Month: October 2011

by The Rt. Rev. Arthur E. Walmsley

I Kings 19:9-18; Psalm 29; Matthew 14:22-33

“Don’t worry.  It’s me.  Don’t be afraid.” –Matthew 14:30

One morning in August a few years ago, I stood looking out our front door when all at once there came a great roar — it reminded me of the engine of a Boeing 747 — and I watched a violent wind twist the trunk of a towering willow tree at the corner of the yard, perhaps a foot in diameter, and snap it off as if it were no bigger than a matchstick.  And another time, a similar storm overrode all the surge protectors in our house, blew out the modem on Roberta’s computer and the sensors which control our garage door openers.  These were convincing reminders that we are children of Mother Nature, though they amounted to minor and local interruptions of our routine, were soon repaired as one of the prices we learn to live within a complex world. 

by The Rev. Darrell Huddleston

1 Kngs. 3:5-12; Ps. 119:129-136; Rom. 8:26-39; Mt. 13:31-33, 44-52

In our gospel lesson, Jesus bombards us with one parable after another, all starting with the phrase, “The Kingdom of heaven is like…”    …a mustard seed and yeast, a buried treasure and a pearl of great price and a fish dragnet.  Two twined images and a solitary concluding one carrying the theme of hiddenness and searching.   The Kingdom is hidden and is something to be discovered.

Perhaps a better phrase for ‘kingdom’ is ‘reign of God’ as the former implies that it might be a place, or only some ideal that will only be known in the future, certainly not in our sordid mess of a world.  The ‘reign of God’, Jesus tells us, can be discovered in the here and now. 

The Rt. Rev. Arthur E. Walmsley

Genesis 28:10-19a; Psalm 139:1-12,23-24; Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, “Surely the Lord is in this place –and

I did not know it!”  And he was afraid, and said, “How awesome is this place!  It is none

other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”

The cases of great figures cut down to size function as civic morality tales because, however good most people are most of the time, temptation is universal. Lust, greed, ambition, envy, fear – choose one. Or three. Every human must navigate the triple labyrinth of animal impulse, rational awareness, and moral choice. No one is immune from the recognition to which St. Paul came: “For the good that I would, I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do.” (Romans 7: 19) It takes nothing away from the gravity of criminal acts, or the unacceptability of the exploitation by the powerful of the weak, to see in the courtroom contest between truth and deceit a process that implicates observers as well as antagonists.

by The Rev. Darrell Huddleston

Gen.  25:19-24; Ps. 65:9-14; Rm. 8:1-11; Mt. 13:1-9, 18-23

This is one of those parables of Jesus that preaches itself.  The Parable of the Sower:  The Soil, the Seed, and the Sower.  Three parts to it and all related.  The Greek word parable (παραβολn, ‘parabole’) means “something cast beside” something else in order to explain or clarify it. The great NT scholar C. H. Dodd said, “…the parable is a metaphor or simile drawn from nature or common life, arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness, and leaving the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application to tease it into active thought.” (Parables of the Kingdom, p. 5)

The dictionary defines parable as “A simple tale told to illustrate a moral truth.” But Jesus’ parables are not simple, moralistic tales, but complex, profound stories.  There is mystery to them; there is a depth, an open-endedness, which makes us see something new when we read them over and over.