I’m not a patient guy. Just ask the driver ahead of me at the light at the intersection. Just ask my wife! (No, better not) I can’t understand why the “evil” people scattered among us don’t get their comeuppance. Everywhere I turn, headlines and breaking news describe plagues & pandemics, famine & drought. Environmental and health laws are being discarded right & left! Economic “recovery” seems to be more important than common-sense quarantine. Materialism, selfishness, arrogance… O Lord, break the heavens and come down and straighten out Creation! Where IS God, and for what does God wait? So these lessons for the weekend are for me; you can listen in if you want to.
The Genesis story, 28:10-19, is about Jacob–who was not a good guy. He had coerced his twin brother Esau into trading his right as first-born for a dish of stew; he had tricked his blind father Isaac into giving him the family blessing; and now he was on the lam from their wrath to find him a wife among his kinfolk. Why didn’t lightning strike him dead? God musta seen some possibility in him: in his vision of the great “ladder” filled with God’s messengers coming and going, God promises Jacob the land and many descendants: “I will not leave you until I have done that of which I have spoken to you”. Evidently God was still at work.
In Romans 8:12-25, St. Paul addresses our wait “with groaning”: “if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience”. Well, I want to see NOW what’s coming, I’m ready NOW for the ultimate harvest. “What you see is what you get” has been my motto. But transformation is rarely an overnight event: growth happens sunrise/sunset. “In some instances the one who hopes may be the only one with the courage to endure the suffering of the present.” (David M. Greensaw, in FEASTING on the WORD, A 3:256) And, “This is an era in which Christians…can understand ourselves to be an alternative community to the destructive ways of life embraced by the larger culture.” (Blair Alison Pogue, op.cit., page 259)
Jesus is still telling parables in Matthew’s Gospel, 13:24-30. Some evil enemy has scattered weed-seeds in the well-started field of a wheat farmer. These weeds even look like the Real Thing; but they’re not. “Let’s rip ’em out today, before they get any bigger and out of control.” No; no, let them grow, and don’t disturb the good stuff. My human side rebels: how can God stand all this imperfection?? Evidently God is still at work, hoping against hope that more good than evil will come from this field.
One of the roles of the Church is to polish diamonds in the rough. Most of us have our success-stories of the Broken Ones who’ve become Whole. These lessons each demand of us that we not rush God, who’s incrementally refining and reclaiming what my impatience has called Junk. Even the weeds…
In the process of unfolding, Horace Brown King
My pondering over scripture readings assigned to the upcoming weekend can be found every Tuesday at this spot on Facebook; or at horacebrownking.com
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