Proper 11 (CWM Sunday) What does Gos require of us?

CWM Sunday   (Isaiah 44: 6-8; Matthew 13: 24-30)

Many people are fascinated by family history: the stories of long-gone relatives, the people we are proud of and the ones we’d rather forget, the events that make us glad of our genes and the things that fascinate or appal us. 

My dad had two aunts – Annie & Ethel, both school teachers - who decided to explore the Whitehead family tree, until they reached a predecessor who had been transported to Australia for sheep-stealing. Just as I thought it was getting interesting - they decided to stop researching at that point !

Today we are invited to explore something of our Christian family as we celebrate Council for World Mission Sunday. We are reminded that we in the URC belong to a worldwide family of 36 partner churches. But like so many family histories – it’s not straightforward.

The beginning of our ‘family life’ is rooted in the evangelical awakening of the 18^th century: the time of John & Charles Wesley and George Whitfield.

A Missionary Society was formed “to spread the knowledge of Christ among heathen and other unenlightened nations.”

We might cringe at that language now, but what became known as the London Missionary Society was not a denominational society, intent on planting its parent denomination, but a group wanting to share the gospel and then allow the local church to decide on its own form of governing its life. 

LMS took the gospel to India, the Pacific islands, the West Indies, parts of Africa, and what we might call ‘the far East’, including China. 

There were great heroes of the LMS – John Williams in the Pacific – who gave his name to a series of ships which continued to serve the many scattered islands – if you ever collected ship ha’pennies in Sunday school as a child – that’s what those were supporting.

In Africa, Dr David Livingstone, the first European in many parts of central Africa.

And Eric Liddell,  who after his medal-winning performances at the 1924 Olympics (made famous by the film Chariots of Fire) returned to China (where he had been born to parents who were LMS missionaries) to be a missionary and teacher himself.

And at a time when women could not be ordained as minister in the UK, many women were accepted to serve as missionaries with the LMS.

 

After the second world war, with colonial structures crumbling and independence for many of the countries served by LMS, people looked for a new model for churches to work together.

The name was changed to Council for World Mission, based on equal partnership, collaboration and mutuality. Not just the gospel going out from the UK to the rest of the world, but our family of world churches sharing together in mission and learning from each other. In 2012 the global office of CWM moved from London to Singapore, with the vision “Life-flourishing Communities, Living out God’s promise of a New Heaven and a New Earth”.

This quick snippet of family history gives us stories to be proud of, some we’d rather forget, and a sense of the changes which people have made in response to what God is asking of them.

As a small part of this long story, we might wonder

How do we know what God wants of us, as members of this ‘family’ of churches?

 

Into our wondering, Jesus tells this puzzling parable of the wheats and the weeds.

Someone sows good seed in their field – and waits for the wheat to grow. But an ‘enemy’ sows weeds in the fields – and in time the slaves of the farmer see the mixture of the crop they want and the weeds they don’t want, growing together.

 

The slaves have questions – why did this happen?

Did the owner sow an unreliable seed mixture?

Does the owner want them to go and weed the field?

The owner tells them to leave everything to grow, and the reapers will sort it out at harvest time – harvesting first the weeds, to be burned, and then the wheat, for storage.

 

As we ponder the parable, we have to use our imaginations as we puzzle beyond the farming story to the “something more” to which the story is pointing.

The disciples are impatient and can’t wait to get Jesus on his own to explain the parable to them.

Jesus tells them

“The one who sows the good seed is the Son of Man; the field is the world, and the good seed are the children of the kingdom; the weeds are the children of the evil one, and the enemy who sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are angels.”

 

When the shoots start to grow it’s not immediately obvious which is the wanted crop and which is the weeds. As we go through this world we meet all sorts of people and Jesus makes clear that we cannot always be certain who is “good” or who is “bad”.

What does God want of us? To leave the ultimate judgment of other people to God. – we may even be surprised by God’s judgment. There are certainly other stories of Jesus which have most unlikely heroes.

The task of ‘weeding’ is up to the angels.

Meanwhile, like the slaves in the parable, our task is to do our best to get on with the work we’ve been given.

Like Isaiah, we trust in the God who is our rock, and try to live lives loving and serving God and doing our best to be part of the mission Jesus has given us — proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God drawing near.

 

What does God want of us?

Sometimes to see what’s happening around us – like the slaves in the parable – and to ask ourselves questions.

Sometimes to wait and see what develops.

Certainly to pause before rushing into doing what we think is the right thing to do (like the slaves offering to pull up the weeds) without care for the consequences.

 

What does that mean for us in this chapel?

Our own ideas of what it means to be a chapel in the twenty-first century may well have changed.

I still meet people who expect someone from the ‘chapel’ to be grumpy and disapproving; judgmental and rather a kill-joy.

And the fact that we often use the word ‘chapel’ rather than ‘church’ to describe ourselves indicates our history, and those who were once gathered apart from the Anglican, state church.

But who does God want us to be now?

We need to do our best to respond to what we know of kingdom of God and God’s love – looking at the world around, asking where God is at work, and remembering that when we act, we act in the name of God.

I hope we can reach out with the good news of the love of God before we rush to condemn the world.

Remembering that we are part of the family of churches in the Council for World Mission might help us to see ourselves as just one expression of worship & church life.

So may God strengthen us, in the name of Christ, to be people who go out with joy and with Good news – loving and serving the people we meet in name of God. Amen.