Title: Got yeast?  Text: Matthew 13: 24-30

Preached by Rev. James Murray at Dominion-Chalmers United Church, July 17 2011

This week Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced that Canada is no longer a liberal country. Harper told an audience in Calgary that "Conservative values are Canadian values. Canadian values are conservative values.” Such pronouncements are not sitting well with some Canadians. They feel Canada has a variety of political and social values, and not all of them are strictly conservative ones. Last year Canada failed to win a seat on the United Nations Security Council because the European , African and Arab all disapproved of Canada’s foreign policies. Many Canadians felt our international stature is slipping backwards as a result. While we say we are a country which welcomes immigrants, Canada has cut back on the number of family members who are allowed to immigrate to this country. Even members of the Conservative Party are questioning why Canada is taking a huge step backwards on Climate Change as the government seeks to protect the Tar Sands from any kind of responsible regulation.

It is as if there is a huge gap between the way things are, and what is the right thing to do. And we don’t all agree as to what those right things to do are. The fact more and more of us can feel this gap growing, enables us to understand what Jesus was talking about in a new way.  You see, all of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, is written from the perspective of a persecuted people who are in the minority.

The Bible writers see the world differently from most people.  Most world religions describe the greatness and strength of the hero when he first finds God. This morning we heard about Jacob who has his moment of enlightenment while he is a fugitive. When he is helpless and vulnerable, sleeping unprotected in the wilderness, he finds God. These are different stories which tell of a different kind of God. The foundational stories of the Old Testament tells of Moses leading people out of slavery. His story is written from the slave’s perspective, not the slave masters.  When David is anointed to be the next king, the prophet Elijah deliberately picks the seventh son and not the first born son of Jesse. Our God doesn’t favour the first born son.

The first time the stories of the Bible were collected into one book happened while the people were enslaved again, this time during their exile in Babylon. By the time Jesus was born, the nation of Israel had not existed for over 150 years. They were a conquered people. The Greeks and later the Romans had occupied the land and ran it for their own benefit. All of his stories are told from the perspective of the underdog, and not the master.

But this is not how you and I were taught to read the Bible. Since the Protestant Reformation in Europe, we’ve been taught to read it from the point of view that we are the Empire. We are the powerful ones. We are the first born sons who are entitled to everything. We are the colonizers who occupy other countries in order to spread our empire. We are the economic elite. We are so used to being in a position of power that we don’t even notice our own bias.

We just assume that everyone who comes to church is of the same social and economic status as we are. We assume everyone has the same appreciation for classical music that we do. We take it for granted that everyone has the same experience and political views as us. We just assume that everyone knows how to behave and dress in a ‘respectable’ way. Heaven forbid that the minister wear shorts to church on a hot day! A couple of years ago when I first grew this beard I was told by a church elder that I should shave it off because it made me look ‘common’. ‘Common’ as in ‘working class’. We take these assumptions for granted to the point that we don’t even notice how out of touch we are with the world around us.

When you hear the parable of the wheat and the weeds, do you identify with the landowner? Or do you identify yourself with the servants? Jesus meant for us to hear this parable from the point of view of the servants. From the landowner’s perspective, this is a parable about judgement and punishment. From the point of view of the priviledged rich landowner, those who do evil will be punished in the end. And that is a comforting message to those of us who are rich, powerful and in control.

But what does this parable say if you read it from the servant’s point of view? From the servant’s point of view, the landowner is an idiot.

If you’ve got weeds in your field, the wise thing to do is to pull them out. Now. You wouldn’t wait till October to pull the dandelions out of your lawn, would you? Every gardener knows that you weed early, and you weed often. To leave it till the harvest is a recipe for disaster. Now if the landowner’s enemy did do this deliberately, everyone in town will know about this. In a culture based on honour, this landowner is now the laughing stock of the town. He has been made powerless.

But notice what he does and doesn’t do. The landowner doesn’t blame his workers, which would have been the easy thing to do. And he doesn’t retaliate against his enemy. He doesn’t seek revenge. He does nothing. He is finished. Is Jesus saying the Kingdom of God is about the undoing of the wealthy?  Or is Jesus saying the Kingdom is about us learning not to retaliate when something bad happens to us?

Because we are just learning to hear the parables of Jesus from the point of view of being the underdog, we aren’t exactly sure what it means. This is all new to us. Even our scholars are saying this change of perspective, which has only happened in the last twenty or thirty years, is a work in progress. So we have had to listen to people who are more experienced at being powerless  than us so can learn to hear what Jesus is saying. People like women. People who aren’t white. People who don’t live in the most powerful nations on earth.  People who don’t have as much money as us. People who don’t dress as nice as us.  From them we can learn to read the Bible with a new perspective. We used to speak of Biblical Justice as always being about the punishment of wrongdoers. Now we are beginning to see how Biblical Justice is more about a just and fair distribution of all the resources. The only judgement is put on those who had resources and didn’t share them. Justice has more to do with a fair distribution than a vengeful retribution. 

This is a big shock for us. For we were raised to believe Canada is a Christian nation. We often feel betrayed and confused when we see our countries not acting as if they are part of Christ’s kingdom. It is a shock to realize the god of our nation is really the almighty dollar, and the leaders of our economy can’t see any further than the next quarterly earnings statement as they make their plans.

In the time of Jesus, there was only one Kingdom. That was the kingdom of Rome.

If you used the word “The Kingdom” everyone knew you meant Rome. For Jesus to talk about a Kingdom of God, was a subversive twist. It was to ask what this world would be like if God ran it. Jesus never imagined we would actually ever get to run the empire. He just wanted us to ask how to deal with all this dysfunctional stuff which we are currently accepting as normal.