Thorns and thistles

There’s nothing quite so satisfying as spending time in the garden ripping and tearing out the weeds. Especially dandelions choking our petunias and carrots.  Some of us weed with our bare hands, which is fine when we are dealing with chickweed, but thistles are a different matter.  Their sharp edges alert us when we get too close or handle them roughly.  They are utterly useless plants that doesn’t have a place in a civilized and cultivated garden.  Rather like mosquitos, thistles feel like something God shouldn’t have wasted time in creating in the first place.

So of course, when Jesus told a parable about a wheat field, the listeners would be confused with his story.  They would have related to the workers who are upset at the thistles growing with the crop.  Sabotaging food sources was a favorite tactic of war back in his day.  Destroying crops disrupts the food supply the soldiers depend on to defend their land from invaders.

The disciples would have been fine with the story up until the point that Jesus told of the farmer ordering his workers to allow the weeds to grow until harvest time.  Only then would the thistles be sorted out from the wheat.  That didn’t sound fair!

We don’t want to live with thistles, we don’t want to get poked and scratched by thorns.  We like labels, “this person is wheat, that person is thorn”.  We like black and white thinking, “once a thorn, always a thorn”.  We like pointing fingers, feeling righteous, judging people as safe or unsafe.  We like to imagine all the thorny people get punished in the end.  I won’t get burnt because I’m not thorny, I’m the wheat that everyone wants.  And we all see ourselves as the heroes of our own story.  That habit of judging others and congratulating myself without honest self-reflection is addicting.

Until we come face to face with God.  The psalmist wrote that God searches me and knows me through and through. God made me and formed my inward parts; God fashioned me in my mother's womb.  When everyone else was in ignorance of who I was, God knew all of me.  This set of verses has become the bedrock of many people of faith who are born two spirited or intersex.  Intersex are people born with both male and female anatomy.  About three out of every 100 babies will be born ambiguous.  There are many incidents where a doctor was called in to decide a baby’s gender and made a mistake.  Or did surgery thinking they were fixing a problem, only to cause issues for the child once they hit puberty.  Can you imagine discovering you were a boy at the age of 14?  Or a girl?  These things happen.  And scientists are also learning more and more about brain chemistry that changes how they understand gender and orientation.  The boxes we may have grown up with as children are found to be dangerous to those who don’t fit them.

Jesus touched on two things.  That the community of God was to wait on judging and let God do that.  Because we humans are quick to judge.  We’re fast to put people into boxes.  God says, let everything grow and in good time we will have justice.  But justice without mercy can lead to dreadful consequences. A community of faith can end up pointing fingers at each other, and like thistles, can scratch and tear everyone around.  Mercy without Justice can end up just enabling and empowering the thistles to prickle and scratch everyone around.  Both of those extremes are below the line.  Both of these extremes do not help the wheat grow tall and strong.  Both these extremes do not help the Community of God to thrive.

The other thing is that Jesus taught patience.  We are called to wait to see what will happen.  Who knows what time and patience will do?  The only one who knows whether we are thistles or wheat is God who knows us through and through.  That idea is enough to comfort the shyest and scare the boldest of us. 

We all have times when we are both wheat and thistle.  There are times when we might scratch when we least intend to, or times when someone bumps into our thorns and gets hurt.  It happens.  But God gives us tremendous gifts to help us work through those hurts and pain.  The first gift, sometimes the hardest gift to remember we have, is the gift of curiosity.  Turning to curiosity, is, in the mind of Parker Palmer, a famous Quaker, the way to open ourselves up to how God might see the situation.  Parker Palmer says that when the going gets rough, we are to turn to new thoughts and attitudes. 

“Turn from reaction and judgment to wonder and compassionate inquiry. Ask yourself, “I wonder why they feel/think this way?” or “I wonder what my reaction teaches me about myself?” Set aside judgment. Learn to ask honest, open questions which are ones you cannot possibly ask while thinking, “I know the right answer to this and I sure hope you give it to me…” Thus, “Have you ever thought about seeing a therapist?” is not an honest, open question! But, “What did you learn from the experience you just told us about?” is.

Honest open questions, instead of putting people in boxes, is how the Community of God grows.  Letting everything grow until God’s time, finding a balance between justice and mercy.  Remembering that God knows us all, our thorns, our wheat, our growth, right down to our DNA.  It is a gift and a challenge.  It is not easy for us to talk about the times we get scratched and the times we scratch others.  This is true for us both as individuals and also the church.  Not just our local congregation, but our denomination, even all of Christianity.  But such deep honesty is important for growth and health. As the former moderator, the Right Reverend Doctor Carmen Lansdowne wrote,

a community that can carry its hard histories and its holy ones together — that can name the harm and name the grace in one breath — gives the young something no algorithm or feed can offer them: a place to stand. Not a curated highlight reel of heroes, but a real people, with real ancestors, some of whom were remarkable and some of whom were complicit, and all of whom belong to the story the young are now being invited into.

We are invited into the Community of God.  It isn’t easy, it isn’t fast, and sometimes we get lost in the weeds and thistles.  But God reminds us that we are loved, right down to our uncomfortable places, flaws and all.  With that good news, we can trust God to sort out our thistly moments from our lives, when we let God work through us with the spirit to create justice and mercy, compassion and peace.  May it be so for us all!

Parable of the Crazy Gardener

How many of you have ever planted a garden?  Tucking the seeds in the ground, watering them, watching them sprout, trying to figure out if the leaves poking out of the soil are weeds or what you hoped you grew?  And it’s one thing to bury a few pumpkin seeds or sunflower seeds, it’s another thing to depend on a harvest for income.  Jesus was preaching to people who planted crops that was their only source of income.  So why did this parable feature a gardener that any farmer with common sense would see as either ridiculous or downright crazy?

We are not crazy gardeners.  Oh, sure we might have spent $2 for a packet of zucchini seeds and planted every single seed in that packet.  Most gardeners have made that mistake at least once.  But none of us, experienced or inexperienced, would throw a bunch of seed on the highway or on the sidewalk or in the ditch like Jesus had his crazy gardener do.  What a waste! Most of those seeds fell in ridiculous places where they had no hope of growing. Crazy! Where is the good news of this parable?  How does it speak to Alberta in 2026?

On the face of it, the parable is about sharing the good news of God’s heavenly realm, the yoke that is easy and the burden that is light.  It is comforting to know that even the best preaching by Jesus himself was described as a disaster.  Think about it, if the seed was shared equally amongst the birds, the rocks, the thorns and the good soil, only 25% of the seed fell on fertile ground.  That’s a terrible rate of return.  But from the point of view of talking about our faith, it’s probably accurate. 

Talking about our faith is something United Church folks struggle with.  We don’t want to come across as pushy or judgmental or hypocritical.  We don’t want to push a fear-based Christianity either, the kind that intimidates people into coming to church so they may be saved from eternal damnation and hellfire.  That’s not who we are.  But we too have a blind spot.  We might assume people will figure out how much better we are than other denominations and naturally be drawn to us.  After all, we were the first to ordain women, coming up on 90 years ago.  First to apologize to residential school students, first to ordain members of the 2sLGTBQ+ community, first to have women and indigenous people as our national leaders in the Moderator roll, first to arrive to the protest rallies, last to leave, first to write letters for justice and so on.  But that isn’t enough in this day and age.  As someone said to our moderator once, “Your church is so proud of being progressive that it has forgotten how to be Christian.”  We may have fixated on Daring Justice so much that we’ve let the ideas of deep spirituality and bold discipleship take a back seat.  Other denominations might be better at that.

We may think that we don’t have the skills to talk about our faith.  That’s the minister’s job, or the worship leader’s job.  Actually, it’s everyone’s job.  That takes deep spirituality and bold discipleship.  That takes asking ourselves, how do we experience God, and how does it help us live better lives?  If we don’t take the time to ask these deep bold questions, we won’t have the daring courage to share our stories.  And our world needs our stories more than ever before.

Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II wrote in an article about white poverty and the battle for democracy that:

When the prophets [denounce] the evils of political leaders and cultural systems… they always tell the people that God doesn’t need everyone to stand up against injustice. God needs a remnant, just a small number. If a community will come together to declare that another way is possible, they can change the conversation in a society. If even a small group bears witness to the fact that the way things are is not the way things have to be, then everyone who is dissatisfied and questioning their circumstances has somewhere to look for an alternative.
Harvard University’s Erica Chenoweth calls this phenomenon the “3.5 percent rule.” After studying people’s movements across the globe in different cultural contexts and at different moments in history, Chenoweth has concluded that a social movement that wins the active support of around 3.5 percent of a society’s population wins its demands.

3.5% of the population.  That’s how many people in Athabasca?  96 people.  That’s not that many.  If we think of how many people each of us know in this place, through work or church or organizations, 3.5% is a tiny number.  And yet, if we can get 3.5 percent of our town to care about human rights or food security or helping people on AISH or ADAP, or seniors or visible minorities, that’s all that’s needed.  And chances are we don’t need to get these people to care, they already do.  We just need to help them find each other and know that they are not alone.  We need to listen with compassion and understanding and prayer.  We are the soil that Jesus plants seeds in.  When we practise deep spirituality, praying, worshiping, learning hymns and bible verses that sustain us, it’s like we are fertilizing ourselves.  When we think about our faith, try to put into words who or what God is for us, read inspiring words, that’s discipleship.  That’s the weeding of our soil.  And then Jesus said, when we have good, weed-free soil, the abundance of harvest will surprise us!  Oh God, help us to fertilize and to weed like wise gardeners so we may help in your amazing harvest.  Help us be the 3.5% that will change the world.  Help us have the courage to share our stories to the rocks and the road and the birds and the thistles so that we don’t miss the good soil by accident.  And help us to remember that no seed that we plant is truly wasted, your world needs our abundant and wasteful crazy gardening.  Amen.

Finding Rest for the Weary

Isn’t it nice to rest on the Sunday after a busy Canada Day?  Volunteers make a good public holiday a great one, and it seemed that this year it was even more precious to have a peaceful celebration for everyone.  It was lovely to see so many people dressed in red and white and maple leaves. That felt restful too. 

Goodness knows there have been days that were anything but restful.  The manners and politeness between strangers seem to get forgotten in the political noise and strife that fills our conversations, our social media, and our news reports.  There have been discussions and debates that have been anything but restful, and sometimes downright ugly.  People are dug into their positions, and it’s hard to tell where folks stand unless they are sporting hats or t-shirts.  There are people who are losing sleep, tossing and turning about the state of the world.  Now that the letters about ADAP and AISH have been arriving, there are probably people losing sleep about that.  The stories of suffering that will result for some of our vulnerable family and friends who depend on AISH is causing financial stress.  And the industries who most desperately need employees are the construction industry and the restaurant industry.  However, are people put on ADAP likely to become those employees?  Both construction and restaurant are highly physical and need level-headed common sense under pressure.  Nurses and health care professionals also are in high demand, and again, not likely to recruit folks who are on ADAP.  I’m sure some doctors are losing sleep too with everything changing so fast.  In fact, there are probably a lot of people who are stressed out in this world that is facing what some folks are calling a polycrisis.  Impacts on our environment like flooding and heat bubbles, impacts on our economy with tariffs and trade deals, the loss of trust in systems like health inspectors or government agencies that are supposed to protect our data, and sleep may be the scarcest commodity in Alberta right now!

Humanity always has struggled with sleepless nights.  Jacob, Abraham’s grandson, lost sleep when he cheated his brother Esau out of the family business.  His guilty conscience was so intense that he described it like wrestling with an angel all night.  His attempt to reunite with Esau decades later was also another night of anguish.  Jesus, most famously, lost sleep on the last night of his life, scolding his disciples, saying, “could you not keep watch with me for one hour?”  Scripture says his prayers were so agonizing that he sweated tears of blood.  And Pilate’s wife had disturbing dreams and begged her husband not to condemn Jesus to death.

But then there’s Paul.  Doesn’t he sound like his mind was racing at 2 in the morning as he wrote this part of the letter?  He keeps repeating phrases in a different order, “I don’t do what I know is right, what I know is right I don’t do,” and on and on.  Sounds like a typical brain caught in an endless loop of guilt and self-loathing.  It also sounds like he’s struggling with an addiction of some sort, a bad habit, a broken pattern of behavior.

How many of us can relate to poor Paul?  I know the healthy thing I want to do, but I’ll buy that chocolate bar at the gas station even if I just had lunch 20 minutes ago.  Or I’ll reach for one more cigarette even though a carton of smokes costs more than I want to spend.  Or I’ll go into the casino for 5 minutes and stay 5 hours.  Or I’ll just have one beer at my neighbor’s barbecue, it won’t hurt.  Or this time I will keep my temper and not yell at my family members in public.  Or I’ll just watch one more episode on Netflix.  And the next thing we know, we’ve done exactly what we promised ourselves we would not do.  Whether we have a clear addiction to drugs or gambling or promiscuity or a less obvious addiction like being addicted to gossip or yelling or pity parties, it can keep us from having a full and joyful life.  The kind of life that Christ wanted for us, an abundant life free from fear and guilt and jealousy. A life that is not lived like we are prisoners to bad habits and fears.  A life that is not full of resentments and grudges.  A life free from power struggles where we strive to prove that we are right and everyone else is wrong or ignorant or lazy.  A life that does not take pleasure in calling people names like woke or libtard or fascist.  A life that does not lead to depression, resentment and paranoia. 

Paul’s words would not sound out of place in a 12-step recovery program.  Like AA, NA and other support groups, Paul admitted that he was powerless over the bad habits that he wrestled with.  That’s Step 1.  Then he said how he gave thanks that God set him free.  That’s Step 2, believing in a Power that can free us.  Paul then said that he set his mind on serving God instead of himself.  Step 3 says to make a decision to turn our will and lives over to God however we understand God. That sounds what Paul wrote about when he decided to live by God’s way.

When we obsess over other people’s behaviors instead of our own, when we let addictions to anger or self-centeredness or bad habits of body, mind or spirit, we can end up struggling with sleepless nights, broken promises, destructive behaviors.  But when we hear Jesus inviting us to lay our burdens down and sing a new song to God, we will find indeed that Jesus sets us free from all broken ways.  Now, more than ever, may we as Canadians set our ways to ways of peace and love for all our neighbors not just on Canada Day but every day. May it be so for us all. Amen.