claim it. A merchant finds a pearl of great value and does the same. There is something here about recognition–about seeing what truly matters…like realizing it’s not about finding the right math answer at the kitchen table, but it’s the relationship that’s deepened by working through the hard things together.

In a world that constantly tells us what is valuable–success, wealth, status, control–these parables invite us to reorient our hearts. The kingdom is not something we earn or achieve or solve. It is something we discover with curiosity and joy, and when we do, it has the potential to reshape everything.

Jesus ends his kingdom snapshots with the image of a net, cast wide into the sea, gathering all kinds of fish–without distinction, without pre-sorting, without exclusion. The sorting comes later. And if we read this through the lens of grace, we remember that God’s justice is not about punishment. It’s about restoration and truth-telling and making things right – not on our terms, but always on God’s terms.

And here’s the thing…it’s not up to us to do the sorting. Our call, and what God is asking us to do, is to simply cast the net wide. That’s it. And by casting the net wide, we create communities where all are welcomed, where diversity is not feared but celebrated, where questions are honoured, and where healing becomes possible…because the kingdom of heaven is not a gated community; it is an ever-expanding table…perhaps a table covered in middle school math homework where God comes to us in a new untraditional way…in a way that reinforces that we are loved, not because of what we do, but because of who God is.

For us, this means that God continues to reveal God-self to us and the world in sometimes small and unassuming ways…by the quiet acts of kindness; the moments of connection and relationship; in the small seeds we plant that we trust will grow…in the sometimes-hidden work of transformation which takes root in ourselves; in our communities; and in the world.

We are called then to stay open to the delightful surprise of God and the possibility that the kingdom of heaven might show up in places we least expect…at a kitchen table; in a difficult conversation; in the courage to forgive; in the decision to begin again. It means that God calls us to hold loosely to what the world tells us is valuable, and lean more deeply into what gives life. And, it means we cast our nets wide. Because the kingdom of heaven is not about scarcity or exclusion. It is not about getting it all right. It’s about grace and relationship … grace that grows like a weed offering shelter to more life than we know; grace that rises like bread to be broken to feed the world; grace that is hidden in plain sight, waiting to be discovered and shared. Grace in middle school math and the connection formed when wading through the hard together.

So you see, the kingdom of heaven is already among us. In you; in me. In the communities we call home. I pray that we may have eyes to see it; hearts to trust it; and the courage to live it.

Pastor Christie paints a picture from today’s gospel, a warm and welcoming scene of discovery and delight in the riches of God’s grace already and always around us. Because God chooses us, we are free from limitations set by our fears, our feelings of inadequacy, or the negative messages we hear in our world. We are free to imagine the fullness of God’s reign and our own place within it. And freed by grace, we can open our eyes, our hearts and our whole selves to see where God’s reign is still unfolding, and to be messengers of God’s love to all we meet each day.

May God make it so. Amen.

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/